In Lancaster, California

It's more ornate than I remember,
obelisks and thrones the way some towns
flash royal orthodox cathedrals.

Away from the madness of London
its pristine deserted grandeur
asked too many painful questions.

And then I saw some people, distant names
but soon remembered from my time there
as the members of my universal family.

But they were as changed as the towers
stayed the same, sheepish they were still
amongst this cult that seemed invisible.

The only thing I thought or felt was the question
I had to ask, that could not be formed:
"where is she"?

For I knew the answer in the books placed where I left them,
that all of this was what I had created,
out of nothing was now stone.

The Stoner Olympics

With Michael Phelps putting Baltimore bong hits on the map and Jamaica dominating something other than bobsledding, it's high time we lit the torch for the Stoner Olympics, as a high-minded alternative for the athletes who, to be blunt, are excluded from the Jock Olympics. Call it the Swag Olympiad, keeping it real by featuring those games of prowess and endurance favored by the organic peoples of this earth. Here are some of the events:

Laser Tag
Hacky Sack
Hill-Rolling
Whiffle Ball
Boogie Boarding
Donut Eating
Surfing (Body and Channel)
Skateboard (Office Park, Pool, Downhill, Off-Road)
Golf (Miniature and Disc)
Chicken Fighting
Quarry Diving
PBR Beer Pong
Planking
Dominoes (Pizza Delivering)
Synchronized Liquid Motion Toys
Jumping off Roofs
Cannonball Splashing
Call-Your-Own-Foul Streetball
Guitar Hero
Innertube Floating
Swing Jumping
Competitive Firecrackers
Drum Circle Spin Dancing
Larping
Neon Bowling
Popping Wheelies
Underwater Breath Holding
Yoo Hoo Chug'a'Lug
Velcro Tennis
Tetherball
Hammock Rodeo
Water Balloon Dodgeball
Parkour/Freerunning
Construction Site Vandalism
Competitive Tagging
Ultimate Frisbee
Foosball
Cheese Curl Marathon
Suicide Shopping Cart Slalom
Free-Style Paintball
Pool

Stevens Textplication #22: Nuances on a Theme by Williams

“Nuances of a Theme by Williams” from 1918 is an odd poem in an odd canon: a collaboration of sorts between two giants of 20th century American Modernism, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. The Paterson pediatrician and Hartford surety-bond attorney were friends (at least as much as two inwardly turned writers can be), having found a common interest in the emerging European art of Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Duchamp, etc. at the 1913 Armory Show, and subsequently in the salon of Walter Kreymborg, who published Others: A Magazine of New Verse, the most experimental of the many little magazines that were the advance guard of literary modernism during the war years.

Williams and Stevens continued a warm correspondence for nearly 40 years, including a strange introduction by Stevens to Williams’ Collected Poems, done as a favor to help Williams get it published. Letters are never a fair representation of a friendship, and the surviving ones between these two are no exception, with little to show except occasional curt statements like Stevens informing Williams that he could not visit his house while he was in Hartford because Mrs. Stevens didn’t wish to entertain. Thus one can only guess at what they actually did together (Stevens the drinker, Williams the philanderer); the letter reproduced above (unbelievably typed by a female secretary) might provide some sense (hat tip to the ever-reliable John Latta for the image).

I imagine such “all-too-human” diversions took the place of what would probably be inharmonious discussions, as the two poets were equally strong-willed in their visions of what poetry should be, and the collision of ideals could have been a train wreck for the two prickly poets, Williams the connoisseur of things as they are, collector of beauty in motion, the master of the stop and go of American speech, the one who almost single-handedly turned our poetic meter from even to odd lines, the witness to the poor and dispossessed, etc. vs. Stevens the blank verse traditionalist, the poet of imagination and the sublime, the seeker after the invisible, the misperceived, the impossible.* Readers tend to overstate such differences, of course, because it’s easy to overlook the human commonality of two hyper-sensitive poets of the same time and place seeking in their own way a common pursuit of truth and beauty.**

It’s easy in fact to see a strong commonality of approach in “Nuances,” which would be expected between two friends. It opens with a complete Williams poem, “El Hombre” from Al Que Quiere (1917), as the first four italicized lines, and expands their metaphor of the evening star in Stevensian fashion. Here’s the poem:

It's a strange courage
You give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part!

I
Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze
that reflects neither my face nor any inner part
of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

II
Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses
you in its own light.
Be not chimera of morning,
Half-man, half-star.
Be not an intelligence,
Like a widow's bird
Or an old horse.

Williams' italicized "introduction" is an uneasy mixture; the first lines of the two couplets have the syncopated rhythms Williams became famous for, and the second lines are rhyming (or near-rhyming) iambic. The effect is almost like a spontaneous utterance ("it's a strange courage...") followed by a formal Greek chorus ("you give me ancient star"...), as if the self and world are already fragmented at the outset of the perception. The picture is vivid: an isolated evening star staying fixed while the colors of the sunset go through their sequence. Why this gives "strange courage" is the apparent independence and imperturbability of the small thing against the large moving machine of earth. One thinks of the poet, or any tiny thing, as a pole star, unruffled by the fashions and thoughts changing all around, and to the poignant beauty humans find in the light dimming into darkness. The star light may be dim, but it is constant and reassuring for having its integrity intact.

Stevens takes this sense and runs with it. His stanza I continues with a plea to the star itself to "shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze," thereby adding detail, or nuance, directly to Williams' perception, and to further elaborate on the existing image, clarifies that this star "reflects neither face nor any inner part of my being." The star is not only separate from the earth, but explicitly from human affairs, specifically those of the speaker of the poem. With this, the romantic identification of Williams' speaker with the star is broken, for there must be no relation between the two of them. "Shine like fire, that mirrors nothing" becomes an alternative beauty, one that is satisfying not in its familiarity to human longing but in its remoteness. It is the alien beauty that cannot speak of this world.

Stanza II shifts from the long pentameter and hexameters one is accustomed to with Stevens to shorter Williamsesque lines. The images also become more like those Williams customarily used ("a widow's bird," "an old horse"). The sense of the stanza is a plea for the star to resist all the temptations of humanity in order to stay whole. It could only, so the argument goes, be "half-man, half-star," a "chimera" (illusion). The speaker gives an example that matches Williams in concrete clarity: the star would at best pick up only parts of the mind of man, as a bird substituted for a husband picks up some words of the widow, or a horse picks up along the way some sense of what it feels like to be human.

The sum total of Stevens' lines amplify Williams' honoring of the separate star to clarify that it shouldn't even pay attention to the human onlooker (stanza I) or humanity at all (stanza II) in order to maintain its autonomy. It seems at first like a small and strange elaboration on a fully-formed poem by someone else, until one remembers the distinctions between Stevens and Williams in outlook. Williams recognizes in the star an emblem of the lost, something broken off from human compassion and love. That it still shines despite being utterly alone is a cause for courage, along the almost explicitly political lines of the power of the individual. Williams poems often turn between the pathos of an observed scene (often in poor environments) and the larger political questions of honesty and integrity.

Stevens who we all know will have none of that, asks more basic questions, like how do you know what you are seeing is not yourself, or at least an idealization you've created? The resistance he advises is not by the star but to the star, for once it is called to our attention we inevitably look, admire, and slowly it becomes a part of ourselves ("humanity suffuses you in its own light"). He does not want the star to be our "pet", which is what he jocularly implies Williams has done with it.

The solitude and distance of the star is far greater than even Williams imagines, as Stevens' clarifies in his poignant longing not to feel what he is feeling as he appropriates whatever reality the star possesses. This shows how effective the poem is as a collaboration - one of the more effective poetic collaborations of the modern era.


* For an interesting discussion (including my own views) on Williams (including vis a vis Stevens) see Jordan Davis’ reviews here, here and here.
** Stevens’ relationships with other writers were not quite so cordial. He was punched by Ernest Hemingway and engaged in a long-term seething match with Robert Frost, who accused him of writing “bric-a-brac poems.”

Reality's a Bitch

I sway at the train station
like a magnificent weed
waiting
for the sun to return to a cloud
—the thought that keeps the sun beating.

The Curse of Hermes

Words are free
No ranchero can corral them
They must bristle through every cell
In a galactic honeycomb,
The bees whose limbs distill them
Single-minded on their queen.

Where the Boundary Between Acting and Perceiving Ends

Bartlett Arboretum

The forest yields a xylophone,
a Potter's Field,
Hasidim with their long white beards.
I talk to the birds with the mallets,
place a stone on the stone,
say "good day" to a fellow human.
There's only joy and peace and laughing.
The elves need me as much as I need them.

Blaine's Conclusion

Storms over Indiana —
The last flight into Arkansas —
Let go of what you've heard
So there's new space.

Red Mushrooms Along the Path

The Satanists have no more clues
Than the Christians or the Mystics
Still our lives turn into stories
In which others find their God.

Dreaming of New Jerusalem

There's always a question
When the pondering's gone:
Do I have the guts to use my gut?
When I'm done
Blue sun.

In Lieu of Alcohol after a Week of Work

Thieving magpies of the full

    Monty moon,

Shrieks of “ego” through the golden trees

                Soiled to inky black,

The catbird’s open finally

                To the thought of compromise,

She gets the forest must be lit

                But insists it must stay dark.

The dove doesn’t have the heart to disagree

                Publically, for he’s afraid

Once he tastes the blood he won’t

    Stop until he’s drank it all.

The sparrow says all feather work goes through her

                As their self-appointed keeper

But she flies from every conflict,

                From the glare of minutiae.

The blue jay’s thoughts are sloppy

    As if they are his feelings

And his feelings are pure selfishness

                As if they are his thoughts.

The raven comes to realize, a semi-click too late

    That one of the challenges of being smart

Is knowing you have to surrender eventually

                To idiots.

The finch just whistles and looks pretty

                Says the secret to survival

Is losing every battle, to fluff up all the victors

                To be sacrificed in the war.

It’s a night where everything you do

                Reveals itself as useless

Done for the sole purpose

                Of pretending there’s consensus.

It’s the kind of night where the truth

                Reveals its hidden dangers,

Where everyone has their say, in an icy

                Professional way

So the end is guaranteed before the first cool vent of blood.

The Look of Sun Through Clouds

The past has become not only meaningless but boring,
All that is left is grief, of its endless heavy stirring;
To let something go when there's so much that I loved to replay,
Like feeling that pang for the destitute, as they fall away.

A birth that enters in grey - without a name, without a home
To go to, no memory of the way things should have been,
But still it goes forward in knowing...we follow, who don't know,
The ones who once thought we knew, through lessons repeated,
Traumas recounted - a bird that has faded away, now seen
In the youngest eyes, as clear as the widening sky.

Mind as a Playground for Faith

Isn't it great how we always assume the worst?
For example the thought of an unjust God,
as if we would be allowed
to kill each other so easily
if death were all there is.

From a Man's Perspective

It's loud with New York cicadas tonight
in a throb of raspy discontent
Could people ever be as articulate?
the seventeen veils of the tigress are stripped and

You misconstrue
my warmth for desire
And turn my desire to cool
negotiation

We manuever with all the rectitude of insects
but none of the precision
I feel at my ears the loaded gun
unaware that I am holding one

Stevens Textplication #21: The Apostrophe to Vincentine

“…quand, sur l'or glauque de lointaines
Verdures dédiant leur vigne à des fontaines,
Ondoie une blancheur animale au repos:
Et qu'au prélude lent où naissent les pipeaux
Ce vol de cygnes, non! de naïades se sauve
Ou plonge...“ – Stephan Mallarmé, from “L'après-midi d'un faune” (The Afternoon of a Faun)

“…when, on the icy gold of distant
Green dedicating its vines to fountains,
Undulates an animal whiteness at rest:
And as slow prelude in which pipes are born
This flight of swans, no! Naiads flee
Or plunge…"


“The Apostrophe to Vincentine” from 1918 uses roman numbering as its primary motif to convey the peculiarly Stevensian take on the relationship between self and world:

I.
I figured you as nude between
Monotonous earth and dark blue sky.
It made you seem so small and lean
And nameless,
Heavenly Vincentine.

II.
I saw you then, as warm as flesh,
Brunette,
But yet not too brunette,
As warm, as clean.
Your dress was green,
Was whited green,
Green Vincentine.

III.
Then you came walking,
In a group
Of human others,
Voluble.
Yes: you came walking,
Vincentine.
Yes: you came talking.

IV.
And what I knew you felt
Came then.
Monotonous earth I saw become
Illimitable sphere of you,
And that white animal, so lean,
Turned Vincentine,
And that white animal, so lean,
Turned heavenly, heavenly Vincentine.

The stanza labeled I deposits us right into a nether region where it’s clear that this undefined and ambiguous figure of Vincentine exists somewhere between flesh (“nude”) and spirit (“heavenly”). The most literal reading of the passage would be if the speaker imagined the angel as human it would diminish her, just as a male fantasy of a female makes the actual flesh and blood female seem “small” and impersonal (“nameless”).

As if to answer that unsatisfying attempt at imagining the figure, Vincentine leaps forth in stanza II “warm as flesh,” with a distinct brunette hair and a particular “whited green” dress. “As warm as flesh” is not quite flesh however, just as a dress is a covering not quite the actual person. One gets the sense of the sun bursting forth from the pre-dawn of stanza I to unveil the green of the earth.

In stanza III the personification becomes even more vivid, as the earth wakes up to show moving human shapes (“you came walking”) and the sound of human voices (“you came talking”). “Yes,” twice, to announce there is now an actual person, however that person is not specifically labeled as Vincentine. Also striking and perhaps related is the way this individual when finally seen is subsumed within human society. That sublimation cannot be an end for the speaker who seeks something more sublime.

The resolution in stanza IV comes down, in my view, to the first line: “and what I knew you felt.” The speaker, as he is imagining and visualizing the presence of the figure goes inside Vincentine so to speak to assume an internal as well as external knowledge, and with that everything becomes Vincentine. Not only does the “white animal” (a poetic description of a human, the “you” in the prior stanza?) become (“turned”) heavenly, but there is no separation – the flesh (“animal”) has become spirit (“illimitable”).

These stanzas taken as a progression show the operation of imagination, from a vague and insufficient view to a transcendence, much like the Old Testament God transforming a world void of form into a paradise on earth.

The poet has no identity, according to Keats, he/she automatically becomes the beings and things around, but (unvoiced by Keats) there is a poet’s identity in this, a separation, of wanting for it to be more, more complete, more intense, more connected. It is this urge that for Stevens (expanding on Keats) drives the imagination. The wonder of it is that the Earth (at least for this poem) responds enough for the imagination to hold onto its primacy.

Rooting for a sports team is exciting until your team loses; falling in love is stupendous until you can’t agree on what to do together. Then the earth becomes “monotonous” and imagination takes over to create a more desired outcome, thus turning what would end in human bitterness into something transforming, revealing of something larger, a gateway to the unutterable. In the loneliness of imagination is found a prophecy.

Arcady

As if I was writing 100 years ago...

Singing past the cemetery
flowers in their curls
go the Grenstone girls
Clover leaves and starry grasses
grown tender in the dew
There’s plenty of good lads under clay
that’s the way to keep them
young and clean and good
Happier than mere living could
and they the hapless brides…
By prophets of wandering – telephone poles –
shrines of the lighted sky
The girls play with moonbeams, laugh like a child
how full are their eyes with starlight
As they lengthen out his lodging in the dust
when she waits, he listens
when she breathes, he sleeps.

“I’ll see you off to go sailing away —
On the herring-infested sea
Out where the gulls
are at play—

“Arcady is where you are from, and where
we both shall return someday.

“Soon you will come sailing back
Over the sea
Back again home
to me.

“Your mother says you are from Arcady,
the place that we’ll both love to be.”

Song: Cathedral Street

With the second set of riots tonight in Anaheim (not covered) and the Joker's hair still green (not orange), this seems as appropriate a time as any to post the song version of this, a bit of autobiography:



Tupac twirled his toothpick with a frown
“The only thing that matters now
In this godforsaken desert town
Is how to drive these plow mules to oblivion.”

Tupac with his hologram
Blessed the emerald valley
From Coachella all the way to Indio
And he went back to his friends in barren stone.

It was on Cathedral Street
When he dared to question Socrates
In a masked crusaders holy cape
At the May Day Communist parade
Where girls with polka-dot skirts hypnotized
And the revolution wasn’t televised.

Tupac with his girls at Fascist Island
The sands of lunch got in his time
He serves soft-serve koans to blue smurf kids
Reads Blue Cliff Notes on tilt-a-whirling gigs

It was on Cathedral Street
When he dared to question Socrates
As the May Day Communist parade
Left flowers on top of the Indian grave
And the Gang of Four played tunes for bouffant brides
And the revolution wasn’t televised.

Tupac, with everyone in pain
We stood there in silence
Waited ‘til you finally passed away
To save a world not ready to be saved

It was on Cathedral Street
When he dared to question Socrates
In a masked crusaders holy cape
At the May Day Communist parade
The girls in polka-dot skirts hypnotized
And the revolution wasn’t televised.

Meanwhile in Sports News...

After a nittany of complaints, they conducted an internal pen-state-citation, full of righteous pen-state-nation, as homogenized and paternoized as cheese. But in the state pen, Paterno familias was well culp-pen-stated for turning pen-state’s evidence and the penn-i-tence for com-penn-state-utory rape was three in nomino paterno et filii et spiritus sanduskus'es, a Paternohouse stake, some Paternobello mushrooms, some paternio furniture, and no more playing of paternotudes like “Sacre de Paternotemps” by Igor Sandinsky at home games. In Happy Valley this was deemed too very sterndusky of a pennishment, too paternoid, there was not enough pennestation to de-penn-state all these statues, but most saw a patterno in these paternoty suits, a suspicious paternolineal paternomonial paternoarchically paternocidal and paternogenic paternophilia from paternos in crime. They wanted them paterno’ed down. Are there no paternohouses no prisons? they cried. Is paternoism the last refuge of the paternoist?

Haiku

Grass flies green
Sun gold tail
Swat!

Box in the Medicine Cabinet After 20 Years

I slipped out of your life like a snake
on a tree trunk that effervesces slowly
as everything else in the forest a dance
of eat and be eaten, live from what's died.

The courtyard apartment, with the blue carpet,
the wedding plates hung on the wall,
our turtle named Goethe, plank floors in the hall—
someone else's death is inside of it now

but still there's a part of me there
away from the shame and regret of the flesh
inside the heart of it all
looking out calm at forgotten hillsides.

For Hart Crane

Their hearts are as gifts—the already broken—
aspic and strychnine, tears of the muse
sponged from the soaking—words can't be spoken—
everything good on this earth has no use.

It's only in words that are lifted away
—some rarefied bend of the spoon—
where lunatic voyagers burn in their play
of vapor that yearns off the moon.

Some residue must—that's all we've got—
be left—when our wisdom has fallen apart
—some fact of our essence—distilled to knot
our surrender in peace to the dark.

Such words—will never find meaning in what
betrayed as the end left us ruined—
our dreams became then the loneliest cut
—the music will tend to the wound.


Harold Hart Crane, born this day in 1899, was the stuff of legend for not only his doomed romantic poet life (i.e. jumping off a cruise ship to his death at age 32) but for his sublime verse, as he was the only American poet I know of who extended Eliot's early lyricism into something more sustained and sustaining. Seen as a lightweight in his day, we are only now starting to understand the richness, ambition and depth of his vision. His life was a chaotic swirl of family dysfunction, self-loathing homosexuality and alienating alcoholism held together by the idealism of his poetry, which another, more enlightened age might have preferred to the grim materialism of Pound and Eliot.

What can I say other than he is one of my favorite poets period. Read if you like White Buildings or The Bridge, or the book on his life, The Broken Tower (cleverly turned into an autobiography of James Franco when made into a film last year). Here are a few of Crane's uncollected poems, to give a sample of the quality of work he threw away:


The Visible, The Untrue

Yes, I being
the terrible puppet of my dreams, shall
lavish this on you—
the dense mine of the orchid, split in two.
And your fingernails with all their zest for doom?

I'm wearing badges
that cancel all your kindness. I watch the silver
Zeppelin devastate the sky. To stir your confidence?
To rouse what sanctions?

The silver strophe… the canto
bright with myth… Such
distances leap landward from innocence dissolute—
she hazards jets; wears tiger-lilies, bolts herself
within a jeweled belt.

Surely she has felt the distance
again expand voiceless between us,
as an uncoiled shell, postures that seem too much impromptu…

The shiver of a moth’s descent, the moon
in a mad orange flare
floods the grape-hung night. She
has become a pathos—waif of the tides.

The window weight throbs in its blind
partition. To extinguish what I have of faith.
Yes, light. And it is always
always, always the eternal rainbow.
And it is always the day, the farewell day unkind.


The Hive

Up the chasm-walls of my bleeding heart
Humanity pecks, claws, sobs, and climbs;
Up the inside, and over every part
Of the hive of the world that is my heart.

And of all the sowing, and all the tear-tendering,
And reaping, have mercy and love issued forth.
Mercy, white milk, and honey, gold love—
And I watch, and say, “These the anguish are worth.”


A Persuasion

If she waits late at night
Hearing the wind,
It is to gather kindnesses
No world can offer.

She has drawn her hands away.
The wind plays andantes
Of lost hopes and regrets,—
And yet is kind.

Below the wind,
Waiting for morning
The hills lie curved and blent
As now her heart and mind.


And for something he most assuredly did not throw away, there's this:

New York Thunderstorm

I. An Image

The current flashes through black sky
Glint of eyes through glasses
Shadowy as sills inside Manhattan
Ink white teletype
Watermarks
What’s swollen

II. A Sound

Interjections
Hidden businessmen
Echo through the crowded train
Mad calculations only rich and damaged can pursue:
Connecticut taxes, revenues due, memories of itineraries,
Moving meetings to be “on the same page
In light of the numbers.”

They want to “tap into your experience on the agency side.”

Life Blown into Bubbles

People are never the way they are for me,
I always must add others in for color
To make of everyone someone perfected,
As complete as I dream myself to be

But am not. I can't live a day without
This fantasy, that our separate minds combine
To one idea, in one human form,
That we can be as much as we can see.

But the something more is never quite enough
No matter how real I can make it.
It always strikes some chord of truth, beyond
The clouds that I can see, no matter how

Imaginary I know it to be;
How dreams can make us one though we are not.

The Problem with Paradise

It's theoretically possible for a utopia
to be far enough away from human society
to sustain itself indefinitely,
but it will want to have some contact inevitably
for a utopia has nothing to teach
without insoluble problems.

Red Sunglasses

I was going to tell the world
to replace the word "babysitter"
with "nestwatcher", because it's time,
when I found a pair of darkroom red sunglasses
but the world didn't change,butterflies still made green vapor trails,
hydrangeas still held the blue one seeks after years of meditation,
crows still pretended to be black.
Only two things showed their uncorrupted hues:
the sky, now pink, and the morning glory, which turned
magnificent magenta, the heart of an objective god.

You will never see through these red sunglasses.

After Work

5 o’clock commuters freed to green throng across the cross-walk, like the flight of pigeons over a vent except the faces, seen outside the hive, purse their lips with weary eyes, suddenly lost as to where home is, each wearing a different dimly understood cross. Others wait vacantly in lines outside the Griffon and the Pickle Bar for "The Bodacker” or “The Beast” or for the misanthropic moralists who turn the gears of cabs or buses or postal trucks; they stand perfectly still like ghosts except for their thumbs, having given over their souls to the boxes in their hands.

On the street, shadowed by towers, everyone leans underneath to speak, one guy even kneels on the curb so he’ll be heard. An endless bark of questions into cellphones: “What’s the rate?”, “What’s the hold-up?”, “What needs to happen?”, “Where were you?”. Then, with the pragmatism that never saw a fact that wasn’t something else, the answer comes, another question: “Who knows?”, “Who knew?”, “Who’s counting?”, “Who cares?”. It seems this makes the city run, that if anyone actually knew anything the whole black Gotham carousel would seize up in its chains.

Meanwhile they’re not getting paid to wait at the train platform, sheen of interlocking wire below, and the man on the billboard, no matter how many times you catch his eyes, remains a dick. Islands form on the concrete, in darkness, shrugging untracked hillsides, framing mottled shores. They board with summer looseness for Stamford, the city of big-horn sheep, red, joyous, relentless, where they move with intent, like Flamenco Dancers, with self-absorbed kindness and gentle violence, knowing what is right and what is wrong but too determined to be satisfied with the world as it is, for they have no patience to learn to be insane.

Unsent Letter #20

Writing isn't giving love
but being loved.
Reading's not receiving love
but loving.
If what I write escapes you,
if you've turned your head away
when I respond with my soul to your soul, say,
how's that different from a prayer?
Who cares if it's unanswered, what object it should reach
when it's speaking to God directly?
I can read the thoughts of the dead, who's to say
what is heard?

Once Around the Tower of Babel

In Tudor City everyone’s a diplomat, with badges and plates to prove it. They’re insatiable in their untranslatable languages, wires to their ears, scribbling on note cards. I hear every language from Telugu to Pinghua to Adyghe (add-dig-za), untranslatable, but I know from tone of voice they are choppin it up like pimp skillets about some cold piece of work booghetto scrub getting all up in their drink-drank with their janky cabbage. I translate what it means into my own private language.

There’s the requisite obelisk, and above it a translation: “swords to plowshares … learn to war no more – Isaiah.” Below the obelisk, protests in every language, untranslatable, something about power corrupting absolutely.

The Consulates all look the same, like dark supper clubs for the old men who control the world, and the people who come out of them all have the ceremonial garb of Hollywood celebrities. One of them’s been boarded up – near 51st and 2nd there’s something resembling reality, a glitch in the matrix, with panhandlers and poison traps – then more New York rhododendrons and United Nations restaurants: Hofbrau’s and Blarney Stones, Mango Lassi stands, “balanced Thai to go,” Pushmina for sale. Passport joints are thick as hot dog booths around here. On Dag Hammarskjold Plaza the tourists take pictures of homeless people, thinking they are wearing native costumes.

Not Noah’s Ark but Noah’s Garden inside the Ford Foundation Building, Eden three atriums high, security guards with wires in their ears, in a bubble of untranslatable silence. Around them blah blah blah in every language, untranslatable. In “Bars and Books” a man writes notes, untranslatable, all I can read are the signs above: “Perpetuities” … “Fine Cigars”. I pass Pierre Loti Wine Bar – no one knows where Pierre Loti is, and when or if he will ever return.

The Solitude of Crowds

It’s considered impolite in New York City to look at myself on the streets. One must look askew, with deep focus an inch in front of the eyes. I suppose this is for our own protection, like the rule that says we can’t look upward at the ornate belltowers and inexplicable greenhouses and dark-windowed C-Suites along the ridgetops of the city. Such a view would break our stride and jar us from our positions, just like looking at my faces would cause unimaginable distress, for I take so many forms, show such multitudes of expressions: now worried, now angry, now mischievous, now bored, now smiling for no apparent reason.

And the expression changes depending on how I am looked at, something that never can be known! Such bright and impenetrable surfaces, yet they look so familiar and so real. It’s a continuous walking thorn of imperfection, still every face glows with the holiness of a pure soul no matter how distorted the manifestation, whether green-haired waif or gold-bezzeled queen, bearded bum sleeping with mouth wide-open or old man with invisible earpiece dictating terms of surrender with a smile.

Most upsetting of all, I want to be seen. And I want to look back. Such dangerous confrontations can only be done as if looking at the sun, indirectly. A glance is too much. Still I flirt with myself, feel ashamed and repulsed at the sight, lose myself in the liquid of my eyes. I see at last how small and how large the worries of the world are. These faces, like a desert mirage, are a dream that goes on forever, a mirror within a mirror within a mirror, for I need so many different ways to feel, so many uncanny things to think about, so many distinct and eccentric traits to make me feel separate and apart.

There’s nothing sadder than this city of myself, being lost in the loneliness of the crowd. I stop to do the one thing they allow you to do here: look in a storefront window. I see through the foreign reflected face as if there’s nothing there, for behind it is Ernest Hemingway's actual typewriter, and I am comforted that time at least does not exist.

Stevens Textplication 20: Earthy Anecdote

Imagine it’s 1923, and you’ve just picked up the first book by someone hailed in all the right literary salons as an emerging modernist poet, to be considered alongside Eliot’s existential men, Pound’s troubadour anti-heroes, and Yeats’ jaded dreamers. Among the techniques of the new poetry then developing in little magazines was strict attention to detail, use of exotic poetic forms, the rhythms of cities, machinery and daily speech, structures shaped by stream-of-consciousness and collage, linguistic play, allusive erudition, deep almost impenetrable thinking, the conviction that all was lost. Prepared for the strictest and most elegant practitioner of such effects, this is the very first poem you would confront from Wallace Stevens:

Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

You have to hand it to Stevens to start off his first book with such a poem. "Earthy Anecdote" has no people, no drama, no believable situation, no recognizable form, its main character is wholly imaginary but not explained in any way, almost every word in it is repeated multiple times. It is like a nursery rhyme without the rhyme, or better yet a cartoon, the primitive kind one would see on movie screens in 1923. It makes perfect sense in fact as a cartoon, you can just see that funny firecat bristling and the poor clattering herd of bucks go veering away.

And just in case you have the idea that this is one big metaphor, Stevens himself wrote, by way of explanation to the editor of the Modern School journal that first published the poem, “there’s no symbolism in the ‘Earthy Anecdote’ (L 204)" ... "I intended something quite concrete: actual animals” (L 209). Except that there’s no such animal as a firecat. And even the biggest predatory cats will quietly stalk a herd of deer, not bristle at them as if they are dogs. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine a clattering of bucks stopping for anything, much less swerving in multiple directions as puppets of an angry feline.

Still readers feel that it makes sense, recognizing the dynamism expressed in it of irresistible force working out some kind of agreement with immovable object, of a social compact between hunter and hunted, of something resembling the human desire to if not control, at least reroute reality through force of will (or as Ryan Wetterling puts it “the cycle of pursuit, evasion, and repose upon the edges of the mind”). Thus this strange firecat has been allegorized as a cougar, lightning, a prairie fire, the sun, God actual or imagined by the bucks, the imagination, the female, Stevens himself, an oil well, a red panda (called a firecat in China), the color yellow – every one of these as symbol has some literal flaw, not the least of which is the scene doesn’t make literal sense in the first place. But then there’s that cartoon logic, which makes perfect sense.

Also bear in mind here that the word "bristle" has three distinct connotations:

1. strong, free-flowing movement ("the crowd bristled")
2. irritated response ("she bristled at the suggestion")
3. a shiny appearance ('the stars bristled")

Stevens the dictionary man has clearly found (with La Gioconda smile) a way to combine all three senses in the personage of the firecat, which already carries within it suggestions of uncontainable force, star-like gleaming, an outsized feline sensitivity to its surroundings. One might offer correlary suggestions about "clattering" and bucks, the more masculine equivalent, suitable for work, romance and any competitive endeavors. But as sharply as they are represented the abstraction is such one cannot see these figures as more than shadows. It is a stand-off between reader and writer, much like the perpetual stand-off between the archetypal animals. The only way to resolve the conflict is to free the interpretations to pure subjectivity, something Stevens throughout his life seemed to encourage.

I for one see in the firecat something of the Sisyphean plight of the individual, seen from the air ("over Oklahoma") and repeated endlessly. It could take the form of the writer redirecting but not capturing reality with his bright eyes and muse-powered will, or the boss with the power to "fire" herding his young bucks off in the right direction but not getting them exactly to follow orders, or the reader who can shape the words coming at him and interpret it left or right but can only end it by inscrutably going to sleep. One sees this dynamic in many human situations, how the negative will of the individual can influence the will of the group, but not in a way that satisfies either side or changes anything. Think of wars, protests, investment, religion, politics, anywhere the unresolved duality of life puts people at odds, there is always someone who can "play the players" to get them to swerve, but it is a limited power the individual has in the social realm, one of influence and not authentic independence.

Perhaps that is part of the key to the mystery why Stevens put this poem first in his introduction to the general public. Or maybe not. “There is a good deal of theory about it, but explanations spoil things,” Stevens wrote of the poem in the 1918 letter (L 204). Anecdote, personal account, from the Greek anekdota (unpublished items), also means “a secret or private, hitherto-unpublished narrative.” So, recognizing that this poem un-"earth"ed may be of something still buried from literal, literary or critical thought (at least mine), I will leave with, apropos of nothing, two interesting Summer anecdotes.

The Legend of the Fire Cat, from Florida Panther Net
In August of every year, according to the tribal legend of the Yakimas and Lummis in the Puget Sound area, a large puma appears as the Great Fire Cat, jumping from the Olympic Mountains to the Selkirks, to Baker, to Rainier, and back to the Olympics, setting fires. It is said that a long time ago a chief of the Lummi Indians on the islands in Puget Sound acquired great wealth and stored it in a huge cave. He captured a large female puma and trained her to live in the cave and guard his treasures. The chief told his two sons that if misfortune should come to them after his death, they should go with fifty men to the cave and tie a fawn at the entrance to lure the big cat out. They then could slay the animal and recover the riches stored inside the cave.

One of the sons grew greedy and gathered fifty warriors with him to steal the wealth. They followed the directions of the chief and killed the puma as it bounded out of the cave. In their greed and haste, they did not realize they killed a kitten of the big female. While rejoicing over the kill, the great guardian cat charged from the depths of the cave and killed the son of the chief with one swipe of her massive paw and then pursued the warriors into the timber, seeking them out one by one until she had killed them all. The beast was so enraged that she clawed the huge tree until the pitch burst into flames and the forests roared with fire. Since then, the great Fire Cat is supposed to return annually in all her fury to fire the mountains in August.

A hunting practice from Stevens' childhood, from Benton News
From June through September, Pennsylvania hunters would often "fire-hunt" deer. Deer would come to streams, rivers, or other bodies of water at night. Hunters would build a fire of yellow pitch pine in the middle of a canoe, and station a man in the stern to steer and one or two others in front to shoot the deer. When the deer or other animals were spotted, the canoe was steered to drift toward them. The deer would raise their heads and stare at the fire. If the deer finally decided to run, it would see its own shadow in the banks and thinking it was a dog or wolf would cry out and jump into the water, giving the hunters another few shots. In this manner, the early hunters could kill one to four in a location and three to ten deer a night.

Explosions on the Beach

“Patriotism,” Krishnamurti said, “is a disease,”
and the cops are out in force at Westport Beach
to quarantine those poor, unauthorized free,
and even the few they wave beyond the ropes
stagger under the weight of their medications:
the Budweiser keggers, Vilebrequin beach towels,
chairs with parasols, pop-up cabanas, tiki lanterns,
enough charcoal and kerosene for a winter,
enough steak to feed the Marines.

They’re here to see the puppet show of armaments.
The elders grab for alcohol in bags and white canteens
and think the Chinese lanterns high above are loaded drones,
while boys are mesmerized in front of fires in hollowed craters,
and little girls are buried, seashell glitter in their eyes, in sand,
and teenagers in uniform snap to sexualized attention
behind the chafing of their too-tight rubber bands.
All pass the time by talking of themselves in terms of war.

Then the phosphorescent locusts come,
the magic rabbits from the incandescent hats,
the Horatio Alger Hiss flak cracks and semaphoric blasts,
evanescent decorations of a city in the sky:
fire flowers, star fountains, bursting jewels, moving footballs, bleeding
ribbons;
mortars spell out U and S and A and then puff out
(just like this country now, in its afterburn of IR swaps),
while a city of yachts watches on the horizon,
and a city on the beach glows with sparklers, flares and lamps.

A storm of infantry blasts from the sea,
cannons shake the smoke-encrusted beach,
and the ghosts of ancient minutemen and sailors
come to settle once again their final scores,
and then the sky itself joins in, as lightning
bolts torpedo through the clouds, electric
thunder rocket ships explode, white
flashes more insistent than this pyrotechnic staging,
sonic booms far grander than this gunpowder report,
as if to say “how many people do I have to kill
to keep you humble?” As giant drops of rain begin to fall
people run, appropriately cowed, for any shelter.
A crane walks like a question mark, as before.

Triple Warmer Blues

As my design for the world falls away
so does my knowledge;
for what did I need it,
something better,
except my own sense of unworthiness?
The leaf hands always reach out to help me;
can I touch them, or must I stay alone
in my solitude?

Tuva Language Notes

I have always known you.
I look forward to meeting you.
The future is always the past we don't see.

June's Translucent Moon - 12

“Roar” said the wind and the lion,
intangible vestige of parabolas
facing a wide-angled circumference
waging an eye on territories
nondescript. The owing you wager
in tents disengaging blows fabulous
for the squibs, the fire-laden embers
that crawl to the ceilings and make
the day-chasers crease. Rotund
in convexity all things spin to
gradual stuff, which flies up in fuzz
to be kissed by the nothingness
empty and hungry beyond believing;
the switch like a match and the stars
are lit up in patterns too subtle
to notice for those who can't stare
with infinite time at what never,
except for seeing, disappears. Death
springs to life, just like light burns
to dark, it's all one big wave
moving merrily across the patchboard
where your hands at play rehearse
the orchestra, for premieres of lights
when it's over, the learning, the constant
tight turning of screws where the
universe moves, the whole of all
shifting as your focus on what's
ever moving makes new conversations
as all you thought inanimate is alive,
talking, working in you at so many
levels you can only sit back and let
a little in as you only can trust it
a little - every detail carefully chosen,
every decision mapped in advance, it's
not what you choose but the way choice
is experienced, the choice in the way
you tend the unknown, to find what is
there when it's gone, to become
what you are as what you are not -
the rainbows and ribbons show at the edges
as something impossibly far,
not your heritage, your destiny,
the least you have earned
for enduring - you star child
bending and yearning as far as you can go,
your infinite power at bay
to deal with the discovery
of who you are, as something
other, a recognition that
seems an introduction, that
seems a goodbye, but
is only turning, in a
flash it's already turned,
made empirical, with room
for all, the particles you
are, part of your breathing,
there is nothing other, although
otherness surrounds you. Can
you know yourself? Can you know
others? Can you go peacefully but with
feeling, lovingly but with knowing,
harmoniously but with yearning for
oneness? The one way is found
all alone, forever pairing,
forever getting closer, growing away,
a glimpse at how wide you are,
growing to center, moving to stillness,
where you came from, in a moment
forever held. Impossible
the possible, unyielding
the yielding, impassable
the navigable, impenetrable
the penetrated, unfathomable
the understandable, unsolvable
the solved, irredeemable
the redeemed, unfixable
the fixed, unfashionable
the fashioned, unsellable
the sold, unbearable
the borne, uncontainable
the contained, uncontrollable
the controlled, unimpeachable
the impeached, unrelenting
the relenting, unbelonging
the belonging, unlovable
the loved, unbelievable
the believed, incredible
the credible, irreplaceable
the replaced, undefinable
the defined, irretrievable
the retrieved, irremediable
the healed, immutable
the solid, unbreakable
the broken, impermeable
the merged, insoluble
the melted, unrealizable
the realized - and so
goes the journey, into
the void, to be filled with
the light that is there.

Lyrics: Tupac

Tupac twirled his toothpick with a frown
“The only thing that matters now
In this godforsaken desert town
Is how to move these plow mules toward oblivion.”

Tupac from his hologram
Blessed the emerald valley
From Coachella all the way to Indio
And he went back to his friends in barren stone.

It was on Cathedral Street
When he dared to question Socrates
In a masked crusaders holy cape
At the May Day Communist parade
Where the girls with polka-dot skirts hypnotized
And the revolution wasn’t televised.

Tupac with his girls at Fascist Island
The sands of lunch got in his time
He shares soft-serve koans with blue smurf kids
Reads Blue Cliff Notes on tilt-a-whirling-gigs

It was on Cathedral Street
When he dared to question Socrates
As the May Day Communist parade
Left flowers on top of the Indian grave
And the Gang of Four played tunes for bouffant brides
And the revolution wasn’t televised.

The cannon fusillades could never clang
Not even flags that clapped a cartoon bang
The Gang of Four was never improvised
The Culture Revolution gave out prizes

Tupac, with everyone in pain
You stood there in the silence
Waited ‘til you finally passed away
To save a world not ready to be saved

It was on Cathedral Street
When he dared to question Socrates
In a masked crusaders holy cape
At the May Day Communist parade
When the girls with polka-dot skirts hypnotized
And the revolution wasn’t televised.

Butcher's Hill Vignettes

I.
The view was like from Venice on the Domino Sugar island, the seagreen vapors of Baltimore harbor like looking to the Adriatic and then the Far East; and on the other side, from under the shadow of the impossibly large glissading sign, the darkest windows flare orange as the night sky.

II.
She was of a generation who regarded it as a failure of imagination to not pretend a certain duty and decorum, for they were not empowered and dignified as they are today and she would not simply drown her five children, or deal as a cat would with such a situation and eat them.

III.
Everything was fine until we got to Patterson Park, played some football, did cartwheels, ate hoagies like Dagwood's wet dreams; then all the horror started, for this was too much like the childhood I pretended, and I longed for beer-smeared bars and incinerator windows.

June's Translucent Moon - 11

Neptune! Uranus! Pluto! Wheeeeee!

Syncopated astronauts lost in dirigible diction spend gravitas stipends offered to mentors aching with querulous pleasantries, supercilious twists that bob like guitars, quiddity’s twin, a shut-in foisting its pressure-run centemes on Hallelujah themes, as the squirrel rides pantomime rails while dogs lick at hickory chicory ginseng & gypsum, the loblolly pines cast a red vacant crust on the fear iron threads of ravening heartstrings through thirsting daytime foundry jets, the fail of the sentence whirrs rimshot double entrances, traipses of non-fire to blue semaphoric protuberance neglects on a silver carnation plate – loquacious sonar tranquility – steadfast the orchids in sanguine repose where fresh hobbled kensingtons track Abigail’s wigwam and selenite dervish tails can boast cat spring capstones with fling-ready coffers, the tell is the mockingbird smell all ready for harbinger salad, the symptom of lilac-time pilfering, the crocodile insanity of incoherent rotograviturizing blanched in cannibal suction of camouflaged blandishments glazing the igneous clamor of motes relapsing to spin ridiculous in exorbitant obscuritas the quell of the boutonnieres, the finish handkerchiefs aimed at the prow of semblance misfits whose sacrilege moats nears a gavel of rolodex scrimshawed and scud-timed in foam of rotisserie steerage, for the surgeon of necessity flounders at stations where airplanes relay common genuflects hog-tied and horror-nosed in sumptuous passages where time is a waif coping eloquent in white manner corduroy stilled to an artifact of glamour held to some innocent inversion where pinkies go souping and catalogues redeploy synchronized myths in parses of staggering barnacle trunks of steam-driven continentals governed by insects in cavernous igloos where dead deals are plucked and the stupendous milestones of ambidextrous malfeasance leaves clover-zinged inkblots for spite, a colonnade of counter-suits fathoming jalopies gone ear-bell in condoms of flight that sears the evening cuticle with ambient centers, the comatose ringers whose mountains remember the soldiers of pith in homage not meant for necessities, the blur they create is unheated to clear past reluctances and canopy the gnaws like green shards of delight that renovate innertubes caught in the traction of feel-good foolhardyhood spun down ambiguous, the locks seldom caterwaul at joystick spiff n’ tact like cubes on the authorized line irrigation, like spies on new plankton the reveille goes nuclear on bon-bon shop circulars living in a vestibule of insubstantial reverie the trial comes at cost when other lodges need assuaging, it’s always pine in the waging past the monument stylus to chaste mercenaries of vigilance cleft like two wildebeests in theory, a blast they called the trade dilemma, a humdinger chocolate pulp maintenance of sordid sentience gauged to intersect scrumptious rapscallions at random pulpits in whose ramparts are configured the bitterness internal derivation spears the suds.

Midtown Vignettes

I.
The stone finials in Central Park
alone in the blur of people
might as well be the pyramids
the builders are gone.

II.
The big Apple store is right next to ABC
which is across the street from the Mormon Church
which is across the street from Julliard
which is across the street from Brooks Brothers –
it’s all one projection screen this reality
as far as the eye can see.
Everyone looks to the sky at 1:19.
I better go quick to unknowing.

III.
“Papyrus” is next to the poetry muse
winging her lyre through Rockefeller Center.
There’s no one even close but Mallarme
glistening too far away.

Premonition

The rain takes us out like a boat at sea
With sirens at daybreak, as if loose from moorings,
The electrical flare fills the low pressure sky
With freedom’s wide gallop, across the void.

And it seems like it might be the end now
- Nerve endings are throbbing with pain
Like beasts have come into our ghostly bodies,
Our consciousness wanes, our touch is less feeling,

The rain blocks all vents and all drains
As we’re breathing; there are so many things one can die of
- Add lightning from fast-moving skies to the list
With ulcers and ruptures and motorcycle accidents –

In this rain there’s no past and no future
Just something you have to sit still through
- A clatter of pearls on the roof – in panic:
Will the body give way? Is it there to betray me?

When I ask that question, then and only then
Do I see it’s the earth’s way of healing, the summer squalls
And fearful diseases are its’ kindest ways of speaking
To ears waxed with lack of understanding;

Life and death rides above, a matter of electricity
That says "no" for us and listens in return, and in that drum,
In that silence, then, and then only
The storm lifts to a blue morning shine.

Solstice Fire

The fire is the fire
and the music is the music
and they dance together
before my open senses.
Then all at once
the fire is the music
and the music is the fire
and I know that nothing ever can be lost.

Notes from a "Brand Journey"

"Words are the liquid power of an organization, and we’re all empowered to author the brand every day..." - Paola

Yes stocks come with shocks and bonds can’t wave wands and straddles are for cattle and discovery creep for sheep and the Dow is a cow and the S&P is asleep and money markets are funny carpets and derivatives are recidivive and callable swaps are pops to the chops and assets are grass hits with portable tits and puts are sluts and debt is wet and gold is cold and leverage is a beverage and triple witching is a bitch for pitching and ditching and calls are falls whether covered or naked you still will get ra-ked by markets that bargain and buckets of jargon and margins like hard-ons for algorithm jizm on hedge fund fudge runs, all you alpha salivators and beta data dumpsters and delta gay day traders and buried librarian contrarians who adopt your options and abort your shorts for the long song haul, for a rising tide lifts all yachts but high rates take lobsters from pots, and sharks never change their spot trades, and whalewatching is too much like slots nowadays, so grab your inflation rations from the commodity squeeze freezer in the GDP eatery where earnings are burning and dividends are toast and bacon’s in the making and eggs are all in one basket to roost, as they boast in unemployment toilets where imports are snorted and exports deported, that dollars holler and foller the tape you should cry when you buy but don’t yell when you sell if you shape your escape at the closing bell shake-down hosing hell hoe-down just take a flier on the buyer if inquiring to aspire to pump the slump and dump the jump for you subsidize the risk when you bask in the ask and authorize a frisk when you rid the bid so just camouflage your arbitrage for proxies taste the toxic waste and junk is just not fungible and crown jewels are not paste and bubbles are trouble and Ponzi schemes are conmen’s dreams and pyramids are beer run bids to doom your boom and bust your lust, just bullshit and bear it from uptick to downgrade ‘til the fed eats your homework and your credit fork has had it, for you can’t clone the euro zone or phone in a loan on your own dialtone or wedge in a hedge when you’re pledged to the ledge to perverted serves of inverted curves, bargain malls of margin calls, the something fetid in synthetic credit, save your shells for the dumbbells, Windex the index before you back up the truck or your fucked, take cramdowns on bagel town before you book at par for mounting with cookie jar accounting, are the black swans game changers can we really socialize the dangers?

June's Translucent Moon - 10

It's the longest day. Can we make this short?

No. There is too little time before time disappears.
Your pulling away from the hair ropes of others
is only to see that you are them inside
but unrealized, like everything else in this wide
and realizing universe. We the guides learn
as we are called by the students - one good turn
creates another - in the spinning swirl,
the soul-conserving whirling spiral.
Convivial to all you share flesh of all
as you are consumed in ways unknowable,
but you as illusion must cede to the law
by breaking, and breaking, you must have a flaw
to join in perfection with something to add,
the things that you lack are the things you call bad,
the darkness is what overcomes you the most
because you don't know how to influence ghosts,
so the ghosts have you, instead of you teaching them
who they are, part of you, to share in the hymn.
You are the little boy lost always found,
that's how you align with the sound,
the loving and longing and far-away feel
will make what you call life - inevitably - real.

So light's not all it's cracked up to be...

Domestic

Irascible broom

                           incontestable

unrepentantly memorable

            steely malfeasance merrily jacked

it sweeps you

                      to roll-away cottages

                             from vagabond bridges

            you clean up the messes

    but there's no cleaning up what you see.

Corseted mop

                       sneeringly puckers

               paints with clear water

     squeezes the brown from the tube

picture goes muddy - what's lifted and deposited

                                                       confused.

Featherdustbrush

                             scours off the surface of the world

                      light into particles

           taking the gray off the wood and the mantles

                 makes them older somehow.

Impossible vacuum

                                 vanquishing nose hair

                 bashing the leg on the lounge chair

   making the building shake

                     ungluing the cat.

And the trash collecting

                                       never stops

                            it's not even who they are

                                the ugly them, in a box

                     but what is foreign.

Soapsuds in the basement

                                           scum lines on the wall

                the wheel keeps turning endless like TV

                            the baskets always full

                                   the ghost sits on a stool

                                                      forever laughing.

Acid & elbows

                         acid & knees

                                               and water

         hands for the sake of debris
                                                      window-streaked rainbows

                      of some cloudy other side

                                                               other people's toilet bowls

                    don't say a thing about them

     you don't already know.

You wax the floor poetic

                                          scraping tarnish off the day
                  the shine off of the grease

          leaving only the nothing of love behind.  

The Drummers of Summer

A heart beats alone
                                   in the center of
                                                              the circle

              the other drummers pound
                                                              around its cue

                       and soon it disappears
                                                              in the swirl

                            of Persian dancers
                                       red bonfires
                                     flying dreads.


A person's only ever wholly a person
                                                             in the whole

                         completely dissolved.

Aesthetic

Review of recent National Book Award poetry winners.

Any poem that can't go up in smoke
is not worth being written.
If it's not like bear shit in the woods
it's just a scam.
If it doesn't bring the darkness you'd pay any price not to face
you can't say it's worth the trees that it would fell.
If it doesn't make you regret your life & your 15 shots last Friday night
then it's just a crossword puzzle parlor game.
If it has to rhyme, it's wrong, if it must cohere, it's false,
if it gives you more than one detail, it's only the ego speaking.
If it mourns some childhood memory and wonders why it thinks of it
it just might then be dangerously corrupt.
If it makes your mind go crazy trying to make of it some sense,
then it clearly doesn't have a beating heart.
If it confuses popes and poodles for the fun of it
you can tell it to the king in case he's hiring a new fool.
If it talks about undressing, sucking cocks or licking pussy
it's probably a cover for that killer called a Poet.

If it fails to say the one thing that it started out to do,
if it fails to find a few words that are true,
if it doesn't know of artists, facts or inhumanities,
if it can't say what it means in any acceptable tone of voice,
if it can't even crawl, much less walk, much less dance, much less beat a
rhythm stick,
it just might have a chance
at breathing,
at surviving the first night,
at earning being lifted to oblivion.

William Bronk in My Living Room

"...even we, who whisper together now closely, as though we were two, as children do ... making believe, even as we believe, that another is there." - from "Not My Loneliness, But Ours" (The World, The Wordless)

Birdsong scrapes its pattern in my head
—like you, my dear, like you,
the sounds are all I have to know
the pain that I call yours

In the back and forth of thoughts 

       all of them my own,      

all stolen from the sky

       without the codes.

Where I live,

       behind this layering of lies

everything, even the baby saying "hi"
over and over and over again

makes sense.

Commonly Asked Questions

Why does chocolate kill dogs?
Why does light make you sneeze?
Why does God allow suffering?
Why does Quebec want to secede?
Why does Broly hate Goku?
Why does hair turn gray?
Why does scratching feel good?
Why does it hurt when I pee?
Why does the internet love cats?
Why does love have to be so sad?
Why does fiber make you fart?
Why does warm air rise?
Why does a broom stay upright?
Why does career advice suck?
Why does everybody love Brian Scalabrine?
Why does my phone say 4g?
Why does the Catholic Church believe in Purgatory?
Why does Scotch smell like Band-Aids?
Why does airline food taste bad?
Why does squid taste like bicycle tires?
Why does asparagus make my pee smell funny?
Why does garlic turn blue?
Why does poop turn green?
Why does salt melt slugs?
Why does Queen Latifah wear a key?
Why does the kkk burn crosses?
Why does Netflix suck?
Why does duct tape kill warts?
Why does it always rain on me?
Why does your life suck?
Why does Victoria Beckham never smile?
Why does your nose get stuffy one nostril at a time?
Why does DHS need 450 million hollow point rounds?
Why does oversleeping make you tired?
Why does my singing sound so great in the shower?
Why does Bolivia have two capitals?
Why does Gatsby reach out to the water?
Why does music give me goose bumps?
Why does rigor mortis occur?
Why does everything suck?
Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?
Why does Johnny Depp have an accent?
Why does a black light make scorpions and cat urine glow?
Why does daydreaming get such a bad rap?
Why does watering a plant too much kill it?
Why does the moon during a lunar eclipse look red?
Why does the US spend more on health care than any other country on
the planet?
Why does alcohol make you drunk?
Why does helium change your voice?
Why does James Hardin have a beard?
Why does Joss Whedon always kill the characters we love?
Why does grapefruit mess with your medicine?
Why does lb stand for pound?
Why does the pool turn blond hair green?
Why does Zeus give Persephone to Hades?
Why does my water smell like rotten eggs?
Why does weed make your eyes red?
Why does religion still exist?
Why does Twitter hate me?
Why does time fly by as you get older?
Why does fog after sunrise disappear?
Why does Beyonce’s baby need a TM after her name?
Why does your nose run when you cry?
Why does Kenny always die?
Why does your period stop in water?
Why does it matter if you plagiarize?
Why does everyone hate Nickelback?
Why does everyone hate me?
Why does life suck?
Why does love hurt?
Why does Lincoln face right on the penny?
Why does ice float?
Why does Sirius twinkle?
Why does Monsanto sue farmers who save seeds?
Why do people say Jesus H. Christ?
Why does my cat lick me?
Why does guacamole turn brown?
Why does God hate me?
Why do some people taste words?
Why does Swiss cheese have holes?
Why does dehydration cause headaches?
Why does UPS take so long?
Why does getting married make you fat?
Why does Kevin Durant have a backpack?
Why does blood taste like metal?
Why does the cinnamon challenge hurt?
Why does salt cause high blood pressure?
Why is xo hugs and kisses?
Why does chopping an onion make you cry?
Why does my eye twitch?
Why does pepper make you sneeze?
Why does my stomach growl?
Why does Voldemort have no nose?
Why does my life suck?
Why does work start at 9?
Why does the caged bird sing?
Why does the sun shine?
Why does steam come out of my vagina?
Why does using Facebook feel so good?
Why does life exist?
Why do cats purr?
Why does the letter J keep appearing in my email messages?
Why does Anthony Davis have a unibrow?
Why does my baby hiccough so much?
Why does the mainstream media totally ignore the Bilderberger Group?
Why does poop float?
Why does rain smell?
Why does my belly button smell?
Why do people yawn?
Why does sex ruin a friendship?
Why does Saturn have rings?

June's Translucent Moon - 9

"Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem." - Paul Celan

Truth is a girl not a cave-wall
That blurs at its endings with froth.
We rise to real only when the heat of our vapor dissipates.
Commerce with stars is the ink gift of Thoth.

Ecrivain - effacement - vraiment comme-ca?
Record for the Lord the turnip yields
Save your blood for your own plot,
The always target moving farther fields.

Boxes to be opened, like winter solstice packages,
Mind's toys with gears that hold the stones of years
Our ticking clocks to make us feel alive
And make our peace with all that disappears.

Like vampyres before a funhouse mirror
We are the minotaurs of our own labyrinths
Collecting all we love inside our pyramids
So we can let it go like any prince

When kingdoms come like wormholes to jump in.
That varnished limitation - you call yourself - a victim,
It hurts to know you put that version there
To learn the depths of surface from the skim.

You'll enter any room, inhabit any day,
Make remote controllers bow before your will,
Appear in precious seconds as the light you really are
—And all of it just patterns held until

You learn that you're a verb and not a noun,
There is no truth but you inside your hands,
The eyes that watch you always are your own,
You are your one and only biggest fan.

Song: Last Diner

Down the mountain in 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

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 mine / now there’s nothing I can do
So I paid up and walked out / to a beautiful haze
I wanted only to get back / to my old familiar maze
Where they still have the horses / for the harness race
Thought they ran up in heaven / not this broken down 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
Where every meal is free / for eternity

The Weed Hill Improvement Association

Lights! Camera! Reality!

decorous doorknobs

                               birthday surrealism

      pineapples but

unresolved tool sheds

                                     blond wood curls

purple Galaxie 500’s barnacled with rust

               

stonework with green filling

                kids already pushing

                                                    every edge –

       the thirst for infinite regress

                                in the blue of fading address

weeds grow from rock walls like

                                                    family trees

                up from a gravestone

                                all the milky secrets

                        out in the open

spurious sawgrass groans

                at the spring chassis

                                                teeth machines

                that grin with green filth

                                                in their mouths

the pulp of a million

                dandelions scattered

                                as salts beside the drains

     with desiccated baby’s breath

                forget-me-nots neglected

                                day lilies hung out on the nod

while dogs smile at crotches

                vines like cartoon octopi

     hang like petticoats

                                a thistle glistening

                      roller-coaster ride

long grass like feather quill

                pens clasped in their cases

                                gone to seed

                    but quivering with ideas

cheek-colored clover

                centers the bees

     as they whizz through the vortex

                missing bullseyes

the squirrels are finally caught red-handed

           they protest in stillness for a moment

     but then they fly

                                they know

                they’ve stolen everything