An Unnecessary Sermon

"Þau horfðu á mig þögul
og hurfu mér sýn
inn í nóttina myrkrið og nóttina."
- Snorri Hjartarson

Now that the world has ended
we finally can speak frankly,
as all the things you've held inside
were outside anyway,
larger than you ever knew
like everything you never saw,
for everything you saw was there
because it needs your eye
not because it was all
there was to see.

You never were alive
in the way you thought you were
but in the way that rocks and knowledge are,
and after all this gasp of time
you thought you were alone
you were sharing your brain all along
(the thickness of a cranium was no test for a friend),
it was just like the playgrounds of your childhood,
they never really ended, it never really mattered
that the sand was not the earth
and your shovel not the hand of mighty God.

It's time to go back home now
for a juice box and a nap,
how many things you knew that you could do, if not for hands.
You thought that there was never time enough
but there was only time
to take of distant vistas what you could,
to get as close as eyes and hands and voices would allow,
pretending it was real with all your soul
as if it was itself and not your
breath that made it actual.

Your mourning days are over.
This light would seem too vivid,
its strokes too magnified
when you were piecing out
the parts of you disguised
in people who needed your help
or who wanted you to die
or begged for the forgiveness
you never gave -
how small that all seemed then, but now how large,
larger than the sunlight that you worshiped,
to travel cross such infinite extents
to find: yourself, unborn;

in the universe past time
this feeling is what's new
what the hand of God on something small would feel like,
what it means to see it all in one detail,
how love is just a vehicle, on the other
side of light there is the eye
beyond the mind, beyond kind
we always knew, despite how far,
would still be there.

Descending Sign

The scarlet apocalypse of lipstick azalea
Scars the gray-green graveyard, the only color
            This lint-covered spring.
After awhile I start to take it personally
These days without sun,
           The waiting for the paint on the visible to dry
To unveil again the elves, gnomes and fairies
And a channeled wiccan wind to blow
            Like a chanteuse seduction

            Instead of these
Woodpeckers clanging the eaves
           Or the vengeful God of Science
With a logic born from chaos
Who blows imagined lives out of his breath
And assures us we can believe in anything
Whatever helps to cultivate the chemical of joy
           But, at the end of the day, his equation resolves
To the null set of total annihilation.

                                  The Gods here died too long ago,
They were no longer expedient,
           They no longer had the power to shock.
These people on the Hudson, these people of the mind
Admire the granite walls and mourn their rising
Convinced that they are made of something actual
            Not just their thought.

                               Human nature, infecting
All they touch, replaces an abundant world
           By saying nothing is beyond it.
                              So here they stay
Within the fog, noting weakness and calling it wit,
           Displaying knowledge like an aperitif
Best served to just oneself.

                                    A splash of sun
And the graffiti comes back to life.
The chatter all around, that makes of people
Confessor priests, goes on
          Because there never is a truth that stays,
The whole leaks through in every chiding
Of the neighbors, schools, assembly halls,
         Enough to fill the sumac leaves
With something more than grief.

Friday Afternoon on Park Avenue

The tell-tale liars emerge
when all the salesman
has left to hawk is
the relentless logic of his close

And the City
falls away from stone
onto sweetly
blinking steam

The last grounds of autonomy
go through the press
and one is held to the mediocrity
of one's half-assed, half-cocked status

Identity shifts like debt from one
credit to another,
warm as cigarette smoke
and just as fungible

But one can still play
dress up, wear musty
conductor's hats and debutante fur
from heirloom status attics

And speak of fabled lives
that glow beyond the rest
the smarter, harder-charging ones
whose names go on the gifts

In the constant interchange
between the accomplished and alive
between the ones blessed to be living
and the one's who've stolen a piece of God's mind

Fractured Self-Portrait

I.
I am the businessman everyone wants to read their poems to -
I write mine in my sleep
and they are everyone else's.

II.
I am the most famous poet in the world
but nobody knows who I am -
they're forever almost reciting my words
and almost making them turn to hollow sound.

III.
I am the shadow of the book,
the thought excluded from the literature -
the living cannot know a thing of death,
they must be free to flail about themselves.

Notes from El Yucatan

He was more like John-Paul Belmondo than John-Paul Belmondo, that 12-year old boy Roberto, who danced better than Baryshnikov but worshipped Michael Jackson. He could solve a Rubik’s Cube in 30 seconds, but couldn’t explain why they always served limes and called them lemons, or why he never went down even on the hottest days through the Parthenon-like eye-hole to the moss-topped oasis 100’s of feet down called the cinote. He never explained anything in fact, for it would still the flow, confuse the mind with thinking. He kept four women moving, including his mother and autistic sister who knew everything, and despised most every man, except of course the Shaman who turned into a jaguar eyes-first. They lived in a village like a National Geographic diorama, a few huts inside a cornfield by some sacred ancient crossroads the Nazis and the CIA had sent teams to investigate because it was an opening to Agartha. They had taken off the day from school as they habitually do, because the teachers get so cruel on torrid days when you pretended you weren’t smarter than they were, to picnic at a partially excavated pyramid deep in the jungle. They put mango and pineapple at its pinnacle for the aluxes. When they returned a half-hour later (though time is different there) the fruit was partially eaten, and beside it was a long crystal finger with an amethyst point. Marina reached for it, but Roberto said “no, you can’t take that.” They climbed back down to dance to Justin Beiber with other naiads, devas, nixies, talking birds and trees, the iguanas with watermelon lips watching. Next day, Marina was taken to the hospital, she woke up with an infection on her toe. The mere thought, her mother said, of having the crystal had poisoned her. That’s how pure it is there, in scorned Yucatan, where everything is equal and on speaking terms, for that jungle has no water, it falls through limestone sieves back to sea level.

Ordinary Woman

She listens to the tulips in their bells
While multi-tasking fresh emergencies
She coaxes secret truths they'd never tell
From buddhas in disguise as honey bees
There's always time for beauty
Although she's always harried
She always gives so others can be free

She's an ordinary woman
No one stops to see
No special love songs for her joie de vivre
But the earth can't dance without her
The birds refuse to sing
'Til she extends her soul another spring

Her world is just abundance to be shared
And all its pain just moments to console
For no one dies without someone who cared
There never is a life too small or low
It's the ones they don't remember
She always has a tear for
She leads the checkered orphans to the shore

Oh, a new wind has come
Now we must act as one
Maybe we all will know
The current she always follows

She's an ordinary woman
No one stops to see
No special love songs for her memory
But the earth can't spin without her
The bells can only ring
'Til she extends her soul another spring

Coda for a Ghost

Obama     no-bomb-ed     Osama
for photo        no photo
no body         at sea
like Mafia?        it’s Muslim
not Muslim        no problem
we’ve matched up the DNA
no DNA        facial recognition technology
what photo?        these photos
all phony        national security
the Pakis killed him        no Pakistan involvement (officially)
(they just have all witnesses in custody)
why kill him?        he fired first
he was unarmed         using his wife as a shield
wife was killed         only injured
the woman was not his wife        just some crossfire
but Khalid his son was killed        no, his son Hamza
the neighbor who walked by the house every day
said there was no Osama there        you needed an ID
to walk down the street        it was right next to the Military Academy!
inside his house        oval windows
outside his house        they’re all square
his hard drive was full of intelligence
no internet        no cell phone        no dialysis machine
our leaders watched it live on TV    no video, no audio, “fog of war”
“heavily armoured hounds with infared cameras”
assisted the Navy SEALS        but no one knows why the helicopter fell
        and don’t get me started on the towers...

And all of this to celebrate a death
above the other millions that we’ve killed.
It’s time to toast the victory, however temporary, however phony
we paid for with our children and our freedom,
to know what the loss of our money and dignity was for.
It’s the very thinness of the tissues of the lie
that makes us believe it all more strongly.

Relativism 101

"Does the heart have words?" the poet asked...
The men laughed "of course it does not,"
the women motioned but could not make a sound
and the children replied "when a word is smiling,
you know it has come from the heart."

"Does the earth feel pain?" the farmer asked...
The men said it was impossible scientifically,
the women said they feel the pain themselves
and the children asked the earth and reported
"someday you will learn."

"Are people good?" the pilgrim asked...
The men said "some are, some aren't,"
the women said "everyone is good
but everyone needs a little help"
and the children said that "fudge is good
and spiders when they're squashed, but people?"
They'd never had that, maybe it's something they should try.

At the New York Stock Exchange

The epicenter of capitalism (they say)
is as hollow as the Fabergé egg
Czar Nicholas bequeathed (in the boardroom)
before the Rothschild bankers finally offed him.
That egg, an old clock and a Venus by Warhol
are all that remain here of the traditional;
it's all media and machines now on the floor,
an automated photo-op casino show
for those who think the murders in their name
will one day pay off.

You can see yourself on flatscreen TV,
watch the corporate banners for the opening bell
be unfurled and folded like a military funeral,
joke about the royal wedding with security guards
as lonely as a witness at a courthouse one.
This is the "real world" greater than our own,
but it's just a TV studio, the balcony that seems so
immense is just so tiny.

Upstairs, in the offices, where the bosses used to sit
and send down pink slips while they tugged on their cigars,
are the Picasso's and Pollock's, the art without faces
they want us to think of as the great.
But somewhere, some 20-something retiree,
an Aldrich or such, with more money than his legacee's can ever spend,
holds in his private collection
the real stuff, Kirchner, say, or Beckmann from the war,
to look at with the horror that only his kind know,
the culpability not to be too widely shared,
even in the galleries of the bourse.

Three Poems by C.P. Cavafy

Poet Constantine P. Cavafy, born on this day 148 years ago, seemed born to torment translators. First there's the matter of his idiom — the crazy veering he did as a Greek in Alexandria between dialect and formal speech, modernity and antiquity, and that special eccentric diction that on occasion led him to coin his own words. But that is just a palimpsest of surface, possible with modern technology to peer through. The conundrum is his nuance, so precise that the normal mode of translators — equalizing semantic resonances on a pair of language scales — always seems to throw everything off. Even one stolen word to fill the vast linguistic chasm changes an entire poem, yet poetic translation is nothing without such stolen words. Cavafy, who also lived and studied in England, must be very pleased to see the frustration caused to us dim-witted Anglos when we try to enter his strange and wistful paradise — one invisible to all but the most refined sensibilities.

So, here are three poems that are not quite epic failures as translations. For more sophisticated mis-translations, one can view Cavafy's entire canon online, which also includes the Greek originals in written and spoken form. Oh, and I also posted my translation of a more famous Cavafy poem, The City, here two years ago. Happy birthday, C.P., you historian of the senses.

Chandelier

In a room small and empty, four walls only,
all green and covered in cloths,
a chandelier shines brightly with fire
and in each of its flames is the smolder
of lust’s sickness, the force of desire.

In that slightest of rooms the light multiplies,
the chandelier trembles with heat.
No ordinary light gets away from here,
it’s not made for timorous bodies
this fever of pleasure.

A December in 1903

And if I cannot tell about my love—
if I don't speak for hair, for lips, for eyes;
your face I hold it still inside my soul,
I hold the sound of your voice in my brain,
September days, erupting in my dreams,
chisel and paint my phrases and words
in every subject I touch, each idea I say.

Cleo's Illness

This Cleo, a nice
kid, three and 20 years old—
aristocratically bred, with a rare knowledge of Greek—
has fallen ill. He caught the fever
going around Alexandria this year.

The fever found him morally exhausted already
heartsick at his partner, a young actor,
who loved him and wanted him no longer.

He's seriously ill, his parents are worried.

The maid who raised him
is also afraid for Cleo's life.
In her fretful condition
she thinks of an idol
she loved when she was little, before she worked as a maid
at this prominent Christian home and became herself a Christian.
She secretly offers some cake, wine and honey
to the idol, and chants whatever supplications
she can remember — scraps, melodies. The silly
doesn't know if the little black demon Meles, father of Homer,
can cure a Christian or not.

In a New York Second

millions of people in the naked city
but we can always identify a celebrity...

Menelaus the Poet to the Translator

I always do like visitors, and as I've said before
I'm sure I feel like Christ did when they pulled away the stone.
Here's some bread and some retsina.
The woman here will make you anything you want to eat.
The view here of the docks from this window is quite striking
at a certain time of light.
There are books of course piled high in every room
but I'm afraid they're all in Greek.
I'm going to the brothel now, I won't return tonight.
I trust the questions of tense and tone and gender and stress
may occupy your mind.

I'd tell you all my secrets, but I'm afraid I have but one:
I'm not much of a poet, so my readers do the work.
I hope this fact will help you when my words turn up as ash;
they never were alive, you know, just magic on a page
that stayed long after the illusion was delivered.

About that inch of dust on all the furniture and paintings,
I assume you want things just the way they were
as you no doubt prefer these seedy accomodations
to the five-star inn down the street?
Don't think my disappearance reflects a lack of kindness.
I find the nicest people can be thousands of years old,
like wine they get more interesting with age.
So, stay, enjoy, think of my simple life and humble quarters
as your home away from home.
If anyone disturbs you, be it neighbors or landlady,
just say you understand me and they'll leave you quite alone.
To do what, I wish I knew, for I left that station long ago.
I find I miss the friends I could have had along the way.

Japan sinking in the ocean, as presented by various contemporary poetry schools

The Brutalists
You think you have problems?
I was born on Cesspool Harbour
scavenging the rat droppings of empire
in a scow that fished out butkis.

Feminist
Hera has returned, with petticoat and tidal wave,
to teach what power feels like to the other,
to meet again your gaze, Lili Marlene. Do you feel it now?

Queer Theory
The geishas turn to tears, red
lipstick on the shores of Vancouver, kabuki
dolls dressed in weeds, open kimonos
at the bottom of the sea.

American hybrid
m'aider parade
where have all the origami gone?
I remember my father's transistor
baseball games every night
the way he breathed through them
never Osaka,
never meant to be.

Flarf
hot greased Asian chick
to rock your night volcano

Visualist

It's not nice

to fool Mother Nature

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

were only a kind of test

this time it's personal

maybe

it's

the

end

Black
Learn to breathe through gills
like the ancestors
in perpetual diaspora
still pushing waters across floors

Post Language
zen lemonade
sea anemone anomie
bankers in brine scrapers
smiling buddhas land in Normandy

New Formalists
There once was a man from Kyoto
whose dick, when he came, took a photo
You think that's a trick,
he smiled, accent thick,
if it stays hards I might even float-o

Academic
We tried to escape
post-capitalism, tried the evade
the voice, but deep in the interstices
of Nietzsche keen Proustian space
someone thought we were cool,
published us, and now look,
Japan has come loose from its moorings.

Po Mo
Uhura Mazda, the Subaru sisters,
weapons of manga distraction.
Wi is the world, bring good things to life.
Where will we go to blow our brains now?

A Tree

Saucer Magnolia
Queen of the Spring
How can mere tree branches hold
your galaxy of tulips?
Milk-white like pear blossoms never are
and pinker than any crabapple
with thousands of bloomers opened at once
like a cotillion in a teenage boy's dreams.
Sky flowers fall down to earth with no sound
from limbs that were bare last week
and soon will be building a ceiling of leaves
for songbirds now drunk on its sweets.
Great Mother - is that all we really know of you?
Your perfume to remind us you're still here?

Easter Sunrise

beautiful lake
perfectly still
an infinite mirror

the universe would die
if it stayed like that

Another Losing Round with Monsieur Lapin

The giant blue rabbit wants to be famous,
to have his imprint spread across the world,
the hills to peal with huzzahs instead of birds.

Come out of your holes, prick up your ears,
attend to the giant blue rabbit
impressive as hell, who brings the holy shit.

He'll teach you to burrow inside your heart,
keep you from eating the wrong kind of leaf,
show you the shades of the sky you can't see.

Let warrens be renamed, his praises declaimed,
let him be the voice for all the other rabbits,
the one they know themselves by.

May he feed the needs of lovers, obsess scholars,
make the sad and lonely laugh, entertain laborers,
may his utterances be examined like entrails for clues.

May he live the kind of life that is worth living,
may he see the adoration in their eyes
and leave behind something stronger than mere fur.

The alternative is unthinkable,
to be blue in a world of brown,
goliath against the ants that always win.

Where, but among rabbits, can he ever find a home?
Must the chocolates in his pockets be forever buried?
Maybe worms are all that life returns, some usefulness for darkness.

Two Interpretations of Basho's Frog Haiku

A version inspired by the Buddhist readings on Ken Knabb's incomparable BOP Secrets site (hat tip Patrick)...

ancient springtime
pond

time for frog
to fall away

inside water
plup!

...And a literal version (thanks Veronica)

rain on an old pond is
a frog jumping with a swish
the sound of water

At Walt Whitman's Birthplace

Huntington, NY

They say Walt passed this way
but who the fuck knows -
No thing at this place
was like it was.
We've all grown larger
than even his beard.
The house creaks with poems
it has wrote.
I doubt he'd approve
of his monument much
Why fence gardens and re-name
the streets of the town?
I close the latch to leave
and it opens.
I close it and it opens again
just like Walt
Telling me that there are no boundaries
but I close it again and walk on.

The Law of Spirit, Analogy Ten

Beauty must be alive - it grows
like branches on a tree
and there are never branches not alive with beauty,
it is the mark of life.
There doesn't seem to be a real distinction
between life and beauty;
one finds its own expression
in abundant camouflage
the other finds a way to give itself
to what is similar.
There is no curl without a purpose,
every straight line points to somewhere,
everything is only stilled to be admired
before it begins again
chasing a spiral.

The Law of Spirit, Analogy Nine

Each new generation gets a little more freedom
earned, somehow, at birth.
Elders yell behind bars
kids walk through as if invisible.
They've had enough of those traps,
they want to find some others
the next young ones will peel away like a face.
This may never end;
it's astounding how old we must become
to be born.

The Law of Spirit, Analogy Eight

I subdivide
to imaginary worlds
that each are real
distinct in my mind

As this larger world
so full of dreams
is real inside
some larger mind

The Law of Spirit, Analogy Seven

There are so many kinds of roses
how can there be one truth?

Out of infinite variations
which one is perfection?

If everything empties to one
why is every one thing so different?

The universe goes on farther than we can imagine
but you are exactly unique.

We've long sought to solve the penultimate sum
when the wonder is so many numbers.

The Law of Spirit, Analogy Six

It's April, and death is in the air.
The angels pray for us.
The Chrysler building weeps,
its rays are for the sun god.
It's time to clean out all we know,
release it like funeral salt.
It's time to re-erase the slate,
to know this house is just a school
and learning the same as light.

The Law of Spirit, Analogy Five

The best poets, like the best corporations
leave indigenous peoples diseased and dead,
the lungs of the earth in cesspools.

That's why they're paid so handsomely,
to not clean up their messes when they
don't have to.

The product is all that matters
or more precisely, getting people to pay
more than it's worth

Through any means neccesary
protected from the dangerous by the mind
a safety net of nerves.

Show mercy and you're next to be sacrificed,
there'll be room enough for kindness
when you have won.

Gifts turn to tricks, love turns to lust,
it's as natural as breathing,
the mind is so inevitable

Devising new dilemmas for the heart to overcome
the river of atonement
that always solves the puzzles without trying.

The Law of Spirit, Analogy Four

Surrender to art, there's nothing the mind
can control that won't turn to a lie.

The real is the heart, so let desire fill like
balloons and flow to the sky.

Life may be chaos, but it always makes sense
unlike fictions, for beauty exists

Despite us, who will her to charm, total her sums,
the lost dog who finds her way back

Every time - the lover who makes the moon shine
and the wine taste like lips.

We knit clotted quilts, and she pulls on a string
and the life you were living is gone,

A blue light on the horizon
is all that is left of your soul.

The Law of Spirit, Analogy Three

Thank God they are without hope,
these artists, who leave their souls on the canvas
in all the best galleries, where the last extant jazz combos play.
The food is sublime, the wine recognized,
the notes tied together will almost replace a ghost's life
with something that could turn from meaning at any moment.

Not as good, I'll admit, as a dog, gun and pickup truck
but there's a place in heaven for the rarefied.
Life is, to the chosen, an entourage
whose echoes become an homage,
the world as the one in the Louvre,
a prison, like all vaults of gold.

The Law of Spirit, Analogy Two

God's light is there to share not just receive,
like the time my mob-connected uncle delivered the Stanley Cup
into our kitchen, instead of my father throwing him out,
I wish we had filled it with harlequin ice cream and maraschino cherries
and invited the neighborhood to share a shiny cathedral of gold
for just one night. It would have looked like the Mayan ruins
to Catherwood, the blueprint for Hollywood.

The Law of Spirit, Analogy One

It turns out I paid more in taxes this year
than the ten largest American corporations combined.
Who knew?
And while I did get a toll-booth guy to spot me five cents,
I didn't get no $800 billion dollar gift like they did.
Isn't that great?
Just imagine how many more jobs and opportunities we'd have
if those corporations were allowed to fail?
Free energy, real health care, our work used for goods not debt -
how holy that it is not the way it could be -
that we can dream.

Nine Poems by Charles Baudelaire

I don't like to look back, but in honor of Charles Baudelaire's 190th birthday today, here's a sampling of nine translations from 1999.

ILL-STARRED
To bear a weight that cannot be borne,
Sisyphus, even you aren't that strong,
Although your heart cannot be torn
Time is short and Art is long.

Far from celebrated sepulchers
Toward a solitary graveyard
My heart, like a drum muffled hard
Beats a funeral march for the ill-starred.

—Many jewels are buried or shrouded
In darkness and oblivion's clouds,
Far from any pick or drill bit,

Many a flower unburdens with regret
Its perfume sweet like a secret;
In profoundly empty solitude to sit.

BEACONS
Reubens, river of forgetfulness, garden of sloth,
Pillow of wet flesh that one cannot love,
But where life throngs and seethes without cease
Like the air in the sky and the water in the seas.

Leonardo da Vinci, sinister mirror,
Where these charming angels with sweet smiles
Charged with mystery, appear in shadows
Of glaciers and pines that close off the country.

Rembrandt, sad hospital full of murmurs
Decorated only with a crucifix,
Where tearful prayers arise from filth
And a ray of winter light crosses brusquely.

Michelangelo, a wasteland where one sees Hercules
Mingling with Christ, and rising in a straight line
Powerful phantoms that in the twilight
Tear their shrouds with stretching fingers.

Rage of a boxer, impudence of a faun,
You who gather together the beauty of the boor,
Your big heart swelling with pride at man defective and yellow,
Puget, melancholy emperor of the poor.

Watteau, this carnival of illustrious hearts
Like butterflies, errant and flamboyant,
In the cool decor, with delicate lightning in the chandeliers
Crossing the madness of the twirling ball.

Goya, nightmare of unknown things,
Fetuses roasting on the spit,
Harridans in the mirror and naked children
Tempting demons by loosening their stockings.

Delacroix, haunted lake of blood and evil angels,
Shaded by evergreen forests of dark firs,
Where, under a grieving sky, strange fanfares
Pass, like a gasping breath of Weber.

These curses, these blasphemies, these moans,
These ecstasies, these tears, these cries of "Te Deum"
Are an echo reiterated in a thousand mazes;
It is for mortal hearts a divine opium!

It is a cry repeated by a thousand sentinels,
An order returned by a thousand megaphones,
A beacon lighting a thousand citadels
A summons to hunters lost in the wide woods.

For truly, O Lord, what better testimony
Can we give to our dignity
Than this burning sob that rolls from age to age
And comes to die on the shore of Your eternity?

CARRION
Recall the object that we saw, my soul,
That summer morning sweet and beautiful,
A squalid carrion along the path's detour
On a bed strewn with pebbles,

Legs in the air, like a lewd female,
Burning and sweating toxins,
Its manner nonchalant and cynical,
Its belly full of exhalations.

The sun emblazons this spoiled decay,
To bring it to a boil,
And reclaim for Nature in a hundred ways
All She had joined from the soil;

And the sky regards the superb carcass
Like a flower it has brought to bloom.
The odor is so strong of putridness
You believe you will faint from the fumes.

As the flies buzz over the fetid belly,
A black battalion spreads
Of larvae slowly oozing like jelly
Over these living shreds.

It subsides and climbs, like a wave,
Or like a sparkling surge;
This swollen body, emptied like a cave,
Seems to live and grow more large.

And this world produces a strange music,
Like running water and the wind,
Or the grain winnowed under the rhythmic
Stirring and turning of the fan.

The forms turn to dream and disappear,
A rough sketch that comes slowly,
That the canvas forgets and the artist refigures
From his memory.

A yapping dog behind the rocks
With angry eye regards us,
Waiting us out like a spying fox
For his own piece of the carcass.

—And nevertheless you too will come to manure,
This horrible infection,
Star of my eyes, sun of my nature,
You, my angel and passion!

Yes! That's what you'll be, O queen of the graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you are choked with the grown-over grasses,
And mold made of your remnants.

Alas, O my beauty! Tell the worms,
When it's you their kisses get a taste of,
That I have guarded your divine essence and form
With all of my decomposed love.

THE POSSESSED
The sun is clothed in crepe. Like you, mistress.
O Moon of my life, bundled up in shadow;
Sleep or smoke as you like; be mute, be callow
And plunge into the gulf of listlessness

I love you thus! Nevertheless, if you wish today
Like an eclipsed star bringing forth a penumbra
To strut your Folly unencumbered,
So be it! Charming dagger, burst from your case!

Ignite your eyes with the lustrous flame!
Ignite desire for the fools to claim!
Morbid or petulant, all of you is my pleasure;

Be what you want, black night, red aurora;
In my entire, trembling body there is not a fiber
That doesn't cry: O my dear Beelzebub, I adore you!

FOREVER THE SAME (Semper Eadem)
From where, tell me please, did this strange sadness come,
Rising like the sea over rocks black and bare?
—When harvest time for our hearts is done,
Living becomes evil. This secret is known to all who are aware,

This sorrow very simple, this pain not mysterious,
Explodes, like your joy, with a glittering rush.
Cease then your searching, O belle curious!
And though your voice may be soft, please hush!

Hush your ignorant mouth! Your infantile cackle!
Soul always stolen, heart always crippled!
But Death, more than Life, ties us to its wishes.

So please, let my heart become drunk on a lie
And plunge like a dream in your beautiful eyes
And doze for a while in the shade of your lashes.

WINE OF THE RAGMEN
Often, with a street lamp's blootshot clarity,
As the wind beats its flame to irregularity,
In the heart of an old town, labyrinth of mud
Where humanity swarms like maggots in a restless flood,

Here comes a ragman, shaking his head,
Stumbling, bumping into walls, uninhibited,
Oblivious to rats, and like a poet, perplexed,
Pouring out his heart in glorious projects.

He takes oaths, offers sublime dictum,
Buries the wicked, lifts up the victims,
And under a sky like a suspended canopy
Gets high on the splendors of his own probity.

Yes, these people harassed by vexing parentage,
Ground down by work and tormented by the age,
Exhausted and broke, collapsed on a heap of debris,
Vomiting across enormous Paris,

Return, wearing the perfume of wine barrels,
With their companions, gone grey in their quarrels,
Whose moustaches hang like old flags.
Banners and flowers salute their rags,

Triumphal arches stand erect, solemn wizardry!
And in the deafening and astounding orgy
Of the bugles, the drum, the cries and the sun,
Glory comes to those drunk with love ones!

Thus passed through frivolous Humanity
The resplendent gold of wine, the dazzling treasury;
Of its feats by the throats of men it sings
And by its gifts it reigns like the true kings.

To drown rancor and soothe the indolence
Of all these wretched old men who die in silence,
Out of sympathy their sleep was made by the Divine;
Mankind, sacred children of the Sun, supplied the Wine!

METAMORPHOSIS OF A VAMPIRE
The woman however, with her mouth of strawberry,
While twisting like a snake on the embers,
And kneading her breasts on the andiron's shoulders,
Let slip these words that her musk seemed to carry:
—"Me, I have the damp lip, and I know the science
Of losing in a bed the ancient conscience.
I dry all tears on my triumphant breasts,
And make old men laugh with a child's carelessness.
I replace the moon, the sun, the sky and the stars
To those who see me without a veil, bare,
I am, my dear scientist, a scholar of pleasure,
When I choke a man in my dreaded arms,
Or when I give my neck to the bite's abandon
And my breasts, fragile and robust, timid and free
Swoon on these mattresses with emotion,
And the impotent angels damn themselves for me!"

When she had sucked from my bones all the marrow,
And languidly turned my face toward her
To return a kiss of love, I did not live any more
Except as one stuck to her side, all full of puss!
I closed my two eyes, in cold terror,
And when I reopened them I saw with a vividness,
Instead of the mighty mannequin at my side,
Withdrawing all the blood I could provide,
There trembled in confusion some skeletal remains
Returning the cry of a weathervane
Or a sign, at the end of an iron upright
That balances the wind during winter nights.

THE DEATH OF LOVERS
We will have beds of fleeting odors,
Couches deep as memorials,
And strange flowers on the stairs
To blossom for us under skies more beautiful.

Following each other 'til the last warmths came,
From our two hearts, two vast torches will pour
The reflection of their double flames
On our two spirits, these twin mirrors.

One evening made of pink and mystical blue,
We will exchange a single flash from afar,
Like a long sob, charged with adieux;

And later an Angel, the gates ajar,
Will joyously restore to life the ores,
The dead flames and the tarnished mirrors.

TO THE READER
Stupidity, mistake, stinginess, vice
Absorb our minds and drain our bodies force
And we feed our kindly remorse
Like beggars nourish their lice.

Our sins are persistent, our repentance lacking,
We will pay dearly to confess
And will end gaily back in the muddy mess
Believing our vile tears can wash the stains from their backing.

On the pillow of evil is Satan, greatest of kings, philosophers, priests,
Who continually swings our delighted souls
And turns the rich metal of our will
To vapor with his lucent alchemies.

It's the Devil who pulls the strings we press!
In repugnant things we find charms kept;
Each day towards Hell we descend another step
Without horror, to traverse the fetid darkness

Like the wastrel who kicks and bites
The martyred tit of an ancient hooker
We steal a passing clandestine pleasure
Like juice from old oranges squeezed tight.

Teeming like a million worms
Demons people our brains
And, when we breathe, in our lungs death remains
Drop down, invisible river, with mute moans

If rape, poison, dagger, fire
Have not yet embroidered a pleasing design,
The banal canvas has our pitiful fate defined
It is our soul, alas, not daring to aspire.

Yet among the jackals, panthers and hounds,
The monkeys, scorpions, vultures and snakes,
The monsters that yap, howl, groan, crawl and shake
In the squalid menagerie where our defects are unbound,

There is one more mean, more vulgar, more ugly, more cold;
Although it lets no great gesture, no great cry, free
It would easily turn the earth to debris
And in a yawn would swallow the globe.

It's Boredom!—Uncontrolled tears make the eye thicken,
It dreams of scaffolds and smoking a hookah,
You know, hypocrite reader, this sensitive creature
—brother reader—my likeness—my twin.

Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and the Film Noir Femme Fatale

An essay in the French style.

A casual film buff would probably conclude that the femme fatale archetype – the alluring female version of what used to be known as a sociopath – is one of the two or three dominant tropes in the film noir genre. “Pretty to think so,” as Hemingway wrote in Paris, for the French terms sound and feel so much alike (apropos for the only film genre named by critics). Sadly, I am hard-pressed (or is it hard-boiled) to find more than a scattering of movies graced by this lady draped in black. Female characters become less prominent and certainly less virtuous in the film noir cycle, but the true black widow – as in real life – is hard to find. To what, one may ask, do we owe all this fuss?

As with most of the literary elements of film noir, discussion of the femme fatale starts with three pulp writers, Baltimoreans Dashiell Hammett and James Cain, and Los Angelino Raymond Chandler. Characteristic of the way they invert and re-imagine dimestore novel clichés, all three writers feature fleshed-out versions of the “lady of ill repute” character. Cain takes it the farthest, of course, essentially creating in novels like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice the gender-reversed idea of a woman solely motivated by greed and power, who ruthlessly uses sex instead of a gun to get her way (and to combat her perceived powerlessness). It’s the male characters, though, that are of the most interest. While the women are somewhat moribund, the men find, in the pulse of sexual attraction, the proclivity to become sociopaths themselves – their personalities become fractured, MK Ultra style, so they look on their deeds with both detachment and horror. The shock for 1940s movie audiences, however, was not so much the compromised man as the heartless woman. Films to that time invariably portrayed women as the moral center of the plot, the ones who subtly directed the characters to right action in the face of fear and temptations for wrong. Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity crushed that gender stereotype like a cigarette in her pointy stiletto heels, turning sex from a way to redemption to just another addiction that led, as all those movies do, to an appointment with a very hot chair.

“You’re good,” the words of Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) to Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), similarly shocked sensibilities, because the man became in that moment the arbiter of morality, the mother so to speak. What sparked his compliment though was his recognition of her as someone who does what he does. He is torn not so much by physical attraction as admiration for her ruthless tactics, for it’s his soul-searching of what it means to be heroic in a corrupt world that keeps him from the kind of effortless deviousness she demonstrates. That’s characteristic of Hammett’s controlled world, where rules can be sussed no matter how depraved the human condition (for this reason I have always found Clint Eastwood’s characters as direct antecedents of Hammett’s – the way one must constantly and cleverly negotiate between the rules of the criminal and the rules of the authority).

Chandler explodes that pretense of rules – and his treatment of women serves that end – portraying a world where the cops, instead of being obstacles that must be, as part of a code, fed no information, become worse than the criminals, additional adversaries that must be factored in, as NBA teams of today sometimes must battle both the opposing team and the corrupted referees. Unlike overpaid superstars, however, Marlowe refuses to give in, or rather he’s smart enough to simply watch the behavior, and find therein the keys to his own survival. In his discerning state, all around him become robots, programmed by some evil force that is always just a step beyond his ken. It’s only when you think you know what drives people, as poor Moose did in Farewell My Lovely, that you fall.

Hollywood had little patience for these kinds of subtleties. The typical Tinseltown dish, outside of no-budget outriders like Detour (which actually portrayed a three-dimensional demented woman, it wasn’t all about the guy), was sex-kitten romps like Gilda, where the guy is just deluded by jealousy and the girl can’t help it. Rita Hayworth there and in The Lady from Shanghai may have been outside the bounds of 1940’s decency conventions, but her behavior today would be considered laughably child-like (her actual life, which included her father sexually abusing her with her mother beside them in bed and dressing her up as his 12-year old wife in public among other things, was a completely different matter).

Most noirs were standard police-procedure yarns, precursors of Dragnet, about the seedy exteriors, the night-for-night lighting, the claustrophobic camera angles, the moral ambiguity. What’s shocking today about these movies is not the diminished role of females, but the openness of police corruption. Today, woman can be as degraded, duplicitous or manipulative as a filmmaker wants them to be, but there’s still the attitude of “one bad apple spoils the bunch” when it comes to the portrayal of law enforcement. Not so for the noirs of the 40’s and 50’s, where cops routinely give in to temptation, go sadistic on crooks and informants equally, avoid risks, miss obvious clues, and in general honor the blue code more in the breach than in the observance. Movies like Rogue Cop and Shield for Murder delve deeper into the sociology of this, presenting in typical message picture fashion how those who protect and serve are falling further and further behind the suburban norm of affluence. While post-noirs like Chinatown peel the cameras back to a wide-angle look at the corruption near the top, original noirs didn’t extend the critical gaze to judges, lawyers or politicians. The all-seeing camera eye stays at the individual level and the viewer is forced to see horrible crimes committed (often involving women as victims) because the cops are clueless.

I think the reason the femme fatale has taken hold in our rearview noir mirror is due to its later development in Hollywood, with movies like Body Heat and Black Widow and extending to today’s most interesting genre, the Reality or Paranoia genre. Similar to noir, Reality or Paranoia portrays a world unmoored from the safety of morality and convention, but it goes much deeper into the idea of being manipulated in our thoughts and actions by outside, unknowable forces. The common situation of all these films (a partial list can be found here) is where the hero/heroine never knows if the dream/nightmare world he/she is experiencing is real or a manipulation of reality/perception by unknown (usually malign) forces. The sheer number of pictures in this genre, its relevance to the contemporary mindset, and particularly its eerie “true-to-life” resemblance to the glut of Monarch / Bluebeam / MK Ultra programs among Hollywood stars (these are people mind controlled to unconsciously have sex, kill or say anything on command by “masters” who’d created in them multiple personalities through deliberate and prolonged childhood sexual, emotional and drug abuse) awaits further, systematic investigation.

For today’s purposes, I’m intrigued by the power of a woman (or man) who does not respond to suggestions of love in the sincere, giving and expected 1-to-1 way humans interact – in other words, how 2-D people so often “win” in a 3-D world. That’s the essential role of the femme fatale, to disrupt the normal relation. That’s also the role of the sociopath, who pretends to care for you as a person, but behind the eyes is always probing for weaknesses of compassion to exploit. Confronting such a stark reality is what is at the heart of Shelley’s great “Mont Blanc” poem. I know that fountains of ink have gone into glossing this formidable masterpiece that reads like an homage to film noir. But it’s hard to argue with the idea that the poem exists as a sort of end-stop to the Romantic movement (narrowly defined), in which the imagined Romantic dream of being at one with nature is finally acknowledged as a delusion. Similarly the dream of love between a man and a woman relies on a ratio of giving and receiving that is forever unmeasured, because all it takes is a wink to think that that person’s very being has just been given up to yours. Birds, even branches on trees, wink, and so one is quite permitted to construct elaborate monuments to one’s ego, where everything around one is a function of oneself.

Shelley starts the poem in this vein, with the grand poetic transference we love those beautiful Romantic Poet souls for: “giant brood of pines …children of elder time, in whose devotion the chainless winds still come and ever came to drink their odours,” “holding an unremitting interchange with the clear universe of things around.” But, as he goes deeper, beyond a Wordsworthian marking of territory between the self and other, “some veil robes some unsculptured image,” and he finally must reach “remote, serene, and inaccessible” Mont Blanc:

A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destined path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks' drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost. The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,
And their place is not known.

Can you just see the lighting of John Alton or Harry Wild infuse this city?

Working Day With Lack of Sleep

From the time the jets overhead start brewing coffee
to the line of Indians at 4 o'clock in front of the tea machine
everyone's a flag trapped in barbed wire
staring at a darkness that isn't there.
They tidy up their little piece of the larger chaos,
thinking themselves too small to warrant sanity
but big enough to feel responsible for everyone else's stupidity.
The best expressions of their minds, hearts and spirits
are thrown in the abyss like a bejeweled virgin to a volcano
to measure its depths, which helps in the debates
between those who know enough to be dangerous
and those who don't, the peasant arguments that never end
as they wait for the decider like children wait for Santa Clause
but deciders can only decide
what they don't want
when they see it.
How the sausage is made is irrelevant, the bosses say,
winners keep their mouths shut, their noses clean,
their powder dry, their asses covered, and they learn
when to dole out blame like penny candy,
for all of it is just a game, 
it isn't life or death
not like it is for those who work
to have health care
so they can die sooner.

Beats daytime television any day.

White Crane Eating Snakes

The other is the same, somehow.
The boy is really girl, the stone another star.
We cultivate extremes but we can't escape that fact.
A trail of black always flows from the white.
A bird taking flight lives on in my mind.

Harlem Ghosts

The City brings the seedy grandeur,
The occult stonework stains,
The peeling paint on brickface,
The rust-washed water towers,

Cathedrals with their lime-green domes
Now smoked-glass auditoriums
With 50-year-old leaves and flowers,
Rooftop railings of stone,

Brick mosaics rubbed away
From smiling keystone teeth
And men with beards who never smile
For pigeons to hide under, from rain.

If we were to renew all this
It would be ruined.
The children playing in the dust
Would disappear.
The yellowed books on window shelves
Would lose their words.

The students and the poor
Must inhabit this musée d’amour,
Must pull the white blinds down
Flags of surrender
And change inside,
To salve the city loneliness
With ghosts,
To hail the love and laughter
Long denied.

For people aren’t atoms,
They are molecules
Bound in magnet likeness
Frequencies,
Those seen and unseen equally.

Last Observations before Percy Awakes

April is cruel for chimneys and historians,
aficionados of the color brown
but those who like bird scales
and pink upon their trees
are usually pleased - it's a matter of taste,
what people see in the way things appear,
the subtleties culled by the eye.

It's brave to see winter the purest of jewels
and kind to believe in the new splash of moss,
how worms and mosquitoes are vital to life
and flowers mementos of death.

For each to his own the symbolism springs,
the flow of all thought through position,
to make of a canvas as bold and as blank
as the sun on the frill ends of clouds.

The Infinite

From the Italian of Count Giacomo Leopardi

This lonely hill was always dear to me,
With hedge that blocked from view the final sun.
I’d stare at endless space and never see
A vestige of this place I knew as human

Just silence, just a quiet so profound
I’d pretend to be in thought so that my heart
Would not be scared. And as the wind
Came rustling through the trees, I came apart,

Became the boundless silence to its voice,
Became the infinite, a single mind
That heard dead seasons turn their memories loose
To make a new life singular in sound.

My thoughts drown in this vast immensity:
How sweet to be the shipwrecked in this sea.

Confessions of a Hermit Crab

The sludge of classic pop stars filters through my bones,
the snow of old sit coms,
the dot com archives of alchemy
sift like cards through library fingers
with my dreams of being a pastry chef or ball player,
the ringer of the bells at Rapa Nui.

Anything but these eyes
that take it all on
with nothing left of the inside.

They're all escaping, these illusions
that what was once within these shells
is not here now,
too precious for obtaining,
still there is no facet missing
without a form.

Talking About Cars on the Train with Frank

The ambulance chaser is a regular car guy too,
an eight-cylinder Mercedes S is his walking-around vehicle,
he has a bar-hopping Ferrari he likes to watch his wife drive
and a bunch of old muscle cars, all modified,
the floor in his garage is like kitchen tile.

Must Be Some Kind of Misunderstanding

A rainbow of rebel crocuses in the snow,
the daffodils know not to attempt
such insults to God
but Man cannot stop
His self-flagelation
for only sinners can be purified,
as out of abscess (He thinks)
tulips grow.

Nothing Opposes the Positive

I guess there are people dying
in this post-realistic world
but the only tears I see
are on the ground

like nuts in front of squirrels;
how we work to integrate
views from clouds
with rain on skin.

Deprogramming the Tycoon

I found a mogul's cigar
broken in two
next to a roadside sewer.
I lit it up as my ancestors did,
out leapt spirit and the air became healed
and centuries flew as if we were sharing
that first fire chalice between us
on that cold Atlantic beach.

Notes from Deep inside the Rabbithole

Reality keeps modulating like Barry Manilow
But there’s nothing but the usual
Sex slaves from Satanic rituals on TV,
HAARP-wave terrorist earthquakes,
Nuclear bombs on the Middle East,
The hopelessness of the controllers
Who know they have no funk
And thus no future, who know they cannot
Cross the barrier without love,
Bless them, what they call fact is fiction
And fiction just a way to acquiescence to their fact
Like Hitler was created so we’d acquiesce to Israel
And Vietnam started (like fluoride for the pineal)
To accommodate LSD
And bring forth what a recovering psychonaut might call
Trespassing on the stargate like a criminal.
Bless them how they serve God, Lucifer and us
As we feed like stocks on information
All of it subtly laced with poison
And the hand that kindly drops it will not share
The secrets on the higher step.
Bless us that we want it just like that –
We like to transform porn into the holy,
Prefer trained clones as politicians,
Want to turn the world on to our toxins.
Bless me too how I liked the mansion
With its Spanish stucco tiles on the guard tower,
The stooped and miserable insect people
Inside, how they excited me.

It’s belief that plagues the non-believer.
Are the faithful really enslaved for making belief
Matter? - when it merely sparkles, phosphorescent,
Waiting to be set free, the panther in a world of vapor
Pouncing on air and drawing blood.

The Most I Can Say for Townes Van Zandt

Autumn is still waiting underneath all of this
The plates breaking on the solitude

The wilderness of numbness
The mirrors that can only blind

Sin is all that Man is good for
That's how we live together
Squeezing out each others souls like paper towels

And yapping like Dalmatians
The answers to our questions
To please a face of stone

Oh that rock is mighty handy
To keep my ass from floating

Through the Headphones

A baby's constant cry
is forced to turn to beauty,
bent notes, fixed scales.
Expression discriminates in time
but the anguish never ends.

After the Flood

Prisons of crosses
Buddhas in pens
What they have left us
Is so misread:
Bodies drowned in knowledge
Never woken up by saviors
In their minds

The City at Night

Stars above
Stars below
Love
Crosses borders
And we look
Beyond our eyes

Dinner with Silver

San Clemente, CA

The conversation turns from refi rates and whether the Lakers will repeat
to conjectures about heaven, disquisitions on the odds of later lives
as light rays or as Mumbai untouchables on the grinding karmic wheel,
or in God's jeweled home, or gone like lamps in the vastnesses of space...
The dessert arrives just in time, and the talk turns to strawberries
that grow down the street, as sweet as maple in the mist of these hills,
and how one day they'd like to go again, through the green veins in the
ocean,
to ride the Arabian horses on Santa Catalina Island.

holyhouse

San Clemente, CA

God is surely closer
than these ancient Chinese characters.
It takes years to smooth the ash like peanut butter
to a still, untroubled surface.
It takes lifetimes to memorize
all the buddhas names.
One can see inside the smoke
a sitting figure in the ebony chair.
The lady of benevolence - Maitreya and Lady Mary to name a few
incarnations - will walk out of the picture
to help you learn to shape your treasures with your hands
but her image is so striking, you hardly need her to.
A voice outside of human form speaks ancient Chinese words
only a sincere heart can understand.
Heaven through the altar
brings certain, joyous smiles.
Gift oranges are laid there
and they can heal us.

The grace of ritual, the side from which to bow,
the order that the candles must be lit, and with which
incantation...

The Gods must take off their shoes
and wait outside,
for in this pavilion,
the pantheon of worshipers
connect in love and peace
through time and space,
find faith they'll find the answers
to the riddles elders laid:
sin, error, fear,
the narrow path of right,
of duty and propriety
- to hope one day to know
the stillness that is smaller
than a molecule.
These climbers of the inaccessible mountain,
the cultivators of its fog,
who share like gum the sweetest leaves
of the rare trees in the sky.
Every sip of tea
is almost like transcendence
and soon we'll be prepared
to embrace the turning moments
without mistaken lifetimes
that compel our staining touch.

Meanwhile, the sun has turned to purple
and covered up the sky
and rolling pearls of surf bring in electric blue
on the beach's mirror shards.
The shapes of all one can want or conceive
wash up and dissolve in the flow:
strange beings, mad blossoms, sacred herbs...

The men and women disguised in white
scatter lilies and chant for dragons.
Heaven's heart refuses
to stop pumping.

The Dream Cannot be Explained

San Clemente, CA

The antiques store
someone else's memories
until a dream hits
and one pulls into shore
lost in the facets of oneself
while staring at an Orafors crystal

End-of-Year Bonfire

We drank snowjack as tax receipts
burned in the fat of the fire
with all the records of your work
like leaves of African violet
as all that you've learned and left behind
is consumed like everything real
as soon as it shapes into form.

My open heart, like this fire, nothing but desire
builds ladders made of light
from the bellows of the thinking wind -
some living crystal glistens
in the center of my skull:
these archetypes are just projections,
the snow, your face, the zebra wood,
the branching of the all into my shadow.

Afternoon Constitutional

The icons of the American empire
lord over us in the sky
while the street is full of Egyptians
who won't wear Ferrari ties.

The people have always had
all of the power
but they savored the tales
of far-away wars,
ignored the local, what's closest, most personal:
Love's irrefutable force.