Springspeak

Frosty day with blossoms
inflamed, the morning sun beckons
limbs to awaken in woods barely red,
the fresh grass but starting to cover the trash,
the moss just edging the riverbed...
Yet everything now being born
wants to propagate,
the sound of discovery is the sound of love,
like beginnings are all the earth needs to be said.

The Falling

the feathers were as stones
that pulled us down the maelstrom
when there were many waiting
for a chance to lift us out

blood turns black as tombstone words
pain unlatches from its purpose
the half-light shines with half-truth blurs
before it dims to darkness

because we think it does
and don't believe the voices
joyous in those open moments
when we're not alive in poisons

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

They say ... that song lyrics can't ... make it ... as poems, as poems can't ... make it ... as songs.

Well I disagree, and to prove it I have taken the best song I can think of, "Madame George" by Van Morrison, and given it a dramatic reading...





And I have taken a recent poem, and with the help of my friend Robert, converted it into a song...

Dolphin Song



You be the judge.

The L Word

An older poem posted publicly now in memory of Whitney Houston and Adrienne Rich, but mostly to commemorate a special occasion…

Wet on wet,
Softness on softness,
Vines that entwine around
A common home,
A common sun,
Your touch on my skin
Goes direct
You yield
As I yield
Same eyes
Same hands
Same mouth,
While I ease myself inside you
You ease yourself inside me
And music comes to deep water
In each of our wells,
Tongue and lips all vibration
Receiving.
No need for dresses that flirt
Makeup that veils
Slimness that outlines
All is seen and known
Is its essential beauty,
We play roles
To share less, not more,
To step away from the all
That we are
Into the I’s of
Laughing and watching,
Free of the constraints
Of lace and rubber,
Cycling together,
Creating harmony
In our friction,
Creating luxury
In needs known so deeply.
We are no different than
Those who give seed and space—
We fire and extinguish
Naturally—
Yet we cannot kiss
In public
We cannot share who we are
With parents,
Cannot be seen as one
In the dual world
Of men and their ribs,
We face their fear
Of sex everywhere
Yet our faces
Are easy to ignore
As we hold on for warmth
Against the coldness of a world
That would rip us apart
At the first need for firmness,
Is it any wonder
We disappear
Into fabrics of curtains
That close?
Is it any wonder
We play as men
While we envy
Their power?
Their abuse is all we have
Control of,
All we allow ourselves:
Pickup trucks
Power tools
Flannel
Cats
Are they not all
Merely
Bold thumbs
At scared eyes
Unwilling to see?
Why is this need
We share
So strange
To others
How could we be
This way, is something
Missing
Or is there
Too much
And how could another be
Equally strange,
To accept oneness,
To long for the familiar,
For what can only begin
To become understood
But at least can be seen
In totality,
Fresh in nakedness
Without anything blocking
The path of love to love.
We know the only decision
That must be made
Is to be together,
Everything else is easy,
Instantaneously known.
Of course, there’s always
The danger, when two
Are so close,
Of hurting
So much more
Sharply
But of this we too are aware,
The continuous need
For touch
Always pure.
Through alchemy
Comes sincerity
Like of like
Brings the power of unlike
Differences magnified
The finest vapors
Small as they are
They can set one free
Send one throbbing
To her beloved
To melt into oneness
With a giggle,
Testing what it means
To be unconditional,
Learning that giving
And taking are one.
At the end of the myth
Of gender, another
Myth,
That it matters,
Is only for those
Who don’t see
How such love
Was a possibility.
The spark of perfect flames,
Of folds into loins
Blending without knowing,
Watching without following,
Hiding without realizing we are caught
In the net we, as spiders,
Devised
To, in seeing,
Get ever closer
To the center of love,
The fullness sought
By the emptiest mind.
The solution cannot exist
Without equations,
The infinite ways
And same result.

Harley Leaning on the Pear Tree

In memory of Eddie, who's hooked now in the grid

Trees need to feel our grief,
for the bodies buried in their soil,
their soothing blossoms
some consolation sent to us,
who never understand.

Our tears are like the tides,
their surgings merely love
that feel so much like loss
we tug and tap at others
'til we accept the solace
the branches gently toss,
and slowly start to see
form from the invisible
some words:

Your Mother
will always
remember.

Dolphin Song

"God has created for each soul a universe corresponding to that soul." - Henry Corbin

Starfire gallops through the cloudless skies
Dreaming of the ropes that fly, thinking that the earth won’t rise
She’s my friend, riding Saturn’s rings along the shore
Farther than we ever ran before now
Never want to see through eyes
Of the low, it feels right to be lonely here
Feels all right to be blue
Lost in all I do

Aqua fingertips of foam
Starlight makes us glow
Starfire always knows
All that’s magical

Mermaids watch over the animal wife
Taken from her watery life, looking in on all this strife
Imagine, seeing the sad woodenness of things
Soothing fragile hearts upon her harp strings
Gentle as the burning knife
Inside impenetrable armor
Gray impeccable suits
Loom over every move

Aqua fingertips of foam
Shimmer silent shame
No one ever knows
When the cluster bombs explode
What errors become
Waves don’t even break
I am sailing home

You know they’re coming
You know they’re swimming
They only want to help us heal
You know they’re hurrying
To our side
You know they only want us to feel

Sandra and the Snakes at Sacred Doors

The Buddha just burns

that's all there is

no identity

but light

form
turns
 ash

necessary

for play

 of shapes

as mercurial as mind

the swimming pool of stars

to dive into

the wings the sword the cross

all black

as black is only

form

given life

by light

only burning

the buddha

wants

only

that

we fit

the tightest shells

we can

to learn

to burn

forms die

to burst

from

meanwhile in the cemetery...

the tulip tree

reminds us

with its sufficiently ridiculous pink

we have complete and unlimited freedom

but there are notes

of plum and aquamarine

to discern

what freedom's for

the hyacinth

and daffodil

together

like

many a completed pair

a grinding machine of opposites

producing optical flux

for us to see behind

the facade

and the forsythia

without a vestige of green

just sunrise yellow

as if spirit

is all there is

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

What better place to go as the trees explode with color than the desert...

Bare Fingers



Where it rains, a lot...

Glendale Rain



And magical flowers grow...

The Night-Blooming Cereus by Robert Hayden

Onion

Peel back the skin
of people to find
what made you cry
was only watching

Stevens Textplication 14: The Plot Against the Giant

“The Plot Against the Giant,” first published in 1917, is one of Stevens’ most sociable and accessible poems. It takes the form of a humorous nursery (non-)rhyme to depict (as so many humorous nursery rhymes do) the delicate politics of male-female relations – and, as usual, quite a bit more:

First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.

One can be forgiven for thinking this is a lot like The Three Little Pigs, right down to the “curious puffing.” This story however replaces terror towards the ogre with compassion (“Le pauvre,” the third one purrs, as if he doesn’t stand a chance). In addition, unlike the self-absorbed three pigs, the three girls here conspire to defeat the giant. Thirdly, unlike the timorous pigs, the girls seem to have complete confidence that their “plot” will work.

Finally, the wolf (proverbial symbol of the predatory male) is replaced by some strange kind of giant.

Wallace Stevens stood 6’3” (according to the Hartford Courant), which combined with his large girth earned him the apparent nickname of “giant” at Harvard. He refers to himself as a giant in a number of poems (for example “Bantams in Pine-Woods” and “Large Red Man Reading”), usually to identify his own persona in the depersonalized landscape, often in a self-deprecating manner.* He similarly portrays the giant here as a “yokel” (a derogatory term for an unsophisticated country person) who is “maundering” (talking in a rambling manner, or moving about in a dreamy or idle way). Those familiar with Stevens’ letters will recognize both of these qualities as negative traits he often assigned to himself. The giant, in true fairy tale fashion, is "whetting his hacker” (sharpening his ax) [Thanks Tom King - see comments], a term which combines ominousness with a cartoon-like secondary meaning (lost in contemporary usage) of “preparing to cough” (his hacker as the mouth that coughs or hacks). There are also suggestions, looking at words like vintages of wine, of hacker as an amateur without talent, a worn-out horse, a literary prostitute (I suppose one could also insinuate the modern connotation of hacker as violator of virtual property). All of these work together to identify the giant in quite oafish and unflattering terms. Magnifying the effect of the imposing awkward giant (as a stand-in for Stevens or a prototypical male) is that the females are described as girls. This is also important to establish the innocence in their play, even as they know the ruthless consequences of their actions. So aware, in fact, that we feel sorry for him, reading about the detailed strategy the girls have in store for him.

The first girl wants to “check” the giant (stop the forward motion) with the sense of smell, more specifically the “civilest odors” of geraniums. The fragrance of flowers is nature at its most sexual, of course, especially with the “unsmelled” qualifier to create dissonance in the giant against the civility required towards the lovely feminine blossoms. The next stage is to assault the giant with equally delicate sights, to ply him with “threads” that will “abash” him (destroy his self-possession or self- confidence of: disconcert). Again, the sexual suggestiveness is hard to miss: “Arching cloths besprinkled with colors / As small as fish-eggs.” Finally, in the coup de grace he will be undone by the sound of intimate whispering in his ear. The reader will immediately notice the clever double-entendre in the word “labial,” connoting both the surrounding lips of female genitalia and the consonant sound made by fully or partly closing the speaking lips (as in the letters b, m or w). This is matched with another pun, "guttural," the consonant articulated in the back of the throat (I’ll leave that particular image to others) that also contains notes of harshness, uncouthness, a mind, as it were, in the gutter.

One could easily read this poem in fact as a dramatization of the accouterments of female seduction, from fragrance to clothes to well-placed words, or even as some kind of manipulative foursome, proceeding from enticement (“check”) to stimulation (“abash”) and finally consummation (“undo”). Having “gone there,” however, I do not believe this poem is about sexuality as much as I think sexuality is being used as a correlative for the aesthetic response. The sensuous is not necessarily sensual, the cigar may be just a cigar, what appears on the surface is merely heightened (ptp) by the risqué undertone. We are all moved by nature’s scents, pacified by the sight of fine handiwork, and, perhaps most importantly for Stevens, affected at the deepest levels by the sound of poetry. Or that’s the theory at least. One of the charming things about this poem is that it all takes place from the perspective of the girls, so we never see if their plan ever really pans out. Maybe this theory only works on paper. I think of that oft-quoted line by Stevens’ good friend William Carlos Williams, “it is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” It’s more than conceivable that our yokel ogre would be completely unmoved by these machinations – as most people seem to be unmoved by art and poetry. Still, the whole tone of the poem proposes that there is something that is “deep within us” that is moved enough to believe this powerful goliath can be felled by delicate beauty, that music can indeed “tame the savage beast.” And if the beast, in fact, is Stevens, it could be a confession of sorts about how he is powerless before the lure of subtle beauty, as other men are powerless before the charms of women.

As satisfying as this line of reasoning is, the poem also opens up to deeper layers. The way the imaginative bouquets of scent, sight and sound unhinge the receiver’s perception of reality, for example, or the ideas about sound and sense and their respective roles in cognition expressed in the last three lines of the poem:

I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.

I am struck by the similarity here to the work of Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913), the Swiss linguist whose theories essentially created the academic disciplines of semiotics and structuralism, along with its offshoot deconstructionism. Saussure posited a tenuous relationship between the “signifier” (the word in the case of language) and the “signified” (the idea being expressed), theorizing that the abstract and value-free word stands in for the idea of a thing not out of any intrinsic connection but because we’ve been socially conditioned to believe it does. Stevens (who probably wasn’t familiar with Saussure at that time) demonstrates this fractured relationship by identifying the third girl’s speech not by its content but its phonetic components (labials and gutturals). To Saussure, words succeed in describing fundamentally alien concepts and things largely through a negative relation (i.e. we know red because it is not any other color). Similarly, the labials are “heavenly” only because they are not the gutturals that, come to think of it, are rather harsh and forbidding. As Saussure expressed it, “the entire linguistic system is founded upon the irrational principle that the sign is arbitrary.” Language, seen as an arbitrary sign, becomes distinct and unhooked from the content it is supposed to be subsumed under, showing an almost infinite flexibility to bend, shape and create reality and in fact take over the relationship with the thing being signified, because the signified is only understood through the signifier’s irrational and arbitrary expression.** “It will undo him,” Stevens concludes, the mere sound of the words, the quality of their phonemes tyrannizes whatever content was contained in that whisper. This is especially significant because Saussure put particular emphasis on speech as opposed to writing, which he viewed as a lesser component of language. It is the sound of words that embody their arbitrariness, and their power, to Saussure. So, too, the giant, slayed by irrational and arbitrary sounds, is hit at a level below that of mere understanding. “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,” explained T.S. Eliot. Poetry at its best, in fact, undoes meaning, allowing a passage to our more naked and vulnerable state, where the pure play of words creates something far more important than meaning.

* Joan Richardson in her biography has an interesting theory that Stevens’ gigantism was caused by the minerals in the water around Reading, Pennsylvania where he grew up, a condition that was somewhat common in that area. It also had, according to Richardson, a noticeable side effect: sexual dysfunction, a trait she assigns to Stevens in coldly tracking his “loveless” marriage and only one (late in life) child. Whatever the merits of that thesis, size and sexuality are clearly interwoven in this poem.

** As influential as Saussure’s theories have been, their reliance on feeling instead of intellectual rigor forces them to stay as rather simplistic observations about the relationship between language and reality. The truly problematic nature of that relationship was far more brilliantly and breathtakingly expressed by the amateur American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, who incidentally worked for the same Hartford Insurance Company that Stevens worked for from the 1920’s to the 1940’s. His analysis of Hopi and other ancient Indo-American languages formed the basis for the rather remarkable claim that the grammatical structure of language actually creates the way we conceive of reality. I’m sure I’ll get around to the Stevens-Whorf connection at some future point.

Notes on the Controllers

All the Satanic ritual child sex abuse mind control cults have hierarchies
The secret banking cartel that controls every aspect of our political,
cultural and economic life on earth has hierarchies
All the soul-depleting, power-vampire religious organizations have
hierarchies
All the bloodthirsty alien-military surveillers have hierarchies,
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, the Rothschild Committee of
300, the Triads, Majestic 12,
But none of these and so many hidden others are real hierarchies,
The real hierarchy is only awaiting our decisions
And if we burst forth as individuals thinking only for ourselves
That is the natural order of things, the intrinsic connection
That they fear the most.

Bare Fingers

The desert rivers took two wedding rings
Jealous sajuaros

The eternal people hope to have and hold
Just gold dust in the streams

Where salmon give it all up for their children
I sacrificed my faith for love each time

Genealogy

Part of me had names like Zephaniah, Ebenezer, Alrick and Epenetus;
Part of me came from the sands of Dornoch and the Outer Hebrides
and the weirs of Ware, West Hertfordshire;
Part of me landed in Boston in 1631, New Haven in 1638,
Cambridge in 1643, and Kennebunk in 1766;
Part of me was a brigade surgeon for Washington at Yorktown
and White Plains,
Another part raised the first company on Long Island;
Part of me studied with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother,
Another got rich building ships upriver or sending logs from
Cornwall to Montreal;
Part of me was in the Continental Congress, or got Plattsburgh
named for me;
Another part gave sermons to Puritans every Sunday, or was selectman
in Kent and Constable;
Farmed 84 acres in Milford, or turned virgin soil in what is now
Topsfield…

It’s all on the chart, with a straight line to me,
With names like Hovey, Man, Platt and McCulloch,
The first practical electric light, Kew Gardens and Richmond Hills,
The only Cabinet Secretary to serve under three Presidents...
And this is just on my maternal grandfather’s side,
I can’t wait 'til I get to the less confident charts
Where the horsethieves and opium addicts reside,
On the branches of the tree that love has taken down,
The fathers who never knew their fathers,
The mothers who were too ashamed to re-marry,
The bad gay poet expunged from the memories,
And all the other kinds of failure: the squandering of fortunes,
The pre-fab homes in Florida 50 years before their time,
The 10 Hobbesian lives for every enlightened Hume one.

I’ve done all that too, I don’t have to relive it,
The legacy I’m born with is merely that freedom
Handed down from choices on the thousand forking surnames
That ineluctably lead to Genghis Khan, the father of us all.
I am related to you somehow, you too are my blood;
Let’s visit a while, have some brandy from the snifter,
Pose for pictures by the sword of 1812, reminisce
About the witch trials, Indian Wars and the pilfered family silver,
The Old Country where they still leave a place for us at the table.

End of Winter

A new light from the southeast
hits resistant windows
glaring not to wake up
but you can’t stay asleep
the chimeras
where you are abandoned
only will be nightmares
a little longer
before the dying shadows show
the spiderwebs that terrified
glisten now like galaxies
the dust that once you mourned
is now alive
the boxes with your name on them
stored inside the rafters
have ceased their pull
as you look out on a brighter,
more benign world.

Along the Path

A profusion of green creepers on the winter forest floor
alive in scattered plots like shapes of graves,
how they burst with yellow star-light bowing flowers.
Leafless beech trees shine like Weimaraner hides.

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

It's that time of the year when one must attempt to get real...

The One-Way Ticket to Florida



And get raw...

The Children of Baltimore



For Saint Patrick's Day, check out these wonderful videos of contemporary Irish language poems, including "Athair" by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill:

Athair le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill from Feenish Productions on Vimeo.

The One-Way Ticket to Florida

Everyone loves death
they hunger as for nothing else
they leap into the night
and think of nothing other
than that syrup, that home of black,
the bitter tea no substitute,
the rose a foreign scent.

Why does feeling turn so quickly into pain
and thought to hopeless puzzlement?
Such suffering will end, we hope, or at least
an end will set us free without our having to let go.

A kinder sleep
without the undone crying
through knotted pasts in dreams.

At last unbroken stillness
and everything forgiven
and nothing to be scared of
is unveiled,
the final ice white lover
unwinds her lace, unspools her garter
and the thing we have been praying for
flows like endless stars.

Cutting

Here's hoping that the purpose of the internet is not to wound...

"You're as narcissistic as a Daffodil,"
The self-made expert ridiculed, "stay with
Daisies, friend." "You don’t deserve Forsythia,
You bootless one-eyed churl..."
"I suppose you are that squalid soul
Who still believes in Orchids." And so
They lined up in a row to be made sad work of:
The fat-witted who liked Adder’s Tongue,
The rattle-brained who fancied Creeping Beauty,
The sleeveless chuckle-heads who were not afraid
To give allegiance to a Bluebell,
The puzzle-brained who craved Delphinium
Like quenchless extortionate swine,
The meretricious sonofabitches who gormandized
Gummy Gardenia or Hairless Fleabane,
Uncultivated jakes and unregenerate bamboozlers all.
Good Friday Grass? “Don’t put your talent on a napkin”
Dog’s Mercury? “Hidebound lickpenny as dull as ditchwater ”
Hibiscus or Hyacinth? “Such buckram foppery,
Soidistant coxcombry, van winkle dandy doodlery”
"You talk a good Bearded Iris
But you put the saddle on the wrong horse,
Aimed at a pigeon and killed a crow,
Threw a stone in your own garden,
Grabbed the wrong pig by the tail."
Talk of Ranunculus, on the other hand, "overshot the mark."
“The wooden spoon philisters call Amaryllis
Jersey Whites, swain and slatterns know them as
Belladonna Lilies, but only a
Mephistophelean megalomaniac such as yourself
Would dare the Naked Lady sobriquet.”
“Oh you wooly-headed arbiter elegantiarum,
You mad Corinthian, Linneaeus settled this mess
Once and for all, it is lycoris squamigera
To all but unreconstituted dilettantes.”
“Wrong again you bookless smatterer
The unimpeachable ex officio sous tous les rapports
True term is brunsvigia josephinae
Unless you are so sensitive to pink a Ragwort
Turns to Himalayan Cowslip.”
“Oh you’re so light on your feet, like a Bellflower,
Palatially garish in the best bib and tucker.”
“The saucebox wants snuffing, you strait handed crib,
For mentioning Squirrel Corn and Yellow Tack-Stem.”
“Avaricious skinflint sparking Azure Bluets
Too apathetic to even realize the approach of your own
Metastasizing corruption.”
“Stinking Rogerers should take a long drop
From a short rope.” “May the Coltsfoot cult be
Torn up by rusty shears and fed to gophers.”
“How long have you Lupine parasites
Been closet pedophiliacs?” “How easily
The Wake Robin leads you to your slaughter!”
“You were cankered with the ooze of softer feelings
To insinuate Black-Eyed Susans half-cocked
You pertinacious whoreson with your gasconading
Magniloquence.” “Such shallow profundity for
Barbados Cherry…” “wide-wasting man millinery…”
“Envenomed puppyism at its most shameful,
Ill-nurtured, reechy and mucid.”
“A Buttercup Anenome won’t save the draggle-
Tailed pettifogging blackguard of a deep dye.”
“Spare me your mendacious yahoos for Dewberry
You’re making bricks without straw, extracting
Sunbeams from cucumbers, catching weasels asleep.”
“Your contempt-dripped asides for Lesser Celandine
Is worthy of a sea king, scurrilous peculators,
Magsmen, thimbleriggers, skittle sharpers,
Foot pads, spielers, sandbaggers, blacklegs.”
“And the good old Gillyflower like a peccant
Leprous rash – so beautiful! – the purulent
Caboodle of unwiped scabbery, you!”
“Your paltering excuses for the Philadelphia Lily,
Perfectly irremissible, irreclaimable, iniquitous,
Misbegotten…” “ and your hoarse rendition
Of the Bonfire Tree a seedy argument worn right to the stump,
Purseproud, dry as dust, malignantly dishonest…”
"Your Trout Lily logic is airtight as an attic…”
“You cut blocks with a razor when you whispered
Snowflake…” “I abhor the way you wave Wisteria
Over the proceedings like a censor.” “You’re better than Scilla
You supercilious cur.” “Your baleful versus
Of Dracula Crocuses are much too Oxfordian tragic.”
“Don’t pretend the torments of Tantalus over
Evening Primrose or the Early-Star-of-Bethlehem either…”
"Of all the disputatious coggery, the mummery
With borrowed plumes, I can't surmise a Bloodroot
From your turnip, you strained it at a gnat
And swallowed a camel there." "Enough
Of your craven cozenings you suppositious stooge,
Covetous of Missionbells, one-sided, double-hearted..." "Your
White Dwarf Trillium is as rotten as a pear
Yet gaudy as a Tulip.” And so it went on
‘Til one day a woman dropped by the board,
Implored them to love, to not be so cruel,
At which, the men became more serious,
Taking their special razors out of their boxes
The ones that cut deeper, right to the bone,
The skin of others til they feel enough pain.

In Meditation

i am a bug
buzzing around the flame
of the shapeless I
who is too kind
to swat it away

The Chord Yet to Resolve

Hearts don't break
unlike machines
they widen
through distance to what's lost
the swell of love's backwash
its endless power

To sit with what you feel
when what you feel
is more than you
can make the spirit
ashen

Some of the most beautiful vistas in the West
cannot be photographed
it's for our own protection
the Earth will grieve with us
if only we can bear its magnificence
without chopping it up
to bite-size names and images
make abstract numbers answers
not holy chords
the cry that calms the stars
for the cold machine of mind knows it's alive
by quivering with the grief
the lights
awaken
in empathy contagion
this is being
without answers
to them
what we call pain
some purity of love

Leap of Faith

We hunger for the void
'cos it's the one thing we don't understand
—we take a leap of faith that in that place
we don't have to feel.

The Hard Work

It's so easy to feel our limbs extend to eternity,
that the only thing that's keeping us from being all that is
is so we can know the enormous details of a moment.
Still we persist in the hard work of being alone,
pretending in the void we can be uncontainable.

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

I'm feeling a little Hammett...

Curse of the Lobster Woman



And feeling a little Hanson...*

The Dream Poetry of Rusty Kjarvik



And sensing that the world has come unhinged...

Fever from Solar Storms



* Why just put my voice on my own words, and those of long-dead masters, when great contemporaries are waiting to be sound out? Rusty Kjarvik (aka Matt Hanson) has kindly given his permission to me to say WORD on his behalf, with a little assist from VAS.

Fever from Solar Storms

I.
No winks and twirling pistols on Light Street,
just barflies with crooked smiles,
pelts on rusty majorette spikes
and a nervous look in her eyes
that maybe the blood isn't dried,
not even breaking into smirks as the cluster bombs exploded.

The politics of torch songs have gotten quite complicated while I was
away.
The bridal dress has turned into a habit.
There’s no William Powell as Topper Sterling
with his debonair brand of benevolent debauchery and kindly jaded
twinkling wit
or Carole Lombard the ferret-faced blonde with her gunsel in distress
repartee
for me, see, every night's still Gladys Knight night.
It’s even been a hard day’s Knight night
(it’s hard out here for a pip).

II.
“Persona management software is in the arsenal now of this man's army,” one of the candidates harrumphed triumphantly, like angelina jolie without the african babies and semi-retarded pretty-boy boyfriend, not a one of them has sold their mother into prostitution, not a one Sir Hemminghaws of Coeur d’Alene can keep from blurting out how to bring our value proposition to the table we must dot the i’s and cross the t’s and take a deep dive outside of the box to take it to the next level raise the bar close the gap and move the needle on the new normal navigating ambiguity so that we’re all on the same page onboarding low cost high impact sell and tell synergistic strategies of shared ownership sacrifice to socialize the message and institutionalize the paradigm shift – too mm mm good, the sound of one hand clapping, only a dialectical sophist would disagree, and we're all dialectical sophists now.

In my debate, gadabout gadfly the last democrat would wear a top hat, not sanctimonious blue, he’d miss details but swallow landscapes, he wouldn’t catastrophize suspicious male packages, but make the good feel good about evil and the evil feel good about good, say things like “kitty needs some milk” and “the cheaper the hood the gaudier the patter” and implore us to
“Never ever ever ever ever
Ever ever ever ever ever
Ever make the mistake
Of underestimating
The dangerous
Insanity
Of Bob Hope.”

III.
Holy cosmic transubstantiation Batman:
Six degrees of separation for this 33rd and a third degree mason,
the siddha musta fed me some bad fungus
or it was an ad hoc a la carte nip off the silkworm larva cart—
I didn’t keep my lotus powder dry
and all the mount meru mouthpieces work now for the other side.
It’s wake up in guyville on Guy Falkes day
with Goyas in the mist, goyim in our midst,
shoeless in gaza with the portable huzzahs
of heliocentric maniacs and orbital pan handlers,
the smell of bible black shoe leather in the morning
gaining agartha but losing your sole
for a cuppa shoeless joe,
the glimmering carnival too far off in the distance.
The plymouth has landed
but that's ok admiral byrds died like a soldier;
when the going gets encyclopedic, the encyclopedic glow.

“Abandon all hope” just as it all went black.
So this is death: Same. As. It. Ever. Was.

Stevens Textplication 13: Valley Candle

With its open-ended symbols and enigmatic meaning, “Valley Candle” from 1917 could support many flickering images of Wallace Stevens: the lapsed Christian, the dour aesthete, the atheist preoccupied with death, etc. To me, though, he is always the poet of self and world—an icy documenter of what gets abraded away on either side because of what happens in between. Thus I find a related meaning in the poem:

My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.

Most (if not all) commentators believe the candle blows out, or at least that it is ambiguous, as it could be flickering from the wind in a different direction (usually to distinguish the first gust from the second, when it almost assuredly goes out). I don’t agree that a supernatural condition has to be imposed of the candle being blown out by the wind and creating a ghost “image.” In fact I believe Stevens specifically used the word “image” to describe the candle in the second instance to tell the reader that it did not blow out. The discussion is all on why he used that word instead of, say, flame, light or candle. Similarly, “beams of the huge night” has been taken as an elusive and contradictory description that must be understood more in metaphysical than actual terms, when to me it seems strikingly clear, maybe from too many nights alone in the desert, that it is an accurate physical description of stars on a clear night.

The physical action, to me at least, is straightforward. One candle in an immense valley at night (a picture that drips with symbolism, of the illuminating power of the mind or religious spirit, of the immortal soul in the vale of tears, of the singular imagination in the alien world, of the tiny human in the vastness of nature, but we’ll leave that aside)—it neither illuminates nor is swallowed by the “huge night.” Instead the stars (in a lovely verb) “converge” on it. Think of the way a candle sends off its own beams outward and upward when burning, and how those would connect, in the absence of other light, with the dim light rays of the stars. It’s really a precise—albeit poetic—physical description, one that also works metaphorically: the human light and the natural light merge to become one. What changes that communion is the wind. What do the lights need to merge in this way? Complete meditative stillness. The wind disrupts it.

On strictly physical terms, then, we have a scene that could be repeated endlessly, like the proverbial Chinese laundry, the glow of lights united followed by the chaotic scattering of their beams. What gives it distinction as a poem, as alluded to before, is the word “image.” It’s significant that this word is the only one not repeated after the first line of the poem. The wind brings something that diminishes in some way the communion. The Latin definition of “image” is of an artificial, two-dimensional representation of something, not the actual thing. The wind may not have changed in its ebb what is happening between the candle and stars, but it has changed how that relationship is perceived.

I think (thanks John Latta) of Stephen Crane’s poem “Black Riders”: “…truth was to me / A breath, a wind, / A shadow, a phantom, / And never had I touched / The hem of its garment.” The breath of wind, taken as expression creative or otherwise, turns what's real into approximation, taking something away with it. The movement of wind, taken as the forces that uncover and reveal, show that there is something inherently amiss in the one-to-one correspondence between self and world. The truth gives a lesson-ing. It is the soul’s progress that is at issue here, from unconscious celebrant of the divine unities into conscious awareness of the separation between the individual and the whole, seeing the candlelight, as it were, on Plato’s cave wall, as a shadow of the truth and not the truth itself. Once made aware, the inhabitant of Stevens' poems continues to know and cultivate, in the wind, the separation.

Thoughts While Changing the Battery

Without me the world would have no meaning,
The name on the grave would not be my own,
The past not created from scratch on a whim,

The future not agreed-to beforehand.
The Gods would not be noticed, or complimented on their clothes,
The songbirds and power lines would not connect,

The milk from the factories would refuse to be drunk,
The radio would be off when the hair is cut,
The stones would not be alive.

Despite all of that, I feel lucky to be here,
Thankful to receive what needs to be given,
Hopeful to give what the world can’t live without.

An irresistible force meets an immovable object,
Two are drawn to the light that they themselves emit
But can’t see, it’s always the other, always.

What's Left

The genius of the artist
isn't found in what is made,

that temporary structure
marking where the will was stayed,

any more than God is seen
in a photo of His sky at closing time,

it's in the mind, sifting
to keep the balance shifting true

immeasurable sorrow on one side
backed with body parts and life-size sets and glue.

Carcass Turning into Soup

How endlessly we recombine
answers into questions
as if the world so fully formed
was one big jigsaw puzzle.

How the earth conspires, by growing more,
it can't abide a final draft
from bible scribes or online trolls
or microbes that turn four-course waste to life-force dirt.

The news is different every day
so are the people reading it,
all fashions must fast forward to further fashions,
people, jokes and songs go stale, must be replaced.

Memes and synchronicities stick out
in the slurry of the stream,
as God throws hats across the attic
from the magic vaudeville box.

Triptych

More Information People Aren't Really Ready For
The clenched fist
of us against the world
opens at last
and a butterfly releases
the fist existed just to nurture it
for this moment when it flies away

Nostalgia Before Spring
The crocuses sneer
at all my sorrow
To them, death is only an excuse
to turn purple
All my pain is no less beautiful
for having died first
Yet I hold on to regret
the way I lived
As if that which is gone
defines my worth
Always something shadowing the present
some obsolete gem
That answered every single question
once

For Phil and Jackie, Who Stayed
This is about
The time I leave

My words and music in a box
Beside the blue suitcase

I turn from faces crying
As if I have no choice

As if the hearth must fall before
The stream that promises nothing

I'm too blinding to be held
Like a diamond in a setting

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

It's a special year so I thought I'd make a toast...

29-Line Poem



And remember the gifts brought to us by winter...

Closer to a Colder Point



And deeply reflect on the darkness in March...

Memory by Friedrich Holderlin



Andenken (reading in German)

Stevens Textplication 12: To the Roaring Wind

“To the Roaring Wind,” from 1917, is one of Stevens’ shortest poems, clocking in at a mere 13 words, with a remarkable eight of its 22 syllables sibilants:

What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.

Stevens placed it as a coda to end his first collection, Harmonium, giving the finish of the book a lights-out, lullaby quality. Still, the poem jars and leaves the volume feeling unsettled, like the sound of the surf that refuses to stop for us. Part of that is its cryptic obscurity: Who is he talking to? What is the point of this exercise? Why would a syllable be so important? It also reverses normal poetic practice of invoking the muse of poetry at the beginning of the book to ask obliquely at least for more poetry at the end. Where is a reader to go with this unresolved and inexplicable desire?

One way to navigate the enigma is to note the sonic congruence between the wind of the title and the human voice implied by the Latin word vocalissimus, which means "vocalist, singer, utterer of sound." The wind, symbolic of nature, inspires the voice, symbolic of the human, in a poetic utterance. What complicates it here is that the human only seeks a syllable, which normally would deny meaning in favor of sound alone, so that the human voice at its most poetic is only trying to reproduce the sound the wind makes. Furthermore, the search involves “the distances of sleep,” that is, either nature or the human (or both) is asleep, suggesting the irrational and perhaps impossible nature of this quest (and recalling the efforts of the Surrealists to capture a stranger and deeper truth from immersion in the unconscious world of dreams).

Despite these obstacles, the imperative “speak it” at the end implies the will is strong enough to wrest something human out of the inhuman, some essential expression that can be seen as poetry. In this way the poem is consonant with Stevens’ poetic project as a whole: the vast gulf between inhuman reality and human perception, and the obsessive desire to use imagination to bridge the gap all on one side, which creates strange and wonderful flowers that can serve to replace the ever-hidden truth.

Dream, voice, reality - that’s all nice and neat but I can’t shake the feeling that this poem is really about something far more earthbound and mundane. I imagine the poet – unable to sleep as so many poets are wont – gazing, not wholly annoyed, at his snoring wife, marveling at the relentless purposefulness of it all, how everything is right in the world but deprived of any meaning – how this opens up a gap in the mind for what we call the poetic.

Dream Logic

Life is a dream from which we’ve just woken up;
We quickly forget where we were the last moment,
Have we left too many airtight wrinkles behind
To trace our steps?

Why must the mind demand all that proof
Of what seemed unassailable reasoning
In the deep work of sleep, called non sequiturs
When the task is complete?

When we look at ourselves from above
Can we say that our arc is like a birds’?
Or do we endlessly skip from conundrum and repulsion
Waiting for imagined worms to drop?

There is no philosophy precise enough,
No words that won’t succumb to generosity,
No numbers to take the place of consciousness
(Or help us sleep as the case may be).

We say we’re afraid of nothingness, but we’re not
It’s that something flows on like a river
Without us, with no mind to make ripples
As it clasps a no-longer-laughing stick.

The Unified Map of all Repercussions (A Toast)

It’s a FREE day
So LEAP
To words you have no business knowing
To feelings only saints may comprehend
To LOVE
Without a reason
Without a BIG GULP refill explanation
To LIFE
For what if there is no threat?
What if there is no death?
What if you can't see it in your heart to hate no more?
SALUT
There is no reason to be right
SKOAL
There are no winners in this fight
NAZ-DROH-VEE-AH
Y’all did the best you could
YEH-CHID-DA and CHOK DEE DZO
Aren't we blessed you even would
Say
PROOST
Arise ye dismal functionaries serving lizard grey!
LA CHAIM
And the dialectic leopard on the swingset coiled all day
It’s time to JUMP the ropes
SNAP the synapse
HOP the quantum
SHOOT the faith
Time to LEAP

On the Margins of the Large

Lies are the only way to understand this world
—leaves turn into trees, birds becoming skies—
‘Til finally we’d pay any price
To keep the other versions at bay
—the sky is green, as every one of us is a sun—

Our stories hang like shadows on the light of never knowing
How else can we the blind find out our way?
We tell stories to steal time—when we know there is no time,
We tell stories to steal words—when we know there are no words,
To steal the fire of who we are—when we don’t know who to be,
And to steal what we desire—when we don’t know what to want.
We tell stories to remember what we never knew at all
And to forget what we were born to never lose.

The stories wrap us up like blankets of warm judgment
Condemning what’s too painful to accept:
That the world that’s full of people cannot fit inside our block
In surrogates, in symbols, to make us think that we’re caught up,
That the clumps of dirt we gather are not distinct from earth's remainder,
That the storm won’t move too fast for any one of us to see,
That the gods we seek are closer than we know.

Our homes are lovely forgeries, we’ve built them with what we believe,
Their beams bend with the promise that some truth will fill its frame
Like spirit fills the universe of stars, and we cast from it our arch
possessive eye
On ideas spread like mushrooms, that keep alive the hopelessness,
The dark and moistened prayer for that one time that we almost saw
The Truth to come again, as if that would alone be just enough
For the myths to make us Gods enough to believe in one,
To hear in distant music a life that no longer exists,
That never existed except as what we lost before we got here,
Striking likenesses together for the palest glimpse of fire,
Exaggerated shadows and the light ever invisible.

We will not stop 'til the echo of our artificial and conditional
Conversations become the very currency of heaven,
‘Til the inhuman falseness that the Gods despise becomes at last
The reaching down in mercy that we know comes out of desperate lies.

Spleen

From the French of Paul Verlaine

The roses were always red,
And always black was the ivy.

My dear, all the times you have fled
My despair is always revived.

The sky was too blue, too tender,
The sea too green and the air too sweet.

I’m always afraid – what to wait for!
What seeps now from your atrocity?

The holly with its varnished leaf,
The boxwood sheen I am weary,

And the endless campaign of grief
And everything, but you, dreary.


Les roses étaient toutes rouges,
Et les lierres étaient tout noirs.

Chère, pour peu que tu te bouges,
Renaissent tous mes désespoirs.

Le ciel était trop bleu, trop tendre
La mer trop verte et l'air trop doux.

Je crains toujours,- ce qu'est d'attendre!
Quelque fuite atroce de vous.

Du houx à la feuille vernie
Et du luisant buis je suis las,

Et de la campagne infinie
Et de tout, fors de vous, hélas!

A Day in My Home Town

One man, his world in a sack by his side, taps the recyclables through the flap, the litter he spent the morning collecting, hearing each bottle break as it falls in the machine. He will cash the receipt and use what he’s earned for a package of cigarettes and a meal at McDonalds, where he has a coupon, ducking the cops each step along the way.

Another man taps on his computer, and a maze of mezzanine loans for boarded-up strip malls and mostly vacant office parks are marked in a key stroke as current, preserving his obscene bonus and saving his firm from having to acknowledge its insolvency. He knows it's illegal, but he also knows the IRS, if he didn’t do it, would attach all of his homes.

I sit somewhere in the middle of all this, trying to keep my heart from feeling and my mind from going tilt, for it’s important to remember that things are perfect the way they are, for these two know their choices, they know this is their journey, and they’re given what they need to grow by this and this alone.

My Computer Wrote Me a Poem

What you have is...
Aha Buslogic
Joliet Loop
Serial Console Slip
Select Vortex
Emulation
ash badblocks
busybox
cat chain chatter
clear clone
dump echo
elvis false
flash gunzip
halt head hex
dump kernel key
kill linux
length loadmap
more mount
pax ping
profile protocols
reboot route script
shared slattach sleep
sort split strings
swap off
swap on
synctail tar test
touch trace route
true tune unpack
update view
watch which yes
as root

(the above was waiting for me on my work computer this morning, with numbers, code and command words removed, and line breaks added)

The Choice to be Slave or Master, Dead or Alive

one person
can hold the world
inside the mind
or without knowing
can be the world
whole

Places

Manhattan,
such a backwards and uncivil borough
not like Rivertucky
with its rainbowthundersnow,
where you can hear the sacred symphonies
of the lizard people underneath.

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

No poem today, instead a random mini-reading (hat tip Hannah)

Merlin by Edwin Muir:



The Days Unexploded Landmines from a week ago Friday:



Off Maryland Avenue from Phoenix, 2007

Windbreaks

We think we are being watched
As we ourselves watch
Or would watch, if we could keep silent,
If the sound of the distance wasn't so acute,
The look of smoke so beautiful.

Ideas spring into being like fog
And disappear when the light dissolves them.
Why must we face reality
When we will turn it into illusion anyway?

The debaucheries of judgment
Seem so out of synch with the force
Like a tuning fork through the trees.
Transparence is all around us;
We see nothing.

The light leads the blind
Away from the need of sight.

To be set adrift, facing all but one's own mind
Or be caught in the oblivion of ubiquity;
To search for the frail orange light
In the windows at dusk,
Or be absorbed in the deepening blue.

Rain types on the leaves,
Sparrows drop as the trees breathe.
The ground is a sponge with flowing veins
Flooding down the grass unable to constrain it.

Let us go to the river, and disappear,
Dissolve like domes of bug bubble in the fern-patterned flow,
Feel the eons passing.
We would starve here if, while feeling fish twist
Through our bloodstream, feeling the cold omnipotence
Of intertwining windbreaks, we did not also
Have these tricks of perception
Which allow us to picture a net
Where we see the fish swimming.

New World

It's true the trees
don't speak of their wisdom
but the finches spread
a little of it around
on finally-yielding ground.

The bloom of mildew
and chartreuse moss,
young squirrels with rat tails
hold the dream of life
in their mouths.

A sparrow keeps a bare twig
like laurel in her beak
and waves it to towards the sky
to say "what can you do
for me now, sun?"

The cinquefoil
shows its own hue
of purple
distinct
from the barely perceptible

haze in the air
and gloss on the streams,
what seems a living earth's
philosophizing,
rocking the young things to re-birth,

like the gun is raised
but no plant
has jumped it,
for they know better than us
the structure of things.

The hills themselves
well up with love
and wear their green frills
like an outbreak of goosebumps;
the slow, slow logic of the universal mind

always between visible and unseen...
We make our new world
from shadows and glare
to keep it from seeming
too far away.

The Compost in the In-Box

In every town the laborers stand
single-file for nearly a mile
waiting to be chosen that day
for any kind of work, while I
look on from outside of the elements,
humming through a smooth train
to a daily destination where the world
waits to clap when I discover it -
in return I must be patient
for the discoveries of others, for whom
I must clap as if I need that
for myself - perhaps I do,
the right to speak is given when you listen,
the right to act when you can prove you can stay still,
you give directions when you learn to take them -
this, not the products that we grow,
is the work - waiting like the laborers
to earn the right to sweat,
for we would turn over all the topsoil
if we had the choice, and not
recognize that all things have a right
to sit in the sun and grow - equally -
even that fat, wide-flapped leaf
that believes it's only qualified to rise
if it blots out all the light in the sky.

New York, 2012

In a flash of train sparks
the world changed
from one where I
was the only person in it
to one where I do not exist

Fiona Apple!

Posted for no other reason than I love you, Fiona

“I suddenly feel like a different person
From the roots of my soul come a gentle coercion
And I ran my hand o'er a strange inversion
A vacancy that just did not belong
The child is gone”

“So keep on callng me names, keep on, keep on
And I'll keep kicking the crap till it's gone
If you keep on killing, you could get me to settle
And as soon as I settle, I bet I'll be
Able to move on.”

"I'm either so sick in the head
I need to be bled dry to quit
Or I just really used to love him
I sure hope that's it."

There's Fiona with breakfast…


All day and all night…


At the movies…


Singing along with the oldies…


Before going to bed…


And the reason I can die now:


(Alright I know this is probably not copacetic with the library police. The videos are off youtube and the pictures are from an unnoted photographer in an unremembered newspaper from a show in Phoenix in 2006. And everything is Fiona's -- as always).

Staring at a Sunny Sky

I can't stop
stirring the dirt to powder

to get behind
what is there

it's out in the open
not seen

The Swan

From the German of Rainer Maria Rilke

Misfortune, through the not yet gone
sways his crippled way, bound
like the gangly walk of swans.

And this stopping, this no longer fastened
every morning, to the firm ground
as he becomes so anxiously fallen—:

to the water, in which he slides with empathy
and into which, with clockwork and revery
he sends to both sides waves, float on float;

wearing an unending silence and acuity,
royal majesty gaining immensity,
on glass he glides his ermine coat.

In Tom Waits World

The clown, the rebel, the outcast
busking for coin
at the Witches Brew Tavern.
His time is different than ours,
the words are different,
who he is is simplified
for entertainment.
How much smaller he will be
to overcome with largeness
the horror of their eyes.
He puts their names in his song
and stares right into their gaze.
He's proud of stopping short,
at earning what they give
and walking in a long, diagonal path
the one that disappears into the night
away from kerosene street lights,
black webs hanging as if from an eyelid.

He eats like an animal in the dark.

He's proud he can appear
at different corners
in these three
black and circumscribed blocks.

He's finally glad he's alive
when standing in his boots
with his every possession
on his back, they're the rocks
he has to carry,
which he volunteered to hold
and can let go at any time
as soon as he's ready.
As soon as he's ready
he'll save people's lives
by pretending there's no blood.

Poets and Poetry

Having even one reader is like having an encounter with God - the thought that thousands, even millions, read even one poet - that's slavery, and a reminder that with the Internet, EVERYONE will LIGHT up the sky like Shakespeare (who wasn't actually Shakespeare).

(OK I still think Rilke in German has above-average magnificence).