A Smattering of Snow

Release

the sadness

to the soil,

the toil of sense
 and consequence

to bury like a cross
 that flutters in the earth

that's only life and death
revolutions.

Love takes these
solid forms

so we may let

what we love go

- for that's how pure

we have to be

to know

who we are,

love.

The Squeal of Packing Tape

It's the final red before the browns
but instead the leaves turn pink,
a shade that one can only see
at the edges of extremity,
where nothing needs to stay
for what sense it had has disappeared
and all things are allowed now to be strange.

The Absurdity of Judgment

Praise to the criminals who live on the block,
And the lazy-bones shirkers from work,
And the self-involved dilettantes who let morals slip
Too deep in their comforts of pain.
We all look the same:
Same clothes, same town, same eyes,
But oh what a rainbow each follows
And how well the pieces all fit,
Like one family chained
And yet estranged
To learn in freedom.

It's the album of someone I thought I knew:
Old photos from Georgia,
The wedding in Yuma,
Strange postcards from Horsetail Falls...

Gratitude for Words

Nothing's known about these forms
that we identify

The only light inside our minds is words
to tell us others know

A record of existence
when it's all on this one side

But I'm grateful that the unreal
has a shadow

That I feel the seeming touch of distant things
impossible though they are

I find words for even that in time
as comforting as prayer

Open-Air Church

And finally the trees give way to vision,
The truth we've been eluding comes to view,

November birds in arrows cross the sky,
And all that we have have talked about turns true

In one wind's gusty sigh - and then it goes
Like leaves are called within the one to fall.

The acorns break to fragments, like our worlds,
The pieces all we see now of the whole;

The shock is far too large to be aware
Save tremors in one leaf defined in air.

The Great One

Obscenities of tar
he spiraled from his dreadlocks
like a poodle shaking off some dirty pool
in rage against the all
that stayed numb and so oblivious
- the talking to the cell-phone selves,
the growling for the gift of food -
that's what had turned him into this
unrecoverable addict
'cos it hurt too much to notice
no one acted like a human
- someone else was an abstraction
whose suffering couldn't touch them -
they thought that they were better
than the least who lived among them
- as if his sleeping
on the floor
made a difference.

Love's Higher Octave

Thinking of Jack Gilbert (1925-2012).

The body is no place
for the body
The spirit is no place
for the spirit

Love makes them overflow
into each other
Like great rivers
without shores
Emptying the dregs of all
that was not love:

The jewels you thought
were yours,
The stones you hoped
were jewels
In the mirrored moon dissolving
just like you.

Love says what you are missing
isn't there,
Makes sure that what is hidden
can't be found

For the only thing worth having
in the end
The treasure of this ever-
dying realm

Is to lose all that you know
for what you don't
And hold on to its tether
to let go.

How else to know the stars
live in your heart
Than let them be too far away
to touch?

Off Ocean Avenue

Something was always wrong
And there were never any words:

For the attitude of the older boys as we sat on the new roof eating blue
Bugs Bunny popsicles;
For the manner Spider used, when he said to calming cops “my name is
George” a hundred times “and I didn’t do nothing”;
For the way it felt when the kindly therapist stepped outside and I was
bludgeoned by his foam-cased sticks of death;
For the laugh I heard when I caught crabs with my fingers just to watch
my teacher crush them underneath the launch ramp wheels;
For the confusion trying to right itself when I saw the bag of weed on the
babysitter’s bureau, where the magical records were kept…

The poison judgment started there...

Because I had no words for it
My spirit went to sleep
(A victim has no mouth, but always sees) —
The only thing to say, the tyrant speaks.

Still there are no words inside:

The way the wrong turned right
— The church was mocked and spat upon,
Its teachings things to shame —
What strange and quivering buoy
Stays floating in that cove,
Where sentinels sing pain not prophecy?

Autumn at Woodlawn

The cemetery hill
emblazoned with rust
a blanket of leaves tucked under headboard stones
canopies of gold like laurel for old warriors
blood-red leaves beside the mausoleum

And all I think of now
is the unfamiliar shade of green
in the flowing, flowing stream

Stevens Textplication #27: Cortège for Rosenbloom

This essay would not be possible without the generous help of Robert Arnquist

We discussed last time the gay and convivial funeral poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” A darker and more solemn funeral poem is “Cortège for Rosenbloom” from 1921.

Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead
And his finical carriers tread
On a hundred legs, the tread
Of the dead.
Rosenbloom is dead.
 
They carry the wizened one
Of the color of horn
To the sullen hill,
Treading a tread
In unison for the dead. 

Rosenbloom is dead.
The tread of the carriers does not halt
On the hill, but turns
Up the sky.
They are bearing his body into the sky.
 
It is the infants of misanthropes
And the infants of nothingness
That tread
The wooden ascents
Of the ascending of the dead.
 
It is turbans they wear
And boots of fur
As they tread the boards
In a region of frost,
Viewing the frost,
 
To a chirr of gongs
And a chitter of cries
And the heavy thrum
Of the endless tread
That they tread;
 
To a jangle of doom
And a jumble of words
Of the intense poem
Of the strictest prose
Of Rosenbloom.  

And they bury him there,
Body and soul,
In a place in the sky.
The lamentable tread!
Rosenbloom is dead.

The first thing I notice in reading this poem is the obvious and poetic nom-de-plume of the central character: rose in bloom. This presents immediate difficulties for me because my mind immediately goes to the most famous nom-de-plume in all of literature, Shakes-peare, and all the blooming roses that lie therein: the Tudor roses, the rose that lives on in the poem (the central theme of the sonnets), the dizzying number of rose references, like, for example, “What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet: II,ii), even the similar-sounding Rosencrantz character, the courtier "false friend" of Hamlet who is also, famously "dead". And this presents even more immediate difficulties because I am forced in some way to come to terms in a particularly telling Stevens poem with the vast enormity of the Edward De Vere authorship tragedy. De Vere was a man whose works literally form our mother tongue, but whose role in creating them has been completely excised from conventional history, leading to horrible deformations in our understanding not only of his deeply autobiographical works but of history, literary and otherwise. Take the Shakes-peare sonnets, for example, where 400 years of the best and brightest scholarship has totally failed to extract any tangible meaning from them, simply because they got it wrong about who wrote them. The meaning of the sonnets becomes crystal clear – and so much more poignant than they would otherwise be - once one realizes that they were written by De Vere, the Lord of Oxford, to his illegitimate son Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southhampton and potential heir to the throne (to whom they were dedicated) after De Vere had given up his name and works to his patron (and one-time lover) Queen Elizabeth in return for her pardon of Southhampton, who was to be executed for his part in the Essex rebellion (she ultimately and surprisingly did spare his head even though he had openly fought against her rule). The sonnets are first and foremost the expressions of a father to the son, full of love and life instruction as father’s words are always apt towards, but three typically bizarre De Vere life circumstances lift this beyond the familiar: one is that the son doesn't know he is the father (so the bond can only go one way); two, the father believes his life work (the writings of Shakespeare) will be unknown or at least anonymous because of his compromise with the Queen, so he must accept that his own immortality comes through his son; and three, there is a special urgency in the poems because his son may still actually be executed or alternatively become king to replace the (legitimately) child-less Elizabeth. All of this brings out a pure and particularly artful version of that great De Verean conflict and contradiction; he sometimes convinces himself and us of his belief in his son’s immortality, sometimes not. Therein lies the beauty.

This sort of surface scratching can be done throughout the Shakes-peare canon, but my point is not to re-inter Caesar but to praise Stevens. Suffice it to say the burial of Shakespeare figures prominently in “Cortège for Rosenbloom,” just as the immortal words of De Vere echo over the proceedings...

“Cortège for Rosenbloom”…

“For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.” (Sonnet 104)

Cortège, from the Latin word court, connotes a ceremonial funeral procession for a distinguished person. It carries with it the magnificent display appropriate to nobility, just as the name Rosenbloom implies an actual personage to be buried. But the twist here is that the pallbearers distort their roles and responsibilities behind a show of pomp to perversely dishonor the dead, while the dead person has assumed a punning name barely disguising his real identity. A rose in full bloom can be dead, or it can live forever. That is the conflict and contradiction within this poem.

“Now the wry Rosenbloom is dead…” 

“And the vile squeaking of the wry-necked fife.” (Merchant of Venice: II.v)

The only term used to describe Rosenbloom in the entire poem is “wry.” Given that this is his funeral, a term connoting dry humor with a touch of irony is itself wry, and a touch macabre. Interestingly, there is no better adjective for Edward de Vere as a writer than “wry” – wry asides, wry humor in the face of tragedy, wry word-play, wry metaphor at the center of all his works. And of course there’s the implication of “awry” as well, where all the plots and his own life plans went.

“And his finical carriers tread…”

“Go, tread the path that thou shalt ne'er return. Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so, that I will shortly send thy soul to heaven, if heaven will take the present at our hands.” (Richard III: I, i)

Finical means finicky, fastidious, overly precise or delicate, an apt description of the awkward yet somber carriage of pallbearers. (Contrast with “glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue” (King Lear: II.ii), a typical against-the-grain combination of words by De Vere that brings you right there but opens it up at the same time to the madness and mystery of being). The heavy iambs and particularly overwrought repetitions throughout the poem emphasize the solemnity and awkwardness of the carriers (a word that connotes more than just carrying from place to place). When Stevens wants to get really heavy, he does the repetition to death, so to speak, and this poem is understandably no exception. The awkwardness of the stresses and repetition in this poem though is particularly striking (“finical carriers tread” for example has the rhythm of the pallbearers dancing too quickly and tripping). It's a signal that there’s something fishy-rotten in this state of Denmark…

"On a hundred legs, the tread

Of the dead…” 

“'Tis very pregnant, the jewel that we find, we stoop and take't because we see it; but what we do not see we tread upon, and never think of it.” (Measure for Measure: II, i)

This line pulled away from the whole reveals its own pointed ambiguity: the pallbearers are carrying the dead, but they themselves may also be dead (or alternatively, only the pallbearers are dead - perhaps because they are "playing" that role). It’s ominous either way, with the implication that for all its scale there is nothing honoring about this funeral. Its mob-like size in fact makes it more terrifying.

“Rosenbloom is dead…”

“Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
Before the bastard signs of fair were born,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head;
Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay:
In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself and true,
Making no summer of another's green,
Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;
  And him as for a map doth Nature store,
  To show false Art what beauty was of yore.” (Sonnet 68) 

“They carry the wizened one

Of the color of horn…”

“The horn, I say. Farewell.” (Merry Wives of Windsor: II, i) 

 “Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven” (Hamlet: I, iii)

"Wizened" is another note of ambiguity; was the corpse wise before death, or made wise when prepared for burial? The "color of horn" maintains the same multi-valence; are the horns golden brass, red with jealousy, yellow like bone or white like stars? The context would suggest the “trumpeting” of someone mourned in gold, but then there’s those protruding “horny feet” of the corpse in “The Emperor of Ice Cream” to remind us that there’s also the cold, white shock of death’s appearance, as well as the uncertainty whether it’s the corpse that’s horn-colored or the cortège. The ceremony of death is removed from but inextricably linked to the actual dead. Just as every rose has its thorn, every “good angel [is written on] the devil’s horn” (Measure for Measure: II, iv).

“To the sullen hill

Treading a tread

In unison for the dead…”

“Lo! in the orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty;
And having climb'd the steep-up heavenly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage;
But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,
Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day,
The eyes, 'fore duteous, now converted are
From his low tract and look another way:
  So thou, thyself out-going in thy noon,
  Unlook'd on diest, unless thou get a son.” (Sonnet 7)

The funeral party in this sonnet looks beyond the state of death to heaven, as the son condemned in the Tower could be immortalized in the loving gaze of the father (barring the son achieving the immortality of having his own - nobly born - son). In a similar way, the Rosenbloom cortège as one “unison” beating (calling in a heartbeat as well as the aforementioned trumpets) carries the body to its Golgothan resting grounds, but it is looking beyond its role to something more immortalizing…

“Rosenbloom is dead…”

“But be contented: when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee:
The earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My spirit is thine, the better part of me:
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being dead,
The coward conquest of a wretch's knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered.
  The worth of that is that which it contains,
  And that is this, and this with thee remains.” (Sonnet 74)

“The tread of the carriers does not halt

On the hill, but turns

Up the sky.

They are bearing his body into the sky.”

“The dust should have ascended to the roof of heaven, raised by your populous troops” (Antony and Cleopatra: III, vi)

Here, the body is actually carried beyond the gravesite into the sky. The courtiers are not burying him, they are making him disappear, so that he will be lost to us. Stevens has this to say about the poem, in a letter sent in response to what was apparently a particularly dim-witted interpretation by an college English teacher:

“From time immemorial the philosophers and other scene painters have daubed the sky with dazzle paint. But it all comes down to the proverbial six feet of earth in the end. This is as true of Rosenbloom as of Alcibiades. It cannot be possible that they have never munched this chestnut at Tufts. The ceremonies are amusing. Why not fill the sky with scaffolds and stairs, and go about like genuine realists?” (Letter 226)

Stevens suggests that what seems most fantastic in the poem, the moving of the heavy cortège up the sky, is actually the most realistic. Since we pretend we know what we clearly don’t about things heavenly, why not complete the pretense by staging the play/execution (scaffolds and stairs) in the sky, he seems to ask. It is interesting he explicitly compares his Rosenbloom to Alcibiades, who bears more than passing resemblance to De Vere (albeit he was Greek not English and of a military not literary bent): an aristocrat from one of the oldest and most powerful families who through a life of controversy, disgrace, and overwhelming ambition managed to unify the country, but ended up in exile and uncertain death. It can’t be lost on Stevens that there is no “six feet of earth” for Alcibiades (as there wasn’t for De Vere) because no one knows where or if he is buried. He may as well be buried in the sky, Stevens slyly alludes.

“It is the infants of misanthropes

And the infants of nothingness

That tread…”

“To bed, to bed: sleep kill those pretty eyes,
And give as soft attachment to thy senses
As infants' empty of all thought!” (Toilus and Cressida: IV, ii)

The people in the cortège are finally identified, but in a shocking way, as “infants.” To counterpoise the newly dead with the newly living and attribute in the tributes to the dead only the remembrance of a new-born baby calls to mind Jesus' words when he was being executed "bless them, they know not what they do." These infants are further identified as “misanthropes” (haters of man), a particularly damning qualifier for those who would be honoring a man after death. I read the combination of misanthropy and nothingness to connote that these infants know everything (misanthropes are typically world-weary and cynical) and nothing about him. They might be conspirators, they might be English professors, they might be rival poets, but they are well rid of him just the same. They bury him in the sky - create an artificial monument to make the real spirit - the eternal rose in bloom - disappear behind a marble masked tomb. That, need I point out, is exactly what happened to De Vere – his immortality was shrouded by a false mask that keeps us still from seeing the full portion of light his genius emitted. “The tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (The Scottish Play: V,v) is what happens when the mourners co-opt the mourned. It is an image of toil, deceit and duplicity. The true meanings of life and death are lost.

“The wooden ascents

Of the ascending of the dead…”

“Making dead wood more blest than living lips.” (Sonnet 128)

Ascents (meaning platforms) can lead to ascension (placement in heaven). They are wooden (awkward and stiff) but also organic (made of sky-reaching trees). There is in death both the final falling back to nothingness and the transcendence of life. All of these ambiguities, however, give way to who is doing the ascending: the pallbearers or the dead? Wooden ascents (what Stevens called "scaffolds") are more typically used in executions than funerals. There is an implicit comparison here that by being promoted to the lofty death of martyr he is climbing the raised wooden platform of the executioner, with the same imminent sense of beheading that is always hanging over the hero's head. The rose in bloom is always eminently aware of impending death. Perhaps that's why De Vere identified with roses so strongly, for they suggest the noose of oblivion hanging over his whole creative life, the queen (of the roses) who gives support (assent) but also takes (the literal and figurative scaffold).

"It is turbans they wear

And boots of fur…”

“This gate instructs you how to adore the heavens and bows you t a morning's holy office: the gates of monarchs are arch'd so high that giants may jet through and keep their impious turbans on, without good morrow to the sun. Hail, thou fair heaven!” (Cymbeline: III, iii)

Here is another shocking combination: turbans and boots of fur. Turbans worn around the head (to cover the spiritual gate, the tenth chakra) are a sign of nobility in India, telling everyone that the wearer is an aristocrat, and entitling him to carry a gun or sword (the Sikh custom of wearing turbans is a variation of this, giving the enlightened the same nobility). Boots of fur calls to mind Orpheus' journey to the underworld, where the wild animals turned from loving their noble lord to devouring him. Fur boots would not only be inappropriate climate-wise in places where turbans are worn, they would be forbidden, since the Brahman classes practice strict vegetarianism (fake fur is a relatively recent concept). This strange combination of details suggests that the funeral bearers are being “impious” or disrespectful, assuming the sacred attire of other cultures because it looks cool (like the Boumi's or other fraternal organizations), as well as showcasing themselves (using the pelts of animals killed for their ostentation) instead of displaying proper self-abnegation for the dead.

“As they tread the boards

In a region of frost,

Viewing the frost…”

“To-morrow blossoms, and bears his blushing honours thick upon him; the third day comes a frost, a killing frost, and, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely his greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, and then he falls, as I do.” (Henry VIII: III,ii)

The fur boots do come in handy when one is "walking the plank" into the upper atmosphere. The stark repetition of "frost" here reminds us that for all their elevation into the worlds of purest heaven, all the casket bearers can see and know around them is frost, the ice kingdom of death.

“To a chirr of gongs

And a chitter of cries

And the heavy thrum

Of the endless tread

That they tread…”

“Approach, ye Furies fell!
O Fates, come, come,
Cut thread and thrum;
Quail, crush, conclude, and quell” (A Midsummer’s Night Dream: V, i)

When you see exotic onomatopoeia like this you know you are in a Stevens poem. “Chirr” means “a prolonged low trilling sound,” “chitter” means “a twittering or chattering sound”, and “thrum” means “a continuous rhythmic humming sound.” Each one is precise – one may even say finical – in both sense and sound regarding the gongs, cries and tread respectively of this procession. Such a recognizable euphony should cause joy in the ears/mind of the reader, but instead it enhances and reinforces the overall sick and ominous feeling of the poem. The soundmakers are covering up the truth with empty pomp and circumstance, a cacophony of noise (again those idiots with their tales). All that is left is a cover story, like the mindless duck-man from Stratford we are left to converse with, who merely quacks when we inquire about all the richness and ambiguity of Shakespeare’s poetry.

“To a jangle of doom

And a jumble of words

Of the intense poem

Of the strictest prose

Of Rosenbloom” 

“O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!
(Hamlet: III, I - Ophelia’s response to Hamlet’s “get thee to a nunnery” speech) 

The mindless cacophony of the blood-thirsty mob resolves to a rhyme of “doom” and “bloom.” The “intense poem of the strictest prose” is reduced to “a jumble of words” (just as De Vere’s incomparable achievement was reduced to the cryptographic puzzles and awkward repetitions on the Stratford memorial and dedications - both written by court spy Ben Jonson – a way of saying “pay attention” to the Elizabethans who were obsessed with clues in numbers and words). The funeral procession is a parade of centipedes devouring the corpus (body/text), "munching on that chestnut" in tiny and continuous bites until there's nothing left of the original beauty of the poems and the (p)rose. They are obsessed with the details of carriage and comportment, but too finical to eat it whole. They pretend to do the deceased honor but really they will send him to the sky - make him disappear - for they have no stomach, no appetite, for his true self.

“And they bury his there,

Body and soul,

In a place in the sky.

The lamentable tread!”

“All hid, all hid; an old infant play. Like a demigod here sit I in the sky.” (Love’s Labour Lost: IV, iii)

They consume him without knowing who he is, but he is nevertheless buried – in the pantheon of demigods watching over humanity from "a place in the sky" but having no influence on our earthly doings. Give him a lofty and noisy send off, devour his corpse and his works, strip him of all his petals.

“Rosenbloom is dead.”

"Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes:
  And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
  When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent." (Sonnet 107)

In closing, I probably don’t need to point out that I am interested in this poem because I am interested in the fact that the greatest poet in the English language is by and large anonymous. This lends special glaze to Stevens’ poem, which is clearly about the gap in those we immortalize between the actual person and the imagined personage. A great real-life example of this (if not the actual prompt for the poem) is De Vere, immortalized and made invisible at the same time. The uncharacteristically dark portrayal of the arrogance, callousness, stupidity and group-think of those who would immortalize makes the poem sit uneasily with this reader for quite a while. 

“Traitors, away! he rests not in this tomb:
This monument five hundred years hath stood,
Which I have sumptuously re-edified:
Here none but soldiers and Rome's servitors
Repose in fame; none basely slain in brawls:
Bury him where you can; he comes not here.” (Titus Andronicus: I, i)

Letters in a Broken Mirror

My love, words are kind to us,

It is we who writhe in their shadows

Like bats echolocating for a wall

When all each other offers is an emptiness.

How full we make the words, to compensate I guess

For what we do not hear, it’s in the way

Of hearing each other. Sticks pierce

And they discover, you need them for surrender,

Which is nothing more than changing emphasis.

You say I cannot speak for you, that “we’s” are really “I’s”,

That I can’t see you past my own disguise,

As you infer the words I use are lies

Behind your same unspoken expectation.

“You have to learn to ask for what you want”

Becomes “what makes you feel you need to have it?”

“I cannot live with you so close”

Becomes “I feel I’m in this life alone.”

The truth lies buried somewhere in the sickness

Of thinking that the sense is in the words,

Like talking solves some pesky logic problem

When answers lie inside that secret world

Where I escape from you, to words

I use to be with me, not do for you,

That will not let you misconstrue,

As ancient and as far away as they are from you,

They bring you closer to me;

Words without the dark agenda: communication.

Earth and heaven in lieu of your kiss,

Is that so wrong, to find some bliss

When one has been denied?

How I lack all conscience when I fly!

The divine is no excuse, I made

That choice, to follow where some hope

Emerged from pain – it’s called betrayal

And we do it every day, blaming others…

We’re only justified when we are wrong.

How can I, after I’ve cleaned myself off,

Purified the flow, let it all go,

Ever hope to find you … again … then?

You who are my only endless service?

My graffiti is for your mystery,

The typeset one more peel,

The printer’s ink the prayer for a seal,

At any rate you twist it like a Mobius strip

Without the thought that it may yet be you.

These words, here, commandeer

What truth is left in this,

The lovers’ prickly riddles

That always run from answers.

You cannot trust me ‘cos you cannot know me,

You cannot trust for I don’t know myself,

You cannot when I cannot trust myself.

I trust you in this, so I have no

Way to say a word to you at all.

I know I must be wrong somehow,

I know it's right to hold you,

I know that I must let you go,

How else could I love you? 

Just Another Election Night Drama

They argued the whole time they spent in line

While others scanned the voter’s guides

For how to select death and taxes dutifully

On “Hanging” Tadd Romney’s privatized vote-count machines,

And there was no point they agreed upon

Except the everything that their love was shared

Somehow, and that there was no monitor here

To disentangle right from wrong.

They tried to see each other’s views

Like they tried to see the subtle shades

Between the heart disease and cancer candidates,

But soon enough they fell back on the blaming of the victim,

The other one responsible for a world gone grossly wrong.

Solutions seemed like covenants, 

Offers seemed like smoke,

While the issues really driving them

On their low road to oblivion

Were carefully talked around.

They agreed at last on something,

That they lived at the same number, the same street,

And could swear so before the Phys Ed magistrate, 

But as they went to separate curtains, 

Alone with their thoughts and God, 

They knew how hopeless were their choices: 

To consume or be consumed, to feel pain or just be numb. 

They gave desultory touch to dumb black buttons 

Representing some infinitesimal fraction

Of a superfluous abstraction

Of an actual compromised person

Who seemed somewhat like them,

And they walked away in silence

To the long night of the Chinese knives,

Of counting promises that had wore down trust, 

And adding up the perverse choices

That they seemed each time to make.

You can whistle past the graveyard ‘til

You’re red, white and blue in the face

But you’ll end up in that diner

Cattycorner from the windowless telecom center

To work out in surrender

The terms of your personal responsibility

For all the pain you felt and gave, 

And watch your life fly down the streets

And alleyways like pages of a book caught in a maelstrom

Over endless cups of coffee.

You don’t even have to look at her face

To know she sits in solidarity 

And togetherness across from you

Like a broken, battered crow,

Maintaining a quiet aplomb and dignity

As she twirls her spoon around the yellowing

Coffee that's delivered all night long

By tough but not unfeeling waitresses.

None of the other customers

Even look up from their cups in your direction.

They too have died a thousand times

And the Danish, after all is done and said, 

Is pretty good, enough it seems

To make an Alamo of deep and pointless rage

Dissolve forgotten in the smoke

Of a new morning.

Thoughts on my 1,000th Post

I accomplished everything I set out to do as a poet long before I started this blog. Life itself had become a kind of gravy – when one gets to that place everything is, and comes back out with some tangible evidence, however fragmentary, however fragile, knowing that it wouldn’t exist without one’s courage and sincerity, it transforms the notions of ambition, communication, calling that one learned dutifully in school. There, it was always a competition, a zero-sum proposition to be publishable (whatever that means) or die. In the world of actually doing it, there was another kind of guide, almost a voice, deeper yet more immediate, embracing yet more critical than the superficial voices of careerist litterateurs. Not that I mean to bash careerist litterateurs: if they held on to certain keys they called keys to the kingdom a little too tightly, restricting the tone, content and diction that was expected (in thinly veiled enforcement of the tone, content and diction expected to be applied to them as arbiters and power-handlers), they demarcated precisely how the critical standards they agreed to assume and represent were mental servants of the hungers in their own hearts. And that was a valuable lesson, for it opened me to different ways of looking at what’s “good” and “bad” in poetry: how the art was more in the “being” than the “doing.”

My reader was always at any rate larger and more acute than those readers. My reader was even more acute than the well-intentioned friends and acquaintances who took up the task of reading my strange words with hearts and experiences engaged. The communion with my reader was so much more direct, clear and without the boundaries of time, space, ego and perspective – oh but what a mental trap to convince myself that this simple truth was a fact! It wasn’t a human voice, exactly, and it didn’t articulate words, per se, but none of that was my true difficulty. The challenge was that this reader was not a voice of separation – instead it showed me the field where all the Poets were, how all the thoughts were merged as one indivisible whole yet each one was vital to the organism. I could converse, not behind the screen of long-printed words, but with essences and ideas still spitting out their semblances of meaning. In such close quarters, it became imperative not to read the Poets too closely or eagerly, or at all, but cultivate the fine art of not reading them – how else to reach where they are now and not a thousand years ago? At the same time, ideas from billboards, street people, pigeons assumed inordinate importance to the poem, ahead of things like philosophy, conversation, newspaper facts, and the great approximation of life that is commercial TV. It was always the things that no one noticed that made the biggest impact on the poem, just as it was always the ideas I spoke that no one responded to that became central to the poems, just as the poems that stood the furthest away from me and other human readers shone the brightest.

How could I possibly demonstrate to anyone that this is so? A cursory read of poetics yields nothing of this sense – save the power of the word and the privilege of the poet to corral the invisible. Yet it is central to the dance of flesh and spirit that is my poetic practice. Still, I post most of my poems in a public forum of sorts – one that calls to itself attentions and questions and urges to connect in shared experience. I try to forget this sometimes, but I receive so many wonderful and caring comments I can’t forget that there are readers, each one like a God in light and stature. I try to convince myself that this is really just a giving back for all I’ve learned and loved in the free citizens’ vox populi that is the internet. My real objective, I think, is in reading other people’s work, to be present in an understanding of a comparable sublimity to the one I see, to be able to say “you’re not alone, your thought has moved me.” But this, a service of sorts, is no less “selfish” than the posting of my own poems, it is a perspective that finds its validity only in the invisible heart that lies behind it, one that is often misread and scanned over, often enough at least that a certain faith like callous must be acquired, that what is there will be shared, in the right time and way, despite all egoic evidence to the contrary. And this, this plangent uncertainty, over whether my vast expenditure of time and spirit can be assimilated into the human dimension that is the most important feature of this earthly life, is the greatest gift, for it transports me instantly to all the voiceless and unheard people, it helps me feel the suffering of all those who feel abandoned by God, it helps me gain the power to see myself beyond the containers of those who place me there as part of their own struggle to discover themselves.

It helps me surrender to the immense possibility of faith.

Even so, it does not yield easily, the answer to the question “why do you post your poems online?” Doing so provides a storage unit, yes, it enforces a standard of grammar, diction and punctuation to observe, for sure, it records the daily fluctuations of my examined life, indeed. I feel a part of something, but what that something is changes every day – as my witnessing finds other witnesses impossibly scattered in so many spheres, each also dealing undoubtedly with their own addictions, over-saturations of knowledge, and the limited ability to all humans to reach across the chasm of the eyes.

The overwhelming majority of my now-1,000 posts have been poems or related translations, critical thoughts and songs (and of course it’s the non-poetry – the “Pardon the Interruption” category – that I long to have read by others) – how perfect that I should limit it so, instead of facebooking my life and interests, how perfect to honor the immortal words of Matt Groening: “how do you anger a poet? Be another poet.” How perfect to make the circle so small and incestuous, the purer to make my work stand as a monumental fuck you to everything and everyone but that small, still voice inside myself.

To desire that voice stand in for something larger than me, to want to be noticed, recognized, even “famous” in the face of that, is like asking for heaven on earth. Yet as long as a heart is beating there’s always that hope of union, however imperfectly it is wished for and however unconsciously all thoughts form themselves around the irremediable mystery of our being.

Dispatch from Chaos

The Bavarian stone lithograph tablets
greased and razored to feminize film noir
in a baronial colonial Connecticut home
for the patrons and their saintly gazes,
is it ... enough?

The spirals of gold and green,
the White Ash and Shagbark Hickory,
the couples and labradors,
the plush-floor of leaves,
will it ... suffice for what's
no longer real?

The object must fall away
but not the beloved.
The subject must dissolve
but never the aching love.

The roots in the air,
the boughs on the ground ...
where is the center that's still?

After Po chu-i

The last vestige
  of my wind-shocked mind:

A few angry leaves
  bowing from trees.

Beyond it the branches are still
  in their bareness:

I slowly become
what I am.

The Medievalists

I’m not a fan of prompts, but I found Kristina Marie Darling’s one intriguing: "Choose any scholarly discipline and give an account of its history.  The account be of any length you wish, and it can take any form you see fit" (Thanks Storialist as usual for the Friday read).

They’ve spent hundreds of years in this tavern

conjuring those better days, those uncouth

centuries, reviving the light beside dark paneled walls

of Petrarch’s “dark ages” over mead and grog, fidelity oaths

sworn to mendicant sects and the Roman de la Rose,

as they chase the Magyars, Hussites and Cathars

with the Visigoth Laws, wielding pipe rolls and privy purses,

Aethelbert writs, dooms of the North People, assizes

from shire reeves, these defenders of their Holy Sepulcher

waved pewter chalices at the fiasco at Damascus, the capture

of Constantinople, Barbarossa overreach, the imperial precaria,

the outrage at Anagni, the Avignon papacy, the pragmatic sanction, 

the praise of folly,

the Age of Bede v. the Age of Alfred, Joan d’Arc martyrology.

Roaming their eyes o’er vast fiefdoms and vassalages,

handing down coin of tithes and indulgences,

they hoist pints in praise of bald men,

Charles the Fat and Peter the Hermit,

Theodoric, Gologras and Gawain,

proclaiming bulls of approbation straight out of the Inquisitor’s Manual,

proscribing the ordeal of boiling water for Abelard’s cabbage and ham,

reciting the Booke of Margery Kempe, the Condemnation of Wycliffe

and Wycliffe’s Reply,

re-discovering the head of John the Baptist in a stall, 

the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary in a fungi.

Did laws precede kings, Islam precede Christianity,

individuality predate serfdom, freedom predate property?

They scavenged in slippery bicker treasures already mined

by the likes of the Nazarenes, Pre-Raphaelites, Prosper Merimee,

for the secrets of nations, the legends in their blood,

the roots of local rivalries, the truth in modern stories

of tournaments and plagues, saints and ladies, wizards and fools, 

jacks and kings —

Arden, Maitland, Duhem, Lapesa, Kibansky, Le Goff,

Duby, Ganshof, Lucien Febvre, Schlabach, MacIntyre, Cabell, Bloch,

Bedier, Pidal, Braudel, Ladurie,

Lewis, Moore, Pirenne, Sesini,

Tolkien, Gilson, Schramm, Kantorowitz —

their names are like the deerheads on the walls.

Their grandchildren play with virtual dragons and swords

and the youngest crave gargoyles and darkness still

but no one remembers what this legion of men once said,

the arguments never resolved, of a past no one knew,

the one they invented

before the hangover dawns.

Variations on a Chan Parable

There is the truth

And there is the tiger’s eye

There’s no way to see

The one from the other

The form from the mirror

All is reflected

Inside of the tiger’s eye

The sentry that sees

Through each camouflage

To the flesh underneath

There are no ideas

Except in the tiger’s eye

So purely it sees

The folly of others

Inevitably turning to meat

The forest and trees

Divide for the tiger’s eye

The death that it sees

The animals bow

The lord only growls

The top of the mountain

Goes through the tiger’s eye

That sees how the kind

Alpine goats are too high,

A thought that terrifies

You sprinkle your light

In front of the tiger’s eye

That seizes and sees

All colors but white

‘Til those you would reach are blinded

There’s nothing more just

Than the gaze of the tiger’s eye

With wisdom it sees

And logic it strikes

The string we call trust

There is no escape

From under the tiger’s eye

The way that it sees

Becomes what things are

The polar bear star

Wherever you go

There is the tiger’s eye

Sees all you do

You think it knows you

And you it

You never would guess

How it frames, the tiger’s eye

What you see to size

Eyeing its prize

What you love best

I gave Fanny over

For a shot at the tiger’s eye

Only to see 

That it never quite was

And my life was in error

Aphorism at the Boundary of the Dead

The only thing
between the real
and the ideal
is faith

Sandy in Words, Pictures and Music

Menacing omens
sent for three days straight, still the mind

little pilgrim, as low pressure climbs;

you may not be lost in gadgets

for a time, let that slow and crazy 

diamond rise like snow

and drift like sand, it is you

as imitative crow

swirling round a nowhere

center, stirring up a witches’

vat of gold, to whip the gray shades from

the wicked ditches of the East

singing low, in overtones,

as you open out your button-down

overcoat, put the computers

on their blocks, trundle summer

to the garage, wrap the engines,

nail down skeletons, see to it that

guitars rest comfortably

on sofas, for the horns’o’plenty

are blowing towards Poughkeepsie,

and Rowayton’s underwater already

and the karma freight train roils the skies

but it’s nothing really nothing but a cry.

Lights lurch and flicker, like a death row

promenade. The birds have disappeared

to sing to themselves for awhile.

The wind blows like an acid trip

destroying all you know in waves

that crash on all night shores.

Morning and the squirrels work

harder than before

like all New Yorkers, trying to wrest

the broken nuts, deny

the powerlessness

nature suggests.

The masters of this universe

are not amused a mere three feet

of water on its floor

and the New York Stock Exchange is closed.

The rest of the country meanwhile

takes the whole day off to watch TV,

catch the aftermath of a story

told by a wizard storm named Sandy.

Review: Cloud Atlas

To say there’s never been a movie like Cloud Atlas before is a bit of an understatement. One has to go back to Intolerance to find some cognate for storytelling this radically different, thematic threading this mathematically elucidated, historical scope this deep and wide (Ebert has already called it “one of the most ambitious movies ever made” – again a necessary understatement). The comparison to the 1919 classic is of course absurd, except that the movie that created Hollywood as we know it, that huge and weird wing and a prayer for cinema as an art form, seems unprepared for, as indeed there’s nothing in literature, philosophy or even religion to prepare us for Cloud Atlas.

What can one say about a movie that says more about slavery than Amistad, more about robot-human hybridization than Blade Runner, more about complicities in composer rivalries than Amadeus, more about Scottish pride than Trainspotting, more about corporate conspiracies than Erin Brockovich, more about nursing home loneliness than Cocoon, more about tragic gay love than The Crying Game, more about the Asian mindset than Raise the Red Lantern, more about the British class system than A Clockwork Orange, more about the flaws of enlightenment thinking than Soylent Green, more about the distant past than Stargate, more about the dystopic future than Idiocracy, more about kids solving mysteries than the Spy Kids, more about dialects than Nell, more about the clash of advanced and primitive civilizations than Avatar, more about medical ethics than, well, any movie yet made? This list can go on and on, but none of those qualities even hint at what this movie’s really about. One can compile lists of movies that could get us in the same stadium genre-wise, like those vast interrelated ensemble affairs like Nashville, Short Cuts, Magnolia, Crash, Babel — but none of those have the same actors playing all those different characters. Or one can find any six movies to combine into this one (I’d probably choose 10,000 BC, I Robot, Moby Dick, Silkwood, Copying Beethoven and Calendar Girls) — but it would reveal nothing of how interrelated each one is at all levels. Or one can split the considerable differences between, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Baraka, Dr. Strangelove and The Time Machine, The Streets of San Francisco and The Fountain to conjure a ghost approximation. Again, a sense of how slippery the movie is to define, nothing about its very real coherence and structure.

This is a movie that, in one of its six interrelated storylines, vividly dramatizes how advanced civilizations, inevitably dying from a lack of love and compassion, need the primitive tribal cultures with their fears and ignorance more than the primitive cultures need them and their superior weapons and healing. But it’s just a backdrop to a backdrop, a way to sell an unlikely romance by demonstrating how even belief systems literally light-years away from each other are fundamentally the same.

This is a movie that envisages fast food in the future as instantaneously created food and fantasy, yet the human servers are even worse off than they are today. This staggering thought — paid off horribly without comment later on — is hardly noticed, just as we hardly notice the future virtual apartment that is more convincingly displayed than ever seen before in a movie, for all the audience can care about at the moment is the way the woman listens to the sleeping man’s heart.

This is a movie where a robot becomes a Christ figure for later characters in the movie after being exposed to second-hand Solzhenitsyn from a centuries-old TV movie (from a book written by an earlier character in the movie). But that linear connection seems unimportant at the time, for all we can feel is how she succeeded on her unlikely rise to God-hood by simply deciding to speak in the first place.

This is a movie where the best trapped-in-an-elevator sequence in movie history is also the best sexy hot babe and older gay guy sequence in film history, but it’s only a minor contrivance designed to advance the plot(s).
  

This is a movie where Halle Berry plays a kept Jewish woman named Jocasta, Tom Hanks plays an alcoholic novelist who throws a pretentious critic to his death from a 20-story building, Hugh Grant plays a savage aborigine in face paint. But it’s unlikely you’d know who played these roles until the closing credits.

This is a movie that actually dares to document the suffering sea of existences and how deep and wide the ripple waves from all the interconnected affinities grow (or, as one character says, "what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?").

This is a movie where characters bathed in 1970’s brown share a joint at a nuclear power plant sunset and talk about Carlos Casteneda; where a sadistic transvestite nurse is beaten to a bloody pulp by angry soccer fans; where tattooed Maori slaves glare, seedy Scottish innkeepers extort farthings, Korean prostitutes dress in plastic wrap. All of these vividly realized details and hundreds more not only appear so effortlessly presented as if to emerge from the source of creation itself directly (from "Shen," the common mind that is the source of dreams), they are inextricably connected to the plotlines like the motifs and variations of a symphony that vary in suspense and rhythm to build and expand the viewers' capacity for comprehension, compassion, expansiveness until all the senses meld into one and are humming along with cognition organically and so smoothly that everything is happening all at once, without time.

This is a movie where multiple and convoluted storylines become one at the very end, by breaking down the vast dramas of empires gained and lost to their essence of relationships between people, who are shown — as the onion peels itself ("there is no spoon") — to be the same souls.

Ah, I have captured nothing of this movie.

Let’s try again.

All we can say for sure is that Tom Hanks should only act in the future in roles where he has one eye and speaks pidgin English. Or that the movie is a giant fuck you to Christopher Nolan and all the other Matrix wannabes if nothing else — not to mention Hollywood itself, using its own tricks to de-manipulate if ever so slightly. We’d expect that from the Wachovski’s (no longer brothers after Larry became Lana), just as we’d expect a few fighting future Asians with ridiculous weapons and gravity-defying tools. And a few mind-blowing quotes stuck perfectly in the middle of the action to remind us that we are the movie. We get all that of course, as well as “Mr Anderson” always being waved over the proceedings by Hugo Weaving’s many appearances, but this movie is the reverse of the Matrix series. There, the holy book was hidden in a blockbuster genre picture — here the genre plots are hidden in the holy book. And that is why you will hear over and over how it is a great movie that you will hate, because we are not in the West quite comfortable with the idea of reincarnation, much less the idea of a movie showing how reincarnation actually works — how the murders, mass brainwashings, multiple forms of enslavement, and (especially) cannibalism so rampant throughout the film are only important as personal development lessons, like a 2^nd grade reader. For all its nifty plot resolutions, the movie is not too escapist to forget that the forces of evil, fear and darkness serve a very noble role of creating a structure for the individual to act against. For all its scale, the movie is not too big to emphasize that it’s the tiny acts of kindness in the face of overwhelming evidence of how meaningless and hopeless life is that changes the world. For all its relentless historical (and futuristic) detail, the movie is not too epic to forget that the world that is changed is only superficially the public world, it is really and only the personal, and the real strength of the movie is that it dares to go to the mask behind that mask, letting it fall away to reveal how the personal isn't even known to the person.

In answering the question: "why do we always make the same mistakes over and over again?" filmmakers Tykwer and Wachovski are humbly content to just show us, without comment. Just think of Hugh Grant playing a savage aborigine for a moment. Again that understatement.

The Wachovski's (from The New Yorker)

Flowers & Dreams

A new version of an old song, in homage to Baltimore.



Do you know who you are?
You walk right through the door
One more time
Unlike before.
What brings you back
To tell me "no" again
In your way
In my song?
I see you've changed
Before I look again;
I think about it
All night long.

Flowers and dreams
Never can stay.
Miracles no longer
Get in my way.
Oh yeah I'll give another stranger
The time of day.
From where you look
To where you go
Fly, fly away.

There is nothing at all
In this old avenue
But firedogs dying away.
I can hardly keep track
Of all I've thrown away
Tryin' to get back
To where I start.
And when I'm lost
Another day brings a new
Chance to cry.

Flowers and dreams
Never can stay.
Miracles no longer
Get in my way.
Oh yeah I'll give another stranger
The time of day.

Flowers and dreams
Never can stay.
Miracles no longer
Get in my way.
Oh yeah I'll give another stranger
The time of day.
From where you look
To where you go
Fly, fly away.

I know who you are.
Maybe you can tell me
Who I am,
What I've become,
You wish me luck.
I long that someday
You will find
Another cave
To reach with your hand
And find in the dark
The love that you gave.

Villanelle of Halloween Decorations

Because I looked outside I’m all alone
The otherness I feared was always mine
I turned away from heaven for these bones

The mystery of love was like a stone
I gave my heart to entrails and to signs
Because I looked outside I’m all alone

The skulls survive in dust-soft combat zones
To wait to take as flesh the other side
I turned away from heaven for these bones

The divine was everything I wished to own
I could not comprehend another guide
Because I looked outside I’m all alone

I chose to join the savage, bitter moans
For I have lacked the love to trust the night
I turned away from heaven for these bones

The choices all resolve to one clear tone
The weight of earth dividing from the light
Because I looked outside I’m all alone
I turned away from heaven for these bones

The Rainbow Forest: A Suite for Music

It turned out in the end

                Your love was me

Ravishing the sun

                I couldn’t see

You slipped away free

A little girl who’d lost

                Her trusting way

Bravely hesitat-

                -ing how to stay

You couldn't say

The rainbow forest says what we can’t bear

Hearts we lived inside

Were never there

You left your secrets hanging in the trees

But I never will know where

The Eno River

                Kept on to its course

As we babbled on

                ‘Til we were hoarse

Far from the source

The world we shared was

                Nothing but this world

In silent treatment

                Slow unfurled

Lips only pearled

The rainbow forest shining in the pond

Faces smiling

From a wand

What the frieze reveals is all we know

But it never goes beyond

I have lived inside another’s dream

Without a feeling

I have played so many foreign scenes

                To think of stealing

I have rushed to sides of broken hearts

Without thinking it was mine that fell apart

And now the leaves remind me of the time

I spent wasted on the swelling brine

For you were never what I thought you were

And neither was I

The rainbow forest holds its secrets well

The sugar maples

Never tell

I wait and wait again at our old stone

For the closing mercy bell

Leaves like drops of rain

                Easy from the breeze

Fall around my feet

                Like a gift from grieving trees

So I can know how what I feel is shared

Across the living stars and breathing seas

The rainbow forest lets its losses blow

It’s beautiful

To never know

Even the most narrow love goes on

As one endlessly it goes

Autumn Melancholy

And now I have to set my own heart free.
The leaves will come down in the evening rain,
The droplet that is whole must fall to earth,
The one must separate to join the sea.

You met me at the tunnel light of death
And pulled me back to see the first of life.
I had no eyes that were not made of yours
And all I touched was warmth upon your skin.

I reached the diamond stars laid at your side,
We walked antiquity with hands entwined,
There wasn't any tavern with its laughter left uncaptured,
No philosophy above which we didn't rise.

And now the fickle sunlight says its time to move along
As if the soul was born to jettison.
I hear the ghosts already turning mulch
Of everything I saw and knew and loved.

The wind it has no answers, when it beckons, you must go
Like the hard and forlorn leaf across the road
Without a home or boundary now, no proof it's not alone,
It pushes down the brown and brittle meadow.

The grace that gave us purpose for our lives,
The dumb, miraculous luck that found us one
Just disappears to structures made of bone,
The sweet pretense that it will linger on.

The foliage like ashes from the coals
That can't remember what it was to burn
Is there to make believe it never happened,
A lesson someday, somehow, I will learn.

No Safety in Distraction

Skeletons on people's lawns
Screaming from the trees
Too close for me to what is real