Whores for Eleusis from Baltimore

"Monument City," photograph by John Mifflin Hood, St. Paul Place, Baltimore

"JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon got his real start with Sanford Weill at Commercial Credit in Baltimore in 1985…" – News report

The plan was hatched when we were smoking Viceroys
In the blue and modern building that we passed by every day
Laughing past the Harbor Court Hotel where they both stayed
On the way to Jesse Jackson campaign headquarters,
Or my father’s homegrown weed we tried to smoke
Unsuccessfully from my saxophone, by the bus stop where
Poe appeared in smoke to tell me “translate Baudelaire.”
We laughed at dreams of fame, and cried for those we saw
Everyday, as we we raged against the gap
In the long coke binge called Reagan’s America
Between the have-not’s and the hands who pulled the strings.
They were learning too, how to mainstream loan shark loans,
How to fool wholly-desperate, semi-literate black people
To buy insurance for the bank, “payment protection”
They would call it, in closed-folder closings to force
Squeegie kid parents to sign, techniques they refined
While we tried to enter antique stores to buy old dulcimers
Or listened to Soweto Jazz and Marxist agit-pop,
Or managed pain like waste, or walked the complaint plank
From bar to bar along the godforsaken town down the river.
Sub-prime loans, they finally called them, as they found their
Path to power, to become in ’98 the largest
Financial institution that the world had ever seen,
On the backs of the hapless poor,
While we were planting shrubs and forming families,
Grateful for the trickle-down of a Subaru on credit
And a home without a basement needing labor we called love.
They worked on credit default swaps and naked synthetic triggers,
Making phone calls so Glass-Steagall would go away,
To distract us from the plan to slash the wages
And living standards of America’s middle class
Permanently, on the backs of the hapless poor,
While we paused from life to look down the President’s pants
And count chads in Volusia County
And pretend that Al Qaeda was not El Al CIA.

And now we all are squeegee kids, with six-figure debt portfolios,
Every one of us, paramilitary troops and drones
Keep us off the armored limos of Jamie and his kept men
So they’ll be spared our “jealousy” at having to pay
For his $70 trillion dollars in stupid, greedy losses
With the blood and bones of our children, and the many
Generations after them. He eats at a cafeteria
In the building next to the one I work in now,
Where there never is the indignity of a bill
Or a shortage of blue fin tuna (that BP profits
Helped make possible). There’s a trail of slime behind him,
So many seedy ways to chisel people’s money:
The revolutionary overdraft processing system
That intentionally prioritized higher dollar transactions
So that as many transactions as possible could overdraft;
The $325 million in segregated MF Global customer funds
That he took when he was supposed to be custodian;
The bribed officials in Jefferson County, Alabama, one of
The poorest counties in the US, who entered into a derivatives
Transaction so deadly it forced the citizens to choose
Between sewage treatment and food;
The thousands of multi-million dollar lawsuits
And the paltry sums paid to make them go away
As the cost of doing business, nothing personal, for the world's
Largest public company, the biggest bank too big to jail
(Despite debt more than the entire GDP of the world
A few times over). He’s one of the good guys, the President says,
And maybe he is, in his heart of hearts, where he’s
Worried another wizard might be mixing something up
In some other basement shop. He knows how only
The best and most ruthless of any bunch will be
Immunized from loss, as he writes laws and Op-Ed pieces,
Collects the best politicians money can buy,
And sits on the board of the Federal Reserve
Bequeathing to himself unlimited sums of money
For free to lend at profit, or to gamble instead
For a higher return where he knows any loss from the risk
Will be made whole. His life is a gift to us
To see beyond all his transparent lies
To the vast infrastructure of corruption
That infects every channel of communication
And subverts every walk of life,
While I write poems that don't even change things for myself.

Captain James, painting by Robert McClintock

It’s that grounded merchant ship the Greek owner made
A restaurant of, as a gift to bountiful America,
Where no one ever came to eat. The only time
I ever saw him in all his years in Baltimore was there,
In the dark beyond the perfectly set tables,
Looking at all the invisible people. These were his people,
But even they were jealous, the ghosts who said
The only things that weren’t quite disrespectful.
The only things I ever heard as well.

Captain James posing with his blues guitar

To be honest

Translation of One of Rilke’s Last Poems

From a correspondence with Erika Mitterer, Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, August 24, 1926

Thirteenth Reply, for Erika, the Feast of Praise

Dove, who drifted away                  from aviary stay
Wired to house and circle,              one with the night, the day,
She knows the secret thing             for her wings have entered
Away from all the terror                 nestled in the chill air.

Among the pigeons, the                  ones forever nested,
The never-trembling ones              who don’t know tenderness;
An ever-rested heart                       will never once be tested:
Free from all retraction                  its skill is happiness.

Stretching over nothingness          her being spans the all.
Oh what a fearless throw,             oh what a reckless ball,
Filling her hands with it                with what won’t return: pure
Without the weight of home         she is more.

Dreizehnte Antwort, Für Erika, zum Feste der Rühmung

Taube, die draußen blieb,              außer dem Taubenschlag,
wieder in Kreis und Haus,             einig der Nacht, dem Tag,
weiß sie die Heimlichkeit,              wenn sich der Einbezug
fremdester Schrecken schmiegt    in den gefühlten Flug.

Unter den Tauben, die                  allergeschonteste,
niemals gefährdeste,                     kennt nich die Zärtlichkeit;
wiedererholtes Herz                      ist das bewohnteste:
freier durch Widerruf                   freut sich die Fähigkeit.

Über dem Nirgendssein                spannt sich das Überall!
Ach der geworfene,                       ach der gewagte Ball,
Füllt er die Hände nicht                anders mit Wiederkehr:
rein um sein Heimgewicht           ist er mehr.

What the Breath Says

Everything here is a gift
but it is not your home
—so many have gotten lost
forgetting that one direction.

Homily

John the Baptist has done some fucked-up shit
you can see it in his eyes
goddamned Gideons
I hate them with a passion
in their meeting house of hellfire
—give me that blind dude with the guitar
at the Serenity Church of Recovery,
it's worship man, not fear.

Stevens Textplication 17: Metaphors of a Magnifico

Portrait of Il Magnifico by Agnolo Bronzino

Lorenzo de Medici was known in his Florentine kingdom as Lorenzo il Magnifico, from the Italian for “magnificent.” Il Magnifico was a quite interesting figure, managing despite almost unbelievable debauchery, unscrupulousness and dishonesty (see the Showtime series The Borgias for example) to be the patron of the rebirth of humanism in the form of the Italian Renaissance, supporting da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo and so many other artists, and making it possible for books like the Hermeticum (the inspiration for the scientific revolution) to be distributed throughout Europe.

Today’s poem, “Metaphors of a Magnifico” poses at the outset an interesting question: What kind of metaphors would this magnifico need? To be seen as a great and benevolent king? To have a staff of great thinkers and artisans to replace in the public mind his horrible and bloody deeds?

This poem was published in June of 1918, in the midst of the Great War that made the concept of human civilization a somewhat sketchy one. The scene described in the poem is clearly martial, except that instead of the foxholes and repeating rifles of the then-current war we have men presumably with spears marching across the bridge in unison to what appears to be a medieval city-fortress. We hear and see the squad marching menacingly closer and closer to the pleasant village, followed by what appears to be a loss of consciousness, like a soldier losing his consciousness before death as he nears the gate of the city to fight.

Yet the poem seems about other things. It is a metaphor for something far different, as we’ll discuss. Here it is:

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.

This is old song
That will not declare itself . . .

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.

That will not declare itself
Yet is certain as meaning . . .

The boots of the men clump
On the boards of the bridge.
The first white wall of the village
Rises through fruit-trees.
Of what was it I was thinking?
So the meaning escapes.

The first white wall of the village...
The fruit-trees...

Frederick II Conquered Parma in 1521, Tintoretto (1579)

Let’s unpack this stanza-by-stanza:

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.

This stanza expresses quite concretely the ancient philosophical notion of the One and the Many. Each person lives in their own subjective world that cannot be shared by anyone else. Thus the march of 20 men into a village happens differently in the 20 distinct consciousness’s to the degree that it becomes 20 distinct and separate villages. By the same token, all men are one man in form and moral inheritance, we all share the mind of the one universal consciousness, much as the unified regiment of the soldiers in this image seem to be operating from one shared, hive mind.

This relationship between the collective and the singular is basic to human society and to each individual’s spiritual journey, but it is fundamentally ambiguous. The collapsing figure that fragments into multiple perceptions in Cubist paintings like Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase cannot be easily reconciled with the Mona Lisa. Here the speaker struggles to resolve the polarity:

This is old song
That will not declare itself . . .

The term “declare” is striking, both in its war-like implications and its connotation of a decision between two choices being definitively made. Clearly the speaker wants to know what is the ultimate truth contained in this picture. “Song” is also an interesting choice of word, suggesting an imaginative or unconscious prodding as much as an intellectual thought process. That it is old is indisputable:

The One manifests as the many, the formless putting on form. (Rig Veda ~ 1200 B.C.).

We are in the habit of assuming one Form for each set of many things to which we give the same name. (Plato, The Republic, 380 BC)

Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. (Leibniz, 1670)

Interesting in this context is Fritjof Capra’s book The Tao of Physics, a wonderful introduction to the immense commonality between the Western quantum physics of the Modernist time period and ancient Eastern spiritual beliefs:

The central aim of Eastern mysticism is to experience all the phenomena in the world as manifestations of the same ultimate reality. This reality is seen as the essence of the universe, underlying and unifying the multitude of things and events we observe. The Hindus call it Brahman, The Buddhists Dharmakaya (The Body of Being) or Tathata (Suchness) and the Taoists Tao; each affirming that it transcends our intellectual concepts and defies further explanation. This ultimate essence, however, cannot be separated from its multiple manifestations. It is central to the very nature to manifest itself in myriad forms which come into being and disintegrate, transforming themselves into one another without end. (p. 210)

A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ‘basic building blocks’, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. (p. 78)

The coincident realities to the speaker of the poem seem as confounding as they must have seemed to the physicists of Stevens’ time grappling with wave-particle duality. As Capra writes:

In ordinary life, we are not aware of the unity of all things, but divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is useful and necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. It is an abstraction devised by our discriminating and categorising intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate ‘things’ and ‘events’ are realities of nature is an illusion. (p 76).

But to just accept the one as reality is to turn away from multiplicity, and more importantly to lose the promised connection of subjectivity to the unity. Einstein’s theory of invariance, his term for what we now call the theory of relativity, was designed to answer the question of why the objective laws of nature sometimes seemed to bend depending on the vantage point of the observer. Thus he developed formulas for the relationship between the constancy (or invariance) of physical laws (such as the speed of light), and the relativity of the observer (the position or motion in time or space from which it is observed). Wallace Stevens, who shared the exact same chronology as Einstein (1879-1955), is posing here how the vantage point of the observer affects the constancy of the whole, the effect of which is a reality that can’t stay fixed. How does one get beyond oneself to the ultimate reality?


Osho, who wrote the book Einstein The Buddha

The speaker tries a different tact:

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.

This standard-issue tautology provides a certain comfort of “that’s the way it is.” But that cannot be satisfying given what the mind had just perceived before, how it came close to a sense of ultimate reality via imagination, only to inevitably fall back on uncertainty and ambiguity.

That will not declare itself
Yet is certain as meaning . . .

As with Thomas Pynchon’s novels, the patterns and correspondences the mind so easily identifies don’t connect to a truth that stays valid for more than a split second. The irrefutable truth the mind needs stands slightly beyond ever elusive. The metaphor for metaphor, I suppose, is bridge, and in this one, the narrator gets stuck on said bridge.

Every time the physicists asked nature a question in an atomic experiment, nature answered with a paradox, and the more they tried to clarify the situation, the sharper the paradoxes became. It took them a long time to accept the fact that these paradoxes belong to the intrinsic structure of atomic physics, and to realise that they arise whenever one attempts to describe atomic events in the traditional terms of physics. (Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, p76)

The traditional terms of physics are mathematics, equivalent to the words metaphysicians use. The speaker cannot give up his quest, so decides to go closer in:

The boots of the men clump
On the boards of the bridge.
The first white wall of the village
Rises through fruit-trees.
Of what was it I was thinking?
So the meaning escapes.

The abstraction recedes as details come into focus: the sound of the boots on the boards, the fruit trees appearing, as they would to a soldier getting closer to the walls. This more direct engagement with the phenomenon brings a tangible sensory awareness, but one that eludes the mind and so cannot be captured or understood. The mind is left behind, as in the moment of its death trying to remember something from childhood:

The first white wall of the village...
The fruit-trees...

ChaCha! expert Randy T calls this moment in the poem “a nebulous no man’s land where the intelligence struggles, unsuccessfully, to encompass a reality beyond its reach.” The unreal can be discussed, the real cannot. Is the village even there?

This, to Cary Wolfe (in “The Idea of Observation at Key West”, collected in What is Post-Humanism?) “[confirms] the otherness and difference of ‘external’ reality precisely by insisting on its inseparability from the mind and imagination.” The disjunction calls to mind wave/particle duality again, for the one thing (Space/Consciousness) has potentialities (Wave/Thought) that give rise to the many things (Matter as the Spherical Wave Motion of Space/Reality). Imagination is aligned with the waves in the quantum field, that seem as one and wholly different from the particles we call reality. Capra again:

At the sub-atomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows ‘tendencies to exist’ and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show ‘tendencies to occur.’ In the formalism of quantum theory, these tendencies are expressed as probabilities and are associated with mathematical quantities which take the form of waves. This is why particles can be waves at the same time. (p. 76) 

Or H.G. Widdowson, in the essay “So the Meaning Escapes…”:

[Poetry] is a reality which cannot be explained but only expressed and experienced through the expression.

I think of it also as that moment when the mind gives way to direct experience. I wrote about this sensation in a poem “The Flight from Cincinnati” in terms of the way people waiting at airports for travelers stop their fretting and cogitating when they finally see the people they are there to pick up:

The people who wait look confused, then,
finding their travelers, lose themselves
in recognition, the woes of the waiting
turned to song and story—then I, too,
disappear again.

Where does this all leave us? Despite the stretching of intellectual muscles this poem makes us do, it’s not a stretch to note that the Renaissance fighters for de Medici have been replaced by the doughboys of the Western Front, just as the science de Medici fostered was being replaced by a new science aligned with different myths.

The metaphors, the ability to translate and connect ideas, the highest fruits of the mind when thinking and communicating, in the end serve only the barbarism of war, with death the only resolution possible.

Or maybe that viewpoint too is relative, too narrow:

The Eastern mystics see the universe as an inseparable web, whose interconnections are dynamic and not static. The cosmic web is alive; it moves and grows and changes continually. Modern physics, too, has come to conceive of the universe as such a web of relations and, like Eastern mysticism, has recognised that this web is intrinsically dynamic. The dynamic aspect of matter arises in quantum theory as a consequence of the wave-nature of subatomic particles, and is even more essential in relativity theory, where the unification of space and time implies that the being of matter cannot be separated from its activity. The properties of subatomic particles can therefore only be understood in a dynamic context; in terms of movement, interaction and transformation. (Capra p. 78)

After All That Rain

Cauliflower clouds, in the tree boughs,
brother sun and sister earth, merged,
like this marriage of moss and stone,
the brilliance of the green
in all who live between...

Spikes of light on peaceful leaves,
the furry glare of vines, on wires
widening like cornucopias
from one line to a swarm of green,
in thicket skeins of incandescent branch
and tangled shadows, translucent grass
muscular with knee-deep seed...

New pine sprouts rest in the sun,
maple leaves shine like upside-down stars,
they drip with vibrant light,
sashay and shiver in naked delight,
their pom-poms proving they are free
as hands bow, pray, lean, arch up to see...

A motley crowd allowed to squat the beds
where spinning maple beanies aim their heads.
Algae grows on spindly spears like wands from heavy brush;
the mighty hillside pine...

The glistening is too frequent now,
too aligned
to be but in that other world
I enter, oh too briefly,
before it's gone
to radiant sun
and the twitching of my own hands.

Rejection

Kings will allow in what makes them look good – or giggle –
And behead anyone smarter than they are – it’s God’s will –

For life must revolve around something – we will have found
Inspiration, all of us, from the gifts of the crown,

The way he conjures heaven and the world in his mind.
But the king is just a middle-man, on either side

There are secrets, the underground and celestial
Hosts hold hands to guard the truth that’s unconditional.

The king dispenses only what’s allowed to be known,
For each must bear a silence that’s all his or her own.

Don’t look upon the sad and stupid king with pity,
For you too look away from what is not yours to see.

You too spend regret on all missed opportunities
As if you hadn’t let them go like tolls at parting seas.

Bridge in Fog

Satan fell because he refused
to worship man (says the Koran);
what kind of servant must I be
to question my own divinity?
The ancient monoliths
so finely calibrated
to all the imperfections
of our placement in the sky
(the tilt and wobble, sidereal slant),
but still I cannot trust what is
for fear it's not quite right,
for fear I couldn't tell the difference
between what's good and what is bad
—the hardest choice to make, for where,
without that, would I ever find compassion?

The Oyster Bay Manifesto

“’I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They’ll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive…’” – from “Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering”

This shit’s nothing new, the Knights of Malta tracked your moves like GPS a thousand years ago and read your correspondence as it went from brain to quill. They need only your resistance, nothing more, a white to frame their perfect black, a white made by DuPont the great death-dealer, that’s all you now allow yourself, when you’re chasing down the demons They created for your pleasure, that melt just as you believe you hold Them, the final Mephistopheles in your hands. An enemy! What a distraction, how the mind can be harnessed to a task: eradicate evil! What better way to penetrate the secret center and implant the seed, and with it the DNA of mechanical response – fear and longing – engineered? Divine of a kind, the way the assassins never even know who they are working for, or do not know they’re killing, and every effort to mess their noses in the scenery of their crimes only makes them feel more victimized. Thus what would be still can be projected in an arc – the mind is made to differentiate the calculus, as “proof” of fate (the gears below the gears below the gears).

A beautiful pattern, like that made by geese in winter skies, or the distant nebulas destroying all that’s there.

Any metaphors will only serve another God than the one they are attached to: the cathode-ray Jesus, the cinetheodolite Buddha. Nature is changed, but we recognize it as it was, before the spark was stolen, reflexively. All it takes to redirect the hive mind is one drone infiltrated. Once one thing is changed, universes can be reconfigured. Just one story can re-write history and make the mythic supplicant. Slowly everything becomes plausible instead of real – hallucinations ripped away from base perceptions and diseases diagnosed from the output stream of thinking – there are places that you cannot go, those now deemed too natural…

God submits to the conspiracy, plays Her part perfectly: another way to play the game of choice. If this world is seen as an illusion, there’s always a new one, better or at least more airtight. Something about accepting your own immortality. Something about peeling back the layers of distraction to accept the deeper unanswered questions: “Are you making these relentless connections, or merely seeing them?”; “What is pre-set, what do you set in motion?”; “Why the greater the resistance, the greater the temptation?” All’s you know is that the barest intimation of the ruins of Atlantis is all you need to build a house where you can live. The end of knowledge thus is falsity, innocence resolves only to complicity, the mind the unclean organ snapped like lepers’ slates. It must be kept in prison, of obsessively cancelling the x’s out on either side of the equal sign.


Prose in honor of Thomas Pynchon’s 75th birthday today…

Once Again in the Intergalactic Sweatlodge

The treasure in the hole

is there to hold

as long as it is not

defined as treasure,

a little off

the answer

when being given,

the path to home

must stay on course

despite the missed

and incorrect directions

like a memory of something new…

Temperature rising

to check the mind

awakening

the spirit with its

gentle membrane wave

proceeds…

The eyes are always crooked

adapting

to the outside

and self-created mirrors

so we can see ourselves,

while the glass which

holds my image is

a fraction of my form...

The water carries

toxins out

as water brought them in,

exchange

and in between

a breath

choosing

to receive

and when to give...

Unrecognizable endings

as the balance always settles

at a different place

in the motion,

the distant bells

remembering

what I scarcely recognize,

between the hum and the silence,

as I leap to cast my figure

moving through the space

as inside source,

a quickening

runs on forever

where my mind

so mercifully

cannot go...

Empty mind,

abundant heart –

I am born into

a towel

and at the whispered ending

released from all

but freedom’s feeling

going on, going forever on.

Poem Composed While Asleep

The lighthouse flare
burns the hillsides,
the flowers that play
something they are not
to stand apart
to get along
must now be real
to meet the light.

Hotel Vignette

Grande Lakes, Florida

The orange lights of Orlando at dawn
as the night people with their moon-white faces
chasing billowing sun-dress breezes give way
to the people of the day, with their straight
white skirts and marble-tapping shoes
inside the luxury prison
of Romanesque colonnades,
conquistador chandeliers,
uncertain coral colors.
A squirrel runs across the palazzo
to the forest of gold bamboo.
Floating moss crosses the lake,
the sawgrass glistens.

Update on a Temporary Brother-in-Law

Jacksonville Beach, FL

The curving coast
all round with sand
your orange face
behind it in some
pastel world
of crabs and divorcees,
Ward the Professor
who oversees the HVAC
and the covenants
of some sea-side
condominium community.
Your dream of making history real
is now a footnote in the journal
Pan-American Highway Notes
—not the highway that you live on
where the college students learn
how to break their parents' laws.
Once I was that college student
awed by your integrity,
your drive to make ideas come to life
through humor, hard work and humility
—the book that changes it all
may be the book that's next to read.
Everything on notecards,
not a thought that could be spared,
no frivolity on the graduate student's road.
I didn't really notice
that your heart was not quite in it,
how fear of losing everything kept you going.
How the years have set you free of that
to embrace a mess that's not
so very different from my own.

Cloudpuffs from tenured pipes
as down below I veer
to not know someone who I never could.
It was only me I guess who still believed,
you never would.

The Real Game Now

The real game now
is convincing the rich
they still have money,
and the poor that they still
lack power,
and the middle-class in the midst
of disappearing
that whatever happens
at the end of their street
everything still has
a rational explanation.

M’Aider Parade

For this girl

International day of the sex worker,
The oldest and largest industry in the world,
Commoditizing for profit
The one crying, all-encompassing need,
That one will always give anything to have
And will secretly choose again and again
In those moments of torment and shame
When one finally feels alive.
Who holds the key to the means of production?
It’s time to arise like Lysistrata’s wives!

All the butterflies of programmed Monarch sex slaves;
The sexualized nine-year-olds from steroid milk and S&M cartoons;
The headless mannequins of the 24/7 sweat-shop fashion factories;
The S Factor debutantes learning high-end slut culture;
The May pole dancers trained in counterfeit intimacy;
The emaciated teenage girls in underwear on the cover of every ladies
magazine;
The surgeon-disfigured, Photoshop-altered, eating-disordered model of
earning love that is broadcast out in threatening signals to the heart
of survival at the core of every woman;
The casting-couch script doctors who turn every female character into
heroines to be fucked, victims to be saved, or dreamers after
marriageable men;
The women in China sold to their husbands' mothers, and the mothers
who own them;
The ho’s who teach the tricks to dutifully play the role of predatory boys
     without mercy or restraint;
The mothers who shun reservation girls if they’re not grateful to be alive
after ultra-violent rape for the crime of drinking with the boys;
The daughters who let Indian widows flock to Vrindavan to die;
The deer-thin waifs who starve themselves for love, the acne-covering
make-up fetishists and body-piercing cutters of the soul,
all trying to fit inside a world they can never understand;
The mothers in Somalia who allow 95% of that country’s teenage girls to
have their genitals mutilated;
The underpaid executives in paralyzing heels trying to keep up with the
Jones-boys by revealing something others won’t;
The promoted secretaries who’ve been stripped of all respect by every
man, woman and hr generalist in the large, remembering building;
The Saudi wives who say not so fast on allowing women to drive or live
     a portion of their lives not under a legal male guardian;
The well-spoken spokeswoman who makes it seem so kind and
reasonable to make fearful pregnant girls take a vaginal probe
after they’ve been raped by their fathers as condition for an abortion;
The kindly mother superior who says wives are required by scripture to
go back to cheating, strangling husbands who control every moment
of their lives;
The nurses in South Africa who scream at delivering mothers on their
     knees to clean up their own blood;
The women who take male attention as their only means to power;
All the hard ways women learn to get a man to do what's right before
the universal judge.

Sacred prostitutes! It’s time to reclaim your body parts, your moral
     center, your souls!
It’s time to stare down the male gaze, so that when the poles shift
We won't wonder why the most terrifying thing in this world was the
perfect beauty of every woman!

Unconscious the majorette raises her sceptered wand.
Unconscious we march to the beat of our wounds.
Let us pause to be conscious, to know what we do to ourselves in the
guise of others.

No parades until our sisters are respected!
No peace until the Goddess is set free!

The End of April

Firepit ash from a good burn
blows with blossoms in the gusts.

The moment is too gentle
to hold on to things that are
no longer, for the gift of life
is to grieve.

The Name Book

"Somewhere deep in his shell there's an ember of pride..." - Linda Creed

In some weird way she was trying to speak to me,
like some chick-a-dee or end-of-summer cricket,
the reasons why she could no longer love me,
the things that some imagined me had done.

It came across a vast impossible chasm,
I almost heard the voice of that other me,
but it was soon drowned out by more complaining
and requests to hear her out like a gentle breeze.

I guess some honesty had broke the seal
and sent her into post-traumatic stress,
some pushing back at responsibility for her happiness
from some semblance of a self that's locked inside.

I try to, one more time, express my feelings,
and it's cancelled on procedural grounds again,
that's one of my biggest problems, she says, I never listen,
I need to hear her pain each time it comes.

Amazing how oblivious I can be
when giving love and showing vulnerability
to a closed-off heart and a shut-down mind
and irreconcilable animosity.

I hide behind her smile in public view,
and flash the thumbs-up sign to everyone.
I come home from the people I've inspired
to find an undone list of things to do

and I, perpetual fool, don't question it,
as if I need to prove my love is true,
when it's only giving someone what they want
and thinking that's exactly what I need,

to give without expectation, to love
without constraint, but it always comes again,
it's how I'm doing it, no gentleness
can soothe a charging heart full of herself.

Museum Guards

Fred Wilson, Museum Guards at the Whitney Museum, seen at the Whitney Biennial, April 27, 2012

They keep the art from escaping
Tapping their billy clubs
In case of a fight
Between the beautiful patrons
And the wolf-whistling art.

Big hands reach out as if to help you
But it’s only to keep you from touching
What you feel you need to touch.
They turn their lips to your ears
With reconnaissance walkie-talkies in their hands
But it’s not to explain, only to ask you to shut up.

They stand in front of curtains,
Daring you to go inside,
For you know they will monitor
Every pompous out-of-your-ass statement
Concerning the defenseless on the official walls.
You are theirs
In there.

They come in a variety of poses:
The wrestler, the backhanded priest,
The praying mantis,
And they come with a repertoire of moves:
The spear to keep you from climbing near
The computer parts covered in goo;
The wag so you won’t have to try to go up
The bare plywood stairs to nowhere;
The block to keep you from catching a glimpse
Of Leonard Peltier’s horses in snow.

Their job is to protect what they despise
And despise what they might wish to protect.
Jackson Pollock despite his size could never cut it
As one of them,
The constricting yin to the art’s freeing yang,
The enforcers of taste
For “militant nostalgia,” “palimpsestic billboards,”
“radically unpretentious epics of everyday lives and their unsated
appetites”
(Applied to poetry randomly generated out of in-box spam).

They make sure that you don’t love or hate
Anything placed so precariously in this space,
Instead to just do your time, and be whisked away
To the land promised one room beyond,
Only to find at the end their kind hands
Open at the radioactive exit sign.

Stevens Textplication 16: The Death of a Soldier

“April is the cruelest month,” TS Eliot’s “The Wasteland” famously and counter-intuitively begins, but few have connected that thought to what is the 95th anniversary this month of the U.S. entry into World War I (The Great War) and so onto the international stage of slaughter, restrictions on freedom, and monumental indebtedness. Known at the time to be a futile war over nothing in particular, it was primped up by U.S. President Wilson as a war “to keep the world safe for Democracy,” “a war to end all wars,” and it became the most bloody in world history, so bloody no one could imagine another one. The cause of the war was the 1913 establishment of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, which finally put the finances of the U.S. into the hands of a cartel of banks controlled by Baron Rothschild. This allowed him to act on his belief that the kings and queens he controlled in Europe had outlived their usefulness, and could be replaced with “democratic” governments that he could also (correctly, it turned out) also control. The War specifically set in motion an historic level of global indebtedness, the emergence of a Rothschild satellite the USSR, and a peace treaty dictated by Rothschild that essentially guaranteed the unthinkable, an even more bloody conflict in less than 20 years (partly led by Adolf Hitler… content censored by administrator]

The point of this quick history lesson is not to shed new light on one of the most discussed wars in history, as simply to point out that the mindset of Americans and poets was very different in 1918 when Stevens wrote “The Death of a Soldier.” Today our attitude about war can be expressed by a bumper sticker I saw today “Is there life after death? Find out if you touch my truck.” We’ve become so desensitized to the human cost of war that the shocking simplicity of Stevens’ poem—with none of the characteristic religious fervor and heroic sentiments about war that existed at that time—seems blasé. Then, however, the mass, mechanized slaughter over the dying aristocracies of Europe profoundly changed many people’s views about human nature and human progress. Stevens was not exempt from this. The first poem he published, “Phases,” in the November 1914 issue of Poetry magazine, was a response to the new soon-to-be world war, and “Death of a Soldier” came originally as the first (untitled) poem of a series called “Lettres d’un Soldat” published in 1918 in Poetry magazine. These were based on the wartime correspondence of a French painter, sergeant and devout Christian Eugene Emmanuel Lemercier, whose posthumously published letters Stevens read in 1917. Each of the poems in the series had a direct quote from Lemercier, in fact, in the front of it. For this poem (1 of the series) the epigram was “La mort du soldat est pres des choses naturelles” [the death of a soldier is an almost natural thing]. Later renamed “Death of a Soldier” without the epigram, the poem was only one of four in the series to be published in Harmonium, and the only one to be published in the Palm at the End of the Mind collection.

One wonders why Stevens cut so many of his war poems from his collections; was it mainstream sensibilities, lack of credibility in covering a subject he’d never experienced first-hand, or something deeper? Of the “Soldat” cycle Stevens wrote “the subject absorbs me, but that is no excuse: there are too many people in the world, vitally involved, to whom it is infinitely more than a thing to think of. One forgets this. I wish my all my heart that it had never occurred, even carelessly” (Letters 206). The conflation in “it” to include both the war and his poem about the war is I think an appropriate response. A poet can’t undo what war has done, only inflame the wounds.

Filled with the slow and stately rhythm one would expect in an elegy, the poem reads as follows:

Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days’ personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops.

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.

“Life contracts” like a balloon contracts, “and death is expected” like precipitation is expected. The matter-of-factness of the utterance clashes with the largeness of the consequences, highlighting the insanity of believing that the human folly of war-making is a natural contraction of life’s growth and abundance, and of factoring in a young man’s death as a reasonable and normal result. Human war becomes its own inhuman season, where the soldier is no more than a falling leaf.

Lemercier’s soldier of Christ does not get it easy like Christ, resurrected after “three days” and given a annual commemoration of pomp as a reminder how He is separate from humanity, more divine than the rest of us.

The soldier’s death by contrast is “absolute and without memorial.” Despite the plaque in every town and the private wreaths in graveyards, the one who makes the ultimate sacrifice is in fact what most people want to forget after the war, in favor of compensatory causes and spoils. The soldier in that inhuman season is no different than a temporary wind that has stopped blowing.

This analogy is repeated, the movement of clouds across the heavens added, a poetic touch of moving in heaven although life on earth has been stilled. This suggestion of immortality is made less certain by the clouds going “over” the heavens (as the sky is seen from the observer on earth), and by the ambiguous clouds moving in “their” (heaven’s) direction. We are looking at death from the ground, stripped of the patriotic, religious and rhetorical devices that make it seem, as in so many poets before the Great War, lofty and purposeful. There is nothing in this version of war but meaningless death.

A surprisingly gentle anti-war sentiment.

Hart Crane

Eighty years ago this morning Harold Hart Crane fell to his death from a cruise ship deck, age 32. He left behind some of the most beautiful poems ever written by an American...



For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen

More Ascension Symptoms

The only distinction between God and us
Is that God sees Itself in every one.
Such infinite self-worth
in the infinite self,
but all portions of the prism
deserve the recognition
of their sublime ambition,
their relentless spin toward perfection.

The wholeness of the ocean
swims inside my fingers
still I dare to tell the others
how to sing their soul song?
Why should this microcosm
believe in other realms?

My mind is nothing but a crystal,
makes vibrations into shapes,
for love’s harmonic resonance
the reason it creates.

A New Leaf

A flag at half mast
I failed
for the battle was a proxy for the one inside my head
I can't resolve
some flailing out at some deep past injustice
I long ago surrendered to...
So much easier to look in the light
with its wasted lives and starving people
than the shadow where the truth lies
not yet melted of its frost
while nearby dogwoods blossom
without fragrance merely a moment's opening
to endlessness
waiting with infinite patience

Song: Down Confetti Road

Here's a rough version of the song I posted the lyrics for last week:



Down Confetti Road

Another Vivid Dream

I remember the competition
over fishing holes in Georgia,
Illinois, Northeast Montana,
and how we traded barbs
with shots of Old Granddad
in that dusty French museum of an HQ,
so noble in our plans,
bequeathing hot dogs and paper
napkins on the conquered,
thinking some day we may take on
those rows of gold-dipped books.
We'd been polished like brass
for weeks by squadron leaders,
feted as the victors; they never
had to ask for our permission.
We volunteered
for any mission.
We argued over maps
but shared our chewing gum.
We thought how bad it was
our desert target was infested
with all those poison-armed arachnids.
We guarded each perquisite
of our respective roles
—pilot, gunner, navigator—
like the detail for an emperor.
Our precision was our silence,
for there always comes a time
when the arguing must end.

I remember all of that
as if it happened yesterday,
the smell of sulphur triggers,
the sound of raining sand,
but the thought that there were people
below our cookie bomb
has never once occured
in all these years.

The Conflicted Self Finds Peace at a Mirage

Azaleas in the graveyard;
The warrior’s work is never done;
Always new creation.

Creators blessed as well
By seeing all they formed from air
Destroyed.

Still, one must hold on to something.
Is it natural
Playing Spring
And Fall
As pairs?

We fill the shapes too easily
Because we can’t fit into them
At all.

Thoughts Drowned Out by Rain

The only people
ever right
are those who can stay silent

for there is only war
when words are used
in place of truth

there may not be a wound,
it may feel even preferable
most of the time for most of the world

but still its only people
fighting their own
ugly selves

instead of listening for their private star
or testing how deep their awareness can go
or learning ways to show they really know how to love.


Still, that lunar face
with all its loving kindness
we call silence

seems to beckon
always
a response

some thought to bridge the distance,
to know the space is shared,
simpatico appreciated,

the calling of one's outline in the light
to say "I am your gift"
in pure surrender

when the gifts are harmonized already,
the extra word that hurts the night
is that first word.

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

It was two years ago I was relocated to New York City. For the first month I lived in corporate housing, the 777 building where Chelsea, Midtown and the Garment District meet, the old Tin Pan Alley. The poems I did in that month were limited to seven lines, seven beats per line (most of the time), seven days a week. Tonight I'll read the whole sequence, with the help of Archie Shepp, Carmen Bradford, Joe Henderson, John Coltrane and a cast of millions. It's a bit long but it captures in newness the stretch of the place they call The City...





Sorry about the p's...The originals can be found at the following links:

April 5-30, 2010

May 1-4, 2010

In Duck with Maddy and Dean

That weekend at the beach
when I bought a couple cartons of Winstons,
shared an eight-ball between us,
read William S. Burroughs' Junky
and heard "Free Falling" over 150 times.

The Journey Home

violet gold

ahead of the train

facts exchanged for pocket change

behind

Blueprint

The clean room,
all the lines like floor plan drawings:
the hallways lead to doors forever open,
the furniture is symbols,
light is now circumference,
the people theoretical,
the toilets, sinks and stairs
the only things remotely real...
It's perfect as a player piano roll.
We call it home,
but only 'cos it ends just like a razor edge
with nothing past the white but total darkness,
the only thing we care about,
the place that we can't go.

Patrick's Revenge

There is no other person
to save me from my frame
just terse misunderstanding
and the hunger to be right.

Friends are to be ignored,
jeered and spat upon,
and people you don't even know
turned into heroes,

for feelings are not relevant,
and thoughts should not be clear
and spirit is a hammer when you lack it.
I did not need to be listened to,

although I listened hard,
I did not need response of any kind,
though I responded kindly and in kind
at every opportunity for love.

I held back what I knew
from ears too sensitive for truth,
and breathed three times
when lies were freshly planted

for that is how it often is
with children, 'cos I knew
there was agreement in the richnesses
of words, the generosity of the soil -

not you, you bitter parasite,
it was not for you I made you great,
that I answered half-formed cries,
but because you had such dire need of faith

and I had some to give - it seemed
a fair exchange, at the time,
that you might, if not reciprocate,
at least allow for truth,

in the hope that one day you might
track it down, with reporter's hat
and detective's cape, in some dusty
library at the end of the world -

but life cracks even through those stacks,
projects a shameful monster shadow
over every word you read
til the world becomes so narrow

so full of threat and evil,
that you can only criticize
whatever aspect of yourself you can find
in books, the only real life you have left.

I'd say goodbye, but I'm not really sure
if hello was not all in my mind from the first,
and the truth and beauty recognized
was only ever all my own.

I wanted to believe each day
in a shaped world of apt quotation,
but it only was me finding it
in the end, despite it all

and finally the contradiction
could no longer be hidden...
what works for you, without exclusion,
excludes the rest of us without exception.

The Continuing Search for the Perfect Comeback

Ego
Trumps Blood
Every Time

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.