Still-Life with Newspaper Clippings

Rubber chicken QEIII
Her Majesty's secret sauce
as Kentucky burns fried golden like the dickens
flying carpet bombing carpet kissers dipping
pouring oil upon the grease fire
by a mudsling to the mudslimes
a holy roller dervish derby
the chickens you say
with Yemen slices and salt crystals for the tongue
(peace be upon the Seal of the Prophets)
black pepper, blood ketchup, gold mustard
and straws to break the camels' backs
and finger-licking cotton-picking hot-mess-diggety
lickety-split persnickity package-sniffing dark star dog
rotisserie fricassed
old tymey religion chicken
with USS Coleslaw and mashed Al Queda with crazy on the side
a green dome sno-cone
no coke pepsi.
It's a Sahara mirage like the gold in old Fort Knox,
or the frankincense from Arabia Felix
for the mystery schools of Grease.
They hate us for our chickens
our Kentucky funky chicken gold sun ra
Memphis fried on the Chickasaw bluff,
home of the white King who died on his throne,
land where the black King dropped down to his tomb,
near Timbuktu, the home of the blues.
Ai-gy-ptos spins like a gyroscope
at the business end of a pyramid scheme.
Ambassadors of Soul negotiate with Pharaohs now
at the nuclear Necropolis,
say "Nyet" to NotYetaYahoo
and "wait" to Abominable Dinner Jacket
that needs to be I-roned out
and "are you Sirius?" to Dr. Syria
with a wife from Goldman Sachs.
They're re-writing the Marine Hymn
for plausible deniability
that they landed on the shores of Tripoli
to take out the Colonel who tortured chickens
because he'd eaten too much LSD.
It's a trans-cultural jubilee,
the grease for GDP,
shish kebabs of flesh for trade or sale,
kosher and halal, with double zeros in the eyes
for as long as it takes and as far as the eyes can see,
the mirage seen from the city on shit's creek.
No coke pepsi.

Stevens Textplication #24: Banal Sojourn

The second most common question poets receive (after “how can I get published?”) is “what does your poem mean?” Stevens, like any self-respecting artist, answered such queries with a lawyerly velvet of misdirection and obscurity, but there was one notable exception, a correspondent named Hi Simons. Simons, a medical book publisher in Chicago, started writing Stevens in 1938 to get answers on his cryptic poems, and Stevens surprisingly complied, offering patient and literal explanations over a period of years for many of his poems. Some examples include: “I shall explain The Snow Man as an example of the necessity of identifying oneself with reality in order to understand it and enjoy it,” and [on “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”] “The trouble with the idea of heaven is that it is merely an idea of the earth.”* Most professional Stevens critics today ignore these serious and lucid explanations, because they view Hi Simons as a rank amateur who had no business asking Stevens such questions, so therefore Stevens must have been mocking him by responding as he did. However, the genuine amateur quality (amateur means "lover" in Latin) that critics so despise about Simons is probably what attracted Stevens, since, after all, only lovers can know the joy and sadness that is at the root of great art.

“Banal Sojourn” from 1919 was one of many poems Stevens provided Simons insights into (bearing in mind something else Stevens wrote Simons: “I made up my mind not to explain things, because most people have so little appreciation of poetry that once a poem has been explained it has been destroyed”). “Banal Sojourn,” Stevens wrote, “is a poem of exhaustion in August. The mildew of any late season, of any experience that has grown monotonous as, for instance, the experience of life.” It is hard to imagine a more concise or complete explanation for the poem:

Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps.
The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.
The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.
Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.
Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew,
Our old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries,
“That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!” reminding of seasons,
When radiance came running down, slim through the bareness.
And so it is one damns that green shade at the bottom of the land.
For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear?
And who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the princox?
One has a malady, here, a malady. One feels a malady.

Picking up with Stevens' explanation, the first four lines offer on the one hand almost overwhelmingly lush and beautiful poetic images (sky as blue gum, grackles cracking throats of bone, a swollen slum of bloom), but the literal sense is severe and anti-romantic: the hydrangeas are defined by the wooden tubs they are held in, the trees are the color of darkness, the sound the birds make is a painful and perhaps violent action, an overgrown garden is equated with a slum. The overbearing richness of late Summer is thus beautifully expressed, as one looks beyond the intensity of life for the mechanisms (the “moisture and heat”) running the dense machine.

The middle four lines (after the interjection “Pardie,” roughly equivalent to “Mercy”) personify summer as a “fat beast,” overcome by mildew (“our old bane [enemy]”), corrupted into decadence like Sydney Greenstreet by the heat, having no energy itself but crying out for others “That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!” Princox is another rare word Stevens uses in odd but appropriate ways, the literal meaning being an arrogant, strong-willed but effeminate young man (think of Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet). The contrast between the sapped old beast of summer and the eternally young play of the stars across the sky is to my mind an accurate account of the time right before autumn arrives, when it looks like this endless regeneration of life will go on forever. It reminds the narrator of life's beginning as winter turned to spring and then summer, “slim through the bareness” the light green shoots were as they reached to a suddenly golden sun.

The last four lines move the speaker from observation and memory to a personal reaction, an emotion triggered by the scene. “One damns that green shade at the bottom of the land” one wants “the sky unfuzzed” (by ragweed, dandelions, humidity, etc.), one has (three times) “a malady.” Almost effortlessly, the reader finds herself wanting a certain sickness unto death from all this heaviness, so that birth can come, a true princox of innocence. It’s a subtle contrast to elegiac poems of autumn and winter, where death is seen as a loss and an end. Here, death is welcomed as a new opportunity to escape the boredom and oppression of the fullest ripening of life.

As is usual with Stevens, reality and imagination lurk in the shadows. The palpable loss of innocence forces one to view what would have been seen in romantic, fantastical terms (the garden, the sky, the stars) under the harsh glare of reality, and this is seen as a kind of death.

Before we close, I’d like to discuss the puzzling (to many commentators) line: “For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear?” Eleanor Cook (in A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens) reads this (I think correctly) as a reference to earwigs, as big a bane as mildew to a gardener. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, “The earwig, a small centipede, is thought to be a disguise for the devil in Irish folklore.” Taking this a step further, this line could be making a reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Satan, as the season turns into Autumn, comes into paradise at night to whisper in Eve’s ear as she sleeps:

Squat like a Toad, close at the eare of Eve; [ 800 ]
Assaying by his Devilish art to reach
The Organs of her Fancie, and with them forge
Illusions as he list, Phantasms and Dreams,
Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint
Th' animal spirits that from pure blood arise [ 805 ]
Like gentle breaths from Rivers pure, thence raise
At least distemperd, discontented thoughts,
Vaine hopes, vaine aimes, inordinate desires
Blown up with high conceits ingendring pride.

This act, quickly discovered by Gabriel, sows the seeds for man’s expulsion from Eden. This fits right in with the theme of lost innocence, “the mildew…of any experience that has grown monotonous.”

* All letter references from L504, Collected Letters of Wallace Stevens

Taking the News Personally

As the crowds in Cairo chant “we’re all Osama now”
My lumbago throbs like Sirius at a false flag itching immanent,
A wagging of the angriest hound in the firmament,
As soldiers of the IDF bus to the Wailing Wall
To make peace with their holy pineapple before…

As my country stares sleep-swollen at the sermons
Of Baroness Burnett, Vanna Fortuna and Quim Carcrashion
Or that Michigan Romulan Romany the terrorvangelist Mormon
Whose mad shame glistening eyes transport them like Persephone
From the underworld of a chimney-purple President waving the bloody
Gorgon’s head, paralyzing like the idol of every tribe, to some meadow
Free from dew, as the harps and wind machines go through Yanni’s
Magnanimously voluminous hair.

Running my eyes across the entrail teletype, the luminous flicks
Unspooled from their safety canisters at this moment of the world,
I grieve for my countrypeople, for things are always so much worse than
They appear to be: the Boys Town abductees have influential positions
(If they’re raped when young enough the voices in their heads can run
their lives)
And the cells of virus programs have been mobilized for swift distraction
(In case the mind-controlling drugs and food have side reactions),
The money made in secret shipped offshore (dead sent offline).
The secret’s hid in plane site, the jail gates left wide open,
It’s clear they only care about destroying love, destroying life,
And we give in worship body, mind and soul for the privilege
Of them eating us like Chronos for our own good. And we’re happiest
To serve like this; it’s those on the outside who are lonely
With the coldness of the truth their only friend
And an opening in the rabbit-hole that only hints how deep it goes
Revealing we know nothing at all levels. But the writing on the wall
Proclaims the truth in incomprehensible diction
Which the guests at the table of the beast whitewash
As if Cleanliness was next to Godliness not Death.

Ah, but how could this matter to me? Love is at the end of every thought;
What need could it have to defend itself? There’s no enlightenment
Without Lucifer. The hero’s journey must go through delusion,
For at-one-ment is too easy, without the play of dark self-doubt
We would leap through all our lessons, be untouched by what's not right.
We’re created in full consciousness, and we’re learning all the time,
Reaching for the light in all that moves. Infinite blackness on all sides
Would scarcely be enough to keep us eyeless, without yearning, without
hope.

Yet I cannot accept that all is God, I want you to hear the screaming
From the project towers and bazaars under the bridge,
To feel the brainwaves masquerade as radio transmissions.
I want you to see the grid for rats, with electromagnetic channels,
Surveillance and a noose around the cheese.
When she clutches on her cellphone for dear sweet life
I’d have you believe it has kidnapped her daughter
And she’s waiting on some invisible lord for the ransom word.

The thing is, you see, every fact telegraphed in advance
Comes with a fat disclaimer, that the sender is never satisfied or complete.
In my case, I’m a prophet who remembers how my mouth was washed
with soap
For telling truth; the advocate told at three years old
I did not know what the hell I was talking about;
The visionary shamed for believing in God
By the people I most wanted to please.
I see only terrors in your stoic faces,
Feel keenly the fear that comes off of your brows,
Afraid I’ll be sliced to order again
By the merest raise of an eyebrow,
The slightest unanticipated question.

We calculate the debts we owe to fathers, sons and holy ghosts,
But what of that orphan left with nothing?

When every word is a lie
Maybe silence is the truth.

The bitter man who took away your dreams
How you would thank him now, if only you could.

Resisting Forgiveness

Every day is judgment day
where God is judged.
A suspect in absentia.
How wide we are
we must conjure bars.
Shaped into cells
dreaming of freedom,
we can't conceive how right we are
when we are wrong.

Mid-Year Review

And just like a busboy annoyed at no burn
the CEO walked off the combat carpet
and all we were left was a curt, quick-drawn note:
"our vision is undiminished, thanks to You,
in mutual pursuit of unlimited excellence.
There's nothing to see here, go on with your lives."

And nothing changed in our sun-drenched day,
the levers were so far away, but the father
whose wrath we concocted like a mythical beast in our hearts
was dispensed. The spears were unused,
the chits for late-night candle burning unredeemable.
He'll "pursue other opportunities, effective immediately."

And the tirades where laptops were sacrificed as examples,
the Friday late firings for fun—all done
and gone like a mighty storm passed long ago.
To think of his coffins and parachutes of gold
or the golf swing he mastered while we were here working
is to waste time in bitterness, when there's more to be done,

what existed before him, and continues forever,
the thought and reaction that rolls down the line
as psyches are struck by the mirror-shard grinding
of victims and victors, survivors and saints.
It's not for their hideous waste that these behemoths thrive
but our crossing of boundaries and sharing of space.

And each passing smile and personal affront is a gift
the Corporation is there to serve.

Only In Dreams

Only in dreams is there consciousness
—No footnotes of mind: "we're aware"—
No care how the maze we created got there,
How bewildering the symbols are to us.

There we're the soul that we bow to and bless,
No parsing of breathing and heaven,
No mourning a world that can never awaken
Or look out for its own precious interests.

All answers lead back to the labyrinth,
The walls that divide from the unity.
Past the feeling of some deeper memory
No distinction will stay to imprint.

We wake to the maze, in its haze we're caught
Lost in the fractured confusion
Soon seeking the safety of our own sun
Whose sphere turns as slowly as our thoughts.

Summer Late and Loud

Before it's gone
birds shriek,
crickets scream,
grasses shiver,
the leaves wave farewell.

I am not making this human,
I am failing, in fact, to reach out of my skin,
to see how near to us they are,
to use my mind for any purpose but illusion.

I split like a knife the tremulous print,

on one side: the fear
that expression is stopped like the flesh with death

on the other: the last opportunity
to speak to a world that is love.

But the truth is
it's a harmonization

the one thing we humans can't grasp.

The King Who Played The Fool

Homage to the great lost Don Quixote film

Oh George, I wish I could be like you,
Keep the world at bay with veils and masks
To make movies that no one is allowed to see.

To let a beam of light in called the real.

The whole shooting match of The Tradition
You had it in your bones, no one knew it like you,
But you cast it like a magician’s cape aside
While they held on to what they did not understand
For dear life, as you concocted unimaginable futures
Like others use a mop, you had to be stopped,
For the world is much too fragile not
To be persuaded by your illusion,
Like a blueprint always turns somehow to stone.

What else was there for you,
Master of illusion, than the certainty of the real?
Real opinions, real conversations, real depictions,
No Fakespeare for you, it was more current than the news.
You had to choose from the bottom of a black slush pile
Through the hollowed out Hollywood hole – only that
Was worth the letting go, of endless improvised invention,
How the perfect can be better, the unique more extreme,
The future turned to rancid butter fat, to melt in burned
Producer’s Roman vaults – with no sign of your rococo picaro.

The people took it all in, hoodwinked at a glance,
But they hadn't had a clue on how their lives
Depend upon it; they would get so confused, if you were any less
Dangerous, or less generous in your profligate perversion
To do everything against the senseless established sense.
You shamed the sadists with the most to hide
Behind their bars of power, took in with tragic pity
Such orphans of the storm, exchanging Rita Hayworth
For Marilyn Monroe, as if the Black Dahlia didn’t hang
Over the affair like the acrid orchid scent of human flesh.
In a country without clowns, yours was a pernicious
Elegance, a stunning gravitas. You shot the camera
Like a gun, played the dissonant angles straight,
Bled not like any gunsel on the Cinerama plate,
Brought shades of gray to light the thing we wouldn’t see,
Blackened it to show the void we try so hard to be.

You took responsibility for Senator Joe McCarthy
While they fricasseed your effigy in envy of your nerve,
Your verve, your fire, and slaughtered the golden boy cow
Who refused to die a tragic king for Mephistopheles so pretty
As long as blood is fed, a rotting corpse alive obese besides.
“We will sell no wine – before it’s time.” It’s time.

Lyrics: Alive Tonight

Then say we're two
unjustified
no longer unified
no more worlds
colliding
I can't look into your eyes
the species will survive tonight
if you're alive tonight
hear the flower softly cry
in pain too deep and wise
it disappears until the last time
before it's recognized

I come home
there's a lawyer
got an easy way with smiles
he's on your speed dial
it's perilous
to lie in bed with you tonight
the species will survive tonight
if we can't unite
pull the light you're right
you're always right

Our old friends arranged a ferry
when we both were getting married
we drank a glass of light
threw it away
into the fireplace
they wished us hell
but hid it well
then rang the bell
for kiss and tell
we felt the swell
before the sell
and then we fell
into the well

Song: Resurrection Zion

Solar system climate change
Heat shifts out of range
A thinning of magnetics
Increase in volcanics

Chorus:
Time for surfing
Surfing the Dao
Heaven is flirting
Surfing the Dao
Tears for the birthing
Surfing the Dao
Keys for the searching
Surfing the Dao

Babylon System getting weary, son
Earth firsters show some universal tolerance, mon
Lift yourselves from the rivers of Avon
You will weep when you remember Zion

Sirian pharaohs had dere dog days
Now they grieve for the parting of the rays
The sun is spinning to a resurrection zone
Exodus to make our home our home

Chorus

(Bridge):
See the weeds be trees of life
The streets as cities of light
Love and the word are aligned
We understand why we are kind


Violet Flame heal Jamaica’s poor
A column of light between the earth and stars
Wash all your pharaoh pity away
Ride the banks of the Milky Way

Chorus

See there are stars in our eyes
Star people let’s recognize
(repeat)

Song: Far From Stars

I'll pull you from the hellfire of time
fallen angel little daughter of mine
your present moment never ends
a brand-new world full of brand-new friends
until you think of who you are
and see how far you are from stars
that's when I tell you 'bout the law
that's when you fall into the flaw
where you earn while you burn
and you burn while you learn

How can I be right
when I divvy up your light for the night
chasing demons from the dreams in your bed
put ideas in your magical head
and when you finally pause to stop
after I've pushed it to the top
that's when my heart begins to turn
that's when I get my body to burn
so you'll learn while you burn
and you'll burn while you earn

Three Resting Poems

I. Hope Terrace
The monarch spreads and closes
like the cover of a book
as it ravishes the lilac
like a reader with its limbs
then it flies away like pages
on the other side of sight

II. Deepspring Wood
You cannot hear the water
jiggling on stones
above haze of cicadas
waving heaven's rattles
the bubbles through the hatch
break to ripple supernovas
but the leaves lay still as death
on the waters
and the only way you'd know
the stream was moving
was the way the trees and sky
bounce off against the surface
with a wobble

III. Eden Road
The people here have roots
as dug in as the stones
but the black sunflower
comes from far away
to claim its dibs
on their eternity

Stevens Textplication #23: Nomad Exquisite

I have a line from a poem "let's lucid dream the professional boat-naming class" that I love even though I'm fully aware nobody would have any idea what I'm talking about. It actually has to do with the well-documented fact that there are never any good names for boats (probably a vestige of the British tendency to name everything, pretentiously and badly). If only one could imagine a class where one learned how to properly and professionally name boats, the thinking went. Anyway, "Nomad Exquisite," in addition to being a great or terrible boat name depending on your perspective, is one of those poems that seems to many observers too private, too personal for elucidation (some say this about all of Stevens' poems). Stevens' relationship with Florida in these early poems was indeed shockingly personal, addressing it more often as an alluring and fickle lover than as one of these United States. He published quite a number of poems in this vein, full of exotic tropicality and poignant Northern longing. This one, as they all do, has its own special feel:

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vine angering for life,

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth hymn and hymn
From the beholder,
Beholding all these green sides
And gold sides of green sides,

And blessed mornings,
Meet for the eye of the young alligator,
And lightning colors
So, in me, comes flinging
Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.

First, a gentle reminder that this was written in 1919 not 2012. A quick count of the number of syllables in each of these lines shows how thoroughly Stevens was resisting the English meters still conventional in his time (9,2,4,8 9,5,5,7,6 5,11,5,6,7). So many odd syllables, so erratically arranged, yet the diction (and rhythm) is one of portentous solemnity, lush with phrases such as "immense dew," "brings forth," "beholding," "hymn and hymn" (as opposed to "hymn and whore"?), "blessed mornings," "meet for the eye." It's like Milton on a bender. Notice too the progression of vowel sounds, as the "ih" and "aye" sounds of I dance with the "ee" sounds until the final line, where the a's march in and take over. And what's with all these f's, the most confused sound in the English language?

All of these poetic tricks, I would argue, are for a purpose: to create an disarming and off-putting musicality (an appeal to the South* of emotion, love, sensitivity) in order to disguise its far more prosaic (Northern) content, for the substance of the poem is nothing more than a philosophical proposition that reads something like this:

As water creates vegetation,
As the effect of water creates poetic response in the witness
So out of me comes poetry

So simple, yes, but nothing seems this straightforward in the poem itself, does it? We've got the personification of Florida as "immense dew" for one thing, allegedly non-human green vines "angering for life" (what an unexpected blend of sound and sense here, the aggressive growth of tropical plants as passion for life that mimics in sound the spindly way it grows to the human observer), a bunch of "side" dishes (suggesting how the edges of vegetation in sunlight can be distinctly green or gold or an indistinct mix), the well-timed cameo appearance of a "young alligator" (signaling both birth and death in close proximity to the poet), and the sudden appearance of lightning like one of those famous Floridian storms, so intense that the poet apparently becomes the lightning ("forms, flames and flakes of flame" also sounds like lightning - if lightning could talk - in addition to being a good description of the poet's project in general).

All this poetic license with trademark Everglades imagery (and the Florida of Stevens' time was a lot like the Everglades through and through) expresses with Poe-like hysteria how crazy it feels to be in such a strange place, all the more crazy because one can so easily become a part of it.

This delicate relationship between appearance, metaphor and identity is at the center of this poem. We create our identities through metaphor, the lucid images of relationship we latch onto to imagine who we are in the so-much-larger world, and this metaphor is created out of appearance, what we see. Somewhere along the way, however, the metaphor and the real become confused, we get lost and the arboretum becomes a jungle so to speak, and with this shift, who we are becomes an open question. We act as nature, flinging our own "flakes of flames" (like so much glitter) and believing we are speaking as the lightning, directly inspired by the natural world. But we can only imagine ourselves so at one with nature because we are so totally removed from it. And that's always the Stevensian dilemma, how we can become so completely what we are not, to the point where we don't trust our minds, our senses or our spirit. There's no break in the appearance to clue us in that we are dreaming it, no telling us to stop as we assume all of God's creative powers. There's only a feeling that it isn't as it appears.

So we write poems, literally or figuratively, trying to at least document the subtle interpenetrations between self and world to find in them some evidence, in our own words, of who we are and why we are here.

Since this is the first of Stevens' Florida poems we will discuss I will announce that each of these explications will end with a link to Farewell to Florida, a poem from 1936 that was to be the last poem Stevens ever wrote about Florida. I'm doing this not just because I like to spoil any party I'm invited to, but because without that poem these ones would, for me, have no real meaning.

* It has been poignantly called to my attention that my habitual citing of Native Peoples mythology may appear to one not versed in it as the ravings of a madman. Therefore, let me clarify on this point that I am using the concepts of South and North here in the traditional American Indian usage of North as the cold, white, rational, boundary-making father mind that is in this cycle of being in control of the planet, and South as the hot, red, loving, open, all-accepting mother heart that is now in the process of taking over as a new cycle begins.

A New Leaf

This heavy ball
the Earth I spin
on fingertips
it's a dandelion
before the giving wind
makes us the same:
light.

The Jazz Baby

Happy birthday, Jesse

Too many troubadours and no legitimate leader,
But the jazz baby can almost fly on his blue wing.

Every dream is owned by some unholy conglomerate,
But the jazz baby skreeks like the birds.

Rotted tyrants hold the Earth and its entire people hostage,
But the jazz baby will grab at anything he can reach.

The news edits out the facts to save room for the more important lies,
But the jazz baby hears in church bells things we'll never comprehend.

Every day more furniture is put out on the street,
But the jazz baby has a taste for everything left behind.

Discarded masterpieces float in the sewers,
But the jazz baby looks toward the blue in the skies.

When he looks at you, he smiles right through.

Squinting at the Grid

The kleptocrat plutocrats and the permanent bureaucrats, the pundits and the pharmacists, the political parties and the hangover debt, the courthouses and the department stores, the universities and the transit authorities, the think tank snark and the shark tank stink, the Communists and the Oligarchs, the goombahs and the gossip rags, the intelligentsia and the saved, the prescription drugs and the oil-rich thugs, the publishers and the censors, the gay mafia and the SWAT-team traffic cops, the news and social medias, the drug cartels and the faith-based communities, the docudramas of child sexual abuse and the biggest stories not covered by the news, the vampires and the Vanderbilts, the Monarchs and the monarchies, the air-force drones and the sub-prime loans, the illuminati and the paparazzi, the literati and the twitterati, the teacher preachers and the featured creatures, the fashionistas and da gansta beasts, the BMW blue bloods and the NASCAR rednecks, the Monster drinks and the Monster trucks, the billionaires competing in the Olympics and the endless medical center annexes, the military-theological and the prison-industrial complexes, the terror threats and the blonde bimbettes, the scapegoats and the victims, the champions and the charlatans, the mirror-gazing women and the towel-snapping men, the televisions and the religions, the corporations and the foundations, the programmers and the consumers—everything else wants us to wake up.

Rebound and MC

Post-modern chaos
dirty ecstasy rave
quantum hypnotic inclusive star matter

latticework of acid jazz
funk before it became too dangerous
threshold-testing choral boom arpeggios
ligatures of ultra-radio silence
baby dolls make breaths,
mole fifes are crying
Himalayan crystal cymbals crash to
contraband Egyptian skins and scales
artificial aboriginal drums

black vinyl and moog synthesizers
and quadraphonic stereo sound
in pretty post-pubescent voices
like junkyard debutantes

a Pandora's box of pop turns
as a monkey grinds and squeezes them
echoing like tongueless monks,
hearts and daggers juggled in gelatin
by rhythmic gymnasts
on trampolines

then exquisite fungus
and a rattlesnake gourd
oceans through a sacred organ pipe,
trash pail lids as tins a popping
while copper smelters hum triumphant
a violet pyramid of light,
the sound waves bounce the ruined rafters
of factories like medieval ghost cathedrals

everyone makes his own journey alone
to be one
we must be spirits
but first
we must be robots

Infrared Tears

Have you told your heart
what you are doing, at any moment
is exactly what you're supposed to be doing?

Have you told your heart how magnificent it is?

"Heart," say, "how magnificent this is for us to share,
the way truth is always on the next limb
and beauty on the nearest branch."

Look at it from the heart's perspective,
how much love you do create
in merely sensing what people are
and speaking it through words or eyes or gestures--
what a gift to be present
yet you leave it wrapped in ribbons on the stoop
and ring the bell--

does the heart need
something given?
What is it?
Let's talk...

Love comes from the same place
as your breath upon the air,
it's real.
But no that wasn't love
when compressed by repression,
told off to stand down,
told you were wrong.

You waited many years
for the wherewithal to be right,
but now that you're right, it's still like
you cannot speak at all.

Oh how your brilliance is so unimportant
when to the heart
there's no one speaking, just an emptiness
not being loved enough to be someone.

You and your heart can be dancing,
larger than you know, in time with all that is
in perfect arabesque!

Know that what you don't know
or haven't yet expressed
is another gift yet to be experienced
like the words that never did come back
or the words that did, in cruel regret--
how it widens the eyes to see in this new witness
a further sky, further stars.


Have you told the heart
that it's heard in every thought,
that its beat becomes the rules
that you must follow,
that if you do not honor it
it's not from want of gratitude
but merely from trying too hard?

Have you told your heart
how much you love it, what you are
without it, how you need it
to make you feel the way you are?

Spam Sales

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Lyrics: Far As Stars

I'll pull you from the hellfire of time
fallen angel little daughter of mine
your present moment never ends
brand-new world full of brand-new friends
until you think of who you are
and see how far you are from stars
that's when I tell you 'bout the law
that's when you fall into the flaw
where you earn while you burn
and you burn while you learn

How can I be right
when I divvy up your light for the night
chase the demons from the dreams in your bed
put ideas in your magical head
and when you finally pause to stop
after I've pushed it to the top
that's when my heart begins to turn
that's when I get my body to burn
so you'll earn while you burn
and you'll burn while you learn

Lyrics: Surfing the Dao

The thought insistent
An itch persistent…

Solar system climate change
Heat shifts out of range
A thinning of magnetics
Increase in volcanics

Chorus:
Time for surfing
Surfing the Dao
Heaven is flirting
Surfing the Dao
Tears for the birthing
Surfing the Dao
Keys for the searching
Surfing the Dao

Babylon System getting weary, son
Earth firsters show some universal tolerance, mon
Lift yourselves from the rivers of Avon
You will weep when you remember Zion

Sirian pharaohs had dere dog days
Now they grieve for the parting of the rays
The sun is spinning to a resurrection zone
Exodus to make our home our home

Chorus

(Bridge):
See the weeds be trees of life
The streets as cities of light
Love and the word are aligned
We understand why we are kind


Violet Flame heal Jamaica’s poor
A column of light between the earth and stars
Wash all your pharaoh pity away
Ride the banks of the Milky Way

Chorus

See there are stars in our eyes
Star people let’s recognize
(repeat)

Candida Blues

Stay away from all the processed thoughts
in the cosmic grocery store,
for people no more know God than they know you.

Stay along the edge, where the fresh dirt gleams,
without the sweetness of your mother's voice
or your father's factory salt,
for what ferments inside you
can only rise so far.

It is not you, waiting
at the dome beyond the aisles,
a kind of sun, a kind of sky.

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.