Stevens Textplication 19: Anecdote of the Jar

“God is a Circle, whose Circumference is nowhere and whose Centre is everywhere.” As if to stretch that hermetic maxim to its earthly limits, Stevens takes the humblest of ready-made objects, an actual mason fruit jar identified by the great scholar Roy Harvey Pearce as a "Dominion Wide Mouth Special” widely distributed in the United States from 1913 to the present, (i.e. when notable fruit-lover Stevens was in fact traveling in Tennessee (April and May 1918)),¹ and he sees what happens when he places it on the ground. The result has stunned readers and puzzled scholars for almost 100 years. Here is the poem:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The poem’s basic dynamic is well-expressed by Donald Gutierrez:

Being placed on top of a hill gives the jar an apex of human purpose through nature...It is the design of a created object embodying a human, cultural purpose. Further, the roundness is the symbolic design of purpose placed in nature, which in itself lacks purpose or order. The jar's roundness, exerting a centripetal force on the "slovenly wilderness," endows the wilderness (including the hill) with the order of a center. All the natural disorderliness of the wilderness acquires a purposive spatial character through "centering," and is given a figurative order in the way "rounded" and rounding human purpose shapes significance into the raw matter of earthly phenomena. Accordingly, human circularity, human centralization, civilizes "wilderness," not only the wild, that is, but chaos, nullity, meaninglessness, by providing it structure. This governing force is so powerful that even in its plainest, simplest representations ("grey and bare") the jar compels a "surrounding."²

I’m reminded of a proper British lady I once saw in Barbados, surrounded by an overwhelming miasma of vine and bloom, calmly snipping at some hibiscus with her garden trimmer, with just a few strokes keeping all of nature in check. John Vernon takes that thought one step further:

In "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together" [Stevens] asserts that each person sees in the pineapple a "tangent of himself," and that "the fruit so seen" is also "a part of the nature that he contemplates." In "Connoisseur of Chaos" he says that "the pensive man ... sees that eagle float / For which the intricate Alps are a single nest." The point of both poems is that the wholeness of the world is composed by a single object that opens upon it, the pineapple or eagle, and this unity of object and world in turn passes through the perspective that opens upon it, the someone who puts the pineapple together or "the pensive man" who sees the eagle.

This is why the jar in "Anecdote of the Jar" can "Make the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill." And it is why such an object as the jar couldn't possibly be an inert thing enclosed in its shape; it reaches out for the eyes of whoever is watching and with those eyes arranges the world around it.³

The wikipedia entry on this poem gives an interesting account of some of the different ways Anecdote has been "plausibly" interpreted. There are the cultural critics who see the dominion jar as a symbol of industrialization, mass-production, homogenization and other deleterious effects of capitalism, and the feminist critics who view the clear round jar as a symbol of the male that has subdued the natural female to take "dominion." The common thread of both of these readings is the control of the small jar over everything else, and that's the root of the problem with these approaches. The jar (apologies to Freud) is just a jar. It's absurd in any literal reading to think of an empty mason jar taking control over all of Tennessee as described (unless we feel Stevens is susceptible to awkward, paint-by-numbers symbolism). It's more the absurdity (and impossibility) of the jar's prominence in the larger world that is the interest to the poet here.

Somewhat closer are the more traditional “new criticism” readings that approach the Tennessee jar akin to Keats' Grecian urn, a symbol of art (or poetry), more specifically for the way it shapes reality by framing it, by transforming the wilderness with the human touch. The “slovenly” surrounds the jar, the “sprawl” goes around it. There are difficulties of course with this comparison; a mass-produced jar is not the same thing as a Grecian Urn, and the “gray and bare” found object does not inspire in the poet the reveries of Keats towards the urn's meaning and beauty. One could suggest this is an ironic take on the modernist revolution, where the jar replaces the urn like photography replaced painting, but how then does one reconcile this stringent irony with the idea of the jar standing in for all art? Whatever the aesthetic arguments for or against the jar, the poem does have something to do with the will to see the jar as all-encompassing, to look through art (imagination) and find an absurd dominion over, well, life itself. As Joseph Carroll writes, Stevens “transfers his own imaginative activity to an inhuman medium.”⁴

A related reading would be what I would term the anti-Romantic interpretation, where the poem rejects the easy interplay between humans and nature in spirit that was cultivated by the Romantic poets as the rapture that illuminates God (although in reality the interplay was very problematic, see Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” for example). In Anecdote the jar and nature have nothing in common, they relate as in a dysfunctional marriage between reality and the imagination, no melding of souls, just some bending of wills perhaps. The jar is “clear,” so presumably it mirrors the scene around it, but it is not the “transparent eye” Emerson proposed that in utter emptiness finds its being by filling in spirit with the world around it. What’s missing of course is consciousness. It is the “I” and not the jar with sentience. The jar can’t stand in for the stereotypical Romantic poet, again it’s the will to see it in this way that makes the différance.

Which brings us to the Deconstructionist reading (albeit one I’ve never actually read), which would have the poem turn on the last two lines: “It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee.” In this view, the jar becomes the reader, thus it is an invisible (“clear”) intruder on the scene, that takes “dominion” over the “text” by resisting it, by not giving in to the natural expression of the work of the art because it is separate, and secondary. This unwillingness or inability to “read” controls the meaning of the text, making the reader not the creator the driving force, the “winner” so to speak. (An expensive college education didn’t go to waste on me!)

In reality, the so-called post-structuralist critics are too circumspect to take it this far, they simply say, from J. Hillis Miller to Harold Bloom and on, that the poem is incoherent in structure and epistemologically meaningless, so the reader can make anything they want of it, and thereby betray their own agendas of reading. This fits in nicely with their agenda, which is to paint Stevens as a poet who can’t be explained or resolved because he hasn’t reconciled two seemingly contradictory propositions: “reality is imagination” and “imagination is reality.” Thus poems like “Anecdote of a Jar” are seen as resistant to all attempts to explain them, that in fact it plays “gotcha” on critics for trying to put words Stevens’ wisely stayed away from using on insolvable puzzles of doubt in the mind’s ability to know.⁵

To me this is a dereliction of duty on the part of the critic to understand what the words are actually saying. In Stevens’ world, reality exists, but it is continually made problematic by the imagination, the subjective or non-material side of being that quickly gets caught in the nether world between what is and what appears. The point is not that Stevens’ continuous efforts to separate out the subject from the object, the imagined from the real, from continual interpenetration are impossible. Of course they are impossible (Montaigne and any number of classic thinkers could have told them that).⁶ What gives significance to this effort of creating a “fiction” out of the real through a back and forth examining of how things get abraded away on either side of self and world, is the way that process of perception leads to a fuller understanding of the numinal, the sublime, the metaphysic. This means specifically the role of the imagination in creating and fulfilling our spiritual being, in identifying what is most genuine about us (“the voice that is great within us”)⁷—even if it is not “real.” That Stevens is fundamentally a mystical writer seems lost on so many critics, but if one looks at his subject as one of intellect at war with itself I suppose it resembles only a lost cause, to the critic at least if not to the poet.

Most of the approaches I’ve surveyed here miss something essential about the structure of this poem, that it is not the jar that is important but the “I” that places it. This may be because the I immediately drops out of the “picture” after setting down the jar. There is a kind of transference of consciousness into the jar through the process of letting the imaginative feel of the scene take over. The order out of chaos in other words takes over the one who orders it. It is here we finally get a glimpse at how this poem ties into Stevens’ central concern: how easily and inextricably the real becomes the imagined. One becomes the things surrounding one, but at the same time ineluctably separate. Human subjectivity transforms the sharpness of life to a blur, the truth to a lie, but that's where “all the magic happens,” the self is found.

The convexity of the round jar causes the appearance of the wilderness to surround it in a reflection. Look at the jar for its capacity to contain and reflect light. “Round it was,” not the jar (see picture above), but the beam of light created in its refraction (from, say, late afternoon sun upon it).

This light “made the slovenly wilderness / surround that hill.” Do I have to spell out the Christian iconography here? “The wilderness rose up to it, and it sprawled around, no longer wild.” Like any heathen, it was saved. The jar was “tall and of a port in the air.” Isn’t that how Jesus is described? “It took dominion everywhere” as reflected light, or as The Light.

Yet “the jar was gray and bare” – it was merely a container for light. The real is only the place from where the imagination takes off, to find the truth of one’s spiritual nature (as the Eastern sages say “we are not bodies having a spiritual experience, but spirits having a bodily experience”). “It did not give of bird or bush,” its gift was not that of nature or the material world, it was “like nothing else in Tennessee.” The Baptist, anti-Baptist, Pentecostal, Adventist, et al churches that seem to infest Tennessee like no other U.S. state cannot quite, in their hallowed rituals and sanctified buildings, capture the singularity of light the empty mason jar brings to the all-seeing eye of the observer.


Notes:
1. Roy Harvey Pearce, "’Anecdote of the Jar’": An Iconological Note," The Wallace Stevens Journal 1:2 (Summer 1977), 65.
2. From "Circular Art: Round Poems of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams." Concerning Poetry 14:1 (Spring 1981).
3. From The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.
4. From Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987.
5. For more on this see Tim Morris. Wallace Stevens: Poetry and Criticism. Cambridge UK: Salt Publishing, 2006. Pp. xi-xxvi.
6. This essay is indebted to the work of Paul de Man, whose radical approach to texts is exemplified in essays like “Montaigne and Transcendence” (1953). Unfortunately de Man never wrote about Stevens, so the speculations here can’t be more directly linked to his great interpretative work.
7. A line from “Evening Without Angels” from Stevens’ Ideas of Order collection (1935).

Flowers for the Reader

All art is but a butterfly
Roams larger than our sights
Shows our minds how inconceivable
We are, how far behind.

We chase like lepidopterists leaping
Some trace of fallen grace.
The poets hold our hopes in keeping as a thought
If not a place.

Still its hollows we inhabit
As a bubble yet to burst,
We bring our fevers and our fancies to it,
Virgins to its birth.

But it never calms our raptures
What lives so far away
In worlds where myths are freshly fractured,
Nets can't capture prey

Where the sun in evening grandeur
Will glaze transcending hills
That speak as an eternal candle
Music of the real

While we, in death's embracing stillness
Mourn what never was—
What calls across the mortal distance,
Words that hear just us?

June's Translucent Moon - 8*

"From your first day at school you are cut off from life to make theories." - Taisen Deshimaru¹

Cyprus news² the benevolent fleck³
of insubstantial subsidized dreck⁴
to wallow in like timers⁵ in their time
—the realpoetic⁶ vicissitudes of rhyme⁷
intrude upon comeuppance schemes,⁷
the narrow-minded lip synch⁸ at the quarter beams,⁹
what egg on something fluffy¹⁰ in the dustbin lint remover¹¹
with the bastard tint of structures¹² doomed to be redeemable
gone to seed
gone to seed...¹³

The rimshot¹⁴ of a common law¹⁵
that strangles prayer and throttles raw
comes sneakily in canvasses turned green¹⁶ by stealth neglect
another virtue cigarette¹⁷ and the pins reset¹⁸ the net

It's all a gruesome company of manifolds¹⁹ and pinions²⁰
to make this bumper car avoid decisions.

It's this, not that, not that, but this, no, this²¹
twists to scattered utterance²² of piss²³
that sprays²⁴ out from the inside
always leaves foul nests alone²⁵
where blades are smoothed against rawhide²⁶
and moons are only there²⁷ to moan.

The daft encumbrance²⁸ of the fool in stew
as the wooden²⁹ ladle stirs shit in the brew
to share as some strange ritual
a demitasse³⁰ of God
who never listens to their prayers
from choking on the cod
piece³¹ that the fool³² wore to appease
the ogres³³ unappeasable who into dinner sneeze.

Courtiers and sycophants using up their mind
on useless, useless trivia that storms the brick-backed³⁴ vine
to make cerebral sausage³⁵ packed with innuendo's curse
to smite³⁶ the site-shared property ³⁷from library's wet nurse

Collect, refine, regurgitate; there are no students here
just teenagers with self-esteem that comes like ghosts³⁸ with beer,
a dense machine of missile toss³⁹ to train new future death
mongerers whose in-tuition⁴⁰ pays to forget their breath⁴¹
and remember animosity in the pages of the past
the thing they have to say to prove they're worthy of what lasts
but there's no grand epiphany, no final festshrift blues
just twilight and the tolling⁴² of the dues.

And yes, we all believe in this, outside the ivy walls,
the place where dreams of intellect can prove we are not wrong
for making small decisions like a whore⁴³ to win the day,
for tuning out the rapt outsiders⁴⁴ song,
the theory of another, better way⁴⁵
—but facts are facts the worth we give to scholars who can't teach
is the debt⁴⁶ in the degrees, the slavery we can reach
in the threat of higher learning, the fear of steps behind,
that you could not explain yourself without a lambskin⁴⁷ rind⁴⁸

While Gracchus and Gawain await your every waking thought
they'll live in you without a grade⁴⁹ of what might get you bought
from knowing they are valuable, as if you need advice
to catapult millennia for the pearl⁵⁰ beyond a price.


* With Critical Apparatus

1. Quoted in Kubla Toledo. "Simplified Damage Madness." Comparative Consciousness 75 (1954). Vort Academy.
2. Reference to the headline in the New York Times on June 11, 2012 ("It's Cypress's turn for a debt crisis") homologous to that in the London Times on June 12, 1812 ("Cypress in debt ... again"). See Monica Structures. "Finding Intrinsic Grandchildren." Purloined Universe 10 (2010). Distance Hilaire.
3. Serbo-Croatian, from Dyskolos Pergolesi. "Towards Holographic Papyrologie." Byzantium Drummer 123 (1972). Serbian Hotel Institute. Reprinted in Racing Catharsis Yearbook
4. Yiddish "drek" (filth) vs. Old English "dik" (dyke). See Christ Rachewiltz. "Post-Symbolist Eros Masters." Multiple Meaning Apostle (1998). Johnson Lukács Antiquities. Reprinted in Annual Carlos Hebrew Food 2001
5.  Broken alarm clocks. For clarification, see Longinus Sartre. "Giroux Efficiency Restored." Calculator Experience 1:102 (1984). Political Bicycle Scholarship.
6. For detailed commentary on the reading protocols for the use of this pun as episteme of historicity, see Johnny Seam. "Hyperion Lingering: Another Urinandum Transtextual Death." Hermetic De-Facement Interior 1 (1976). Unsung Toasts Institute.
7. e.g. rime. See Fruman Merkelback. "Sonnet Trouble Again." Paranoid Poetry Navigation 15 (2004). Eros Dare - Reader. Reprinted in Fine Wordsworthing (2008)
8. For a detailed discussion of the scholarship/innocence conundrum in Finnegan's Wake and The Simpsons, see Matthew Britannica's dissertation "Bagging a Homer: The Cryptozoologosization and Deratiocination of Canonical Culture in Finnegan's Wake and The Simpsons." Reprinted as "Bourgeois Nonsense: The Dialectic of Dialects and Dioramas" in God Disguised as a Binky: Critical Essays on the Simpsons (2009). Murdoch's Last Odyssey Press.
9. "Ruby are my love's red lips..." See Eva Gadjo. "Paradox Mastery Mulch." Cool Epistemology 16 (2011). Surprised University.
10. For a numismatic reading see Primal Eliot. "Amazing Spoon Scrivening in Moral E Prose Objects." Tensegrity Cellist 1 (2001). Penguin Oppression Press.
11. A plurality of scholars gloss this as a reference to the ancient world's most troubling epistemological riddle: "fuzzy wuzzy was a bear / fuzzy wuzzy had no hair / fuzzy wuzzy wasn't fuzzy wuzzy." For background see Tiny Dudley. Problem Transcendence. Billings, Montana; Last Horse (1987).
12. Before swiffers, surface lint was removed by small pans with tapered ends, whereby a thick brush "swept" the dust into the pan for disposal. See Lowry Kees. "Frobenius TV Theorizing." Rational Illustrations Bulletin 23:147 (1947). Sign Almanac Idea Collecting.
13. "Bodleian hegemony convergence as destablizing bricolage  marks a shift from Althusserian structural totalities as theoretical temporality objects to one in which the contingent possibility of post-structuralist false parataxic epiphanies inaugurates a renewed conception of transgressive marginality bound up with facsimile contingent strategies for the rearticulation of patriarchal power sugar cookies." From Balloon Turner. "Vital Post-Poesque Censorship." Mythic Literary Revolutions 10 (1998). Carre Tombeau. Reprinted in Sharp Snobs 1787-1814: Feminist Calgary Anthology (2002).
14. See "Gene Krupa to the Butthole Surfers: from Polysemy to Ecofeminism," in Somnia Neant. "The Jargon Cabbages." Communication Cannibals 15 (2007). House of Rhetoric.
15. "Mauris iaculis eleifend dapibus. Cras eu libero id ligula molestie dapibus. Mauris euismod nulla eu odio ornare sed sodales ipsum lacinia. Nullam sagittis sapien ut erat malesuada tincidunt. Nulla facilisi.." Quoted from Sterne Partheneia. "Complete Spinoza Rounding Problems." Spinoza Quest 123 (1974). Reprinted in Spinoza Views Re-published (1974).
16. Rhymes with "player." See Henley Speculum. "Theorizing Space Friends." Euphoria Problems 17 (1948). Cyclops Checklist Library.
17. Copper-based pigments were common in paleolithic sites in Burma, but rare after ephrastik projectioning had been realized, suggesting a full stasis disruption in the sedimentary functionality of igneous gas deposits. Artaud Provender. "Distaff Rock Languages as Collideorscape Types Processing." Harvard Prehistoric Skull 192:1 (1957). Editorial Thermidor Foundation.
18. Jalououse, as argued in Floreal Tchelitchew. "Accompanying Plague Ambiguity." Uncle Yonder 1 (1982). Deconstructivist Americas. Reprinted in Sublimation Collecting (1994).
19. A reference to the Nietzschian concept of eternal recurrence. Bellow Herne. "Nineteenth-Century Danger Spells." Herakleitian Essence Revolutions 3 (1981). Mauve Thesaurus.
20. For a discussion of whether this is the intake or exhaust manifold, see Improved Poet Dog. "Factory Debate: Ornery Vermont Scorpion or Well-Tempered Boundary Airport." Indianapolis Genius 12 (1971). Chinese Vamp Gardens.
21. The smallest gear or the outermost wing of a bird, cited to enigmatize binary heterosexuality. See Cleanth Czar. "Rare Cartesian Battles." Uncommon Education Rhetoric 15 (1985). Contempt Season.
22. This line is a combination of Revelation 6:10 and The Devil in Miss Jones. See Annie Chapbook. "Annual Crane Limbo Romanticism." Balloon Languages 3 (1976). Every Greatness. Reprinted in Doomed Emma Essays (1981).
23. See note to Confusions Dowry. "Transgressive Cross-Referentiality in Dystopia: Dialogism Restored!" Assistant Scholars 101 (1994). Persuasion Notebooks.
24. ibid.
25. This reference was omitted from the final version published in the Buffalo Review, for fear of offending the sensibilities of native Buffaloneans. See Basil Braille. "Remembering Linguistic Amerika." Social Philology 102 (1987) (also in High-toned Epigraphik Statesman 4 (1987)). Cedar Top Languages.
26. Sadomasochistic envy, see Herman Mistakes. "Dialectical Gopherwood." Elsewhere Notes 15 (2003). Nude California Prose.
27. A physical impossibility, as pointed out in Lorine Hölderlin. "War After Rectitude." German Hidden Design 12 (1996). North Fearful Museum.
28. Cf. Stuart F Come Outside. "The Drummer in Gray Fields." Vegetal Voices 1 (2002). Radiant egiziani.
29. Proposed study questions: Why is the ladle wooden instead of metal? What do you think the author intended with this word choice? What emotional states are symbolized by wood, and what by metal?
30. Note the orthographic spelling here, cf. demitasse, quadrat, diener, hyssop, macédoine, basenji, numnah, chorion, nacarat, sinicize, hyphaeresis, taleggio, esclandre.
31. For a Rabelasian dynamism perspective, see Asilomar Bombazeen. "Satyricon This?" Today in Aristophanes 400:13 (1983). Unaware Paperbook.
32. See colloquium "Groot Case Harmonious Canons" in Anti-Selves Unmodern Formalist Navigation (Apron-String Narrative Conversion Special Issue) (2007). Shepherds Visiting School.
33. "The subsumption of feminism within a 'more comprehensive' field of gender studies, accompanied by the rise of a 'male feminist perspective that excludes women,' and the dominance within feminist thought of an 'anti-essentialism so radical that every use of the term 'woman,' however 'provisionally' it is adopted, is disallowed' (14-15). The two trends are linked because 'the rise of gender studies is linked to, and often depends for its justification on, the tendency within poststructuralist thought to dispute notions of identity and the subject' (15). These trends are troubling for Ms. Parnassus because she fears that, insofar as gender studies tend to decenter women as the subjects of feminism, they may be not a 'new phase' in feminism but rather feminism's 'phase-out.'" From Giorgio Manley. "Nutritious Lulu Leaves Cleansing." Sioux Grammatology 15 (1997). Damaged Americas. Reprinted in the Shoemaker Lectures (Pig Rag Maisie Writing).
34. A pun on brick-bat. See Cadmus Martin. 1960 Medusa Guidebook. Invisible Oxford Kentucky; Catharsis Global (1970).
35. For linkages to Upton Sinclair, see Shaker Terrell. "Hephaestus Preaching." Nazarene Absentee 10:2 (1974). Saddest Bibliographical Ideas.
36. Cf. Merry Wives of Windsor III, i, line 1326: "Well, I will smite his noddles. Pray you, follow." See Braque Wilbur. "On Commonplace Ghosts, Eye Keeping Mimes and Robot Ear Ambiguity: Some Invisible Avian Trivia in Shakespearean Darkness." Swahili Continuities 150:15 (1969). February Circle. Reprinted in Popular Morris Collecting (1971) and Shaxper Train Examiner (1972).
37. For a thorough discussion of Visigoth property law, see Griselda McLuhan. "Thoughts Post-Modern Ex Prefaces." Byzantium Labor 130:15 (1935). Italian Devil Letters.
38. Cf. Caspar the Friendly Ghost, who everyone loved at the end of every episode but everyone was afraid of at the beginning, suggesting something happened overnight that can't be disclosed on children's television. 
39. Cf. Bruce Cockburn "I Wish I Had Rocket-Launcher." Wouldn't that be so fucking awesome?.
40. Oh, in-tuition, for tuition, I get it. Har har.
41. Cf. The Sompnour’s Tale line 32,987 "We have this worlde’s lust all in despight / Lazar and Dives lived diversely, / And diverse guerdon hadde they thereby." See Jim Rectitude. "Kipling Resistance Professorship Manuscripts Investigation." Master Absentee 3 (1963). Team Jesus Fragments.
42. For further discussion, see Saussy Renault. "Teaching Spiritual Romance Careers: An Incommensurability Construction Cabala." Contemporary Hero 7 (1993). Ishmael Limbo Gallery. Also Usura Fergusson."The Severance Manifesto." Seuss Alternative Linguistics 17:10 (1995). Yoruba Historiography.
43. "That's a thing, right?" Liz Lemon.
44. Is anybody even reading this shit?
45. I am going to go to Starbuck's now to get a latte and that hot chick behind the counter's number.
46. How many more of these fucking citations are there? Dude, I got news, this fucking poem makes no sense at all.
47. Do you want to watch my goop box? It's trippy.
48. Do you want to play charades with my cat?
49. Could I bum a cigarette? A light?
50. Do you want to read some of my poems?

I Am Not I by Juan Ramón Jiménez

When I heard Gary Zukov reciting by heart my man Robert Bly's version of this classic poem to Oprah, I decided to offer my own version.

I am not I.
I am
What’s me without me knowing it
At my side at times I see
And sometimes forget.
Who stays, serene, when I speak,
Who when I hate, sweetly forgives,
Who walks where I am not,
Who when I pass away, still stands.


[Spanish original]:

Yo no soy yo.
Soy este
que va a mi lado sin yo verlo,
que, a veces, voy a ver,
y que, a veces olvido.
El que calla, sereno, cuando hablo,
el que perdona, dulce, cuando odio,
el que pasea por donde no estoy,
el que quedará en pie cuando yo muera.


[Bly's translation]:

I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
the one who remains silent while I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing when I die.

Addendum to Al Jolson in Blackface Singing Finnegan's Wake in its Entirety to a Prison Audience Somewhere in Michigan

Elveesta Proustley sweeps wit his muddah's fishnets
still wearin his strat straps and a badass pompadour,
he splayed a mean gutfuddle naymah Madaleene
blankateen the wine-dark see with escradrilles of funk
on the qu'est ce que c'est imperium of silence,
siren songs remembered for not be'un dere
like Bunk Johnson and Buddy Bolden
whose note we nevah hoyd
still haunts us from the g-string air,
das invenshun de da bloozes,
the flatted fit Leadbeller drank
like your rootabeggah milkshake
at the Memphisifto boogie jernt,
the great chain of bein' po headbongers boys and mosh
the toof will turnip doe'cha'no baggas can't be toobers
the nastyurchin dus mah blooms be wheezing da woof
from down on de parchiment firm, papyrus
of the pen-men in tunestiles booweeviladdled
oyning while they boyning, the HP
Floydcraft and Blind Blake Popemobile
who shoe'd nuff gnew each other's tails off wo back when
as cool, muddy howlang berrylee perceptigreatballsoffeefoofumfifosuh
gerontion greetonions of cool, Son House
of Common Placeyear bets at the still wife with white King
Biscuit and Blind Lime Watermelon
Tipperaree and Ticondewoga two
as the woof baynes moonly (alice) going fur-word.

Not even our own Sappho Smith
and her lesbyanest torchslongs
that drove mencattle crazy
in dem Storyville hovelles
primitif like Anakreon
with Umaygahd minacigarets and injun gizzards
and kitchin kinky straightener stench
went temporarity like Thomas Dylan
slumming like he Charley P on
Lady Montagu's pig farm.

Pre-Raphaelites and their mellotrons
conjure megamanic middle earth in
Arkestral Minervas in the Dork
axes n irish war pipes fifes and lambeg drums
straight from Egypt and Morocco
via Saturn and the Dog Star
laying down sum fuzzy Phrygian modes
of mystical gematria
as mariachi oompah bands
serve up jigs of irish bluegrass strains
and Samarvinotis Keats trills lonely
so sweetly that you'd think
he rilly fer rill didinna disappeared
before he so young died.

Old Squool they call it nah
but when Li'ul Richud and the Faerie Queeneries
traipsed through England fair back in the day
wearing the kick of war machinery pants
Satanic Jerusalem's pleasure Zeppelins
decreed a pleasing trobar by Cavalcanti
on snowblind Milton's Sabbath Black
who's red next the scriptures too literally
and the graduate axekicksers descended to madness
because they factoscrips have no rebop.

William Butler Morrison
bean from Belfast and all hated all the
Whiskey Irish Catlicks
and therefore all mankind
but still he brought like suds at dawn
the sound of Gawd a knocking
on our door with a brogue and tarot calling carob
a heavenly Primitif Baptist choir.

Percy Brian Jones he drowned
in a Cinqueterre swimming pool
after learning that the world
was not the way he wanted it to look
and even though he could be swiving
with any betty he laid his blond blue eyes upon
he was tortured for hizz suckexcessness
by the Olde Rich Young Mick Byron
and Keith Frankensteininscensed
who sold dey sools to the
process church to be immortalized in stones
jes' loyke the Bard o Liveopool
who ruled de commun tunguncheek
with rings of justice, blings of love
and Johnnie be Donne could lay down
deadly but not proud guitar
like unringing the bell and crossing
state lines with an angel in a rented
tuxedo blue sonnet cadillac.

Meanwhile in Amorica Thelonious Dickinson
with no cabaret club license to speak of
cleared the room
with hisher devil's intervals
heshe called them cool
til everybody knew enough
to keep the funk away
or maybe it was that all-white
porcupine pie hat that swayed as heshe flayed,
and good old Walt Waldo Zimmerman
who made his living out of chiseling
the devil at his own redemption game
saying black when it was white outside
and white when it was fashionably black
and even cheating death by motorcycle assassassignation
while saying sayings only Jeezuhs
could get away with saying, nome saying sore nuft,
and my homey Edgar Franz Costello
who never said anything straight-up
it had to esccollate rage all the ways to the top
to ambiguous post-god heaven
and thunder to earth back in ribbons of giggles
every word a lie or as Jolson said
thank you black america
when he was done.

June's Translucent Moon - 7

She walks through the rib-cage of academia
furioso with scribbles of vengeance
to right the inherent thrust of his argument
towards more appetites, less longings—

her spiderman backpack keeps inconvenient theories
of the origins of life and Dewey decimal system
from the triple zero stacks of the library,
the bibliographies of bibliographies.

There's a human at the end of her walk
perhaps with a cigarette, a leering cravat,
to disabuse her of her inhumanity
with predictable frailty, the listing for nuance
a sock to the jaw that no ipso facto gets back.

She's a student, so she doesn't have questions
just solutions, explanations, equivocations
for her interlocutor tired of the sermons,
the dotting of I's with the unexamined outside
like light through the stained glass arches
that can't stay away, merely yellow with intent.

The stacks hold illumitable manuscripts
and the bathrooms have porn cartoons,
these students change less that the texts, he found,
refusing to be subsumed - as the masters
in the monasteries before them refused,
changing words to the New Testament
countless times as it suited their status
as keepers of useless knowledge.

"Paint your own thing," the Buddhist priest said
to the art preservationist unable to reconstruct
what had dripped over time to the bowl in the earth
as if it had no better thing to do.

The lost is collected and stuffed into pipes
and blurred with prescriptions of unending night.

The cast of the play may wear pantsuits this season
and speak with the patois of dragonskinned gangs
but the story's the same
as every tale in every time,
predictable as a lawnmower,

frogthroat confusion dissected with prongs
for a sharp microscopic confusion,
called perplexity, tensegrity, high irony,
ambiguity, game or chaos theory, the ineluctable
pushing on the string, the drawing and quartering
of hairs, the splitting of straws,
the quibbling to bend the unknowable to dough
to begin again,

as if our own time
could rhyme with medieval,
as if we had ever stopped thinking that way,
as if these ideas weren't hospital curtains
to give privacy rights to our shame

—the ethereal is too real
we must track formulations
like blood on a dress
for clues to the murder of a hero
who never existed
except as we've re-created him
from cardboard and twine
and jealousy toward the divine.

Humanitas and its irrefutable reason,
Scientia and its endless capriciousness,
in this place where the adversarial truths lay hidden
under a thousand paving stones
—until the blocks themselves can't be truthful,
they must hold on to each others' sides
in hopes that the jewel long analyzed
will one day form.

In parlors of the night
hawks strum their talons
until the new light
makes the squirrel tails like rats',
waiting for the bleed of distant mercy
in a world where pride makes protection fact.

The creatures scurry to their dens
to don their robes and stroke their pipes,
the fires all aligned as if to symbolize,
then the stoking of the trivializing leaf.

The dancers will leap,
the ashes will keep.
The burn of censors
twirling round the pit
we have all jumped into from this.

June's Translucent Moon - 6

Are rules fools tools?

Yes when they can't be followed,
The real ones behind the hollows
Don't care if you know them or not.
What humans do is stay bought
Like it or don't that's the truth,
For the heart there's no substitute.

Why do I believe my own lies so easily?

That is the price to communicate.
You resent it in others, repudiate
What you resist, as if it's the real
That's discussed as you close a deal.
What if illusion was all that you had?
Would you think then that you're life was wasted?

How can I live my freedom?

Let it join you while you're away
In sleep, in silence, interstices of the day,
Hold to the lectern as off the notes fly,
Know it's not luck you're alive.
Learning is only forgetting,
Creation the sun that is setting.

How can I step into love?

Don't agonize what you walk away from,
See with closed eyes the unification,
Know that the visible lives to be still,
But you live electrified skeletal
Where things become one at the flash of a bulb,
Their distinction found in that moment and culled.

How does the sky walk in me?

Tether yourself to your own focused being,
Something must hold itself all down the streaming.
The real must get larger, you must let the gap
Grow past the structures you've made from the map.
Know people turn into your concepts and back
As the vapors you seize turn to facts.

How do I walk in the sky?

With tact and with reverence, innocent wise,
For there's not here a place for your eyes.
The feeling is consummate inside the chords.
The landscape grows straight from the words.
The time that you value so much you must waste
And space can't exist, nor anything not out of place.

June's Translucent Moon - 5

”Our Lady’s rare transit”

Immobilized while the sun moves eternal
Skekinah fields Venus green diurnal
Pick-me-up trumpets in reveille staining
Of stick-me-up scrum stock for inner entraining
In difficult big-wig hats

Eleusis you themed, Aloysius on the masthead,
A double-down transfer-edged cacophony ring
In stout circuit sentences grand in word prisons
The blest fingered furnaces pining rapt ash
Recoiled and recalled in the placement of sash
Sordid with monstrances shooting their tracks
Ever-bloomed moon, lilac moth-frequencies
Ill-conceived ill-stars to burgeon our plight
Man-dead and man-heavy dropped into sequences
Pistols from skirt curtains itched for a fight
The innumerable vestibules croaked into residues
Residual valences coiffed to a pitch
To cover the dashes that snitch

Surreal venereal cockpit of light
Finds eggs at vibrator dawn teemed with blight
Rascals and androids merrily vie
For umbrage at cost for the night
Releasing redemption in whorls of pink light
The folds always yield to the tremulous truth
That stiffens and flexes and holds down the shoot
Like jalopy calliopes bursting with loot
It’s stricken and struck-down and strunk out and fanned
The keys to obscenity purloined and banned
In woeful obliquity, morose regret,
The sanctions come facing like blocks
Come tumbles like quarters through sieves of good luck
Where books of immemorial debt go to town
To rupture and wind man around
Electric surveillance and bon vivant frowns
They pass through the current selection of crowns
To take scattered eyelashes down

Subterfuge of laughter, cool dressage of anger
Compromised squalor of incendiary desire
Hoopla the Barbarian knows the gist
That makes it a sin to enter and kiss
To puncture a view in essence
The cavalier player of pearls and incense
Lost antiquarians stacking the decalogues
Vying for virgins who strip to their flogs
Condemning the women who hold up like glue
Through the bastard hours and contemptuous views
Willing to sun-squat in outbursts of maize
The squirm and the slurry, the rage
Bilious casualty brimming with grief
At the dead-set-against-itself chastity thief
Roaring with sanctity ceremonial glee
Ravenous flowers and turbulent seas
And all of the graciousness stops at the freeze
We crawl to the urban terminal
Bilking innumerable charity pickings
That feebly emote the security ward prickings
Stick it to the woman who braves bare breast babies
And heeds all commands in the guise of the almighty
She ratchets away what she catches
But leaves some threads loose on the spool
There always is some blast to warn her
That she happily forfeits to be fooled

The rabbit of symphonies plays with the keys
And call cloudlines down for an encore of sleaze
Brandishing diplomats improper tongues
They bandy the worth of their crumbs
In sums with their lungs
The interlopes plea to stay in good graces
Of fleas and horse thiefs
The ignorant savages warning of beasts
To keep their own home-powder dry
Grandiloquent eye with the bantering fly-ointment
Trivializing terror and glee
It’s all what you do to get by at your job don’t you see?
The world’s oldest man in his red robes and locks
Contemplates suicide watching the clocks
He waves his new chalice through breast, eyes, lips, labia
Ordering pieces to size

Cheer the numinous wrath on the vine
Condemn the desperate desire you pine
A stopping from everything to be more kind
Resentment comes out in due time
The bells of the servants will chime
And hell will break loose in the blinds
Stealth ruination and popes who serve wine
To entwine the looters with scenery crime
No one knows who is right, what goes on in between
Is never apparently quite what it seems

Hostages shared and hostages freed
And taken away the endemic feed
Covered and cloistered and cowered and keyed
—Both sides of one crystal set to revolving
One more conundrum that’s almost worth solving
Running from innocent lies
Turned indecent sighs
Trusting the truth to a clamorous vestige
Of original real, the original feeling
The shame that we shared dealt and dealing in
Mastery over the Earth
That weeping mass of life now burdened
With our antagonized births,
The craving of excess, the natural deemed sin,
The whole disenfranchised disillusioned chemistry
That knows not its own responsibilities
To keep and to move like the sun in the sky
And the moon that returns every sigh

moonbow in Hawaii

June's Translucent Moon - 4

The unfathomable - released -
to non-exclusion -
The redeemable - foretold -
as arabesque -

So are the quandries you
inspire
with ineluctable longing,
fragment vision,
impossible retrievals
of downy lost snow.

Such is the kindness
you display
to cuckold stuck attitudes
send them away

A new breathing
meeting of two
to splash the ornamental
pyre with jewels

It's giving, not that hand
that reaches back
in wonder how the gift
can be received.

The poker-faced who lie
to stay on track
must disengage from
truths they can conceive

For attitudes lose altitudes
as soon as they are spun
yields run one way across
the staking plank, the righteous
ladder
ever wobbling as it falls
across the stars...

Is this the change?

Yes - so it appears -
the tears are of a morning
slow diminishing
in blights and blots of
cantilevered
finishing.

We've waited for varnish to
yellow
with more patience than you
could know,

The polyglot appendages are
warped
by time-machine fantasy
torques.

Attend well the alchemy
players,
the tight-fist illuminous
fares
like Chiron and his boat
to a rock band
from Chicago

—if you think that's
a coincidence
I've got unified fields
to peddle,
the gravity-free fields
of Florida,
the strawberry fields
gene meddled
and the horrid utopias
that turn the earth's blood
to smoke.

It's old, all that smoldering
control - you don't
have to buy it,
they came 'cos you asked them,
they wanted you to know
—messiah they worship,
colors aglow.

If you can't see sun
in the shadow
you'll not see your own
mirrored face.
If you debunk the world
in your pillow
You won't remember
the grace of the place,

So many short circuits
to so many dead ends!
Heaven is waiting
within this dimension.
Everything could be your friend!

Subtle glitter flies off
your fingers
gravity comes from your
heart.
All are in pewstools
awaiting your blessing
The miracle of your art.

You dove into darkness
to bow before demons
because you felt
nothing at first
and now that you know what it feels like to suffer
let it go
—you have permission—
to haul the world in
like flies on lines
like forks with tines
like gold from mines
like poets rhymes...

Tail-spinning, wind-spitting
dervish dynamo
to the center spin,
the circle is you.

When I'm finished, the blue sun

June's Translucent Moon - 3

Surrender bones, I'm waiting...

Reginald I'm sorry. The blitz
comes subterfuged. The light
comes underheeded, the blank
falls underused.
Query the digits,
marry the quagmire, dally
the derring-do
it's for you, to
disable and enable as you do.

The working man's blues, to sing
and not to beg - the plate that's full
is empty where you lay.
Begone
the culpable grading you invite,
responsible for what is right,
you are the spark-son ameliorating foreign sleight.
Let the lawyer's speak for themselves you say
as if you'd found a way
already taken;
the epilogue of seems is
believing, not fact
in black and white—
there are no final chimes
to justify,
only intention
to climb
empty air
as if
it's a mountain.
Nomenclature D, it seems,
is but a cover
for something more
unfathomable
in your dreams,
the thought that you are reaching,
in your scheming, different
frequencies.
You fall below
by choice, you know, and every
bitter crop is there to
ride you higher back
so you may know
what others know
inside your hat...

Alignment, so you say
'cause words can only play
about a board game ready
to commence
—senseless recompense—
a juridicial fence,
the laughter and the loneliness
you miss...

So where go I? To the sky
to pull down petals
of unending reply,
sanctified as solid
in the earth's
immortal gyre...

Who am I to know? The grassgrows
fire of an innocent illusion,
love is never the worst thing you can do
to express,
but hatred for yourself
must be redeemed.

Right to write? Rite. Releasing
is beginning, constriction
comes from fear, everyone
is here to mark the year
you called yourself
free...

echo-sense, marked private

June's Translucent Moon - 2

The engine in the center - gold...

A never ending fire
rips the bulwark catapults,
pulls the slat desires,
harmonize the commonplace
with lies
hinging disintering things,
widgets long estopped;
cranes that pull up skeletons
roam an endless loch.
Terraforms and terrabytes,
tetrahedron gnomes
cast their numbers to the wind
breaking in rad forms
spurious, supercilious
easing into place
that core that won't stop baking
catalogs new tastes,
wretched format you require
for all your stations
of learning how to deal with your
ecstatic calculations.
Stop, just stop the merry romp
of blackening your sight
it's just an endless ferment,
a dial of black and white.
Overlong and overmuch
you've fiddled new returns
when all that is invites you
to unlearn.

----------------------------------

Spiritus. Restus. Nos Deus Tributum.
Wo es colyandrun virtus veritas.
It is in the seeing - now -
not with eyes but inner sight,
the bourn from which the shadows are created.
Like motes in your eye, like dandelion manes,
the highest consciousness trying to arrive
inside your mind's eye
o traveler from home!
To allow us make us real
—so you too turn actual
not just a sullen sharpening of wind
but an intentional being
tied to endless chains
of life aligned
in harmonies
eccentric
to the source,
inviolable outbursts,
incandescent threads.
What is not
is only what
what is
appears to promise:
the opening in something
of a gate;
the hand that furrows
catches on the shore
of turbid rushing
forward as the spore.
Maintenant vous-etes decrime,
la volontaire escrime,
The may pole and the manifold
in perfect sheets of rhyme!

You could call earth
a prison
except words
definition
locks what is in
to what it isn't.
Look at how all stuff turns into mind
and how mind captures all it is
merely to look.

dove's blue wing

June's Translucent Moon - 1

Willow from another galaxy...

The load of common argument
feels underwhelmed and hardly hidden
—boars with helmet holes know where this leads—
peace an albatross
thwarting what is riven,
play of tape and styrofoam
the loft that it is given—
more the culprits vagabond
cries for precious baggage
gone to dim-sum abattoirs
where larks float in procession,
birds of altered paradise
in words of bantam structure
burn away like Avignon
the bursars of the mighty.
Chill in all my demon states
the real on the front burner
glows in rectitudal longing
forced against the paper
singed like lotus avatars
bent to differing height-bars
rose to master primal tracks
where cold can grow unending.
Bare the greasy willow skein
called upon a gloaming
rivaled in a sudden charm
foiled with chrome and croning
basking all its buskitude
in circles of drawn net;
interferes with drama travel sutures
bears upon neglect,
throws a different polywogger
down into the depths,
roars of vacillating squirrels
mired to tethered bets,
flawed in vaudeville starry troopers,
queens upon a sill,
vows to take the next way higher
turn another trail.
Born upon the astral remnants,
torn upon the spring,
form becomes an empty olive palm
upon the brain
where the coming of distractions vend
a leak of quarter-cup
stars upon the lunar bake sale grow
another heart.
Yet in deed we're all among it,
flinging in the dust,
still the beam goes omni-dextrous
only what we know
surrounds the yellow of our crawling
discontent...

lambcloud with eye like Diana - green - mine

Important Message for All Poets

Poets! Want your poems more widely read? You've heard about prompts, those key words shared in groups to challenge or help inspire a poem. Instead of using innocuous literary words as prompts, use some of the 377 words or terms from U.S. Homeland Security 2011 Analyst’s Desktop Binder that online monitors at the National Operations Center are on the lookout for as they "process" over 20 million "transactions" each year. Here's how it works. Using any one of these words automatically triggers a looksee by the Feds into your email, web, Facebook, twitter, etc. communications. Using multiple words can only increase your views, "hits", and more importantly gets actual government agents instead of robots to read your poems -- thus increasing your audience beyond the usual word nerds you typically get. Don't worry, the list doesn't contain the real words that can get you in trouble, such as:

Anonymous, Zombies, bath salts, animal rights activists, plant fertilizer, energy-1, Ivory Wave, false flag, Red Dove, Blue Silk, Zoom, Bloom, Chemtrails, Cloud Nine, Ocean Snow, Bluffdale, Ponzi, Lunar Wave, Bell Tower, Black Helicopter, DARPA, Captain Crunch, box cutters, Mariner Eccles, Middle Class Wealth Destruction, Kelantanese dinar, Vanilla Sky, Agenda 21, NATO 5, The Logan Act, White Lightning, 5-0, sleemoth, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Scarface, FEMA death camps, Hurricane Charlie, Bohemian Club, muppets, London Olympics 2012, Stellar Wind, sheeple, Jon Corzine, 1984, HAARP, SMERSH, domestic surveillance drones, gloog, alternative media, mr brownstone, MKUltra, Monsanto, Flame, LulzSec, tax resistance movement, reactor 2, Bilderberg, Mossad, Blackwater, Rfid Chips, Operation Sundevil, Stuxnet, Bank for International Settlements, Cayman Islands, Obama kill list, nuclear trigger, crop duster, Forex, open source, International Monetary Fund, Mormon Mafia, National Guard Geospatial Information Interoperability Exploitation Portable, pedophile rings, bongwater, Bill of Rights, banksters, fiat currency, gunch, kaopectate, freedom

To get you started, here are fifteen words and terms from the list, all of them guaranteed to get the attention of the Federal Government. Use them as prompts to insert into your next poem:

• Ice 
• Exercise 
• Erosion 
• Cloud 
• Dock 
• Pork 
• Smart 
• Social media 
• Wave 
• Prevention 
• Snow 
• Aid 
• Watch 
• Power 
• San Diego 

Isn't that cool? If you want to learn more about the policy, including a complete list of monitored words, go here (and here for the official sanitized version). Meanwhile, let's start the joint rolling with a randomized poem composed exclusively of proscribed words on the list. As always, if something bad happens to me, it's not an accident or suicide. So, what do you say, can we create a task force (oops) of poets to trigger an avalanche (oops), flood (oops), wildfire (oops), earthquake (oops) and go viral (oops)? I think we can!


artistic assassins 
nuclear heroin
el paso PLO
eco tuberculosis
golfo car bomb
cancelled snow
enriched cocaine contamination facility 
radioactive center for disease control 
hazmat exercise gang
subway body scanner 
weapons grade tornado
amtrak pakistan
tucson taliban
world assassination barrio
trojan outage
tamiflu drug war
phishing scammers border patrol 
secret fusion first responder 
suspicious mexican agriculture bureau
nigeria department of homeland security
alcohol shots integration team
emergency infection forces 
conventional suspicious attack 
dirty management key
yemen tobacco fund
san diego separatists
denial recruitment agency
hezbollah republicans
usss los yuma 
nuevo-arabian IRA 
dea standoff center 
brown mutation bureau 
chemical resistant hurricane 
dedicated terror marshal
listeria car service
taliban-grade liberation agency 
nogales infection squad
conventional wildfire bureau
china nerve authority 
suspicious twister initiative lab
emergency pork defense team
social media epidemic control
smart looting authority
jihad enforcement office
e coli assistance bureau
human health disruption team 
emergency smugglers service 
security derivatives virus
suspicious airport scanner command
nuclear tsunami service 
anthrax operations
cancelled vaccine gas 
biosurveillance contamination assistance 
media enriched malware enforcement
law of computer infrastructure smuggling
revolutionary zetas 
hamas citizenship and drug trafficking fund 
suspicious red cross recruitment injection 
secret islamic nuclear failure control
collapse management 
outbreak enforcement
power outage snow


"The ACLU reports that, every day, the NSA intercepts and stores around 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, text and other electronic communications thanks to laws like FISA. To put it into perspective, they add, 'that’s equivalent to 138 million books, every 24 hours.'"- from Refreshing News

The Lure of Modernity

Apollo with a mouse click
 vanquishes the Titans,
Dionysus justifies an online poker habit
                                                                          by shrugging she is Greek,
While Zeus and Hera try again
                                                  with Kleenexes and Chiron’s notebook,
And Kronus, longevity-obsessed, has spent his savings
      on Chinese herbs and oils.
Prometheus is bound to the terms of his contract
but still he takes lunches with headhunters
Expensing his network because you can’t, you know,
put a value on nostalgia.
Hercules bleeds for the poor,
                                                    sacrificed like cattle, with less ritual;
The root of it all is his father of course, brutal and capricious,
the blood in his shoes not his heart.
He’s working on this, slowly, as is Hephaestus
learning to forgive himself
For falling in love with a shade,
  the oldest crime in the new book.
Athena has a website on owls
                       that keeps her from eviscerating Timmay and the Bernank;
She learned all she knows from The Simpsons;
her vengeance would know no boundaries.

Incestuous they meet to dispute
  at the Olympian Tap and Chat Room.
There is no Truth
  so they don’t have to tell it
But there’s one thing on which they agree:
  All people are stupid,
To be victims of Gods ...
                                            but it’s mirrors and straws that they grasp,
All that they know
                                  about humans
Are symbols:
Everyone’s life is a story,
Every event's a report,
all feelings come out in a song;
They’re lost in the scrivener’s art
duly noted in the minutes of Hermes.

They loosen their bra-straps, tug on their beards
                                                                         and cry, the thunder rolls
Like a spiderweb over the houses and cities.
                                                                  The humans look up with pity
Seeing their dream of the heavens
 displayed in the sky.
They make offerings of fire and spirits
 in their backyards praying
Before the sun comes again
               like something they never have seen.

White Paper with Tracked Changes

On the bourse where poems are traded
One must always maintain a hedge,
Some contrarian opinion to mold plain-speaking into nonsense
And turn gibberish to perfect sense—
The empty room must be jimmied open, light let in.
There’s nothing intrinsic here, just because
The prices multiply like corn or sorghum
—The value is the debt that’s taken on:
The obsequious doff of a cap as comment;
The memory recalled of paneled rooms in fall where words were
Cotton candy, pink and sticky and opiative sweet;
The gift of a gloss like a kiss or a candle on a long drafty night.
All these things become like postcards from your own home town,
They all have measured weights in precious metal backing them
And are saved up like Andorran stamps, to be redeemed.
Consciousness demands an equal and opposite consciousness
But performance is for the shareholder,
There’s no product, or customer, or even worker any more.
It’s pay to play, whether you rely on the fly-by-night offset
lithographer to the right
Or if you manage to whisper in the ears of the big boys and their
infinite debt
Portioned out equally like God’s mustard seeds to every student
But unlike God with an agenda to narcissize and abusivate
As they themselves were narcissed and abusized
All the way up that wobbly ladder to be downsized.
You have to hear them workshop talk and theorize
With their latest autographed autobiography ensconced in your wrist
Before you can ask them, in the softest tones,
How does one go about ... getting published?
Or maybe the trade takes place after hours,
In some dim coffee-kvetching club,
Where everyone shouts their POV
To gain the attention of the fabled silent hipster in the back
With his lavender Corvette and organic cigarettes
Who would in theory give up his pretense of a life
To follow you around, buy you a Skyy, admire your every
Breathing sound as an exhalation of the Great.
It’s only business, there’s nothing personal here,
They thank you for sharing at the door
After they collect your fare
(Compensation, like freedom, is never free).

How blessed all this is, though, to be nothing,
Unlike these ivy buildings or those instruments of chrome
That appear to hold a value, someone giving what they own for them
of worth,
For they too fall to nothing, bereft in every bubble-busted town
From Portland to North Platte to Off-White Plains…
It’s now a trading floor for children, where laughter earns a sourball
Or a drawering a gold star; they were born underwater
But still their infinite value is allowed
To ask for more, to make everyone laugh at how stupid you are,
To brag that their rhymes are doper than Dr. Seuss,
To make mistake after mistake with innocent insouciance,
Ask for some common coin in return.

And whatever we ask for drops, mysteriously
Without us ever really knowing it.

Paying the Universe Back

A meditation on this

No rumble. No wind. No ripples.
Now it is official:
The circle is only as wide
As my antenna.

Still I have this trouble
Conceiving it as greater—
Watching a baby's smile
Over fame that changes the world.

What recognition of myself
Is not more needed by the one?
What other gift is not a gift
Returned?

What else can we give
Except our stillness?
How else can we prove
That we are real?

Stevens Textplication 18: Depression Before Spring

Poems tend to be inappropriate venues for lover’s quarrels. The surface is too transparent, the levels underneath are too obscure. “Depression Before Spring” from 1918 broaches this topic with lightness and joviality, but still it captures the sadness of separate worlds. Here is the poem:

The cock crows
But no queen rises.

The hair of my blonde
Is dazzling,
As the spittle of cows
Threading the wind.

Ho! Ho!

But ki-ki-ri-ki
Brings no rou-cou,
No rou-cou-cou.

But no queen comes
In slipper green.

In Pennsylvania, where Stevens came from, they say there are four seasons:

• Winter,
• Still Winter,
• Hunting, and
• Construction.

Something of this sense comes through here, the frustration at the lack of doves and the fringe “slippers” of short green grass that signal spring. The roosters are calling but the spring, personified as a female queen, refuses to cooperate.

That level of meaning – appropriately poetic – works very nicely with the more explicit meaning between the speaker and the unnamed blonde "queen." The first stanza sets the tone with cock –prototypical male – aroused but failing to arouse the queen – prototypical female. This is a familiar early morning event in most bedrooms, with the ironic implication that upon the rooster’s announcement of morning one should “rise and (see next stanza) shine.” At a further layer, the cock is doing the speaking (“crow”), in an aggressive way, but the queen does not “rise” to the bait, or challenge.

The second stanza seems to affect an abrupt shift, a random and strange comparison between blond hair and cow spit. If one views this as a continuation of the previous stanza, however, it makes sense: the woman still asleep in the bed with the sunlight bearing down on her hair appears unpleasant, or at least the man who is trying to rouse her would offer such a comparison to get her “goat.”

The third stanza, “Ho! Ho!” thus becomes a triumphant gotcha interjection, the perfect metaphor of gamesmanship.

But, alas, this doesn’t do any good either. The sound of one (ki-ki-ri-ki) brings no response (rou-cou) from the other. A friend from Slovenia once asked me what roosters sound like in English. I replied, sheepishly, “cock-a-doodle doo.” He said “you know what they sound like in Slovenia? Ri-ki-ri-ki-ri-ki!” and he proceeded to laugh uncontrollably. I think what Stevens is getting at here is a better mimicking of what a rooster actually sounds like than what English customarily permits. The “rou-cou” similarly, is the sound a mourning dove makes, which enlongates into three syllables to mimic rococo, a playful but ornate Late Baroque style of art that (according to Wikipedia) “made strong usage of creamy, pastel-like colours, asymmetrical designs, curves and gold.” This is a nice trick: the supposed sadness of the dove merging into a luscious and awesome beauty, all of it suggesting that, for whatever reason, the female will not come out to play, depriving the speaker of her beauty and sadness. For all the pain of arguing, the alternative to the back and forth is silence. This strutting cock has met his match.

The concluding stanza ends with no queen, no “slipper green.” There are nuances of a rebirth, awakening, even the creation of life deferred, hence the depression. There’s also a touch of Cinderella and her slipper; the prince has been chasing an imaginary thing, and must confront the real. As Stevens wrote: “"Perhaps, it is best, too, that one should have only glimpses of reality - and get the rest from the fairy-tales, from pictures, and music, and books"* The queen is more there for being absent.

* quoted from George Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poets Growth, p. 64.

Lyric: Last Diner

Another episode in the series

Down the mountain in late May / grass as high as a cat
Factories from the fifties / trees grown out of their stacks
There were jokes in the nightclubs / where these old trailers stand
Now the pines in the forest / give the cues to the band
Up ahead there’s a restaurant / smoked eel on the grill
A blue plate in the heyday / they still eat in here still
But they don’t talk to strangers / they just stare into space
Ancient songs on the jukebox / I saw some horses race

This is the last diner ‘til the border
It’s the last best hope / for the highest slope
Mark up your map and push it to the floor where
Every meal is free / with the scenery

In the neighboring county / they caught a lucky roll
Signed the tribe to a contract / opened up a casino
Here they just play their numbers / it’s a numbers game
And the cookie says zero / all that’s left is the name
They all looked at me closely / from a terrible woe
As if I was some producer / for a reality show
But they soon knew I only / came to screw with them too
A coke came not a malted / I can’t tell anyone what to do

This is the last diner ‘til the border
It’s the last best hope / for the interlope
Make the new old and shake off the road torpor
Every meal is free / on the company

People eating garbage / cleaning off their plate
People only smiling / at the worse off with hate
I don’t know how to help them / I am one of them too
I broke every rule to get my share / and now there’s nothing I can do
I paid in cash and I walked out / to a beautiful haze
Wanted only to get back / to my old familiar maze
Where they still have the horses / for the harness race
Thought they ran in heaven / not this broken place

This is the last diner ‘til the border
It’s the last best hope / it’s the dopest dope
Ring up your prayers and find them made to order
Every meal is free / for eternity

Here's last week's lyric done up as a song (thanks for the help, Robert)

World of Limes

Near Trout Town USA

Roscoe, New York

The kind of brook
that makes you feel
the moving world
beneath your feet

The kind of brook
that turns to phosphorescent blue

The kind of brook
you are the tree
that reaches over
fingers dipping in quicksilver

The kind of brook
to lose and reveal
its skin and soul
continuously

The kind of brook
where branches hang
but don't touch down

The kind of brook
that when you acknowledge
its presence
welcomes your own

The kind of brook
whose oak trees heal the mind
whose cool sand banks
hold massive grappling skirts
of airborne pine

The kind of brook
whose islands of wet grass
shine a million miles away

The kind of brook
where squealing birds and slurping banks
and snarling currents sound
like total silence

The kind of brook
that overlooks white-coated rocks
moss blossoming in cracks
rhododendron behind which
words need not exist

The kind of brook
whose calligraphy of limbs
along the green shore
decode the truth our rigid
rapids never catch

The kind of brook
that turns you into stillness
makes you long to be of service
waiting on words

North of Suffren

I. Graduation Feathers
They were waiting for me,
the Catskills,
with greetings of cattails
and wild mountain flowers,
the most complete
harmony of trees
prepared for my arrival.
"Sell your ephemera"
the peeling billboard said
as cottonwood down floated
along the road to Damascus
amid the emerald and evergreen
of irridescent valleys,
molten lavender hillsides,
slippery cliffs,
rough-as-cloudwool peaks.
The families of prominence
each are taking turns
in mottled sunshine
for my view.

II. Framed by Goldenrod
Fishermen like flies
inside the river fishing

III. Beyond Hungry Hollow
The pink barns of apple country,
Eskew's Mulches,
Kellystone and Jellystone Parks,
Old Brutus Historical Society,
You know you're in the country
When you see that 7Up sign.

Last Night

A North Korean microvirologist
and an East German software security specialist
were drinking barley wine in a Northern Ireland bar
in Rochester New York
arguing whether white hots
should go on a garbageplate.
Do you see how crazy my life is?

Meanwhile in the Material World

May is the month in Phoenician Britain
When they worship Nimrod,
The Baal of Beltane,
With bagpipes from Morocco,
The original serpent king
With his hybrid test tube babies
And his two-faced forked tongue
That all our Gods came from,
On a throne of horns with his virgin bride
Who wanted just to kill him,
Mammi at his side,
Known as Isis, Ishtar, Astarte, Athena, Diana, Mary,
“the one face hidden by the many masks,”

Like the Hebrew initiates of the Egyptian mystery school
Who were turned by Babylon’s dragons into Jews
To transmute Zion’s sun and Moses’ muse
And told to follow rules like wishing harm on all the Gentiles
By high priests in psilocybin mushroom hats;
Or Jesus, whose real name was Arrius Piso,
The murderer of Nero,
Who made believe that he was Horus
While the Essenes washed their hands
And the Nazarenes joined the Zealots,
Wrote a brand new book for rebel Jews
That instead remade the moldy Empire Holy,
With new terms of surrender
And a cannibalistic eucharist.

In Manhattan’s pentagrams of darkness
Draculas with dragon wings drift through magick black,
The stones that healed in ancient time now sexualized to shame,
Mage mascara makes Egyptian eyes
On hierophant hermaphrodites
Who walk below the gold of pharaoh tombs,
Its columns, discs and obelisks
As if the slaves once trapped there
Are no more, as if the scientists of sound
Who imagined Saint Patrick’s Cathedral,
Where Jehovah and Lucifer are the same being,
The one unquestioned good in a hell of endless threat,
Have not evolved to deeper sine waves
In vocoder voices synthesized
To synthetic primal rhythm.
There’s fear as far
As the mind can perceive, the rows of empty storefronts
Are filled with things none can afford,
But they drive their broken hearts to gain their share
Of what is visible, material, because they’ll never be
One of the invisible, the royal reptiles
Who need blood, not flashy and disposable jewels.
The gargoyles watch with wings perched
On every public building that reminds us to obey.
In the caves new Mohammeds take dictation
To keep those taking power from the saved.
Above them all the black Moloch cathedrals,
The stone temples of pyramid money
That vie with passing serpents in the sky.

Every good girl must get raped sometime,
Every boy must be arrested with his pants pulled down,
Every vodka must be top-shelf for the chemistry to gel.
Last call for oblivion, for the soul too willingly bartered
For a kind look or the right word, or an edge when
Chasing pussy down the catacombs of sin.
“Are you responsible?
“Mistakes are always made.”
“Are you reliable?”
“We people have our failings.”
“Are you professional?”
“Or do you take things personal?”
“Are you worthy of my trust?”
“You begging child who was born worthless.”
She finds the moment to unleash
Her reticent resistance.
He takes the opportunity
To squeeze between her drink.
There are no words
For what he is,
And she could never say,
So the play the roles of heel and femme fatale
As the poison that they drink turns into words,
Turns into shame, and no ones sees the seven stars
That glow above her head, more radiant than
The crown of thorns adorning Lady Liberty.

He plays the one song of his life over and over
While mold grows on the hotel wall
And every person there wants to abduct him
And the only producers who can help him here
Are dealers, with white gloves and woolen aprons.
The life he lived was not worth living,
How the people thought the same and dreamed
Of nothing, but surviving
While the picturehouse played every possibility
In his head, in every home at ten o’clock
The giant blue-eyed screen
The live feed near from where he lives now:
The Masonic Temple of Druids with their wands of Hollywood
Performing the same trick
As the Wiccans, Freemasons, Mormons:
The rings and secret oaths, the beatings
And exhibited slaves, while in other rooms
They sacrifice some children for the adrenaline
At the moment of their death
And no Satan dogs from Sirius
Will ever detect the bodies under bodies
In their cemeteries, as dreamers come each day
To find the prize that they are missing,
The stardom and the love that has been stripped
Away already, and will never be returned.
The cities underground, to Lancaster and Reno,
Will make of them what everyone desires:
Programmed slaves who always win the best awards.

The obelisk and dome at zero Greenwich time
At Canary Wharf down 1206 from Isle of Dogs
Like Angkor Wat is pointed to the Halls of Draco.
It’s best that I should make my own copper astrolabe
From now on.
Still I have such sadness
For all the lizard people
Who see with eyes deranged
To patterns, colors without form,
Their paper skin no home for love or warmth,
Just the humorless business of
Setting traps for the stupid, the doubting, the lost
With a web that must stay spinning
And the planet spinning nearer to the central sun
That wakes us all up from the deepest sleep
To brush away the ways they tried
To save us from ourselves.
We needed all that sorrow
To be laughing, laughing now.

Something's Different

The trees have now turned blue
returned to their original color;
you're free to be who you are.

The sky is violet now
you see its higher frequency;
a larger field from which to capture dreams.

The water rises burgundy
from caverns in the soil;
your beauty now is fearless

You have to jump right in.

One Day in Haiku

“The aim of haiku is to live twenty four hours a day, that is, to put meaning into every moment, a meaning that may be intense or diffuse, but never ceases.” – R.H. Blythe

I’ve woken all week from this Hindu Professor
Lecturing me on invisible gaps in space
That hold everything together and keep us apart

The blue detergent from the dark cupboard corner
When released floods with pent-up sudsy life
I didn’t follow directions

Trees are the image
Opera the sound
I am the eyes and the ears

An old friend on the phone
“Splendid, that’s simply splendid”
After: “that poor, poor girl”

The sound of water
Swirling over mossy rocks
A camera clicks

“Did you get a good photo?”
“Do not concern yourself with my picture-taking
Go back to your red notepad.”

At the still pond
A leaf tries to get in the picture
A bullfrog tries to get in the poem

Crackling leaves
As from raindrops falling
Above us golden branches, blue sky

Kodak moments
No camera
No more Kodak

Wind through the trees like a rushing stream
But there’s only the stone walls that are a way of life here
At the real stream dogs want to pee

Bouquets in thick black mud
Elephant ears, skunk cabbage, tall yellow iris,
A powder-blue dragonfly with four giant wings

Our quiet walk
Disturbed by a sudden, simultaneous “ah”
Dirt and rock above our heads from an overturned tree

A tree and a rock in the same spot
Have been fighting it out for years
The tree with its chokehold seems to be winning

Poorhouse Brook
Down Frogtown Road
In water turned to filthy-rich wine New Canaan

At the top of the hill beyond the desolate forest
Brand-new mansions all in antique taupe
Every one is deserted, For Sale by Broker

Flags and balloons surround the deli
The doors are flung open wide
The proprietor says hi and smiles, but no food

An actual green yellow red
Traffic light stands in someone’s front yard
I wonder if they turn it on at Christmas

The music is too furious
We wait it out in the driveway
"Cello Concerto" by Camille Saint-Saëns

Pulling roots, dragging water, digging holes, planting flowers
Exhausted afterwards
Like after a fuck

Reading, reading, poetry everywhere
But to catch it I must walk a million miles
Hey that’s me up ahead, reading

The house is now still
Despite the churning of my brain
My clothes spin in the washing machine

A call: they’re drinking urine in LA now
I fear it may now be too late for my idea
Trapped Amazonian Oxygen in canisters

Tony comes to fix the fence
Asks me about the future of the Euro
Says he misses Michelangelo’s face on the Lire

“Times were better when they were worse,
You know, that’s what they say in Sicily
But to them 100 years is in their back pocket.”

Tiny turds in our house we follow as breadcrumbs
To a chipmunk hanging from the window shade
That explains all the funny business in this house

It takes a broom, quick
Reflexes and a village
To coax a chipmunk outdoors

She remembers every number on her old address
In Delaware Ohio
But doesn’t know if Harding or Hayes was born there

Away from his people, Steven Tyler confides to Oprah:
"I'm alone here, I'm all alone!
Will you be my friend?"

I try to get the skinny on this eclipse
A rare alignment of earth, sun, moon and Alcyone
The Great Central Sun – meaning I’m on my own

Mad Men replays my worst scenes from childhood
I can never get enough , squealing with glee
It’s always the highlight of the week

I put more care in preparing for sleep
Than anything else that I do all day
It must be the most important thing

A thin bright light frames the closed door
Like the eclipse – as above, so below
As on the outside, so within

Lyric: World of Limes

In a series. I'll post the song that goes with this as soon as it's finished.

My nightmare was a dream just yesterday
You the line-up pin-up girl
The one who everybody said was guilty
The one for me
You did not kill me then
You just danced across my moves
Said it won’t touch you as if you knew
In the sewer you looked too far
Down the rabbit hole at stars
There’s no need
For the day
Evening queen
Hide away

Wishin’ we were going the right wrong way
In a car
Sirens call then I hear that shot
Wonder where you are

I lost you in a project lounge and grill
Found you at the pay phone bell
The places in between they said they saw you there
I knew they were never near the truth
Everything was make-believe
Like every time you said you’d leave
It’s still so real our world of limes
Down the darkened shades of time
There’s no need
For the day
Evening woman
Slip away

Wishin’ we were going the right wrong way
In a car
Sirens call then I hear that shot
Wonder where you are

You were
Meaner than the world
Better than my word
Crueler than my love
Kinder than the way you let me fall
Through the evening’s shawl

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

Tonight's poem is by Marguerite Young (1908-1995), a descendant of Brigham Young who in her incredibly poetic novels, poetry and non-fiction always seemed obsessed with how doggedly humans pursue utopian ideals. As she said, "All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side."

My friend John Latta posted a wonderful poem of hers from 1944 called The Cloud that I liked so much I decided to read it ... out loud.

Text Message with Implications

The most powerful drop of water in the ocean
fell off the President's brow
while he's waxing his wood in the Oval Bowl
and thinking of secrets
that hang in the air like miasmas;
what was stuffed in his grandmother's dresser drawer
too tightly. Striken by humidity
a young boy wonders who he is,
finds out in a sudden burst of dust
and never again wants to know,
running, forever running
to some annihilating shore.

Goodbye Donna

Don't let Neal Bogart rip you off again in heaven!