While Waiting for the Shower to Warm

Lying together in the morning light
outside of law, outside of time
while the sky dome listens to our silence—
in our horned and warted bodies
there's not a trace of a line between us

Noir et Ivoire

"East Coast sports fans are mean-spirited because there is no possibility of sex there." - Robert Arnquist

I'm numb to the sound of jewelry,
numb to the look of gloss,
numb to the feel of eyes on skin,
numb to the scent of skin fresh washed.

The world, in me, is changing,
the naked is no longer cruel
to young men and old ladies.
The girls at long last can be fools.

Death of the Goddess: A Reading of Louise Bogan’s “Medusa”

“The ringing of a church bell to announce a death is called a death knell. The type of death knell sometimes depended on the person who had died; for example in the counties of Kent and Surrey in England it was customary to ring three times three strokes for a man and three times two for a woman.” – from Wikipedia entry on Church Bells

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter,” said Keats to a Grecian Urn, and few poets have demonstrated that dictum better than Louise Bogan (1897-1970). Perhaps her most famous poem, “Medusa,” published in 1923, is a veritable lucid dream in verse, one of the richest and most inscrutable in the modern canon. What gives Bogan her special haunted quality as a poet is the way she slices the meanings of words so precisely and into so many rich symbolic configurations that they might be word puzzles, anagrams, except that she has also taken great care to let all the emotions from the poetic state of grace float freely in the air. This haunting multi-valence, here and elsewhere, has left most commentators stumped, having to resort to freely writing in events from Bogan’s supposed life story to fill in the ellipses, looking at this poem as demonstrative of a “paralysis of the will” (Ellen Bryant Voigt), “entanglement with the maternal” (Suzanne Clark), or a confrontation of “her own demonic aspect” (Paula Bennett), among other manifestations of a decidedly feminine perspective.

This reading hopefully grounds that sense within a much longer and richer tradition.

First the poem itself:

Medusa
I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved, -- a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.

When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.

This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.

The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.

The conventional read on this poem is that the narrator chanced a view at some horrific but elided trauma, represented by the Medusa from Greek myth, and was turned to metaphoric stone. As a result, she is left paralyzed and silent, like a church bell frozen in mid-peal, but aware of how the world goes on without her. This explanation, poignant as it is, has never fully explained the startling choice of words and imagery, for example the first stanza before the Medusa appears, nor has it provided any context for why it appeared, or what it meant to the narrator. Without taking away from the effect of that interpretation, I'd like to expand the reading to get at some of these questions, by expanding our conception of the Medusa myth.

Medusa, from the Greek, means “sovereign female wisdom,” and represents a Mycenaean variant, imported via Crete from Libya, of the Mother Serpent God who created the world, and with it the secrets of birth, immortality (the snake was thought to shed its skin endlessly), the cycles of time, healing, prophecy, sexuality and the thresholds between worlds. She was regionally known as Ianna in Sumer, Ishtar in Babylon, Au Zit/Set/Hathor (or Isis in the Greek translation) in Egypt, Ashtoreh in Byblos, Astarte in Phoenicia, Ashereh in Canaan, and Athena in Greece, among many other manifestations. As Robert Graves summarizes it in The Greek Myths “the whole of Neolithic Europe, Near and Middle-East, to judge from the surviving artifacts and myths, had a remarkably homogeneous system of religious ideas based on the many-titled Mother Goddess,” all of whom were associated with serpents, which were usually represented in spirals signifying the movement of the heavens. The challenge the modern world has in understanding Greek or other classic myths is that they derive from the matrilineal Goddess religions but were later intentionally corrupted in the transition from the agricultural to the bronze and iron ages by attempts to impose patrilineal political structures. Thus the Goddess worship at the center of ancient myths had to be attacked and destroyed, usually by changing the myth itself to make male gods the creative force and the female gods stripped of their power. The myth of Medusa is a particularly striking example of this, turning from an oracle of the sacred mysteries (the mask of Medusa was originally erected in stone on caves and gateways at sacred sites dedicated to the Goddess and used to guard and protect women in their secret knowledge of the Divine Feminine) to the hideous head of snakes that petrifies men into stone who was beheaded by Perseus on the advice of a furious and jealous Athena.* The trouble is that most modern readers are only familiar with the perverted version, just as their knowledge of serpents is circumscribed by the Adam and Eve creation story in the Bible, which was a similar, deliberate attempt by the Levites to distort the Goddess religions’ own symbols (serpents, trees) from symbols of immortality and creation to those of death and original sin in order to suppress the Goddess religion and claim power for patriarchal alternatives.

Bogan’s poem and its strange emotional hold makes much more sense if read from the light of the Goddess-centered meanings.

The opening lines are as strange and beautiful as any in the English language:

“I had come to the house, in a cave of trees, / Facing a sheer sky.”

The vowels lap over each other like waves in a forward advance of sibilants as the stately meter begins and abruptly stops. We’re left to pause and ponder the many paradoxes of this line: is this house earthly or heavenly? How could an underground cave be a sky-reaching tree? And what of that word used to describe the sky, sheer, connoting both intimate transparency and lofty inaccessibility? It begins to make sense when one realizes that caves were the place of worship in the Goddess religions, much as the church is the house of Christian worship. That is why all the leading male gods and avatars of the first patriarchal age (Apollo, Adonis, Herakles, Hermes/Thoth, Horus, Mithras and Jesus, among many others) were born and resurrected from the dead in caves. The earliest known art, often depicting serpents, also comes from caves, not only because it represents the womb, but the earth humans came from. Trees, similarly, have a rich symbolic connotation, of the sycamore fig tree of life, whose fruit was the blood of the goddess, promising life even after death.**

“Everything moved.” The poem, coiled to a stop, soon lurches forward again, into the flowing dynamics of the natural order but, immediately, “-a bell hung ready to strike.” No sooner does the motion start than more stasis, the church bell that calls the faithful to worship is still and expectant, cast in terms of execution (hung) and violence (strike). The key here, as I’ve discussed in other contexts, is that, of all the many Christian symbols, the bell is the only one that was not appropriated from pagan religions.*** Whatever its import, the bell changes everything: “Sun and reflection wheeled by” implying that now, instead of everything moving, including the narrator, only the sun moves, it has been separated out (into, say, a Sun God?) and her reflections are subject to its light.

This sense of dislocation is matched in the subsequent stanza by the syntax fragmenting into verb-less description. Medusa is introduced, but not by name: “when the bare eyes were before me / And the hissing hair.” The word choice of “bare” (rhyming with hair and, later, air) is particularly significant. Naked, undisguised, without ornament. Interesting ways to describe a mask. Bare also connotes “without illusion,” the revelation of the truth beyond the maya or veil. That is precisely what the oracular Goddesses like Gaia at Delphi purported to offer, with their snakes as constant companions. The eyes and hair are “held up at a window,” implying that it is the severed head of Medusa displayed for all to see, but it is “seen through a door,” as through a portal to secret knowledge. The contrast is highly dissonant, and informs the next, equally motionless sentence, where the eyes are further qualified as being “stiff bald eyes,” highly masculine adjectives that are inapt descriptors of the so-called windows of the soul unless, of course, they are dead. “The serpents on the forehead” –the Eye of Wisdom of the collective Mother Goddess, later made masculine as the Eye of Horus, a snake emerging from the forehead/third eye to transmit wisdom – “Formed in the air.” The emphasis is on formed, which breaks the meter, and creates a strong rhyme with fore- and door. Here we are placed in as dislocated a space as the narrator. Did the serpents form the eyes? Were they both simultaneously formed? Were they already formed or form as she looked? Were they substantial or conjured from thin air? The sense of this unsettling, chimerical sentence is that the narrator feels the depth of the resonance, but is left with only an untrustworthy image.

So ends the “past” portion of the poem, or “Maiden” section in Goddess terms. It was an initiation aborted at the start, a quality of insight and belief confounded. The “present” or “Mother” section begins with the next stanza, but it is a motherhood that is simultaneously denied and elongated. “This is a dead scene forever now.” As with a dead child, the loss eventually supplants the past presence. “Nothing will ever stir,” a nice double entendre implying that the mysteries behind the mask continue to go on beyond our knowledge. “The end will never brighten it more than this” – the third irregular phrasing in a row – “nor the rain blur.” The suggestion here is of the contrast between the admitted reality and the actual reality – it is both timeless and dead, immanent and non-existent, like the Schrödinger's cat experiment, in which the cat is both alive and dead − both possibilities exist until you open the box and investigate.

That sense takes on even greater force in the next stanza. “The water will always fall” – paying off the rain of the previous line – “and will not fall.” We see two separate states or polarities, fertile and desert, male and female realities for want of better terms, which are mutually exclusive. “And the tipped bell make no sound.” The sense is of a pregnant female(s) – shaped like a bell – stopped, made voiceless. “The grass will always be growing for hay / Deep in the ground.” The agricultural prerequisite for Goddess worship – a harvest – continues, but its essence has been literally and figuratively buried.

Finally, we move into the “future” or “Crone” section of the journey: “And I shall stand here like a shadow / Under the great balanced day.” This is heartbreaking poignancy – the “I” knows she must return to what looks like the balance of nature, but must learn as a crone to recognize that because the balance of polarities has been suppressed, she can only be the impossible: a shadow.

The poem ends with even more starkness: “My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind, / And does not drift away.” Spirit, conveyed in its symbolic color of yellow, synecdoche of spring and sunrise, becomes a dust barred from lifting, so it floats aimless, a spoil of potentiality, a throbbing rhyme. It’s the minimalism of it that makes this poem powerful – the collective wound of the subjection of women turned into ethereal stuff.

I’ll let Bogan, from another myth-inspired poem, “Cassandra,” have the final word:

I am the chosen no hand saves:
The shrieking heaven lifted over men,
Not the dumb earth, wherein they set their graves.

* The whole sordid history of the degeneration of this myth through patriarchal power structures is detailed at the Perseus database, Tufts’ authoritative Greek myths site.
** A great resource for the history and rites of the Goddess religions - and their subsequent suppression - is Merlin Stone’s book When God Was A Woman.
*** The bell of the Goddess cults was the sistrum, an ankh-shaped, tambourine-like rattle with four bells tuned to represent the four elements. As it was shaken, serpent energies – akin to kundalini – ascended up the spine to open up the third eye to the white light of enlightenment, the inner sun. Athena, according to Aristotle and Pindar, invented the flute trying to simulate the hissing sound it made, but had to abandon playing it because it distorted the look of her face.

The Rainbow Over the Book Store

The poem I've been writing in my dreams all these years
Has finally disappeared

To be published in a secret anthology
For other eyes and ears

Now I can observe
The way feet lay on escalators.

Peculiar Shade of Gray

The sky is overcast like a mid-life crisis:
All lines seem finite, shabby.

The steel river gathers in scars of black
As it flows past windowless towers.

At the catholic school, a medieval fortress,
Chess piece lions guard every corner.

The wires are strung in canopies along the horizon
Glistening over low-slung block and tin.

In the distance one can see green windows,
The sea like my grandfather's movies.

In the Sacro Facio (Sacred Making) Room

Some dixieland clarinet,
some ode to piano joy,
some celestial monk choir oms,
some car horns -
These are the keys to my meditation,
as I sit with lotus hands
upon a futon.

The tone of God comes
like the wave of the sea,
I can traipse in and out
playing peek-a-boo endlessly
like a fearless boy,
always home.

The Solitudes of August - IX

Sometimes the dream turns into something real:
the silver edges of the heavenly river
re-appear as asphalt cul-de-sac,
the spiral hum of galaxies
become the cry of crickets as they die,
the vap'rous gold of August evenings
dissolves to forests, fattens into blackness.

The pyramid light on the temples of the Gods
who dispense perfection in the robes of men
is only the poems of Mahender Dudani
and the homes to the orphans of Greenwich.

The love of squirrels and power lines and lovers
turns to an emptiness in my center
like a light snorts from a match.

It is then, when this exercise in profusion is finally stilled,
and the first yellow lozenges collect in the grass
that I realize how crowded my loneliness has become,
how pale of a presence reality is,
how there is nothing but dream in this thick air.

It's a place designed for sleeping,
for windows with no blinds
to look on other windows
with the fragrant dust of morning light
the only thing inside.

With Eyes Closed

I can't see, myself, beyond the words
that form like iron filings under magnets
but I feel the eyes inside the room
that saw the same such words, and where they came from
for as long as there've been words, to explain,
and all these eyes, that now my own eyes join in watching
become one eye, in that discernment, the something missing
in the truth is only truth, has only been
a thing, forever waiting, forever watching
with my eyes.

Banal Pastoral

Hail to the Brinkmann grill,
it feels it all,
that particular shade of yellow on a sun dress,
the whistle in the trees as old limbs break,
the slurping of a mother giving baby clothes away.

All of that, they say, goes into the food
with the smoky chardonnay
and the Himalayan crystals.

Blessings waft to the grasses of Eastern Colorado
where the wind and sun blow grace on
green duned herds and desolate flocks.

The trees lean down
like the muzzle of a dog
as the first hickory notes of skunk
hiss from vapor rings of blue.

The children and the skeeters loom
as thrushes sing their vigilance
and soon there is a silence
of golden evening coals.

The flank steaks never say they're done;
there's no such thing as time
except the sense of things escaping.
The forests will be still
until the fire exhausts itself.

The Sixties According to Dante: A Meditation on "Desolation Row"

"You know nothing of my work." -Satan

Rivers of ink have solidified into tar parsing Bob Dylan's inscrutable ultimate (and last to be recorded) track on his 1965 homage to Charley Patton Highway 61 Revisited but, as usual, nothing has really been said. The bulk of the effort seems to be devoted to proving that characters like Dr. Filth and Ophelia are actual people, and that actual people like TS Eliot and Nero are fictional characters. Part of that of course is in the nature of aesthetic experience, which is much like Monty Python's sketch about the funniest joke in the world, in that even a few stitched together words - the smallest hint that things are actually connected - would make the listener die of laughter. So much easier for a critic to say "I like those clever LSBs" (little surrealistic bits) than "I think those LSBs protest too much." It's also understandable in a song that seamlessly tells all but leaves no clues, even amidst the wreckage of a society that hadn't yet been broken up and wistfully sold into carnival parts, that no one is lining up at the door to proclaim it his Après moi, le deluge moment (well, some people, invariably, are - "when I say there's no cannibalism in the British Navy, I mean there is some," per Monty Python in another context).

The best that has been said about this song is that it comes as a surprise. After 10 different ways of disguising disgust behind cool shades and cantankerous barrelhouse piano, slide whistle and soap opera organ, this one kicks the calliope way down – to an almost aristocratic dryness. The song’s strange cornucopia of American jetsam – enough objectively to scare the bejeebus out of any red-blooded American idealist of wealth – Dylan lays out like a suit the night before a funeral, denying us the privilege of his special brand of editorializing (often mistaken as attitude at the expense of word or vocal talent). “Here comes the blind commissioner,” he intones with quivering irritation at the banality of the image, “…one hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in his pants,” as if that dizzying picture of the nature of corruption was the most painfully obvious resolution to this character being placed without our permission and seemingly Athena-like into our badly knocked-upside heads. One of the few hints of emotion occurs shortly afterward, the genuine compassion for a riot squad that "needs somewhere to go." What to make of the calmness of it all – we’re seeing the very gears roll, greased with cyanide, kerosene, screaming ambulances, heart attack machines and broken doorknobs, crushing hopes and children, none of it displaying any intelligence that it is in control in any way of what's going on, that it knows anything outside of its own circumscription. How easily the townspeople enjoying the traveling circus turn into literary characters, how smoothly those characters turn into the agents of all our sexual, political, religious and economic nightmares, and how logical it seems that this dramatic progression would make the narrator shut his doors on the whole affair. It seems as if normal life enlarged and sped up by massive amounts of drugs has finally become pedestrian again.

The soothing voice is there to suggest there's nothing to stop this endless wheel of numb repetition, because the insight to transcend it is still cruelly denied, because we can’t bring ourselves to step outside our own primitive psychic space to wear others’ less-than-commodious skin. Instead we want to jump inside Dylan’s, who knows this, who needs this, who says, with Western mock-heroic grace “you’re in the wrong place, my friend, you better leave” – his lilt urging us, of course, to do anything but. We have to look, though we be blind, like Homer and Lemon Jefferson, or less than that, for we lack Milton’s “Invisible Rose” except through the medicine-man medium-ship of Skipper Zimmerman, who can only call the youth-stricken faithful to a raging bonfire as a charlatan entertainer, not the Rabbi’s son who had faithfully learned to read the braille of Mississippi cotton fields backwards in the baked potata sun. So, cheated of being the prototypical reluctant messiah, he indifferently mouths the lines for another role, that of true rebel prodigal, the kid with the motorcycle to be envied, with skeleton keys to ward off ignorant furies, selected by secret quorums to serve an historical moment, that one shining instant when Cinderella was a princess and was able to look at the “desert of the real” with a certain longing. “The Good Samaritan … getting ready for the show” is eagerly ponying up to the squalor called home by America’s invisibles, as a tourist of the senses. Here, the romantic pathos of taking actual joy in the pain of others, pain they've already forgotten was once theirs, is toxic desire, the devil mark of the individual.

Satan metes out proper punishments for such hubris, to Casanova if not to the skinny girls who have been, after all, unlike Adam, warned. As has been our generous narrator, who knows the one thing we don’t, that it is the fame of Johnny Angel (aka Einstein) and not the disguise (aka Robin Hood) that burns – the falsely won, not the MKUltra iconography – that is the karmic cost. No wonder the street is empty.

The Solitudes of August - VIII

He reads John Cheever stories on the Housatonic
through the long and sultry afternoons,
And listens to the Vienna Philharmonic
in an old gazebo by a lightbulb moon
But he never once escapes himself,
in all his flying through the mists
To the tops of gothic towers
and their unattainable scripts.
It stirs him to see there are such secrets still revealed
but a wearied understanding is too hard.

A small man with a large heart
that glubs among the stratospheres
He finds himself too far away
for vapor trails to show.
The silver dust that falls on Earth
to shine must hollow be.
The howlings one can sometimes see
are not there to be known.

The Solitudes of August - VII

I am the Imposter's biggest fan, so big he followed me
through music camp and graduate school, past two or three
failed marriages, ruined children, dopplegangers to swat away like flies...
and when the voice milks the words "highly paid solicitors,"
the feeling, from as far away as galaxies,
comes tumbling out of my own skull - the flowers are revealed
to have petals with their thorns - the pulse of my own blood warms...

I am but one in 50 million,
like any familiar stranger
- we all have the face of a Hollywood star
to make what we look like into what we are,
to remind us, like the irises on the table,
of something ineffable in one human
who can speak our truth as fiction,
to tame life like chrysanthemums, into a melody
to shop by, of words honed to only imply the violation
in all that the wounded said, to articulate
the dissociation, to burn the kindling from the dead...

Disasters require mourning - the sunflower leans -
we discover in our shame our glory.

The Enemy

My translation of the Baudelaire poem will be read on this week's edition of Words and Music on BBC3 at 22:30 UK time (5:30 PM ET)

My youth was nothing but a black storm
Crossed now and then by brilliant suns.
The thunder and the rain so ravage the shores
Nothing's left of the fruit my garden held once.

I should employ the rake and the plow,
Having reached the autumn of ideas,
To restore this inundated ground
Where the deep grooves of water form tombs in the lees.

And who knows if the new flowers you dreamed
Will find in a soil stripped and cleaned
The mystic nourishment that fortifies?

—O Sorrow—O Sorrow—Time consumes Life,
And the obscure enemy that gnaws at my heart
Uses the blood that I lose to play my part.

The Solitudes of August - VI

I preach prophecy
and only birds can hear me
yet strangers air mail holy books to my door.

The hermetic scatters
like shattered glass
to the surface of the floor.

They call that "understanding"
but it's really hieroglyphics in sand
that learn new meanings.

There is room in things
for universes entire
to expand in exponentials

and form within their dominance
connections
without so much as a touch.

The Solitudes of August - V

I s'pose that I'll come back around
to the movie that watches itself,
my life - hear again the intervals of french horns
descend behind the purple horses
striding down new emerald mounds.

I know that somewhere in the town
plans are being drawn up
by invisible posses
for me.

All I have to give up is time
and a suspension of belief
that there are writers trying
to cry and laugh people into buying it.
I just hope that the players are likable,
or, if they can't be that, credible
or at least have some charisma to spare,
like fragrance in the air when the picture's over.

But I'll never know. There are too many people
in the cast. I can only imagine
their lines. Perhaps with enough imagining
I don't need to walk through the dream,
the film can be as it was once conceived,
before the suits and the editor's spools,

Before there was a need for me
to wear a turquoise ring and be an Indian,
or a ten-gallon hat to be a Cowboy.
(They're always, you see, on the lookout for heroes,
because nothing in human society
offers anything that may be called a victory,
always a reckoning required in time
in the balancing of gift and receipt).

For my part I hope that this story's 'bout being found,
some whale or some grail they almost go mad in finding,
one that was hiding behind the foyer door all this time
with the sepia-toned strangers in uniforms...

Who knows how it ends, when stories have a mind of their own
(as geometries naturally form from the prism of god's eye).
Characters don't always behave like equations
- always some factor invisible - a viewer? - to obscure it.

The Solitudes of August - IV

The world of cicada song - is not the real one,
Of lawn and airplane motors. The chipmunk's fur
Cannot compare with how the girl pulls all the scent out
From her curls.
The regal glow of summer
Resolves to barbecues and swimming pools,
A woman's, not a blue jay's, sharp complaints.

There is no room in stillness
For betrayal apologetics,
For the deals one makes with evil,
For the keening cry of lack
Across the backyards, where life's victims
Proclaim they're never wrong with icy glass.

The whippoorwills may mock this,
But they have different business -
They reserve their conversations for the moon
And centrifugal breezes - not things
That need convincing they exist.

The Solitudes of August - III

The bird that drags its oars across the sky
Is realized in disappearing. Only the invisible
Is wide enough to hold the paradise
Of the mind. Imagination harvests
Out of darkness such lush Augustan figures:
Bodhisattva, Melchizedek, Jesu,
Each avatar unique to its beholder,
A separate sun for each individual soul,
A god for every god, with dominion over the whole,
To fill the hole of mere appearance with the thought
Of existence. The force they call intelligence
Creates the pretense of the real from endless space.

But how could the god of Moose, with its laws
Comprised of Moose, be also the god of Chipmunk?
I spread my god like trail mix on the sisterly floor
At the feet of a murder of meese.
They look at me with skeptic snuffles
As their eyes grow large to mirror my divine.
The world itself has changed from my believing
Although the Moose, it never will.

The Solitudes of August - II

Better my autobiography in late sun through green bottles
Than in words. They infect the mind with definition

While the swirl of blockglass still evades description
As it calls up memories of heaven.

They are not my memories, but something shared
Anonymous within, a library in a box.

The skeletons are kind, they move from room to room
Pretending they're alive, because we are,

No history, like ghosts, just forms to make new faces
Recognized. An innocence of sorts,

The way some talk as if the dead aren't at the table.
They need communication that much.

Love is real from lilacs,
The frogs and crickets hold the syllable in their throats.

The fireflies sizzle uncontainable.
The same is true for us. We form new names, to do without.

The Solitudes of August - I

“The world imagines for the beholder” - Wallace Stevens

It was there, the quarry, when I woke:
Intention, the granite holding up the glass facade.
Was it me who dreamed, or an angelic whirr
That made the island purr with endless life?
(Or was it just the neighbor, what possessed him
To ride his mower like a locust in the whiteness of the morning?)

It was there when, like anonymous scribes, we spoke
For hours, of immaculate mirrors and marshmallows,
Recited icy poems to film noir heroines
From the same distorted book of hymns,
But was there...agreement?
Was what came like squealings
From distant pools, through the vapors of afternoon,
Just sentences construing in my brain
Like the thrushing of a train, in one vast chain?

What you say is never enough. I go beyond its barricades,
Make lists that all dissolve, of meanings uncontainable.
Red raspberries now peek through clinging thorns.

The High Ground of July

I'm just a man in the crowd,
One of a million steps on the stairs,
Yet there is no world except my own.

They all are alternative
Versions of myself,
Like rivulets of light in leaden glass

That show me what I look like
In all my phases of the moon,
In all the veils of lifetimes I've assumed.

Together we can see the river and the sky
Exchanging light, the beauties
Of this place as for the first time.

Our talk is like a madness,
Only understood by us,
How easily we sway from side to side.

And yet we wear such deathmasks,
Protections of a grave,
As if each one begins and ends inside.

Let's come out of our solitude,
The trees speak with our voice to birds
With minds of cloud that move as rocks need light.

Let's watch the radiant dust
Of the high ground of July
As the edges merge to one delicious whole.

Before the Deal Closes

If we all didn't think we could handle our high
This modern world Manhattan
Would be one big AA meetin'
Serving cupcakes and dream water.

Maybe at the end of this
We can say the way things go
To some cold forsaken coffee cup
Whose service we'll ignore,

For argument's the lingua franca,
The dead leaf we cats claw,
Because it's hard for us to trust
The truth more than the no.

All our fears are of being real enough,
Of telling respectful enough lies
To those with the power to be right.
We rush so the capricious won't wait,

And squirm on the pins of their whims,
But all they want is for us to read their mind
So they can change it, some captured thought they can
React back to, with red ink and a captious bellow.

The subsidies they come and go, like wheels
Upon the dharma, that float as gifts
To tag with shame or with respect.
And then, at last, the inevitable

Bell is rung on the exchange.
The sharks find meat to seize upon.
The paper goes to press.
The restaurants may once again serve food.

Twin Flame Reunion Redux

How can I write a love song when you're right inside me here?
It's been a long time since I called your name, Vivienne
For the compromise is now accomplished,
The merger of heaven and earth,
All it took was a broken arm, a poem in Latin,
A swarm of women, and love to fill every abyss.

I found you at the thought of death,
At the thought of it uniting us again,
At you there waiting and smiling.
I could, even now, let go in an instant,
Let the candle I am burning here
Turn to one relieved of mourning.

In this memory of our reunion
I create the separation again
And you surround me like a ring,
The kaleidoscope returns,
The glow from somewhere else,
A recollect of a distant time
When my mind was never whole,
My heart was never endless,
When my body didn't melt to every color,
And what I touched didn't turn into the one.

Like those distant times...

In Babylon...
When you grieved behind the temple wall,
A nameless mendicant, the only mourner
For the Goddess who had died.

In Kampuchea..
When we drank pink bisque from ceramic cups
In a hammock while the children laughed
And the jungle emptied except for joy.

In Kyoto...
When we sparred, resisting each other
With sticks and discourse, forever
Went the game, until our skin
Instead of weapons touched,
And we were banished in a flash.

In Ghent...
When we cleaned the massive cathedrals,
St. Theresa in our hearts, no words
From either tongue, but desire always spoken
Beyond the lace hooks and the alchemy books.
I was young and you were superior,
There was not a past or future, only then,
The shape of Latin on lips touched by fingers
Wet with holy waters, the sacrifice was total,
Two brides, two virgin mothers.

In Charlotte...
When we learned how to brush our teeth together,
Wrote down your words in piles of notebooks
That told me everything, but nothing that wasn't love.
I savored every sweetness as your flesh,
You showed me how to find your face in others,
How those things that seem like boundaries
Are overcome by love.

And now...
When I make a gift of all that is to you,
Any flower in my eye at once is yours
And you receive it effortlessly
And give to me the things I see,
Turn them into symbols of your love,
The cardboard world collapses into dust
And the people who are toys betray
With their motions they're machines,
But you fill them up with light just the same,
With a love that doesn't need a sun,
That takes me higher in the jet streams
Beyond the freedom of the clouds.

And now...
We land, again, the iron weight of living
With the ringing in the beam.
I'll let that echo fade,
For it's just a bell that speaks of pain,
Of a small and distant voice that may say
What's to become...

And now...
The eyes, the voice, the mind
My own.

The Hindu Riddle

You win
when all the little things
turn inside your mind into one big thing,
like a solved equation.

Normal Night at Home

It rained like Montana
last evening
Our trash cans flowed the rivers
of our street

I said I felt my pineal gland
was pushing out my skull like jiffy pop
You said you lay there paralyzed
the better part of the day

We rummaged in the basement for some five-year-old
white sage
That burned until the walls
told it to stop

There were sirens and a warning voice
to stay away from the tornadoes
As green clouds dropped like ink
on forests diamond gray

There was nothing more to talk about
except the ego
You had work to, you said, do in the astral
you couldn't stop resisting

I had nothing to show, just some words
that aren't mine -
For I am the red trees and the blue vines, the black
Egyptian eyes

Some crabgrass glistened as lightning
flashed our pictures
Then the thunders roared in judgment
of what we feared we had become

I found myself grimacing - I don't
really want to know me -
There's nothing there to see -
just a ghost image, a thoughtless nod toward freedom

A Picture Seen by Two

What if we could share
as large as we can feel,
if insides didn't quiver
much more than others' eyes?

What if people were a tiny bit
larger than the vistas
that can only bloom to life
inside our hearts?

If only we could know for sure
that others felt as we do,
their hearts on the same short
giddy flight.


The mirror only covers
how we look, not how we feel
—infernos underneath,
where silent lovers of the sun

Give birth inside
to what feels
to be
pure light

and yet it's found
as in a foreign land
to coat with mystery
these mythic leaves.

Sunday in Norwalk

The
Coincidence Theorists
would have us believe

That churches
must give birth
to crosses,

But in the church
with no icon
above the Ford dealership

In the place of
the cross
Reverend Ed

Prays it be Peter
walking on water
instead.

Another Adoration of the Divine

I don't know...

if artists have a moral compass:
when everything is beautiful
good and bad can be so nebulous,
when our faintest gasp of feeling
deeply echoes in the seas,
when the face is only seen
in our constant rearrangements,
when the colors that are missing
are those not yet painted in,
when the lesson's in the working
through the masks and the materials,
the grand unveiling nothing
but a stone that fell to earth.

All I know...

the graffiti in the tunnels
is always darker
—no flowers here—
curses.

James Joyce

Who this gizmo sez my writing style is most like. From the Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges.

In one day of man are all days
of time, descending inconceivable
from the initial one, when a terrible
God prefigured the agonies and days,
to that other, the ubiquitous stream
of terrestrial time, the source of its flow
the Eternal, extinguished in the now,
the future, the past, what is passing is mine.
Between dawn and darkness is the universal
story. Descending to night I can view
at my feet the path of the Hebrew,
Carthage destroyed, Glory and Hell.
Grant me, Lord, the courage and joy
to scale the pinnacle of this day.
Cambridge, 1968

Toward Rain as an Everyday Thing

blue bridges

restless anonymity
in Melrose windows
a glassy mind

pallets - oh my heart! - in piles
behind wire
giant spools of pine
wind thick black cable

the stones are painted brown

one day there'll be rain instead of bagpipes
the only sound
now
a voice in Hindi
trembling like black mud

silos of self-storage
on weed-cloaked hills
hold the stuffing
they used to make in
factories here

black glass
broken
cage covers
ripped
a window hole
dug
in concrete
where once
was glass

rusted warehouse windows
with blue frost panes

the girl in the silver t-shirt sits
alone
on a sofa
under the overpass
that's the busiest highway in the world

black stencils
on the back of a billboard
rust veils
on the base of its pole

an iron window
slanted open
horizontal
like the white florescent tubes
inside the anvil dark
tool n'dye
shop

illegal colors
on the mansions
in Bridgeport

the rain
turns tree bark
green
tree stumps
rust red
makes manhole covers
brim
with waters
makes them shine
muddy power lines
back

A Vision of the Future

As children we play
with money all day

But the mighty Bronx
takes us
on its back

Through snares of trees
snag ragged weeds

We all be Niggahs nah
espalda mojadas
ahora

Self-Portrait

I worship my heroes at the break of day,
Scour the paper for when they're in town,
Defend them in absentia against the common lot,
Connect them with the sublime ones in a compact whole.

I put on myself the colors of my heroes,
Show allegiance to the cause with bumper stickers,
See their pale reflections outside my window,
Dream before their pictures on my computer screen all day.

In a world of people they express things right,
They say, as one man, all a man can say,
They lift themselves, with sweat and vision, to a rarefied plane,
Through natural force never live the compromised life.

Oh, I know that there is darkness behind the drive
But it never comes across, except transformed
—All that they've lived turns back into gold.
They bring, from some other realm, an ineffable feeling.

But it's not what they do but who they are that counts;
They're just like me, these people that aren't real,
I don't know who they are, if they even exist
But I know that they've lived the same life I have.

The gurus and hierophants try to tell me
They are parts of myself, just like people in a dream,
That creating and perceiving are identical twins
That unify as one. But I won't believe,

I bow down to the icons as if to God,
Keep track of all they do, like a mother
Keeps her child's hair and feces in a book.
I imagine them on beaches with their families

Sharing what we share, with society's validation,
The sense that something in our eyes revolves
Around them...but maybe it's not our hopes and fears
They're carrying, we only will them to be.

There are no dreams of mine they haven't captured—
Maybe it's not their dreams, but they themselves.
Maybe it's not them, but some strange mirror,
Better to have something, than nothing, there.

Prayer of Thanks with Songbirds

The sun reveals the poems
that magic black night leaves:
a granary of knowing
where all is as it seems,

no larger than the current trails
inside the whispering trees,
no smaller than the vast machines
that churn out ways to see

if not for the whirring
of the solitary
turning like an owl's head
all around

to the orchestra in the leaves,
all music save the tiny sight
of finch and chickadee
flying between boughs quickly.

So inexplicable
the codes and the notes,
how they connect
every tree in the world

Montale in New Canaan

"né più mi occorrono
Le coincidenze, le prenotazioni,
le trappole, gli scorni di chi crede
che la realtà sia quella che si vede."- Eugenio Montale, Xenia II

You dissolve like sugar in the lemon juice, til
you are just that gift of surf, the catch
in an oriole's song, the footfall that is almost
inaudible...
Signs without lives of their own,
never love, because never absence
(though they possess us as any lover,
dole out all we know with the perversity of the divine).
You rush through the vistas
of mountains and streams for the glimpses
in the golden air of the unfamiliar
remembered, but there's only a painful
reminder, that the lover, the great invisible,
is you, just as it's painful to remember
that other people are also angels, equally ghosts.

The fireflies rise, in an emerald evening,
dim enough to hold all our dreams
but too bright to offer salvation.
Then schrapnel thunder, that makes audible stars.

Summer Afternoon

"Air without stripes" - Barbara Guest

Pools blue as hydrangeas,
rocks sick with white
inflamed in light's desire
that twinkles as the wind soothes by,
for the sun demands a mirror
in the thinnest of skins and leaves,
even the flower-bloated bees
that come out from honeysuckle
hidden in the vine battalion depths
to ignite the air with the hue of their cry
stew in their own juices
yearning to cool, leaning to nests
as if nature was one long, lascivious bed
for sleep that swims in visions.

All that can live
is alive now
this large day.
Summer must be
as leisurely as streams,
as generous as crystal
to hold it all inside.

Desire for Switzerland

I thought that tree was my friend
yesterday - it had that color I liked,
the deep green remembered from long ago -
today there is only the gray of the whole.

There was a time I was one with that tree.
I picked it out from all the others in the woods.
I decided to like it, and, finding it mine,
felt divided from the others I shunned.

Now comes the time when such judgment is gone,
when things once so clear seem unknown,
when I must let each tree release to one breath
and not retch at my own emptiness.

But how can I move to the unity to be
when I can't feel its central beat?
How can it be that I traipse this new world
where all that is revolves around nothing?

Two by Du Fu

Unworthy translations of the Master

Goose Alone

goose alone eats not
flies and calls misses flock
none remember it
in cloud vein chase lost
looks as if it sees
thinks that it can hear
mindless ducks answer
mixed up totally

Autumn Meditations (5)

Gods island palace - south side
catch dew through gold stem - high sky
west side - jade lake - falls - queen mom
east comes - mist - purple - fills pass
tail of cloud peacock - lifts gate
sun surrounds dragon scale face
cold river shocked - year's so late
how long to watch blue chains play

The Fence

This magnificent prison,
how gorgeous its window on the world
(nothing but a dark mirror),
how invisible our captors
(how immense their fears).

What a thing it is, isn't it?
The art of corralling the human spirit!

Our thoughts are all of our freedom
as we follow the yellow lines
proud that it's obedience we are choosing.
How attentive we are to the convolved logic,
how we cling to repeated phrases, manufactured facts,
how rules so malleable seem so unbending to us.

We worship slaves who dress like Cleopatra
and speak like Cicero.
We take our orders from predators
on the other side of the argument
against murder, child molestation, rape...
They do their best work there,
while we contend among ourselves
in smaller debates.

Go to the fence, it's barely noticeable,
see what's there to throw you off the scent:
the media, the brainwashed neighbors, the camera eye.

Granted, some will be sacrificed,
they caused [insert disaster here] to further their plans,
and they leave only pastel shades of opinion
for us to wear like clothes.
But the truth
is not something you can name,
it's more like a feeling
that flows from fact to irreconcilable fact
without regard to the form or the motive.

Life just is, there is no real
argument from those who oppose it.

They are as hidden, and can hold us, just as much
as the non-material power to which we surrender in prayer,
that does not answer, but whose silence
only helps us.

Connecticut Morning

The sun always chides me to grow up,
become impeccable, for once.
But the fog this morning arrives dying,
never quite articulating what it is
except to cover the trees
and obscure the bay.

Clarity is another game,
a way of hiding the heart
from its all-knowing largeness
—it hurts as it hurts,
all pain is locked inside it, all joy.
The buildings only disappear.

How I want them to feel, and to think,
these faces of stone, how,
when I let that desire go
the light in the window
recognizes me.
The sun beams descend as blessings.

The white sun turns my head down.
Dark reflections play nearby.
Ah, the endless pose of forced humility.
Nothing ever hurts me but myself:
reading disapproval in the darkness,
feeling vulnerable in the light.

The fog has lifted from the river
as if it was never here.
The voices come back, crying for love.
My choice is to give what I can.
Let all creatures stay where they are.
To move them, I must first kneel down.

The Impossible Orgasm of Sense

To Veronica

One can only truly hear
white water rolling
back black rocks
when the eyes are closed.

One can only smell the cedar
in the salt spray
when the sun glare takes away
the sumac and the sea roses.

One can only see the sea
as a fish would, in a world
without sound or fragrance—
the overlapping sheens, and not

what they seem to mean.
Immerse yourself in the cold brine.
The ocean is endless.
It stops at your skin.

The Whale in the Men's Room

Some people are like the sea, they feel and know
it all, but cannot say one word,

For talking just distorts our deep connection.
The tiniest of nods is full of grief.

I see a lady crying to herself, unbridgeable
with um's and ah's—even a glance disturbs the purity.

Minds like stars are so deep inside us
they seem impossibly far away.

Oh the horror if we found out the greatness
That empties out of us in every moment.

The Shadow of Baphomet

The man who speaks of Satan
becomes Satan, in his speaking,
as I become him speaking, with my ear.

You'd think there would be nothing
to this conjuring, except some feeling
and some words, for something missing,
some absence in our wounds

—but real smoke comes from clanging pipes,
the dark spots merge to one, the pistons
on the ever-churning machine can be seen
ripping some psyche, some flesh, to shreds.

The window shutter flaps—
the demons and the law
hold the room in stillness,
but the hinge can always be elbowed free
to blue light and the golden trees.

The Quiet Companion

The train is crying...gliding through the town
as if it's in a cloud.
It's hard to notice, after such a prolonged silence
That still it isn't speaking from its mind.

The train is crying...one thinks of all the tears
one cannot cry
—For all the pain that one has caused and never known,
And how this train must truly be a friend.

The train is crying...as if it is exhaling
from the sky.
The glass receives and shapes the flow the same as you or I.
It is a finer feeling, a bravery in place of mere transcending.

The train is crying...but now
it's so well hidden
That one could almost swear it was the rain.
What lies beneath it? Behind my desperation for the real?

Poem for My Father

The softness of my father's eyes
blessing all we did with light.
How gentle were his hands
that built houses, washed clothes, cooked meals,
and all of it accomplished just for us
so we could know the fruits of endless love.
"It's what I do," he said, as if there were
no dreams of his own he couldn't share.

He kept us all on time
but there was always time, in him, for us,
to hear our endless tales of poop,
to pretend he couldn't hit the pitches we threw,
to read that same book over again
with the same ridiculous French accent
until we stopped laughing at the word magog,
to persist with me for what seemed like years
until I solved that one math problem.

He taught us how to see: the tree rings,
the leaf veins, the colors in the daffodil.
He taught us how to hear: what people needed
in what they said, the hidden trill
inside each person's voice.
He taught us not to be afraid, of horseshoe crabs
or bumblebees. He showed us it was safe to cross
the felled tree laid across the creek.
He taught us how to say prayers to the frogs and to the oaks -
how it's wrong to slap a mosquito.
We learned from him to love all people equally,
how to ask for what we wanted, how to give without a thought,
how to make mistakes and change, how success begins within.

We always knew to brush our teeth, feed the dog, and say "thank you."
We always knew that other kids only wounded when they felt wounds.

But of all I learned, it's me that I remember,
how I caught the biggest fish, and won the sailing race,
and sounded just as witty as the President
at the adult dinner party.
It mattered that I didn't cry when I skinned my knee,
it mattered that the moon was red, and that my bike was stolen from
me.
I didn't have to waste time thinking where my life would someday
lead,
I could be anything I wanted, there was nothing not allowed.

We read Melville and the Fisher King, and he talked of human
weakness.
I asked how far the stars went back, and he told me all the theories,
and how they all were one, and that I'd have to learn the truth
all by myself.

He always loved me as I was, greasy hair and all,
but saw me try to be like him, and gently, gently frowned.

No emergency at home could raise his voice or bring fear
to his eyes - no dying cat, or broken lamp, or stolen groceries.
He never missed a day of work, or baseball game, or concert,
he always helped us pick up trash from the bay,
and went to all my boy scout camps, and told the scariest stories.

I wonder if I've been half as good
in teaching golden lessons to my own
(as if my kids had thought of them themselves);
in answering every question
(in ways they'd understand);
in showing them how saws and ropes (and, sometimes, women)
worked;
in joining in their play as more than guest,
but as teacher, as coach.

The only answer I receive to this is
love is truth, and truth is love,
and these, indeed, have been my memories.
They ring for me much clearer and more real
than what is actual:

the eggshells, the shaming, the wine.

Harlem in a Clear Red Light

As the day thins, people have turned into images.
They've leapt into the aethers
Like sparks off of the grid,
Like stars that leap like pity
Across these roiling faces
To outline constellations.

The buildings have stopped pretending
That they are of three dimensions.
They are but tones of sunlight
Like the dust in open air.
Everything's invisible
Except what lives in mirrors.

The trees they move too fast now,
Too fast to even see.
The mind moves through the planet
In their leaves.
The majesties of form
Quiver emptily.

How terrified to think this isn't real,
That we can just create it with our eyes,
These perfect harbors and desolate trash
Equally. How pleasing that the world can never see us
Except in shining windows
Of a late, late afternoon.

Morning with Phantoms

The other side is knocking.
There are no words
But I feel the need for purity in my own.

The dead can defend themselves,
It's the living who hold onto hope
That they can re-write another mind
With thoughts of their own.

The viscera resumes its endless adaptation.
The Bronx fills up again with Jewish ghosts
Paletted on stone, in hieroglyph graffiti
That stands alone, each one, even still.

The other side is knocking
But there is not a sound.
I feel the shift of frequencies like a voice.

I must go on, touching without holding on,
Knowing only what is not to be known,
Seeing in what is shown how edges are just beginnings.

In a Silent House

The wind speaks its mind, the walls can't agree
But something is conveyed, in things that pass.
A ghost rocks the chair, a laughter we must bear in the air

How the effects we have caused were no hitch at all
To the ways pieces fall into place.
It's just how the classroom is arranged.

In flesh we can't see those precise symmetries,
They seem like our own sad mistakes, chaos, waste
But the bell rings the lessons, home to the past.

And the path is always freedom, to the order of things.
It glistens but does not change, for all our rearrangements.
The center moves no less than the one inside of us.

It's a shifting of sorts, the dream of a door,
A tremble in the sheer window dressings
Like the trembling at the far end of the void.

What knowledge can come with these consolations?
A twin that goes silent, filling our shadows,
A sound out of nowhere, owning our hearts.

Momentarily Between Worlds

By a corrugated town, the Mexican witch doctor
rascals up the foam that's drawn from smoke:

"In the North magnetic cities
where the brainwaves make things move
one must stay always frenetic
to maneuver round the rooms of brick
dismantled and resumed - where skeletons
have turned to history books
and then to Peruvian menus.

"How much better to imagine owls
in the layers of the sunset
with calm tones when the spring moon shivers
say it's just the way things are.

"The skateboard princes roll the tar
by mangy vine and stoop-stones of dragons and lions;
so quick do things turn stale there,
how easily dilapidated,
how soon the children try to sound like birds.

"Here the evening sun is unadorned
and virgin truth surrounds us like a song,
and we can stare and stare and never get
one hemi-quaver closer. The fire melts
the keening mind, til the wind speaks in our voice...

"Not like those blue horizons
where sailheads bob like trees
shuddering while minds like crows
behind them strive to stay hidden.
The secret there's in knowing
the who, what, where and when,
and remembering that all such facts
resolve to contradiction.

"Here, all mysteries must stay, we can't retain
even an ink stain of this moment
and we wouldn't think to argue
with the birds or with the stars.
The valley floor can only be
imagined...

"No pivot point
for freedom's painful upward roar."

Quan Yin on the Beach

The nose desires this scent,
the eye devours this horizon,
the ear attends to chimes
that voice the air.

So the senses express
their true, undying natures
in a unifying phrase
that feeds on all that is
and therefore feeds it back,

And on all that is false,
for there's nothing to apprehend
but the whirr of right and wrong,
and nothing to be gained
by recognition
but separation's spark.

The only thing to hear
in the breathing of the waves
is the pause that comes between
that some call silence.

June 2, 2010

Falling off the Mountain R.I.P.

The colors in the sand your breath has now dispersed
:: that way the dead remember living


We talked with nothing but quiet
:: centuries passed but did not stop


Look! I improvised the moon
:: still the ocean sighs for what is missing

Small Resistances in the Stream

Young suits and old suits
read the paper like a holy scroll
as graffiti wild as trees flies by
making mockeries of museums.

The blackberry boxes make promises:
new clarities of knowledge,
to be part of something larger.
We can chatter back our thoughts.

The lawyers in their bowties
spilling beer upon their briefs
turn quiet as they see in darkened glass
a ghost image of a breast.

The only person talking is a 50-something woman
about how numb this world's become.
It's the age now of the crone,
plain truth is revelation.