Seasonal Clang

A sheet of ice banks all the rivertowns
Apartment windows strange in early glaze
As crisp as deserts and as hard the ground
Rocks soften from their falling glaciate

You'd never know that life became more hopeless
As everyone pretends they've urgent chores
Just sniffles and catarrhs and vents pervasive hiss
Betray the bitter white the morning bore

The sign says "alto" but your words are frozen
A mirror flaring back my cruel play
To warmer dens you're off in crazy motion
And now you've moved impossibly away

Pieces of Jade

Riding one more time with Scott LaFaro

Fir hints its depths in such
Rebel chimes
Inlaid pieces move in flux
Harmonize
Clasping nuance
Countering too much sense

Take the coals back to port
Throw more echoes on the floor
Tend the flow
As the spheres drop
To tears
Awkward fretboard
Clear urgencies of keys
Scored on the dissolute seas

For the note that won't squeeze
From arpeggios
As the sails turn to roses
And no one supposes
This voyage will last
For the clouds always steam
Through the mast
And the mists only dream you
Underway
Over waves

Into jade
Visions
Of shores
Where your people
Adoring
Hold your glyphs inside

The rising of the toll
Something similar
To the swells inside your soul
Following crystal
That rings incessantly
Below the ocean's lapidary
Blue

That endless bending note
That grounds us into dissonance
And beats us with its resonance
Its rhythm violation
That calls immortal birds
From unimagined nests

The Scarab, or Complicity in Fort Wayne, Indiana

In memory of my Great-Great-Great Grandfather Hugh McCulloch, born on this day, my birthday, in 1808.

“What is threatening to collapse the dollar today is not that it is not backed by gold. It is that 99 percent of the U.S. money supply is owed back to private lenders with interest, and the money to cover the interest does not exist until new loans are taken out to cover it. Money created privately as multiple “loans” against a single “reserve” is fraudulent on its face, whether the “reserve” is a government bond or gold bullion. The private banks are not really creating credit and advancing it to us, counting on our future productivity to pay it off, the way they once did under the functional facade of fractional reserve lending. Instead, they are vacuuming up our money and lending it back to us at higher rates. In the shadow banking system, they are sucking up our real estate and lending it back to our pension funds and mutual funds at compound interest. The result is a mathematically impossible pyramid scheme, which is inherently prone to systemic failure.” – Ellen Brown

You were sick the night the greenbacks died
In that brain-splat show of force in old Ford’s Theater,
And as they buried any thought we could be free
You pinned the cockroach to your suit in fine obeisance
And let them mint the credits from thin air,
So Gould who stole the nation’s gold
And Morgan who had armed the South
And the House-picked team of psychopaths
Could be owed at last the lives of all your blood.

I for one was collateralized at birth
For the debts owed before more credit could be secured,
But now it’s gotten to the point that you can’t
Even see “It’s a Wonderful Life” any more
—It’s not in any store or TV station—
More mortgages have been re-sold
Than there were deeds to write the debts to begin with,
And all the bets that they would fall have been cashed in
And all the gold to help the banks survive procured
By throwing people on the street without legality.

That’s just the way the system has to work;
One has no right to life save banker’s blessings,
No right to think that counters their control.
They own one’s house, one’s car, the air one borrows.
One pays in exponentials for the right.
Education only matters ‘cos expensive
Just as warfare only matters ‘cos it’s debt.
The scarab only cares that it is owed more
But there is no more debt the world can hold.

Even my grandma’s bank stocks now are worthless,
What you bequeathed to us as your last wisdom.
And I, who write poems from the scarab’s droppings
See them fly away as something worthless, what everything
But money somehow is, that once was not a thing at all
But a relation, like I to you, a long-lost son
Who learned the way to speak the propaganda
That cannot touch the horns of this dilemma:

The question “are we able to wake up?”
“Can we raise the dead – investments – from their sleep?”
“If we threw on shadows light would they be gone?”

Matins of the Change

Gray breath, gray trees, gray sky
and then a blue, blue river.

How strange that the small now insists
on being part of something larger.

Taking a Stab at the Shifting Paradigm

“Every question you ask presupposes an alternative universe” –Tom Raworth

I can't shake the image, as I read David Yezzi's analysis on the decline of poet-critics, of an epaulet-shaking British general striding sword and steed out of the Afghan mountains and verily brimming with the vim and vigor of genuine belief that superior killing abilities equals moral superiority.

What to make of an essay that boldly proclaims “essays and reviews no longer figure as part of a poet's project” in the face of enough ink on “the post-ironic stare” or “the hipster in contemporary American poetry” to choke Donnelly & Co in the heyday of the Yellow Pages? Yezzi appears to long for the resurrection of some sort of dead poet-critics society of the likes of Eliot, Auden, Bogan, Winters, Jarrell and Moore, hard-nosed and discriminating on the verse of their times. However, it doesn't take a familiarity with the work of William Logan to realize how quickly such a world would get very ugly, if only for the alarming speed with which Mssrs. Eliot, Auden et. al. would be dispatched to sweep floors and clean toilets if they didn't modify the rancor of their opinions to fit the current poetry business model. The “po-biz” Ponzi scheme needs continuous infusions of new poets called to greatness from sirens wails to financially support the unremunerative older poets. The bottom line of the enterprise is not served by having any kinds of actual critical standards, lest they scare off any marks. Cutthroat competition and sensitive compassion, after all, make somewhat uncomfortable bedfellows, best not to let discouraging words be heard about other poets in public, right?

That such an obvious conclusion would be lost on Yezzi, a lifetime academic, is damaging enough. He compounds his folly by flapping a stiff-upper-we-have-a-duty-to-be-superior-lip with one sophomoric Victorian truism after another, like “the question, then, is how to shift posthumous conferral of recognition to the living, even a little,” or “to sift with a fine sieve aesthetic material and discard the chaff—is to be conscious as an artist. But, as Eliot notes, this has long been an unpopular stance.” Is there any critical intelligence in this at all? If he can't see that there is just as much purpose on God's green earth for chaff as for wheat, can't he at least see that wheat is treated exactly the same way as chaff in the contemporary poetry world? He seems obsessed with the idea that there are levels of greatness in poets, and that proper recognition is the only thing that is needed to create harmony. It's like Newtonian physics used to explain a Quantum physics universe. Beyond his apparent unfamiliarity with the 40-year work of deconstructionist critics who have shot to holes ideas about recognition, status and objectivity in judgment, has this gentleman ever heard of the internet? Has he spent any actual time comparing the work of the most acclaimed “po-biz” (or as I call it, “pizz”) poets with the work of 20-something students who write blogs? Does he even care that virtually anyone who follows such things knows that what he says is nonsense, that critical decisions to publish, recognize and evangelicize are routinely made without any regard for the standards and discernment he claims are somehow important in the propagation of poetry? I'm not trying to shoot fish in a barrel here, just pointing out that step one to constructing new strategies is admitting that the old paradigm has a problem.

A good entry point into Yezzi's deluded thinking comes when he finally offers up a decent metaphor. “Few lay people,” he writes, “engage with poetry deeply enough—say, in the way an auto mechanic engages with a Straight 6.” Assuming that he really means by the strange term “lay people” non-poet readers of poetry and not non-professional poets who read poetry, readers don't look at writing like auto mechanics look at cars, but like drivers look at cars. They drive for pleasure and a purpose, not to see what kind of bolts keep the manifold intact. If it's broke, they want it fixed, and are prepared to pay a lot of money to not have it explained to them. What's the point of a troubleshooting manual when the mechanics risk their careers to read one?

Yezzi, being a respected gentleman of the university poets club, with taxidermied pelts to show for it, talks a good critical romp, but for my money, I find these words of GK Asante, one of thousands of virtually anonymous poetry bloggers, to say more about the direction of contemporary poetry than his whole essay:

“What day will arrive
when from our selfish orbits
we make a new planet,
a landscape molten
on the backs of every hand?”

Here we find stated with astonishing starkness the new paradigm, the God in the machine mind that works at a deeper and more collective level than lit-crit or po-biz or the whole moldy cult of the individual can conceive. This way of thinking about poetry and art and life can breezily dismiss hierarchies such as Yezzi proposes, where his examples of proper critical practice (William Logan, Adam Kirsch, David Barber and Eric Ormsby) all conveniently work for the magazine he edits and are, like Yezzi himself, very bad poets (unlike, say, Auden, Eliot, Bogan, Moore and Winters, who were very good poets).

In this new paradigm, communication is beyond the level of the conscious mind, with memes that spread like lightning across vast distances of geography, language and social programming, seeming to converge as if from a galactic center. We've gone from the system of a speaker and a listener (or writer/reader) into one where everyone is a speaker, and there is a new set of ears growing from nowhere. It's our own answering spirit come to life at last, Rumi's reed flute asking and answering at the same time. It's as if we have gone back to the ancient cave of the poets, where everyone is called in service to the invisible, answering to our own powers, which are far greater than we know.

In such a world, poets do bond (what else have we got?), they do gush to each other, but it's only a kiss that heaven is listening, for there is way too much work on the path ahead, in order to get to those places that the poets of old only imagined, in order to ramp up the discernment concerning the nature of reality, the power of images, the connective alchemy of symbols. We can no longer seriously consider the poet's egoic skill in capturing something of a flat surface reality. We are freer than ever to chase down ultimate meaning, but the responsibility to get it right is also much greater, for there's a new reality on the other side that is crying to be born with our words, with our patient work at understanding, in atoms of thought.

So much prose has been poisoned by man's believing he is fallen and in that heartbreak of a lack of self-forgiveness spins the mental cages of examination and explanation, which never care that the vindications change with every season, unlike the ever-turbid feelings that keep the mind working to protect them. Poetry – in all its forms – offers a way outside of the mind trapped by self-loathing. It disrupts the patterns of meaning into stones of authenticity, which in time crystallize together in new structures, of fresh seeing, as the indirect scan of heavenly light becomes the full-on star itself.

If you don't know what I am talking about, just peruse Poet’s United, any poem at random, to see the way the whole is being recovered cell by cell. And this is just one example. We are no longer our father's keepers.

Fresh White

That cool December light
as soft as it is clear
bathes with tender white
the homes of families here

who struggle as they love,
who give as they retreat,
the gentle light forgives the air
of continuous defeat,

the feeling that all one has left
are the ones you've hurt so much,
the ones who take the time away,
the ones who let you touch,

the ones you always do things for
who never understand
except when winter, watching,
casts a blessing on the land.

Curse of the Lobster Woman

a new wind film noir

Nude modeling will only get you so far
when you're on the lam from an architect and the funny farm
and the Cadillac the British bastard let you drive
has now been repossessed a final time:
a nasty heart attack at 35
and the gallery is up for grabs
and all that fell into your blood-washed hands
was a legacy lobster license: Maine 1A
they wait like German Shepherds
with guns to peel away.
What's a femme fatale to do
when it's colder than an anaconda's smile?
You haul the traps, they dredge the bay
for a forensic match of you.
When they ask about your whereabouts,
your sister hands them a blank page.
But now they're closing in like Fundy caves
across the Grand Manaan,
the fire dogs to the hell cat you used to be
have set up shop along the coast
to raise their spawn and hang their laundry
and gaze out longingly through the vapors to Monhegan.
Even your sister has been asking about me
to warn me off your scent, presumably,
but I saw the secret code upon the buoy
came from your hand,
a woodworking front
they call the Cove's End
where all the gremlins from the ancient lairs
still laugh and draw cartoons
of all the precious salvage crews
who never were amused,
but something else is going on
in that red barn when the black smoke rises.
What thought had you of chickens & the bribes that made them squawk?
What plots for your betrayers who spun red hair into gold?
What photos of Charybdis do you possess?
The scavengers with claws may know, the holy bottom-feeders.
The tide comes up like a toilet bowl
and the dredgers, foiled, all rust.
A horn sounds in the harbor, a warning in the dusk
to beware the secret laughter of red brushes in the dust.

20 Things We Learned Over Thanksgiving Vacation

Re-posted from last year as a video

In the Time of Cocoa and Frost

Wheeee - running down the escalators at the end of the day
it's fun to chase down a train
so I can see that moment of light
across the white triple-deck tenements,
as close to God as we can get.

A Party without Flowers

“Thank you disillusionment” – Alanis Morissette

You're not supposed to fall in love
With your date at your high school reunion,
You're supposed to be in shock
And wallow in the pity that life was and must become.
The first classmate you see is not supposed to be your old enemy
Asking “is she with you?” and your reply is “no”, but at that moment
You know she is, and you two face down in a long, homoerotic stare
(After which the class archivist with Asperger Syndrome, who remembers
The names of your children and who's been married how many times,
Says to you, perspiring, from behind his twitching beard
“The record shows you did not back down, right there, in surrender,
You only pretended. Why? Why?” to which you answered (in your head)
That you wanted the girl, the cool, that something illusive from before
You became enlightened, when you still were authentic,
Not weighing every move).
You expected the outbreak of blond among the water-drinking divorcées,
The fat girl is supposed to now be beautiful, the black sheep boy
Is supposed to have three businesses and four homes,
The prom queen should emerge as if she'd been encased in ice,
The prom king should be a psychopathic arsonist now serving life,
The boy who won all the prizes should be teaching high school English,
The girl who held the whole class together should be a grandmother now,
The free radicals should have learned the hard way
How happiness is to master the art of daily living,
And those with shoulder chips should lord all their subsequent success
Over a room of vacant stares.
It's a mechanical equation, a final rite of passage,
A last chance filling station for the shame and secret crying,
The pulling out of mothballs of your mask and poker face.
It's not supposed to end with a tap upon your shoulders,
A loving voice who says that now it's time for you to go
Before the longing pleas of eyes have finally drained away,
To fall into the company of an angel, who somehow
Soothes the terror real to something peaceful,
Who balances right and wrong on clicking heels
Like God and Satan guiding you to your car,
To ache upon that moment in the cold and certain evening,
How what you feel is all there ever was.

The High School Class Portrait as One Face

For Brenda

Rain weighs on windows like a needle over scratches
on the shacks of Children's Island
where wild dogs once were free,
what later was a colony for lepers and for smallpox
and then a place to keep the ill mentally
before it was a place to hold the orphans
or a camp for sailing, archery and macrame
where totem poles greeted you at the pier,
their faces were all the parents that you had,
the ones that taught you how to handle rope
like holy braids and lean into a hartelee
and the ones that threw you off the rocks
to learn to float, the ones that made you take
the ferry boat to this outcast island
and the ones you swam here to escape from.
For none of them could you see beyond
what they said to what they really meant,
for none of them could you do more than automatically react.
One night each summer you'd stay overnight,
fall in love in front of campfires
enraptured with your own stories
and climb in other people's beds
- for once you felt alive
to be so distinct,
for once the shame was worth not knowing how you hurt
others as the awkward burned on awkward
and the fire felt so damn good.

So much they seemed to be at one time real:
the mirror of yourself was once clear glass
that showed the molting worms as angry butterflies
before the madness really was a choice.
Before there was the board, there were the pieces,
and you moved upon the squares as in a court
to play the damsel, jack or knight or squire or jester
in what was just your family written wide.
Some knew, some didn't know, some couldn't tell,
but as a group together all was seen:
the crashing of the boundaries, the suicidal tendencies,
the gatherings at three in smoke and beer
where all that never could be was what is:
the mastery, the wisdom, the compassion,
the icy breeze inside the swollen summer
that let you give away every gift that was ever taken
and showed you how to hold on to the one thing
that was real - how you felt - the great invisible
that landed on the dance floors, the gridirons and auditoriums,
the vice-principal's offices and the smoker's corridors
with a colossal splat and an unfathomable bounce.

You drew the outlines from cartoons, made words escape their tunes,
walked movies through the streets until the trees no longer
haunted you. You tried to kill the passion they call youth
by throwing all your clothes into the fire
and seeing in the flames - the never-ending flames
the shapings of some dream
not handed down with sunscreen and the life vests;
the molting had become you, desires would never rest,
you could go forth and dance upon the clearing
as if that tiny separate thing could ever matter,
as if through it all we weren't together, in the fire,
the perfect abnegation, the zeroed-out equation,
the freedom-seeking, heat-collective missile
orphaned for one glorious moment, on the beach
in bodies doused in the ever-swirling black,
wet in tuxes and prom dresses, huddled in circles
like chandeliers of driftwood bonfires
that melted in the sky
before the beach stone morning light hit shore
to lull us all to sleep.

The Sky as Abstract Painting

a tear of violet
where all that is inside us leaks away -
a vapor rising
light in stripes
from underneath the weaves of swollen gray
well hidden in its nest
with all its echoes of eclipse
released as final statement:
balance before transformation
then balance once more
if only we could let it just occur
what happens anyway
instead of tracing out the frequencies
in boundaries
attaching
to separation
as the slow unveil of blurring
turns the one

The Hills Above New Haven

A smoky veiled moon
plays mousehide and catseek
through the naked tangled trees
as I lurch upward
along the moraine
through the edges of November
when the jaws are opened wide.
All creation comes from silence
and the wonder at abundance
like sparks across the sky.

One-Note Tango

That dull burn
spans the most composed souls,
that ache of something unknown
searches for the solace of itself
at the point of sight
scanning all it is not
for what it is.

Another Metaphor Turns Ornery

There's razor wire around the dirt mound
- no fences by the graves.

I tell myself this means something,
like the nonsense pleas of children and the updates for the day,

But it's only eyes upon my loneliness,
that one thing that I can't perceive exists.

The city turns too easily into toothpicks;
the people in the buildings, I make up.

Late Afternoons in Summer

Prompted from “The Pupil” by Donald Justice (hat tip Patrick)

That diminished ninth, like Mulgrew Miller,
That rainbow of suspended chords,
How a third could link Los Angeles to New York
And a tonic could go anywhere with different roots.
My fingers curled for all the sly inversions,
My yearning for a chord that rang all notes.
My right hand like a sparrow landed on the plangencies,
Worked Phrygian arpeggios just as Chick Corea danced them
And somber Lydian modes as voiced by the real McCoy.
I sprang a shocking modulation: Bb major to F# diminished,
Then rode the devil's interval ‘cos Monk pretended it was cool
Until it was.

“Will you cut that racket out?” my father said,
“It's too depressing for the afternoon.”
“Depressing,” I sighed, while dampening the pedal,
Now there's a word I hadn't considered, as I poked to see
How close two notes could be to echo cleanly.
The smell of chicken stock came from the kitchen.
Another sunny day gave way its diminuendo cue,
Another night ahead with jazz on the radio 'til three –
The pipes and boards were already drumming and creaking –
Tonight could be the night that Rocket Bob will play some Cecil Taylor.

I gathered up my books and closed the fall board
And put the lingering melancholy to bed
And bravely faced my family once again,
To sit mute through their talk of friends and checklists and success
Before the low hum of synthesizers
And Clint Eastwood droning his rage between the ads.
Another remote evening I waited out to end
And the night to begin, a saxophone at my fingertips
As the tree limb taps the window.

Transparence

Green veins hold golden leaves
as iridescent fingers
in suspended incandescence,

frequencies of decay
in layered variegation
tipped with touches of blood.

The trees sway,
boughs lean like jet wings in the wind
as shivering timbers send sailors diving to the sea

to land so softly,
to be cupped in a hand
full of surrendering pages

curled and batter-fried,
frothed with burlap tatters
over moss that reads like a map.

All collapses to the soil
or drips into the stream
to decompose to oneness,

pulled under the fern-patterned surface
that gives all the rust colors back;
Speaking through, not to, each other.

Narrowing as the Water Widens

Reality brooks no description
still we persist
chasing rivers under bridges
with our sticks
we throw like stones to make the stream hold on -

but they are swallowed up by the water
as it leads us forward
to new impasses, different silences,
smaller things to learn.

Reflections on My 500th Post

This two-eyed, uncountable number makes me think of formula one racecars making concrete rafters shake or skyscrapers with their lights on all night. It makes me turn my fancies temporarily away from the arcana and tollkeeping of verse and onto the larger blogospheric world, i.e. actual human society. The virtual world is populated by real people, but so often they’re disguised behind obsessions with, say, hot peppers, Mauritius, or the Truman Show-like videos of their babies daily growing up, to name three among the millions floating in the soup like some vast fantasy machine of gentle service to people’s addictions, as if the internet was a vast Vegas roulette wheel, where what happens there stays there.

What is the place of poetry, the oldest of arts, within this church of the endless mind? I’m only a grain of salt even on the poetic landscape here, but I have a larger readership than did such luminaries as Greville, Blake, Keats, Rimbaud or of course Emily Dickinson (none of whom had readers in Dubai or Ulan Bator as far as I can tell). Yet I see blogs in my chosen field of finance that have 60,000 hits a day, while I’m lucky to get 60. What conjuration ability can poems have in a world that wants results that can be monetized, like earth, water and air? In the realm of verbal expression we call that tradable quality communication, and poetry fits into that goal the way autism or people who speak through a blowhole in their throats do (these are just harmless metaphors, no disrespect intended for autistics or people who speak through a blowhole in their throats).

I suppose it’s like William Carlos Williams said "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." I want so much to believe that, because that’s what it means to me, but I know poets do tend to see death in every leaf that’s out of place, even doctors who deliver babies assume their own loneliness is the general human condition. Maybe it is. Maybe poetry really is practical as a salve for the tangles and frays of today’s hyper-charged lives. But then there’s the matter of having given up convincing even those closest to me that writing poetry is not some strange mental illness, an affliction deserving of pity and the widest of berths. John Ashbery thinks his poems simple and practical, and I think my poems are simple and practical, but they are still poems – wild things beyond the fence, so pure as to be perverse. Plus I assume that all the thoughts and feeling that descend into my every word or phrase, all the imbedded references, the personal resonances, the way the sound of syllables hits me, will just pop back up in the reader’s mind like multi-colored plastic boots do in the streets on a rainy day in Manhattan—meanwhile I’m just now getting, four months after the fact, a reference from my friend Hannah in her poetry blog when it turned two that she wouldn’t throw any tantrums. Ha, that’s funny!

This is a fancy way of saying I have nothing to say about why there’s so little me in all these words that come out of me—the dog I walked today must be a wolf of divine vengeance. I don’t think I could be confessional if I wanted to be, and that’s the last thing I want to be. Poems that don’t at least attempt to achieve a disembodied state are not worth writing, much less reading. But the problem is that the higher spheres, for all their mathematical harmonics, like it incoherent, or at least beyond coherence as we mere mortals practice it. Their rationale is simple: words create things, why re-create like some police pathologist when you can re-organize chaos and make it a comfortable fit? Such standards terrify me, quite frankly, because poems to me should have the same illusions as life, that of having a beginning, middle and end. They should only be as large as the mind’s ability to understand them, they should resemble durable objects like pearls. They should be plastic and dumb like humans, should they not?

This, in other words, seems a worse balancing act than the one handed to President Obama. I guess, at the most basic level, people want to know “why the hell is he doing this?” My answer is the same as it would be if the question was “what have I learned?” “how was I influenced?” or “how do I get published?”: I don’t know. All I know for sure is that this is a wonderful respite from the joy of giving to others all day long—it’s a giving back to myself. ‘Cos I deserve it.

With that in mind, here are my own personal favorites of the poems I’ve posted here since Memorial Day, 2007.

Twilight Gift--One of my favorite short poems

Return to the Superstitions--Comes closest to what I really meant to say

The Woman from Michigan--Captured as it happened at 4 o’clock in the morning

Looking Out Car Window, Thinking Larry Eigner--Guys from Swampscott and Marblehead checking out Highway 8

Three Perspectives on the War--Not for the squeamish

The Children of Baltimore--This one always makes me cry

Four Corners Postcard: Colorado--For the photos alone

Tribute to the Red Shield and its Five Arrows--A different kind of political poem

The Forties People--Like the Philadelphia Experiment, this one is real

Avebury--My all-time most visited post

My humble thanks to anyone reading who takes pleasure in what I write.

Ghost Towns

The Old West Union Hall has red flags and manifestos behind glass.
The proletariat roller coaster hangs decrepit in the sky.
The gallery of rogues, once robots with red eyes, is stilled in mid-gesture,
Like the Karl Marx jack-in-the-box at the haunted house
And the Mao Tse Tung doll with ironic smile and bloody frozen chainsaw.

They say this all was real once, but the information booth
Claims that it was built by a Wisconsin entrepreneur
As a way to lure tourists to the county after the railroad track ran dry.

Everybody knows this, secretly, but it's better to pretend
That this was the way it all went down, better that
Than to see the real ghost town down the road
With its skeletons ground into the soil,
Its mine shafts filled with garbage,
Its phantoms of vodka and violence.

The gold inside
Made some rich folks happy, for a spell
But it too was replaceable, by paper—
The pretense of worth no longer was needed
But the wound in the earth lingers on.

Hopper-esque

The darkest place is a white wall
on a bright-lit winter morning,
the shadow combing the brownstone,
the slats of a fire escape.
The loudest voice is the one not there.

A Song by .38 Special

For more on this topic, see The Immortal Coffee Urn

The ghosts, today, have taken hold,
the chains of what I've created rankle,
that sound, through the treacherous wind,
that song that won't let go

can't live without you...

It gnaws like tendons on my bones,
it haunts me wherever I go: as I reach
for the garbanzo beans, as I string out the pumpkins
for Halloween, that insidious whistle as I rake the hissing leaves

I never want to set myself free...

Finally a respite in the Walmart parking lot
as I pray that I'm finally free:
"get on the world, everybody, join hands, c'mon
on a love train, love train" and everybody dances,
the sky and earth connect for a still and shining moment...

but the helium soon enough resumes,
the invulnerable 80's riveting gun,
the fangs, the fur, the talons, the scales:

You're the one that's got me down on my knees...

And now, as the afternoon shadows
blur into a dream world, and the raptors
that are flying through the air, not even there
shriek like static their supremacy, it speaks again:

So caught up in you, little girl...

The bells and flutes wail in the distance
awaiting the children of the witching hour,
who know nothing of my tell-tale undead beat,
who will sing as if no songs were ever sung

Baby it's true, you're the one...

The trees have all turned to skeletons
but still this romance lingers on,
some feeling stays alive through me
in the ashes of a song

So caught up in you...

What we stumble on may grow into a flu,
the smallest things can turn immortal,
can become the voices of the hierarchy,
our sadness locked like spheres inside the azure.

A Bout of Indigestion

Inspired by Hannah's Underworld

In time I find some comfort in
this tortoise shell of lesson
how walls are never really walls
and doors yield other doors,
And love is always partial love
and light is never total.

A sample of the actual
infects me like a virus
and every detail turns from brown to red:
a centipede is the godhead,
the sky is empty space.

I hear my voice behind a curtain
dismissing all my fears
with that laugh of recognition:
how I'm greater here than there.

A Poem by Fr. Jan Twardowski

Man

Kneels at night and tries to find God
with eyes of fear, wear and tear-
the distant someone, from whom he'd been parted,
errant and crying, somewhere.

The smell throngs like blooming jasmine
in the golden wheat field of a dream-
who woke who you are, where you swim
through the nights and days unending.

No one says if you are right or wrong,
no one says you are not gorgeous,
only the land of the ancient tombs
hears and knows about your silence.

Translated from the Polish

Glimpse

The cities' autumn ivy:
everything has changed

Candle for the Silent

There's only desperation
'cross the rolling hills of Greenwich
as it fills again with fools.
Let the ghettos have the geniuses,
O blessings on poor Greenwich,
O white light for Darien,
for they who live without hope.
O the minds there, how they're wasted,
doctors paid not to think but to prescribe,
lawyers compensated to evade the true,
businessmen incented to act stupid,
all trained to make the moves that close as traps,
taught in the finest schools how to disregard the real,
to never think of who and where and why and whether they are
or who and what and when and how they serve.
Their empty souls fill time with trifling puzzles
that never will be solved: the statutes, the charts.
O the blue jay cries across the suburbs
as a man wakes up at three in the morning
to think of nothing: the value of his house.

There's only desperation
'cross the rolling hills of Greenwich
as it fills again with heathens.
Let the fallow farms be overvalued
and the barns that turn gold into straw crumble.
Awash in superstition, they wear stones
from the Earth's insides for protection.
Their lives are turned to paper and then burned.
O have mercy for they have no other idols
but the comfortable, they who've learned to look
away from the blackened windows
of those who know an honest pain,
who rely on the invisible
to see them through.
For them there is no other world
beyond the trees,
where live no dwarves, elves or trolls.

There's only desperation
'cross the rolling hills of Greenwich
as it fills with more ennui.
Let love stay within the prisons,
for fear that those inside
will do the things they do to children here
to make them be like they are:
that sword of disappointment
o'er families and marriages.
O leaves that fall and die
and the realization
as the last breath nears
that they never pushed the kids enough
or said enough times "no" to their spouse,
for in the end they didn't spend
enough time at the office
to get done what needed to get done,
to keep the demons out.

A Passing Sense that There areOther People in the World

I say I'm inside the rain
but the day drops bright sun upon the leaves
much clearer than I ever will reveal.

I hide from the sun's perfection
in the perfection of the poem,
hoping that the morning moon
won't slide into the blue,
knowing what I find with eyes
to use is compromise;
beyond its backdrop all my terrors lie
unreachable in kind
—the painting and the words about
the painting must suffice.

The curse of observation:
the sky darkens
as I find the words for sun.

Late October Entrance

That old orange fog
of magical black now visible
of screaming squirrels and skulls
leaves luminescent red
—the dead are always here with us
like towering tree grandfathers
but now they wear the colors
of sunrise and fire
like earth's own spectral jewelry
worn for a special party
where the living and the other side
tell tales through vaporous veils

In the Background While a Comforting Song Plays

The man next to me
is saving the world
(no, don't look to see what he's doing!)
His fingers are typing
in furious waltz time
salvation equations
composing, tight-browed,
the fruit of his singular
place in the crowd.

Soon he will laugh like a jester
and erase what he wrote,
the words that could end
so much pain.
Complete in his answer,
there's no need to weigh down the scale
or get inside other men's heads.

For some unknown reason,
the world has no use
for perfection.
Abysses of pain and wars that won't end
are the smallest conceivable means
to get our attention,
to give us what we call
life lessons,
to show us how to love,
how it begins and ends
in our minds.

... And in Poetry News

I guess poetry still matters in China. A mother beat her child to death because she couldn't memorize a poem:

A woman who beat her five-year-old daughter to death while trying to get her to memorize a poem has been spared jail by a Chinese court, state press said on Wednesday.

Tan Hongying was sentenced to three years in prison by a court in eastern Zhejiang province on Tuesday but the sentence was suspended and she was instead given five years probation, the Beijing Morning News reported.

The report did not say why the court in the city of Jiashan handed down such a light sentence.

The girl died in March after Tan pushed her to memorize a Tang Dynasty (618-907) poem, a common school exercise for Chinese children.

The report did not say what particular Tan Dynasty poem led to the child's death. My money is on the following gem by Li Bai, "Green Mountain" (translation by Witter Byner):

You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain;
I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care.
As the peach-blossom flows down stream
And is gone into the unknown,
I have a world apart that is not among men.

Poem for United Nations Day

For my Uncle Bill, who didn't live to see it reach retirement age.

It's paradise for translators;
the powerless discuss,
the almighty bows.

The bird of peace alights upon the laurel
and the dogs of war invisible (as they always are)
are in soundproof rooms - we all are
allowed to howl - in blue chairs,
into microphones, to be transcribed
in every language on the earth.

Holy Waterbury

His eminence in white reads the eucharist
like an auctioneer - it may as well be Latin
in the cavernous cathedral lined with gold.
Giant granite columns exalt the dome of gold-leaf Jesus
while the red glow of candles haunts the marble floor.
A handful with beads are on their knees, to echo
illegible prayers, as late sun slants
through stained glass windows like brass...

Outside the gates, beneath the gargoyles
a thousand gainfully unemployed wander the streets
in a zombie procession between handouts
—the sweatpants and the ponytails,
the white beards and missing teeth,
colorless poverty from Waterville to Hillside,
dingy laundromats, rincon carnicerias,
purple carpets out on the sidewalk for sale,
snack food and lotto kept behind bars along with
"the lowest prices for cigarettes in the state."
The red brick Georgian mansion is a soup kitchen.
The slate-roofed Mansard with lace eaves and huge bay window
is a haven for physical and sexual abuse.
Beyond that, it's a horror movie set:
the purple Victorian crack mansion,
the turrets boarded up, the wrap-around stairs turned to chutes,
the wood frills hanging down like broken fangs.
Even the Halloween tarantulas are swallowed up in this,
as if the rich folk suddenly disappeared one day,
not the slow decline of duplexes and vinyl,
these mansions on the hill were gutted clean...

By the Mad River, the smelters lie in ruins,
the tar of parking lots still mingles with the weeds,
the brass mills have their black hole eyes forever open,
a broken precious beauty that we all will one day tour
as we do the castles of Europe, but for now
there's nary a brewery or local crafts for tourist trade
there's only boys in hoodies tossing spirals
through the rusty sumac fields...

The ghost of Rosalind Russell
throws brass tacks and firing pins
like dice into the wind -
"it takes a licking and keeps on ticking" -
but Waterbury surrendered after the war.
It lives on, but not here,
in the polished surfaces of deco offices,
for "what lasts better than brass?" (the city's motto)
on a statue with a laurel wreath in bronze,
not far from the final HoJo's in the country,
its orange roof like a sunset that never ends.

Piles of Sunday Papers

Knowledge slips its knots
a foolish thing

and I am left
a golden leaf

set free and floating
over lost and broken notes

the tones kicked out of tunes
forever holding firm to patterns

a la carte

Uncompromising, the way
I pursue this lover, this world -
She must be pure, and love me only
She must be real, and always get me;
No storefronts and no barndoors in between
—For a love that settles never is enough,
That looks to others as it is oneself,
That waits to be told that what is inside
Is not tangible enough, and what is outside
Is never possible without
Compromise. Ah, the word that burns,
That makes one feel so incomplete,
As if I need to trade in flesh
To finally be at peace - no balance, only chaos,
For the war has many faces, be they theft,
Negotiation, neglect or remonstration
And all to put that person in a book
Of memories, a hero of a moment,
The joke that broke the bitter block of ice.

I want more than the scent of perfumed curls,
The quizzical lift of a throat,
The floating eyes, the unrevealing flattery,
I want to leap into the world and make it scream,
To see her with her own eyes,
To speak a common voice,
To hear and yet be heard
At the same time.

Ah, but there is not a voice at all
For one to hear.
The boundaries are sprayed
By hidden lions
And those may not be zebras
In the distance
But hallucinations.
They play with each other
But never change each other's nature -
The excitment of the game
Resolves to death on contact.
So it is with all the human jousts,
No thought of any other,
Just an endless extension of cheese and snares
Inevitable, the ecstasy and grief come through
Out of one's own mind.

There are only the hints
Of glinting laurel, the black shine
In the pool, suggesting one can
Go on and touch the surface.
But the ripples that arise
Are just an echo
Of something hollow
Deep inside
—For vibration here
Is somehow everywhere,
A swirl of dust nebula
As far as the mind can go,
Finding colors that our thoughts can never know:
The ribbons in a would-be lover's hair
That disappears to dark as if
That's all that ever was there,
That single thought
Of something moving
—Attachments to the shapes that static takes
Loosening.

Wyatt at the Tower

Poets write from all sorts of experiences. But imagine the experience of seeing your true love beheaded for adultery from a tower prison cell, along with four innocent people accused of being her lover, while you, the only one who actually slept with her, will soon be set free?

That’s the occasion of the following poem, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Innocentia Veritas Viat Fides Circumdederunt me inimici mei (Innocence Truth Faith Wyatt my enemies surround my soul). His lover was of course the executed queen Anne Boleyn, the Helen of British Protestantism, who Wyatt managed to bed while staying in King Henry VIII’s favor AND be a poet AND avoid being beheaded at the same time, a truly remarkable feat (Those Tudors were nasty to poets, as Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex can attest).

One would think that such a profound experience would disabuse someone of the vanities of ambition, and one would be right. This is a pitiless dissection of all the ways people sell out their integrity to gain power over others. What makes it particularly poignant is the process by which virtue is finally lost, by expending the good within in a futile attempt to get power to answer to it.

Wyatt’s customary style—prosodic virtuosity that isn’t afraid to enunciate itself—turns muted here, making the Latin refrain at the end of every stanza (“circa Regna tonat,” who reigns thunder) sound shocking. This is not about sharpening the modern finger of blame and asking Henry VIII what was he thinking. It is a question that escapes an answer if one is honest, if one, as Wyatt seems to, takes responsibility for consequences. It was assumed back then that all were one, so all shared the common shame together. My how times have changed.

“Who list his wealth and ease retain,
Himself let him unknown contain.
Press not too fast in at that gate
Where the return stands by disdain,
For sure, circa Regna tonat.

The high mountains are blasted oft
When the low valley is mild and soft.
Fortune with Health stands at debate.
The fall is grievous from aloft.
And sure, circa Regna tonat.

These bloody days have broken my heart.
My lust, my youth did them depart,
And blind desire of estate.
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert.
Of truth, circa Regna tonat.

The bell tower showed me such sight
That in my head sticks day and night.
There did I learn out of a grate,
For all favour, glory, or might,
That yet circa Regna tonat.

By proof, I say, there did I learn:
Wit helpeth not defence too yerne,
Of innocency to plead or prate.
Bear low, therefore, give God the stern,
For sure, circa Regna tonat.“

Happpppp-ee B'earth-dee ee.cummings

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here

Not one but two long-ago girlfriends insisted that E.E. Cummings was poetry. I scoffed, being young and inculcated with the bigotries of the village, which regarded him as a sentimental humorist with lexographical dyslexia located in the poorer part of poetrytown, on the block with Ogden Nash and Rod McKuen. One of the bracing things about growing older is having to acknowledge that they were right, I was wrong, for Cummings, born 116 years ago today, remains one of the most underappreciated poets of the 20th century.

While the most celebrated poets of the American century—Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Pound, Williams—were emotional cripples perplexed by the way life was lived by actual people, Cummings met us where we are, with real fondness for the way we emotionally connect with the mysteries of existence:

“We’ve
Such freedom such intense digestion so much
greenness only dying makes
us grow.”

And while those “serious” writers couldn’t joke their way out of a wet paper bag, Cummings approached the grandest of subjects with light and generous wit, not the private, hyper-hip variety of a Frank O’Hara (lionized in part because he was so LMAO funny), but something approaching universality:

“pity this busy monster, manunkind,
Not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim(death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness”

How easy-going he makes the strange, how readily the eccentric becomes, in today’s parlance, the new normal. And this word “manunkind,” was there anyone better at coining words through combination: “ultraomnipotence,” “talentgang,” “mud-luscious” “togethercoloured” “breakfastfood”? For all the whimsical, seemingly random arrangement of words here, is there really a better or more perfect way to say this thought? Doesn’t it draw a vivid picture, despite the abstraction, of how we are really children trapped in an inexplicable machine?

One of my pet theories about Cummings is that his poetic rebellion, not waged against rhyme, meter, story, theme, coherence or any of the other bugaboos of modern poets but against the rules of grammar itself, was actually aimed at the typewriter machine, that infernal co-creater (a point highlighted when I try to reproduce his poems through a modern PC – it’s like putting illuminated writing into typeface - I won’t even try). Brad Leithauser traces his innovations to Gertrude Stein, and in Cummings’ hands her screams of ennui are transformed into perfect, almost mathematical puzzles that are—wonders never cease—solvable, because he wanted us so very much to solve them:

“whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)
and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me.”

He reminds me in many respects of a cheerful double of another New Englander, the dour EA Robinson, in the way failings are celebrated and an assortment of oddballs are given a platform to bravely trumpet their lost ambitions. Cummings is far more gentle, of course, with poems like “anyone lived in a pretty how town” he truncates the Spoon River-like townsfolk into appealing archetypes accessible to us common folk:

"someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream"

Cummings peeks his head into numerous modes. As a love poet:

“the upward singular deepest flower which she carries in the gesture of her hips”

As spiritual seeker:

“my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving”

As aphorist:

“the most wasted of days is one without laughter”

As chronicler of the seasons (he was born in October, but quite clearly a poet of early spring, “when the world is puddle-wonderful.” His poems abound with new love, childhood discoveries, messy complications that are breezily resolved):

“From hopscotch and jump-rope and /it’s/spring/and/ the// goat-footed//balloon-Man whistles/far/and/wee.”

As philosopher:

“knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination”

As humorist:

“I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.”

Even as poet about poetry:

“I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.”

He was even, at times, political:

“At least Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.”

Son of a Unitarian Minister/Harvard Professor, Cummings retained that gentle paternalistic Brahmin affection for that strange place called America, but his lineage was mugwump free-thinker, and he could not help being an apologist for freedom. His insistence on mangling typography to suit his expression speaks of the strictures to which we all willingly submit to leave an impression. He was the preacher who prophesied go out there now, all ye children of Plymouth, and violate some of them grammar rules for thyself!

But it appears that grammar won out in the end (not that it was ever really a battle). We see precursors (in the Borgesean sense) of Cummings in everyday speech – the stammers and shifts of syntax, the artful repetitions (just right now, in fact, I heard someone say: “I’m the guy behind the guy behind the guy behind the guy”) – but Cummings has few followers of his formal yet experimental, jarring yet musical style beyond outliers like Ferlinghetti:

“The pennycandystore beyond the El/is where I first/ fell in love/with unreality//Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom/of that september afternoon//A cat upon the counter moved/among the licorice sticks/and tootsie rolls/and Oh Boy Gum”

But Cummings was never content to stay with shiny surfaces. He was always going for the moment when one can “imagine that yes is the only living thing”:

“love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds.”

October Blue

The fall has a special sadness,
Lives wasted, shadows large,
The clarity of many colors,
The blankets filled with charge.

Achievements always aren't enough;
We hear the baby's cry.
The gold is scattered at our feet,
The choking vines untied.

We're left with consequences
In the sweetest picture frames,
The finite and the endless,
The dropping off of names.

With the first smoke comes the blue notes
And those just turn to breathing.
The forest clearings now appear.
We consecrate our wreathings.

What birds are left, in our blue sky,
What flowers can we savor
As darkness dresses fertile soil
And thoughts grow big and braver?

The St. Columbus Day Massacre

One of these days I'll get around to sourcing all these claims…

Zarco the blue-eyed from Cuba, half noble, half Jew
Set sail in 1492 on the day that Spain expelled its Jews
In the service of the Portuguese king, who looked South
To beat the Byzantine middle-man for pepper and clove
Via Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. They called him Colom
And sent him to Madrid, the home of freshly united Spain,
The throne of Isabella and Ferdinand, who at the moment were too busy
Slaughtering the last Moorish to know a New World had been found.
So he pitched a smaller globe, offered China and its gold
For soon-to-be-unemployed conquistadoros – for new crusades
To retake the holy lands and grains of Egypt.
It was all a clever ruse, a way to buy time for De Gama
And the crews who'd seen Brazilian shores before.

Ah, but before we can get to the petunias and cashews,
The pineapples and bananas, the hammocks and canoes,
The squash and cassava melons, the hurricanes and barbecues,
There was the matter of selling the lie:
That due West was the way to the East—what moron would believe this?
What Queen, even, would see the sad aborigine pelts as the equal of
Chinese silks?
But that was the game he was playing, Zarco the spy, plying the waters
Of the Northern climes, trying to line the demarcation 'tween the rich
Southlands for Portugal, with their open waterways, and the land-locked
Trap of the North, where the savages were souls to save or be enslaved,
At the pleasure of the Queen, who kept sending the slaves he brought
To her back, for she knew it was better to die than be a hostage,
They only differed in their concept of heaven – the Taino wanted no part
Of a Paradise full of Spaniards, and resisted the Christian conscription,
As those who across the ocean resisted the salvation of Ferdinand's
Inquisition; but the natives obtained their revenge: syphilis killed
More Europeans than torture and smallpox killed them.

But first there was the matter of keeping the stratagem hidden
—How to spin, on that first voyage, a garden of Adam and Eves?
Zarco sailed back through the Azores, to land in Lisbon
And strategize with his King once more.
The Queen would be properly skeptical, but she hadn't yet foreseen
The power of the printing press, for a pamphlet had gone up
Through the capitals of Europe: new worlds discovered and priceless
Treasures unearthed by a Genoese woolthreader named Columbus
(Proving that even press releases haven't gotten much more accurate
In the intervening 500 years). And so she was coerced
Against her will to be the empress of the mind of California,
And she sent him off again, this time with idle armies, as mercenaries
For gold, to strip the larder land for the greater good of Portugal
(How could they have known, of the Mayan pyramids, the Aztec
Wheels of gold – the legends that spoke of the white men returning
Who built these palaces and tombs out of their minds?)

But in the meantime there were pretenses to create:
Tobacco and cocoa instead of opium and hashish,
Potatoes and tomatoes to replace frankincense and myrrh,
Paprika and chili peppers as substitutes for India's spices,
That's the power of the lie, as well as mass extermination
So the traders on the horn could import good old slaves from Africa
To work the mines and the plantations (and get for themselves a little
Cut of King John's grace on the side). He fucked it up
On purpose, traveled back to Spain in manacles,
Endured like Christ the insurrections, imprisonments, rip-offs,
For he was in that world, but not of it.

So the Treaty of Tordesillas was papal-bull decreed, dividing up the world
North and South between Iberian spheres. King Henry (Seventh of
England), not one to shirk from power plays, sent a chap from Genoa,
Rechristened as John Cabot, to lay claim on a great continent,
For the land his son made Protestant, for the pleasure of the King,
Not a farthing more for that evil Pope who would take those souls away
—But a land of plenty—fit for poetry and foxes in his Majesty's preserves.
With all those princely trappings, who could ever have believed
That God would change his address, just pack it up and leave
The wars of creed for a little spit of peace?
The Spanish have a word for it: duende.

Flirt Part 2

Cat and squirrel are at it again,
cat's got it in his head to stalk her.
He stomachs his way, hind quarters like stilts,
slow as October maple leaves.
Squirrel bounds across the grass oblivious
foraging nuts in the frantic seasonal rush
while cat is frozen in mid-crouch,
proud to not be found out.
Squirrel turns her sideways eyes to him
as if to say "you playing with me?"
She leaps up a tree, waves her flag
of surrender
and disappears.

The Other Half of the Argument

Response to a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva, in memory of Katherine Hollands

I blot the sun in your sky,
I dispense the stars one by one,
I stay strong as a birch when your tempests pry;
You're not permitted to come in

And beg to me, with eyes like a deer
To walk in my shadow reflective,
For your words will dissolve into tears
Like a child I will have to forgive.

Nin-me-sar-ra (Adoration of Inanna) - IV

The final part of the series. For more on Enheduanna, see Cass Dalgish's poetic response to this poem and legend, Humming the Blues.

Since the heart was full, too full, great Queen, I birthed it for you.
The deep midnight songs I recited to you
The cult singer will echo at noon:
"Because of your captive spouse, your humble protégé,
Your anger has only grown larger, your heart unassuaged."
The powerful lady, respected by kings, accepts her offerings.
She finally accepts her prayer and sacrifice.
Inanna's great heart has been slaked.

Like the light of the rising moon, she was clothed in enchantment.
Nanna came forward to gaze at her in awe
And her mother Ningal blessed her,
And the temple doorsill opened and said "be hailed!"
What all inside spoke to the mistress was exalted.
Draped in allure, your heart is restored, with power to rule with the Word,

O Inanna, all glory!

The Sadness of the Evening

It's the time of perpetual darkness
when artificial lamps daub the dying with life
and the birds hide silent in camouflage stripes
and you can't see the words in shaking leaves
nor the way the world moves boldly through the clouds
—even the rocks are swallowed, for you are not welcome here
except in the warm light of community rooms,
where people will gather 'round tables,
share in a fresh pot of coffee,
unwrap packages, shift in chairs.

Wall Street Sales Pitch

The following should not be construed as investment advice.

It's tranch warfare, my friend, we're riding the yield curve
inverse and non-correlated to all but Kuala Lumpur futures,
we're cherry picking dumbells and fallen angels
pushing on a string with roller coaster swaps
seignorage on a short squeeze with fat tail risk
and tender premiums and option overlays,
no mezzanine strips or synthetic jumbo collars here,
no toxic pump and dump syndicated notes
just good old alpha replication glidepaths,
liquid derivatives with levered overhang
arbitraged for margin creep and alligator spreads
fixed and floating covenant-lite credit facilities
with active durations, junk seasoned paper
an unsecured pure play reverse refi pool of zombie banks
with workout and white knight stalking horse bid implied if distressed
and an airtight rio hedge - a counterparty category killer,
as good as the greenspan put, what the hell,
it's the quadruple witching hour, leverage is king
and quants hug the index to not back-test data mines
and chartists scale out big uglies on their bollinger bands
and value fundies kick the tires on air pocket torpedo stocks
and vulture funds sweat the burn rate on the death valley curve
and traders launder so it won't come out in the wash sale rule,
when the stop-loss circuit-breakers flash crash the chinese wall
and they all turn to barefoot pilgrims on a dead cat bounce,
foaming the runway before the suicide pill,
they take a bath, take a flier, take a report,
they spend their TARP bonuses on a macaroni defense,
become liability-driven, benchmark-agnostic, caught in liquidity traps,
like a currency basket bid whacked to break the buck,
what a barrier to entry, a stub quote sucker's rally,
it's not accounting noise, this time,
where else they gonna look to write their term sheet
than the sure-fire hair cut of basis points
for their information ratio, their tracking error,
their stochastic countercyclical spread metrics
hell, they'll exercise a covered call before
they'll off-load that native beta, where else they gonna go
for rolling excess returns than subordinated debentures,
the simple stuff, the proverbial green shoots of a soft landing?
It's pretty basic, buy high, hedge risk, there is no money
at the end of the day, there's only trust, brother, you and me.

Signage

The magic of the real:
an early-morning swan
on chaff-strewn swollen waters,
the easy float of white on mirrored black.

This incandescent moment
too true for any words

while skill with words goes screaming all around,
the selling of the "me."
What fake to be believed?
Which misleadings to be followed?
What lies do we decide to turn to stories
for our dreams?

The Wishing Well

Go back! Go back! Back to your strings and your pulley.
Lift up! Pour down! There’s never an end to the flow.
Dredge on! Dredge on! The bucket will never be empty.

The leaves skip along now deserted streets aimlessly.
The lamps of your once true and beautiful turn low.
Go back! Go back! Back to your strings and your pulley.

The bright colors fade, the flowers all flee.
What you once replied “yes” to now says “you don’t know.”
Dredge on! Dredge on! The bucket will never be empty.

The water is sinking, it keeps disappearing too quickly.
You lift it with all of your strength, watch it seep again slow.
Go back! Go back! Back to your strings and your pulley.

A vortex of feathers whirl down to some merciless sea.
With a squeal of your ropes you can hold back the sorrow.
Dredge on! Dredge on! The bucket will never be empty.

Don’t stay in the blankets beside that warm body.
Don’t travel the world in the glow on a pillow.
Go back! Go back! Back to your strings and your pulley.
Dredge on! Dredge on! The bucket will never be empty.

Flirt

I watch the cat watch the squirrel.
The squirrel swirls his tail like it's a cat's.
The cat looks back at me with worried eyes.

A Thought Already Out of Date

I spend my words on those who fail to hear;
For those who do, I cannot say a word.

They both have need of nothingness
—The echo of dimensions—
For conversations never get the joke.

Nin-me-sar-ra (Adoration of Inanna) - III

This is the third of a four-part translation of the oldest surviving lyric poem in human history. In this segment, the poet calls forth multiple gods to help her escape her banishment from the holy temple, where she was supplanted as priestess by an unidentifiable male entity.

Sin, tell Heaven of my heart-wrenching fate.
Declare it unto Heaven, and Heaven will deliver me.
Report it into Heaven, and we will be released.
"The Lady will seize the kingship,
Foreign lands and flooded sands lie at her feet.
Woman so exalted, who can make the cities tremble
Step forward, let her heart be soothed for me."
En-hedu-Ana am I, I say to you now in a prayer
My tears, like the sweetest beer
I shed them freely for you, Inanna,
"Your judgment" I submit myself to.

As for Asimbabbar, concern yourself not!
He changed the rites and altered everything.
He stripped great Heaven of its power.
He did not stand in awe of the greatest God.
He turned that temple of endless abundance,
Inexhaustible beauty, into a ruined house
Which he entered as if my companion, but really it was envy!
My wild holy cow, drive out the man! Capture the man!
In this place where life is made possible - where do I stand?
Heaven should force them to surrender the city!
Heaven should strike the despised rebels down!
Enlil should curse them!

The mother shall not soothe her crying child!
O Queen with your lamenting all over the land
May your ship of lamentation be left for the enemy behind!
Must I die for my holy songs?
I - My Nanna has not decided my case.
In renegade land, he destroyed me utterly.
He has not passed a final judgment on me!
Has he pronounced it or not? Does it mean anything?
He stood there in triumph, and drove me from the temple.
He made me fly like a swallow from the window - my life was devoured
—And so I must go to the thorns of the mountain.
He stripped me of my rightful tiara
And gave me a eunuch, saying "this is now your crown!"

One and only Queen, beloved of Heaven, may your heart beat
On my behalf! Beloved wife of Dumuzi
You are the Queen from Horizon to Zenith.
The great gods, the Anuna, submitted to you.
You were born a younger sister
But now you're so much greater!
The Anuna put their lips to the ground before you
But my trial is not yet over, a strange verdict hangs as if my verdict.
To the fruitful bed I did not reach out my hand
And the holy commands I did not reveal to man
Radiant High Priestess of Nanna that I am.
My Queen, beloved of Heaven, may your heart forgive me.

It must be known! It must be known! Nanna has not yet spoken a decree
—"It is yours" is what it said!
Be it known you are as high as the sky!
Be it known you are as wide as the world!
Be it known that you massacre the rebellious!
Be it known that you roar against trespassers!
Be it known how you crush skulls!
Be it known how you devour the dead like a dog!
Be it known your terrible gaze!
Be it known how you raise your terrible gaze!
Be it known of your flashing eyes!
Be it known you are uncompromising!
Be it known you stand triumphant at all times!

That Nanna has not spoken out, and said that "It is yours"
Only makes it sweeter, it makes your power more!
My Queen, beloved of Heaven, I'll reveal to all your wrath!
In the censor I have heaped the coals, the lustration is prepared,
The nuptial chamber waits for you. May your heart be gratified!

Landscape with Iconolatry

They called it Armageddon, the rain
like a bloodthirsty snare drum
in a brutal hail of acorns
cracking on the roofs like tiny skulls.
The birds are all in hiding,
the stones are turning black,
the red brick glows like battlefields
with twisted down spout limbs
and instant mushrooms in the bloody puddles
wide as yarmulkes.

The only thing that's still is a glistening bag
held sheer in a barbed wire tunnel
(no knowledge without suffering, Siddhartha said).

Everywhere, rivers are flowing
like the great chain of being
'cross cloistered checkerboards
in a monstrance mist
that extends across the world
on crosiers with rusted hooks.

Despite what Moses says
we know the storm, somehow, will pass,
as do the crows and rabbits -
no apocalyptic fantasies
for Cromwell and the Protestants
just work to tidy up God's way.

Clearing

A swirl of fog
as my brain unloads the pelf:
people exquisitely screaming
their superior pain
afraid of what they can't see,
their magnificent light.
It's like yarn, this stuff,
equipped to tie or warm,
a dark gauze that holds
the junk along the road
in a hobo's net
so it can gain a second, orange life:
the thing we talk about
in the place of the real,
the thing that burns
with the rage we can't leave with ourselves.

As it falls away, I see it's preferable
that people are only capable of telling lies
—it's cleaner that way, with nothing invested
except in fiduciary paper—no truth
to bind us to obey.