haiku

before the rain
white petal storm
squirrels watching from above

Lyric: Down Confetti Road

I'll occasionally post lyrics I'm working on, to, like the proverbial ship hidden in the picture, let them appear as poems.

Los Angeles you perfect one
I’m your forever wrong
Can’t you ever have an ugly day?
You know love you say
I can’t love anyone
Not the way they love you
For the way
You give love
To everyone

I can learn to touch you
So you won’t have to feel
We never have to go
Anyplace that’s real
Round here

I see in your eyes
Past your cold disguise
A little girl’s imperfect little heart
Strong enough to cry

Los Angeles you sacred one
I kneel down to your sun
And you shine like I’m not even there
Like you are unaware
You are my paradise
I’d pay any price
To hear you
Say that I can
Treat you nice

You know it’s true
I’m with you
You have to say
We’re OK
It’s forever
And I get you
You get me too yeah
We’re a pair
Down that endless road
Down confetti road
You know that’s our neighborhood
Know that’s our lilac vine
That’s us at home
At Christmas time

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

Tonight I'll read a brand-new poem, one that can only be played, as Charles Olsen sez, by the ear ...

Stevens Textplication 15: Gray Room

Arrangement in Pink and Gray (Afternoon Tea), circa 1894, by Edmund C. Tarbell (1862-1938)

The surface, so elegant and poised, and what lies beyond it, unspoken and unspeakable, that’s the tenor of “Gray Room,” the last of our poems from 1917:

Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl--
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you...
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.

“Although you sit in a room that is gray…” the poem begins, but the clause isn’t resolved until the very last line: “I know how furiously your heart is beating.” In between this stark demonstration of the gap between appearance and internal reality (the real and the imagined?) there’s a lot of (shall we say) foreplay; straw-paper that is somehow silver, white that is somehow pale, red branches that have to be clarified as belonging to a red willow, the apparent presence of an outdoor plant (forsythia) inside the room, and of course, the revealing actions of the unnamed female, who lifts her beads to let them drop, gazes at the fan that’s supposed to take the gaze off her, moves a leaf in a bowl of water –seemingly innocuous gestures, of boredom perhaps, that are charged, in the final line, as hints of desire, implied as sexual. What qualifies this short-circuit into the secret heart of appearances is that the speaker “knows” it. It is not objective reality, or even the woman’s stated feeling, but the speaker’s subjective perception, whose important and single addition to the Matisse-like arrangement of images is the adverb “furiously.” We all know that woman, barely containing her longing behind the calm and dreary surface, the officiousness that keeps us at a distance from expressing our passion, yet we don’t know her. She has become a moving ornament, opaque in the male gaze. Maybe it’s just the speaker’s heart that beats furiously. As any man knows, imagination and reality cannot be so easily distinguished.

The Little White Girl, 1864, by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)

What Must Be Said

The following is my translation into English of “Was gesagt werden muss” by Günther Grass (reproduced below), the publication of which last week in Süddeutsche Zeitung caused him to be banned from visiting Israel by the Israeli government. I’m not taking it upon myself to translate this poem because it’s great art (although it is heartfelt in its anguish), or because I like Günther Grass (this is the first thing I’ve ever read by him), or because I agree with the political sentiments (which are about as subtle as a fresh coat of paint, and beyond his personal account don’t rise much above “nuclear weapons are bad,” a noble sentiment that expressed in a poem might as well be asking the sky to be brown), or because Salman Rushdie supports him (I despise Rushdie’s writing), or because Grass won a Nobel Prize (Obama won a Nobel Prize). I’m doing it because someone getting banned from a country for writing a poem gets my attention. It’s every poet’s dream.

Why am I silent, silent too long,
To what is obvious and practiced
In war games, at the end of which, as survivors
We are footnotes at best.

It is the alleged right to the first strike,
Subjugation by thugs
In an organized jubilee
To annihilate the Iranian people
Because of speculation they may be building
An atom bomb in their domain.

Yet why do I forbid myself
To call that other country by name,
Which for years - though secret -
Has grown its own nuclear capabilities
Beyond all control, because not accessible
To inspection?

This fact is publicly concealed,
And made subordinate by my silence,
Which I feel as an incriminating lie
Under duress, with the prospect of punishment
As soon as it is disregarded;
The familiar verdict: "anti-semitism."

Now, though, because in my country,
With its very own crimes,
Which are beyond comparison,
Time after time talked of and taken to task
In a purely commercial transaction, albeit
With nimble lips calling for restitution,
Another U-boat for Israel
With a special purpose, delivering warheads
Complete devastation directly to where
The existence of a single atom bomb is unproven,
While fearing what proof there will be,
I say what needs to be said.

But why have I stayed silent ‘til now?
Because I thought that my past,
Afflicted by a stain that would never be erased
Forbade this fact as a truth to be told
To the state of Israel, to which I am bound
And wish to remain so, as is to be expected.

Why do I say only now,
Aged, with my last pot of ink,
That nuclear-armed Israel endangers
The already fragile peace in the world?
Because it must be said,
Said tomorrow it may be too late;
And because we - as Germans burdened enough -
Could become suppliers to a crime
That is predictable, which is why our complicity
Could not be redeemed through any of the usual excuses.

And yes: I hold back no longer
Because I am tired, of the West's hypocrisy;
And also with this it is to be hoped
That many will be freed from silence,
To appeal to the perpetrator of the foreseeable danger
To renounce violence and
Likewise insist
That unhindered and permanent control be granted
Over the Israeli and Iranian nuclear programs
By the governments of both countries.

Only this way can the Israelis and Palestinians,
And beyond them all people in this
Region wracked by madness
Live side by side with enemies,
And only in this way, can we too be healed.


Warum schweige ich, verschweige zu lange,
was offensichtlich ist und in Planspielen
geübt wurde, an deren Ende als Überlebende
wir allenfalls Fußnoten sind.

Es ist das behauptete Recht auf den Erstschlag,
der das von einem Maulhelden unterjochte
und zum organisierten Jubel gelenkte
iranische Volk auslöschen könnte,
weil in dessen Machtbereich der Bau
einer Atombombe vermutet wird.

Doch warum untersage ich mir,
jenes andere Land beim Namen zu nennen,
in dem seit Jahren - wenn auch geheimgehalten -
ein wachsend nukleares Potential verfügbar
aber außer Kontrolle, weil keiner Prüfung
zugänglich ist?

Das allgemeine Verschweigen dieses Tatbestandes,
dem sich mein Schweigen untergeordnet hat,
empfinde ich als belastende Lüge
und Zwang, der Strafe in Aussicht stellt,
sobald er mißachtet wird;
das Verdikt "Antisemitismus" ist geläufig.

Jetzt aber, weil aus meinem Land,
das von ureigenen Verbrechen,
die ohne Vergleich sind,
Mal um Mal eingeholt und zur Rede gestellt wird,
wiederum und rein geschäftsmäßig, wenn auch
mit flinker Lippe als Wiedergutmachung deklariert,
ein weiteres U-Boot nach Israel
geliefert werden soll, dessen Spezialität
darin besteht, allesvernichtende Sprengköpfe
dorthin lenken zu können, wo die Existenz
einer einzigen Atombombe unbewiesen ist,
doch als Befürchtung von Beweiskraft sein will,
sage ich, was gesagt werden muß.

Warum aber schwieg ich bislang?
Weil ich meinte, meine Herkunft,
die von nie zu tilgendem Makel behaftet ist,
verbiete, diese Tatsache als ausgesprochene Wahrheit
dem Land Israel, dem ich verbunden bin
und bleiben will, zuzumuten.

Warum sage ich jetzt erst,
gealtert und mit letzter Tinte:
Die Atommacht Israel gefährdet
den ohnehin brüchigen Weltfrieden?
Weil gesagt werden muß,
was schon morgen zu spät sein könnte;
auch weil wir - als Deutsche belastet genug -
Zulieferer eines Verbrechens werden könnten,
das voraussehbar ist, weshalb unsere Mitschuld
durch keine der üblichen Ausreden
zu tilgen wäre.

Und zugegeben: ich schweige nicht mehr,
weil ich der Heuchelei des Westens
überdrüssig bin; zudem ist zu hoffen,
es mögen sich viele vom Schweigen befreien,
den Verursacher der erkennbaren Gefahr
zum Verzicht auf Gewalt auffordern und
gleichfalls darauf bestehen,
daß eine unbehinderte und permanente Kontrolle
des israelischen atomaren Potentials
und der iranischen Atomanlagen
durch eine internationale Instanz
von den Regierungen beider Länder zugelassen wird.

Nur so ist allen, den Israelis und Palästinensern,
mehr noch, allen Menschen, die in dieser
vom Wahn okkupierten Region
dicht bei dicht verfeindet leben
und letztlich auch uns zu helfen.

Poetry and its Readers

For Jacob

The raffish squeal of chickadees,
Infectious grosbeak shriek,
Like tele-type to ticker-tape
The woodpecker’s critique
To petals while the kestrel sighs
At hollow threats from crows,
A din of sparrows cracking wise
To sputtering juncos,
The cowbird and the yellowthroat
Trill spins on daily yarns,
The truth, uncomfortable for gulls
Consoles the owls in barns,
Socratic ducks and scrupulous geese
Chase its elusive prize
While mourning doves slow down the beat,
Quails forever surprised.

And all of this to speak to us
In hopes that we might hear;
All glottal stops and sibilants,
They can’t quite pierce our ear
Beyond the racket of their reeds
To say how great our own words are,
Our joyful horns and happy sirens,
Conversant blues guitar.
We bind ears with Ulysses wax
To think past all their clatters
And dream of sounds from far away,
Of peeling to what matters.
Words whirr our throat as they emerge,
As if they should be heard,
It’s in there, worms we never caught,
The poetry of bird.

Looking Past the Poorly Named Boats

Crew teams in fleets
of Hasidim chanting
—at last there will be peace

Adorno In the Board Room

You are nothing but machines, the consultant advised,
Mere Pavlovian droolers who have lost your autonomy of being
In the chimeras of unnavigable society,
That’s how you know your customers so well,
Or at least think you do, but you who furtively
Type on your blackberry or dream of a TV housewife
Are no more rebelling than a hippie dropping acid
Or an ex-hippie writing subversive code,
You are only saying “yes yes yes” to the commerce
You have become, for you must consume to be a member
Of this fraternity, and must as such wish to be consumed.

Every quarter like this you meet, to discuss certainty, your Divinity,
The certainty of new markets, new customers, new processes,
The inevitability of profits, the opportunities in progress,
The dream of leveraging the eye, the bright gleaming phantasm
Of exchange, so that value would not be intrinsic but measurable,
Offering freedom from fear, but there’s a cost … to that,
For certainty requires enlightenment, which requires in turn myth,
Which means your worldview is the only one allowed,
Or else the product to be sold, dependent on that worldview
Would be as pointless as you are. You must put absolutism to work.
Facts can only fit the myth, and thus it’s myths, not facts
That matters, to you and to your customers. In fact only the false
Can be true, for all is interchangeable in the world of exchange
Except what has been already lost.

Similarly, your individuality, however real, can only be
Realized within the company, because it has no soul.
Language itself, you see, is the great “no” to the individual,
It like all commerce is a servant to the public good;
It may begin, in words, as the social expression of the
Individual antithesis of society, but it’s soon mediated
By society's power structures to destroy the individual;
The object is self-contained but the subject self-vacated.
The app always stands alone, unlike the person
Who is only real in the company of people,
Who can only reflect back a false self.
As a servant of this power, language must always
Decline and diminish, it must always turn false,
As your marketing claims always do even if they’re vague enough
To be clear to everyone. The true self lies
In the false possibility that with this decline could come
Resistance, and with that the hope, for an opposite
And impossible alternative.

You are not selling a product but an inevitability;
The subtler ones among you know the importance of the arts,
For they express the dissonance from which the true
That has been abandoned can be reclaimed in theory
But, again, without value, except as what society deems;
Art can be made to serve, as a fetish, in that its useless essence
Can only be commoditized by forcing appropriate responses
Through repetition, propaganda and herding pressures
So that human dignity can be transformed through its primitive force
Into unconscious susceptibility, so that in the sublime
Idealistic projection of art a paradise is realized
But one that is only simulated, thus inducing schizophrenic
Insanity, whereby one again complies with the one directive,
To give over control, to what is known as impulse
But of course is something far more sophisticated,
Acquiescence to what would otherwise be freeing,
If not for the care displayed by people who strive
To make the world more orderly, less savage,
As I’m sure you gentlemen will readily agree.
My instructions are simple: if your customers
Don’t use your product, they’ll be shunned and thus cease
To exist. There is only the herd: some lead, some follow.

The formal part of my presentation is now completed.
Let me tell you an aside of how I invented the Beatles…

Purple Monday with Greens

Christ the Savior waits for you
to cast off that childish Easter shit
and go with Him

Chilly at 153 Degrees

From the bells

come shapes

that coalesce:

creation

from the heart that wants to sound itself

something larger

that glows to the oscillating speed

of light

or stays at the wavelength,

say, of metal ...

such largeness

is but an effect

of breathing

the great mind is a machine

of life living

the logic of the spheres

that cannot be known

in the equation, the form,

the thought,

not even in the emptiness

from which it flows

it is lost at any image,

any resounding,

because it's always what is there

and what is not.

Easter Quote

"Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars ... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they aren't going to become first ministers or presidents and they aren't going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers -- for no reason. It's simply unbelievable how happy flowers are." - Osho

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

Tonight, in the continued absence of rain, I'll read vignette:

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



How the Poem Happened
As an extra, I happened upon the how a poem happens, contemporary poets discuss the making of poems blog, which I took to be a way to gain exposure to some contemporary academic poets I didn’t know. To my surprise, I found that their discussions of how a poem was created and revised opened a window to who they are as people in a positive way. So I’ll approach this poem the same way, answering the same set of questions about how this poem "happened":

When was this poem composed? How did it start?

I rely on sunlight for the vision necessary for poems, so an extended period of rain last September forced me to cultivate a more strictly aural rendition of what was going on around me, and that blindness (so to speak) made me open to all kinds of sounds that could be captured as words in a narrative of tightly-connected rhymes. That formal idea struck me as having a trueness of match, in that it captured both the connective quality of water and its relentless consonance.

How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

I often imagine myself as William Bronk, producing final poems (complete with punctuation) in one pre-conceptualized draft, but more often than not I’m like Charles Baudelaire, relentlessly piddling, continuing to move and alter parts even after a poem’s been “put to bed” online. “Vignette” was typical in this latter respect, in that I probably went through about 10 drafts, but even those kept getting transformed through the powers of the rain. In one sense it took me 30 years to write, as phrases like “humid humus,” “whisper whiskers” and “lickety slick” were all phrases that had been hanging around for a long time waiting for the right “occasion,” but on the other hand, the total without-a-net immersion in the rain as it happened brought out most of the unique perceptions and rhyme patterns, a process that took no more than two days. I remember this one being especially difficult to find the right rhymes for; I somehow felt the need to be exact, and that along with the somewhat uncooperative nature of rain (ie not lending itself to descriptive extravagance) made the composing of this poem a little more of a soggy slog than it normally is for me. But out of such tight challenges the fun emerges.

Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was "received" and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

I don’t believe poetry can exist without inspiration. I take the question to be more about the ease of composition. “Sweat” and “tears” are always necessary (literally in this case), but if you think of them as such, you might as well throw the poem away. One fundamental premise I have about life is that one always has to work for one’s insights, that’s why they’re given, and one has to approach the service of “getting it right” with the utmost devotion and joy. It’s not work, as nothing good that is ever accomplished in the human sphere ever is. It’s just what we do.

Was there anything unusual about the way in which you wrote this poem?

Every poem is unusual to me – they’re all special needs kids. In this case, the focus on consistent word-by-word rhyme, the meaning limited to its details, the tactile obsession, the prose format, all of that is different from what I “normally” do. More specifically, I found myself on the quiet train (where I often write) almost audibly throwing out rhyming sounds hoping to get a word. I guess that gives it a certain distinction in my “oeuvre.”

How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print?

Print? Wouldn’t it get wet?

How long do you let a poem "sit" before you send it off into the world? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

I write every day, but when this poem was written I didn’t feel the need to turn the daily work into a posted daily poem. I’ve found recently however that I can get more out of the process by “forcing” myself to complete a poem each day, as a marker of what insights happened in that day in my life. I’m not sure a poem like this could get written in that environment, but I’m not sure how much longer that environment will be operative. Poetic rules have a funny way of repealing themselves.

As for letting a poem sit, I find I need about 10 years to get enough distance from the context to see if it holds up. It’s like being a vintner, I can’t stop corking bottles just because I’m waiting on a batch to ferment.

Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

I always get confused about that sort of thing. Most of life is a fiction, and facts are those things we need to isolate in order to authentically feel (thank you Iyanla Vanzant). To the extent there’s a feeling here, there’s a fact behind it. The fiction is in the presentation, I suppose. I found in writing fiction the biggest difference between a factual account and a story was not so much the glue of made-up characters and events as it was the compression of time into the narrative requirements. That is very much what’s going on here, so I would say this is a work of fiction that hopefully feels like fact.

Is this a narrative poem?

All of my poems are narrative poems.

Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

I can’t remember what I was reading two days ago much less seven months ago, but I’ll fess to my fair share of mockingbird vapor quaffing (“The Falling” from last Sunday, for example, is a response to Paul Celan that uses his spare diction and many of his stock words). I do that to try to understand and engage rather than as a statement of who I am as a poet. Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but I’d prefer to find a voice that no one else has. “Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished,” at any rate. I wish I could be as self-assured about it as Wallace Stevens (the only influence I’ll admit to, although I think I influenced him more than the other way around), who flat out said he didn’t read other poets, for he couldn’t risk the accidental influence.

Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

The ideal reader, for me at least, is always there hovering like an angel in the wings, gently and with the utmost of grace and tact trying to urge me to rethink the most embarrassing of premises. I’ve gotten to the point of discernment over many years of solitary confinement where I can tell the difference between the ideal reader shutting up in satisfaction and in frustration.

As for the more conventional notions of audience, I’m afraid I’m with John Keats, who expressed the following in an April 9, 1818 letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds: “I have not the slightest feel of humility toward the public – or to anything in existence, -- but the eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty, and the Memory of Great Men. When I am writing for myself for the mere sake of the moment’s enjoyment, perhaps nature has its course with me – but a Preface is written to the Public; a thing I cannot help looking upon as an Enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of Hostility…I never wrote one single line of Poetry with the least Shadow of public thought.”

Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

No. None of my friends, family and acquaintances has the slightest interest in poetry (my next door neighbor is a poet, but we'd rather talk about football). I know people read my poems online though, and a few people actually comment, which is cool.

How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

It’s not for me to say – to me, as I indicated, all my poems are unique.

What is American about this poem?

It was written in America about an American environment using American diction and an American accent by an American – though hopefully all of that won’t be held against it, on account of its universality. By the way, the word America derives, contrary to popular misconception, from the native people’s name for it, Amaruca, land of the serpent gods. I think I am in my own small way trying to regain a connection to the ancient consciousness reflected in that name, in this poem and in many others, where the aboriginal myths are merely gateways to a truth that we, modernized and brainwashed, have lost even the longing for.

Was this poem finished or abandoned?

The only way I can possibly answer Valery's question is with a line from the play Six Degrees of Separation, where a successful art dealer asks a pre-school art teacher how she manages to get such amazing, uncanny work from her students when he (the art dealer) can’t despite a great passion for art do anything of value. She replies “I just know when to take the painting away from them.” It's finished when it's seen, in other words, when it's born.

My Brother's Therapist

I walk through the neighborhood
delighted by the lights
that twinkle inside houses,
the bling of the toy train sets,
some massive, some intricate,
with hills and stores and workers
in every house.

I want to knock on the doors
as I see the changing colors,
the glistening of joy and gentle rumbles
but I know
inside
the train sets all are wrecked
every one of them,
with capsized buildings, twisted people,
engines in a ditch.

The lights now are alarms
and they've sent containment crews
to guard the doors,
keep stray visitors
from seeing.

The Dark Room

It's hard to see these rolling hills
or quicksilver rails as myself.
I file the houses down to size
so they can't overwhelm the nothing
I know of me.
I'm afraid to look at the sun
as where my heart is
and the words on the page as the trace
I left behind.
My worry that God isn't seen
is just my unwillingness to see Him,
what they call "lack of faith,"
the reason for wars and hunger
and the outlines of indistinct things.

The Therapy Circle

Love
somewhere along the line
became Doing
which
somewhere along the line
became Being
which
somewhere along the line
became Love

Glowing Trees, Shadow Soil

The earth, that other world
mourns us with fresh flowers;
but there's no consolation in our flesh,
the castles in our mind, the colors of the sun.
This place without our consciousness
has something else, something more,
some key we are not meant to find
a lock for.
                 Dirt and birds and stones and leaves
are the players in this show
with perfect ebb and flow, and lines
so finely honed we never see
how we're excluded
like kings ever imprisoned in crowns.

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