The Propaganda of Experience

What they don't know hurts those who do
For there is no path between worlds,

The entrenched corruption of appearances
Is somehow protected, its mirrors unbroken;

People still help themselves to what might be them
And threading the gift of recognition

Demonstrate they care by intending to share
With the absence that is there.

Our vibrations in heaven,
Holograms of the whole,

Don't mind what is missing,
The reaching away in love is all.

The thing inside that needs this
Too sacred to be revealed.

Blue Flowers on the Weeds

Does the thought of those not free keep them slaves?
Or does moving away help them see?

Does the thought of God deny His being?
Or is what brings love being empty?

These are the questions that plague our minds
In starts, in shatters.

The smallest thoughts can topple walls
Yet they lift away to grow somewhere

And let the purple trees and succulents
Play inside the head like 50s jazz.

Perhaps in dreams they'll reappear
In the guise of long-dead relatives

Under purple trees, playing 50s jazz
-- The closest thing we have to forgiveness.

Through Layers Upon Layers of Mirror

As light communicates with the curb
Geometries spill across the street,
The homage in the white elegance of homes
To unknown Spaniards turns baroque.

Its art is the golden street, liquid fronds,
Green canvas sheet like a Hollywood wand
As if that's what light's for, to turn black birds silver
And vein diabolical what eyes would otherwise call real.

The iguana stares upright in his cage
At the clues the sun gives to the day,
A stare that seems empty as space. Of what he sees,
There is only what we feel there on his eye.

Odes by Hölderlin: Your Recovery

Look! Your dearest, nature, suffers and sleeps and you,

   All-healing, are missing? Or are you no longer,

      Subtle airs of the ether,

         And the source of the morning light?

All the flowers of the earth, all the golden fruit

   Joyous in the grove, all that does not heal this life,

      You gods, as it nurtures you,

         How was it that you taught yourself?

Oh! You still breathe and resound holy lust for life

   In your usual words of allurement, and yet

      Your flower in tender youth

         Shines, same as usual, for you,

Healing nature, to you, who often, too often,

   When I sank into mourning, smiled in disbelief

      With laurels around your head,

         Still a youth, same as usual!

When I mature one day, behold, as born of you,

   How I make new each day again, all-transforming,

      Your flame that turns to cinders,

         And there’s another I revive.

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Ihre Genesung

Sieh! dein Liebstes, Natur, leidet und schlaft und du,

   Allesheilende, säumst? oder ihr seids nicht mehr,

      Zarte Lüfte des Aethers,

         Und ihr Quellen des Morgenlichts?

Alle Blumen der Erd, alle die goldenen

   Frohen Früchte des Hains, alle sie heilen nicht

      Dieses Leben, ihr Götter,

         Das ihr selber doch euch erzogt?

Ach! schon atmet und tönt heilige Lebenslust

   Ihr im reizenden Wort wieder, wie sonst und schon

      Glänzt in zärtlicher Jugend

         Deine Blume, wie sonst, dich an,

Heilge Natur, o du, welche zu oft, zu oft,

   Wenn ich trauernd versank, lächelnd das zweifelnde

      Haupt mit Gaben umkränzte,

         Jugendliche, nun auch, wie sonst!

Wenn ich altre dereinst, siehe, so geb ich dir,

   Die mich täglich verjüngt, Allesverwandelnde,

      Deiner Flamme die Schlacken,

         Und ein anderer leb ich auf.

Trash Night

Finally quiet now, with the cans on the road,
The slightest crisp of wind blows through the palms,

No pretense from the neighbors, no airs of dogs or cars,
The lawn, wet with soft light, finally takes its turn to speak

To remind you that the work to do has already been done,
The peace of dusk comes at the end of what's left unresolved,

The moon will overcome the silent things that can't be said,
Its soothing light makes all that is invisible grow larger.

What goes on in the house becomes a gentle hue,
Taking guidance from the world of moving shadows and white clouds.

Conversation Between Man and Tree

The trees hold up their leaves for me,
Teaching the reach out to bees and light,
Showing my head how to nod, shoulders
To sway, finger to rise to a point.

The leaves that glitter like the sun
Wave unspoken honor
In a wind turned visible by birds
As if the field went on forever

And the branches didn't tangle
In the contours of the logic
That moved from to to fro, in circles,
Grasses lifting thought.

The force the boughs withstand
Is neither turbulence nor anger,
But their own openness to shock,
How they'll follow the unknown.

Flowers edged like butterflies
And vibrant as the bees
Share ambrosial happiness
Ever conscious of the source

Circling round a center that is nowhere,
As if air currents that decide
The shadow's letters, green leaf gestures,
The yielding from positions

Are not anything one could call ... meaning,
And yet they mean, the speech of spring,
Unbroken and unknowable, as the wind, if risen
Slightly, would take our voices in its sound.

Stevens Textplication #35: On The Manner of Addressing Clouds

Critic bashing is a noble sub-genre in all the arts – not just poetry. Rarely has the creator been more sly in “addressing” his critics, though, than Stevens in his 1921 poem “On the Manner of Addressing Clouds,” which turns the obscure words and abstract concepts literary critics have long been famous for keeping artists safely under control with back against them (with such subtlety the targets may not even know they are the subject of the poem – as evidenced by the many different interpretations offered for it by critical professionals). It’s Stevens at his most playful, which, as here, often ends up also being his most serious. Here’s the poem:

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound.
Funest philosophers and ponderers,
Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
So speech of your processionals returns
In the casual evocations of your tread
Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

The key word in the poem is the addressee, the “you,” who is identified as “grammarians.” This is an exceedingly old word, one that predates the modern idea of grammar as a set of rules for language. The closest analogue to “grammarian” in modern parlance is “philologist” (admittedly not a particularly contemporary term either), someone who studies word derivations, preserves texts, and offers interpretations. There were two major schools of grammarians in the ancient world, the Greek, who focused on literary art as we might conceive it, and the Hebrew, who focused primarily on religious texts. This creates a double meaning for the word, and the poem, as Stevens addresses scholars both literary and religious, and shows them how to address, or discuss, the texts they use as a rod of power in the human sphere.  

These grammarians make a grand and appropriately alliterative entrance in the poem, like a cloud moving across the sky: “Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns”. They are clouds to block the light, yet they wear the clothes of light-bringing authority. The speaker, when addressing them, continues the metaphor: “meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,” suggesting their role, that of showing heaven to mortals, is a dreary, unobtrusive and almost contractual duty.

Their “manner” is to “elicit” – call to expression – “the still sustaining pomps…” Pomps is another archaic word Stevens retrieves – like a grammarian – seemingly to cover his real intentions. Separate from “pomp,” it is an ostentatious display of exaggerated self-importance. In that context, the rest of the sentence suggests an inflated manner of expression completely at odds with the paucity of meaning in what is said: “… pomps / Of speech which are like music so profound / They seem an exaltation without sound.” One could of course take this the opposite way, that the grammarians are guardians and cultivators (as they presumably suppose) of the most sublime expressions of the human connection to the divine – one too fine to even be heard by mortal ears (at least without a "guide"). These opposite readings come together in the sense that what is left of all the hubbub for us non-grammarians is silence.

On a non-literal level "pomps" suggests the appearance of fluffy clouds as they move through the sky, akin to the metaphor of pom-poms. But whether the pomps in question are the texts dissected by the scholars or the textual interpretations created by the scholars creates additional ambiguity that makes it appropriately hard for the reader to give these clouds definition. One must hold in mind when considering/addressing the nature of these clouds rolling across the poem the dual possibility that both the source texts themselves (at least as the interpreters conceive them) and the interpretations (aka the “lit crit shit” that Kenneth Rexroth aptly called “the fog machine”) are equally vapor.

The next sentence appears to confirm that by referring directly to the sources of interpretation, themselves interpretations (of reality): “Funest philosophers and ponderers, / Their evocations are the speech of clouds.” “Funest” is one of Stevens’ most noted unusual words. It stands out in the entire poem, and its meaning stands out in the context of its use: “Causing death or disaster, fatal, catastrophic, deplorable.” How could philosophers and ponderers be so hazardous? Simply because, in trying to determine the meaning of life, they are stuck instead with the insolvable question of “what is death?” Thus those who would reflect on their thoughts end up stuck thinking about death rather than life. This is “the speech of clouds” because it goes literally above our heads. 

The speaker goes back to addressing the grammarians: “So speech of your processionals returns / In the casual evocations of your tread / Across the stale, mysterious seasons.” Processionals are the books that contain litanies and hymns for use in religious processions, most notably funerals. In that metaphor, the only sound or maybe sense (“speech”) in what’s collected in the book to commemorate death is found in the funereal “tread” – "the manner or sound of someone walking" – of the grammarians themselves, completely outside of the book or its spoken/sung contents. In other words, there are, as people often say at death, no words. The seasons themselves (an apt metaphor for the cycle of life and death) are both “stale” and “mysterious,” reinforcing the sense that there is nothing in words or even celebrations to add freshness or meaning to what is inherently unknowable.

“These,” the speaker continues, referring to the steady beat of the grammarians’ steps, “Are the music of meet resignation; these / The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you / To magnify.” Meet – or just – resignation – or acceptance – of the enormity of death can only be found in the ceremony of silently carrying the coffin away. The almost imperceptible sound of that is the true text to interpret. This is not simply a bitter and mocking rejoinder to those who would comfort us by explaining the reasons for suffering and death, it is also a statement that there is something real in that sound itself, like a cat padding across a tin roof when it is raining, that makes it more important than the words people use, as if it opens up a vein of suggestion that connects the human to what is beyond human. The true poetic, in other words. Stevens plays here on the sound of the word “pomps” to suggest what the honoring feels like, a gentle (and tangible) “pomp” of feet. This sound, the poetic residue of experience rather than the mind’s chapter and verse explanations, is what is responsive and can be, the speaker asserts, magnified.*

After all the juggling of literal with figurative, literary with spiritual, contemplated with experienced, created with interpreted, addressing as speaking to with addressing as responding to, and life with death, the poem’s final lines shoot a Stevensian arrow through all the grandiloquence as if it was so much tawdry scenery: “if in that drifting waste / You are to be accompanied by more / Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.”

It’s an exponential leap to say, after vague and fanciful suggestions as to the identity of the clouds in the poem’s title, that they are “drifting waste.” “That’s the rationalist,” as Stevens wrote in another poem, the one who can’t escape literal reality enough to see anything beyond the impenetrable surface. All grammarians are consigned to this prison of meaninglessness unless they embrace what could be called everything from fanciful imagination to mystical consciousness: the natural, invisible and highly personal way feelings are generated and deepened in response to, for example, the desultory hesitation of feet. It may or may not be “real”, but without it even the sun and moon are just shiny objects, without voice (“mute”) or meaning (“bare”).

Stevens, then and now, is old-fashioned enough to still be hopeful such a thing might actually happen.

 * Note the similarity of the words used here (pomps, tread) to the similarly constructed Cortege for Rosenbloom, where the funeral procession also self-importantly dishonors the dead.

What We Know About Him

The facts are bare, but the only hope offered

To capture the firefly in a bottle.

He “might have felt this …” and “may have said that …”

Before making manifest what's disembodied.

So biographers prosecute the defenseless,

Sift the not prevaricated through sieves

To try the sole capital crime for the immortals:

Standing apart from the way life is lived.

And is there not one among you, dear readers,

Who didn’t wish our blessed and deified hero

To be another of heaven’s cruel jokes,

A rancid vessel for impeccable hopes?

Such effort to bring the saint back from the clouds

Where he floated when we had denied him.

If even one inmate escapes from the island

There has to be, has to be some explanation.

Voices in May

Cigarette butts like flagpoles in black sand …

So beauty lurks beyond this moving screen,

Something calls us from some other world

To see, as truth, the diamonds in the tar,

The quiet music of the way chairs are,

Sunlight’s textures as it’s caught inside of forms,

Watch heaven overhang the afternoon

And people talk to no one on their phones,

Share flavorless brioches with no mouths,

Tease no eyes with their lips, provide no maps

With excruciatingly exquisite

Specifics, but trail ribbons that are rich

In nothingness, who resound with absence,

Singular squalls lost in city hiss.

A receipt is dropped, and swirls in the wind,

Merges with what moves inside the mind.

These empty figures, they are really in the sky,

And not among this paradise of birds

Who make their philosophie sound so free,

For they speak of sage and Europe, babies

And chlorine with the one that rules it all.

The wind turns the shadows into voices

To compose the unregarded responses.

The Aristocracy of the Invisible

I.

As the napkin is opened, the folds

Seem like something else

As the Peloponnesian War

Seems like something else:

A glimmer of a common inheritance

As common as something can be at least

Locked inside a private scrutiny.

II.

The invisible shapes itself

Around everything we see

—The feeling is of poetry— 

Wordless, without form,

It lies within us, hungering,

To connect what is

To what we see— 

Layered in like a veil,

We lose it in the literal;

It is either not it or exact,

Shareable as crystal

Or non-existent.

III.

A shade of blue

Is so much more than a color,

It seems impenetrable,

Like the universe

Or the ways of man,

But it is me,

With it within,

That can’t be breached,

I’m responsible

For what is endless,

Unredeemable

Even as my own

Endlessness

Is nothing more

Than a persistent rumor

And my redeemability

More and more seems

To take the form

Of that blue.

The Cost of Obsession

On the saddlehorn mounds
— Smell of pampas burn —
Wheelies fling through air —
One foot, no foot, no hands —
Contortions of bicycle and man —
The other riders would rather towel snap
Than praise — they watch the physics
Like disinterested scholars ...
                                                      But one man
Talks to everyone, the only professor in this
Living classroom. He offers tips, critiques,
Standards that seem in his way of telling to be
Laws. Fearless youth become in his guidance
A sober crew. They gain the mark of a tribe
Gifted and cursed with a light on what's right.

The bikes paint dust in circles
Through the blue afternoon
And it is almost by accident I see it:

The bent tires and pizza boxes
In a canopy inside the woods,
Faded blankets and garish shirts
Strewn across the soft green floor
Where a teakettle and candles also lie,
Commemorating some departed mind.
A woolen hoodie hangs over a branch
In late-afternoon gold, and over all
That smell, the tell-tale marker
When the one who lives here
Is invisible.

First They Get Lost

What does it matter, when one is given a road

And follows it, if the direction is wrong?

It’s easy to see, looking down from the sky,

The waste and complication, but easy too

To see how it works out down the line,

How things must keep moving

Though we pray it will stop.

Yet we fidget at lights like we might miss something.

We never do. All facets of the illusion

Reveal themselves in time, and in a blink of an eye,

Reveal themselves as untrue.

Direction implies a destination, where you were

Supposed to go rather than where you ended up.

The life on the map v. the one on the ground.

Not different in any of the real respects

Except one you take with you

And don’t leave a trace behind.

Evenings with Harmonia

In an instant chaos turns to order.

It’s not easy living with the Gods.

No amount of graffito agitprop

Can destroy civility’s thread,

As if they must live these dark lives of

Excess, fret and disputation without knowing

How the inevitable balance will

Inevitably come out of the madness

No matter how hard they try

To be on the wrong side of everything but history;

Harmoniousness just flows, the doors open and close

In perfect time, the singing breaks out when the woman

Enters the salon. The flap of pigeon wings arrests the melody

But it adjusts, always, through the riffling of coffee cups,

Deep inquisitive cackles, the padding of the Athens cats

Clapping together inevitably with heels. An empty field

Between burned out roofs will open to a spiral stair

Dancing with the moon, weeds waving in tune. It starts

Just late enough, and ends only a moment too soon.

Things become so simple, when everything can be explained

But the pain one feels, and the way that it appeared is

Burned away, the many truths placed before the one.

No matter how irregular the tiles appear

There’s always a pattern. One they cannot escape,

This harmony balanced on the head of a pin. Such balance

As is required when the mistakes of humans must be evaded.

An Orthodox Church by Red Candlelight

The Christians have infiltrated every part of the holy city

But have kept a pilgrim’s innocence:

Look at this savior we just unearthed, isn’t it cool

How he’s outlasted death?

Pigeons hide on the cross.

Manifestation stays within our reach.

Madonna and Child are transparently

Mary Magdalene and Jesus’s baby.

Crowns on the caskets, beards on the priests,

The sun is a jar on a woman’s head.

The hymnless singing brings out beggars

To sell candles in full entrepreneurial force.

The History of Western Civilization

Red poppies – “you’re in my sun, Diogenes” –

The Attic Aristocrats still cavil – Peripatos in stone –

Gods and man one and the same are buzzing flies in grass –

The shade of the Judas tree at some halfway spot

Between what is and what is not – the checkerboard stage

Where orators played to two audiences, the people in the seats

And the Gods in the temples above – bamboo claps at

Applause lines provided by the sea, but the whispered

Words no longer are clarified – still, a graffiti eye

Stares up at the columns – why were we – O cruel Gods –

Forsaken? The grasses stand erect, obeying the syllables

That flow like water through stones glowing with

Embodiment, placed just so, precarious yet prostrate

In offering – moths float and dogs laugh in consummate

Distances – 

                      From our Civilization to the Gods

Is 30 feet of stairs – but it seems insurmountable –

The first columns stand oblivious to us – the threat of

Destruction we represent – but time has worked its wonders –

The perfection of decline – the scrolls are bit out, gouged,

Browned, the ceiling hollowed out to let in the blue – calling

What is not yet deceased, or born – what we’d call ruined –

Figures unrecognizable, as if what's there was only ever

Decoration – to be cataloged and piled – harmonizing columns –
For humans who build labyrinths – as if epiphanies can be
Sustained – but whose epiphany, and why does order rise
To the top? The cedars at the top shriek as if they know
And need to tell – forever disclosing next to the forever
Undisclosed.

                         I sit on the rock, like the poets before me,

Contemplating the poetry bloodstream of our history –
Only the most pure could make this trek – it is undisturbed –
The discourse that occurred here – spare and precise instruction,
No possible variation in response.

                                                                Over at the Greek flag,
However, the sky is the limit on what can be said now,
Any pronouncement can be unpronounced later – it’s OK
To scream or laugh or cry – the wind will help us forget it,
So when we revisit the same tremulous branch, it will bend
With ease, and we will gallivant as if it never will end –
For indeed it doesn’t.

                                        Didn’t that golden mean equation lead
Only to a library of unsolved explanations? So much blahblahblah
To Athena’s owl, who sees the black cat scamper across the rubble,
Like no human can, suddenly to disappear like the Gods
In the broken teeth of pediment – only the pious Carytids,
Always staring away, see.

                                              The marble that shines from within
Is the ground we walk on – offerings made from far away seem

Clearest in conception; when we get up close, knees weaken,
Words fail, the weight of all we’ve been told to be real lightens
As it deepens – the stones that guided the way through blind youth
Are revealed to be gems after all, more real for being pragmatized
As an ideal, like the dry beds we walk through where there might
Have once been water – a sublime that never needed to be captured –
The structure was built to be imagined into existence – the strongest
Foundation, the lightest air – in the valley, diamonds shine from roofs,

Another worship available from the immortals – art is what is

Crowned in acanthus leaves: the meaning of the Gods.

Two Temples

I. Hölderlin in Sounio

The Ionian coves – lit from underneath –

They no longer let the rock speak.

But the grass on the hill has something to say

About the Gods once dead and buried.

The rock partridge coos as she flows uphill

And Poseidon whispers in blue some variant of peace,

For there is still piety here on this rock, a minor

Architectural marvel turned into a thing of epic honor:

                        “Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep

                         Where nothing save the waves

                         There swan-like let me sing and die.”

Only locals and Germans come any more to this

Shore to savor ruin, and remember in photo memorials

This fort of war. The grieving Greeks don’t seem to

Grieve, they move through what is with ease

And recognize something in the care of the immortals

If not the same ones who died. Still, what has fled

Has yet to be replaced. There’s only the sun,

Our instrument, everything else is gone.

II. The Goddess of the Invisible

Amid the sacred forms she said

“There is only the invisible,” or seemed to,

In the move of the pistachio leaves.

Meaning whirrs where no claims can be made,

As Aphaia escaped from Minos by disappearing;

She’s the one who remains, still beckoning at what’s holy:

The rasping grass, the shine on seeds, the changing

Patterns in the fields. Speechless teaching

Free to be perceived or not, but the mind

That expands the universe does not disturb

The eyes or ears of those who trap meaning for a prize.

“Everything serves the invisible,”

She said, without further elucidation,

Because none was needed. I just thought

A moment earlier there was.

Life in Museums

I. Egypt

Poetry is written across the gowns

Of the impossibly serene faces with hands that

Hold palms and hooks of manifestation.

Green-skinned knowledge cries from secret eyes

For the real to be revealed as the ideal.

From Gods far more benign: Humans more actual.

What has happened to us? Who no longer put

The boxes of the dead inside our hearts,

Or ride papyrus boats with ankhs ablaze

Knowing dung beetles co-equal with kings.

II. Eleusis

Aphrodite, Demeter and Persephone,

Always those three, seated in the sanctuary,

Piously cloaked, while the arrogant spear

Throwing boys go unclothed.

Demeter reveals only her Wheat,

Persephone her Horses for the Journey,

Aphrodite her beating Wings.

The initiates proceed without knowing

If they are lovers, mothers, daughters, twins,

They only know the precise instruction

And that knowledge itself is the only salvation

For knowledge, as they offer myrtle branches

And are harnessed to otherworldly horses,

Having broken the death cult amphora.

The thought of death had kept them from life

As a mote keeps light from the eye.

Now they are free. Now piety begins.

Parisien Vignettes

I. Mansard Dreams at the Tuilleries

People in green chairs, a rarefied air where the real

Won’t protrude on the idée, where a crow glares

Atop marbled hair, like a priest says “Vive la guerre!”

Before the fountain, as gypsies trade in compassion

And free-range guitar threads the conversation

Through statues of women, all naked.

I’d declare, “The flowers are short, sculpture is long”

But the poet chairs are roped off: Too fragile.

II. The Haunting of French Painting

Monet creates … his own world

To save us from the one that calls.

A demi-glace of lilac frisson

To veil where light is pure

Abstraction. The source as void permits

All fates: Watery erasures, elaborate refusals,

A few boughs of earth in the spirit maze

Add solidity to cloud, gas to marsh grass,

Takes time back from the sundial.

For Van Gogh, the dry earth comes too hard:

No metaphysical haystacks and cathedrals for him

But ones you can taste, that taste like defeat

Starry nights when the moths die at your feet,

End of an era of light.

Eternal friend Gauguin mourns how one can’t

Have pity, only call for the colors from every aperture:

Prussian Blue, Helios Red, Raw Sienna.

You cannot be Christ

If you’re looking.

Everyone’s done their self-portrait

On the wall of the art supply store:

Every possible choice within limited means of vision.

It’s overwhelmingly close, not that impossible horizon of

lapis noire … gris de payne … vert moyen … ocre de chair …

The kept phallus of the woman Paris rose in light

As the clouds roamed the Seine and I realized why

The Impressionists failed so totally.

III. In a Station of the Metro

The subway speaks above the Gallic purr,

Some voice that had gone missing in the lust for contact,

An echo in the chasm of loss, as if through Gothic stone,

Sacred archways of emptiness tuned to instruction frequencies

From saxophones and steel drums off white ceramic walls

That weave between the realms in reams of sound

Jumpy and forlorn, as silent to the way things are

As riders with their hopeful eyes and pursing lips,

For love is always waiting, however long the pause,

However faint the flicker through the windows.

The stations are emblazoned in blue, and all the stops

Are at Saints: Saint Lazare, Saint Francois, Saint Denis.

The pilgrims take their bags and coats

And journey to the light. The sound below

From grates above has something of the street,

The distant hum of memories builds a nest,

A palimpsest where what is lost can rest.

IV. The Birth of Kings

Through golden glass, dust floats in heaven’s obsolescence

With tales of the cross preserved in words of mortal slavery.

Saint-Chappelle, where kings are crowned, next to the court

Of “LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ”,

Cedes nothing to the freedom of the people to be

Other than equally invisible.

The crowned Madonna welcomes you with supercilious glare

As the Baby beams out petulant to the suckers at His toes.

The angels and the cardinals bow before an idea

Of overwhelming gold and blue sky glass.

The saints have turned to stone – they’re clinging to the roof.

The monks walk up in circles with their candles

Spreading light on scenes of agony that bring comfort to the room.

The halo-red apostles who with one hand hold a dove

Wield in the other a sword. They have forsaken the world

And Greco-Roman bodily perfection, to be giants in a realm

Where the heavens have closed in.

V. The Death of Gods

The cold marble of burial: Clovis, Carloman, Pepin Le Bref

With scepter, crown and lions even in death,

Jeanne de Bourbon with her dogs forever tiny at her feet,

The heart of Louis 17 on display if not still on trial.

They pray in marbled flowing robes of white

Save one black crypt: “Reine – identification incertaine.” 

But in fact the strictest scholarly tradition of France
Can’t vouchsafe said bones belong to said kings,

Rescued as they were from pauper’s graves after the crazy days

Of the bloody Revulsion, when they came with spades
To St. Denis to prey. They say the bones of Antoinette, Marie

Were brought back here intact. But the common ossuary

Of Merovingian royalty suggests otherwise.

The anointed ones were anything but martyrs
Before the peasants moved their bones, but now they glow,

In suspended state, a renunciation miracle.

A Wistfulness Towards Ivy

The professor knows
What fools we would make him become
As the fire of our minds would burn through his papers
And our watery eyes deny him voice,

So he opts for the con:
That you, dear student,
Know nothing,
Just like Plato!

Incoherent theories
In unintelligible words
Are the only remainder
Unassailable.

Nothing else is what it means,
No logic can survive
Inevitable inquisition,
Mind the Titan always eats its young.

It's easier to leave the children
With nothing but the dream,
For who can hang with history,
Its permanence of error?

Who'd track the clues to what must be unknowable
And convince the priests such tracings
Be preserved, their fragile shoots continued
In the hope that one day we may be less wrong?

The free market of the streets absorbs it all
Without a footnote.
They call it movement,
What it does,

The carving up of that which needs to be heard
To make it something mortal,
Its error unrecorded,
Its holiness implied not merely refuted.

Thoughts on Will

There is spirit in these creations.
Life despite it all shines out
From cars, houses, chairs,
More inarticulate maybe than nature
But just as needy. It wants to
Change us, so we vibrate with what
Grows outside.

But we can’t perceive this constant

Grace, the swirls on concrete that speak,
The squeal at the gate that needs listening,
The copter that needs to know it’s not mere
Dragonfly — it's like these steel shapes
And polymer personalities
Still are not worthy.

Even now we see the animals and plants

As senses to engage, real somehow,
Not like what we created, though

It always was that other mind,
The one that lets us think
It’s our decision,
Our plan.

The notes of a piano play, still alive,
From 1953, not what we want it to say
But what it is, what we would call
Breathing, if we didn't fixate on
The differences in our faces, in trying
To make the common
Stand apart.

The water expressed in a fountain's
Trap knows a freedom, like these
Words I capture that move on,
Nomads in the monad, to some
Frequency that calls
In certain turnings
Of the wind.

So we who are fixed, who can
No more evolve, may see
Celestial spinning
Of what we’ve set free,
With the look of the horizon,
The taste of apples, the sound
Of baby birds.

Regrets of the Hive Slave

And so the feel becomes the real
With nothing but antennae
To protect us from the hidden
The world inside no longer viable
Encased in a fear of the other

True immortality dies
As the waves of desire are conjured like a cobra
By the old invisible wands

A flurry of codes and numbers
A library of explanations
But nothing anyone says makes any sense
As what is real

The life within cannot be shared
It has no voice
It has no name
It only glitters with all heaven has to say
And nothing more

Photos by Nan Goldin

The faces look so holy, so guilty,

Imbued with hues of blue,

But what they do, so angry

With finality, whatever suffering

They possess isn't there.

It’s in their eyes, with lip caught

Hanging mid-thought, hair

As it’s pulled back taut.

It overwhelms the streets

And rooms and piers

Like lights on chandeliers.

One wants to cradle instead what rots away,

Some dated monograph, some player

From the 50’s, some image

Of what stays, what never breathed

Our air, or made us disappear.

The gesture that cancelled is sweeter

Than the eye that never ends.

Words Again

Too much has been said.

           Will my last breath

Redeem words that were,

           when they understood,

Unfeeling, parsimonious

but voluminous, mellifluous

When I didn’t have a clue

of the damage I could do

Where silent people lived?

How could one be wrong so many times

            unless convinced that he was right?

And think that insight could be held inside a line

            like a shadow holds a branch

When everything’s already known,

            it’s just some children finding out?

Perhaps their smile is not the one

            that says they’re first to shore,

Perhaps it’s just a look of joy

            when trees give way

And the vista appears,

But it's a vista that’s so far away

            for what is needed here:

To receive an ice cream cone from someone,

            to prove that I’m not what they say,

To tell what I did, how it happened,

            who I am.

A Report

How empty

light is

without us

tho we’re

occupied

by dark earth

and star rise

like we

have no will

only express it

as a back and forth

breath of

death and re-birth

in conscious turning

a report of what’s

too far below

for the Lords

to explore

for themselves

and we are

believed

for the gleam

in our eyes

that remains

of the wait

for this, what has

happened to us

what we know

no more in need

of being

understood

Dance of the Dilettantes

Moon clobbers everything;

       is nothing we think even real?

Our auras adjust like a hand

       at a party where

Everyone seems an extension,

       everything seems within reach

Of that old capricious heart that needs

       it just so, not too close,

Never far, we know how it is, exactly,

       we have lived it,

No matter how removed or concocted

       it seems, we can relate!

Oh the powers we have, to imagine

       the powers we have

And make them snug as a wet suit.

       They’re waiting for us now

To fall into their lap, with their pics

       of pizza and 9-year-old beagles,

Smiling like we belong there,

       and the quotes that they steal

Seem made for us in that moment,

       Who are on a first name basis

With presidents, date A-list royalty

       exclusively, know every ancient land

And every plot twist intimately, as if we

       could sense any trap.

There’s no distinction between what we hear

       and what they are saying,

Though the tapes, when they’re played back

       never validate our faith,

There is only a hiss, as if we were never alive.

       We’ll call it the still voice of yes.

Building an Enclosure

Iguana Boy lays out his sadness at least

Like a man:

Uncompensated play …

The pain of unconsummated dreams …

Such a rich broth he stews in

Yet I can’t make the smoke blow away,

For I’ve been escorted in my day as well

From construction sites bearing insulation lungs,

No parents to teach me my value was zero

And no clue how to be, like the fool, carried over,

And I’ve done my children’s impossible math problems for them

While they gloated from the kindness of another room

At how stressed, when they requested me to do it, I’d become.

And I’ve felt every fiber that held me together

Break at the not-unkind words of a teacher

Who revealed how the world regards me.

And I’ve been enraged

At all the little queens and kings of the realm

When they scream to be protected from society,

But have backed off from ending their dreams prematurely

Though I wanted to scream myself, perhaps with them,

Like an executioner begs to be forgiven.

And I’ve cast myself adrift down indifferent streams

On a porous splinter, where there’s no more questions

Pity can answer, to be free of the shore where

They commiserate, and pluck off the garish blooms

From themselves and hand them over,

Every one of them a tear.

It’s inconceivable how unconditional one must be

When everything is naked, broken and wrong,

But that’s all there is, when being accepted yields so little learned,

A world misconstrued, broken and wrong,

With no value in experience

Or wisdom gained from pain

And no one to oversee the rules who can be viewed

Only imagined.

How could I escape? From the one family?

The bubble in theory that saves what is mine

For me, and keeps others’ needs on the outside

In reality failed when I first tried to turn away

And saw the young astronauts fall to the void

On tethers that really did break

And I heard the hive mind remind me again

– In its kind computer voice – of my failure to act,

My intransigence at saving the doomed,

For they never were doomed after all, merely

Misplaced, free of time and space,

Rogues, just like me, forever learning how not to bend

But able to make a fire from what is.

It still warms,

Still is visible from far away,

Still offers a future of meaning.

There’s meaning in blue lights

And hair color products

But none yet, apparently, in the world.

Sunset Chiaroscuro

A shadow over Commerce where the dream bins lie at ease,
7-Up machine lit up in green,
The Intermodals find their way as the dark patina falls
To tell the people where to watch, who to believe.

The passengers, at the shadow's moment, speak with end-of-day smiles,
Remembering nothing, of salvation's smattering of sun.
There's still light on ticket windows where a woman tries to buy,
But salvation is only for the doomed, individual.

Well-lit warehouse floors, silent cranes and derricks,
No windows in the office parks beside their carless lots,
As a distant tribe of winter palms awaits rebirth, not death
Like the rest of us bereft of possibilities.

A practice field with families under fog lamps,
Worry fills the emptiness inside,
Cognitive relativity rules the roost
And grudge warfare vies for what belongs to heaven.

Security bulbs above the empty trailer cabs,
There is a world, it seems: a distant highway billboard.
The people stepping down the ramps await some kind of signal
But no one seems to know quite what it is.

Long lines of fluorescents in the halls of storage centers,
Whatever it is that's tucked away will not be seen by us.
At coffee shops with neon cups the taste of blood came back
And people only changed each other's minds.

The rows of spying white lights look on blind
While what hides behind glass frosting won't be seen.
The river shows its darkness as its currents catch the sheen
And it rolls along the voices whose words fell in between.

A gallery of forklifts, centered by the flag,
A concrete car wash box with metal gleaming,
And signs for Walnut Ave, Victoria Court but nothing's there
Like no one breaks the white of Pete's Dry Cleaners.

The people sulk away from all of this into the dark,
Marching where their passions lie, anywhere but here,
Down corridors with eyes inflamed, as keen as rats,
Having lost the trust of what they cannot see.

Afternoon Escape

Winter in LA, no one in the park,
Trees alive in sunlight, soundless and still.

Their radiant blooms await another's sickness.
The birds complain from perches far away.

I've walked these black brick paths in circles
Never finding what was needed,

A respite for my mind, solutions to the differences
Between us ...

So unimportant now,
As if a change in wind changes it all.

Yet still there are the crimson flowers shaking,
Like thoughts forgotten, waving madly in the void.

The One Thing Left Unsaid

My life
Flashing before my eyes
Catches
On a woman's curls
Like the shadow
Of a tree
Rips away
The street

We're only
Connected
When alone
Though it pains us
To see it
That way

In our warmth
Of sharing
A constant
Resistance
Of facts
That are not
Ever true

When the Epikurean Are Defeated

Flowers drop on smooth concrete
In another garden these people are free

They know how to bear the toil
Of non-slavery

We can speak to them now, in smiles and concepts
Hands stretched out in lieu of hearts

What if all they need becomes a given?
Does it matter if they no more can want?

What will drive the legs to the next crosswalk
At First and Main, Royal and Squalor

When the hole deep inside
Can be lit with the lamp of the stars?

Putting Ladybugs in a Shoe

The winds come from the direction of the moon
Like skates across the floor where the sand blooms
They push the seabirds back, turn wave crest into breath
The withdrawing tide a skein of tremulous veins

This sets up somehow the unexpected
What we glide through like the kites
Oblivious to the hand that holds the thread
Just the magnitudes of dust, the gust trajectories

The Drifting

Invisible planes
          take down invisible
                   predators
But we hear a rumble
          above the ocean
                   roar

Sand blows like spores
          from the feet of
                   the people
Rushing to the surf
          sunset
                   pearl

Lights on the dock
         as Catalina rides
                  the burning
The horizon isn't ours to touch
        the lilac waves are veils
                  from what's beyond

What's moving
        but never
                  really known
Some surfers and some birds
       emerge in black like spots
                  upon a celluloid

The stories to be made
       are churning
Low light provides
       some shadow and some sun
The action is as real as
        our belief will make it be
Which is only what we know
        of what we see

So glimmers
       take the place of worlds

Scar

Discernment is a curse,
Like doctors who listen to classical music
Don't really listen to classical music;
The river isn't understood with words.

A Day in Booneyville

There's nothing but me in this world.
Still, there's a longing for what is not:
The wife across the street
Who seems to exist, enough to create
The stars and the sea around me
...But then the lights go out
And still it's dark.

The rain seems like something
But it is only the cinders
Of what used to be,
What was created here along Humane Way
In houses worthy of pleasure not paint:
Joyous barbecues over the freeway
Where on a good day one can see peaks with snow.

Only the past is real, what is here now
Is a theory.  What will it be?
The elephants the children see
Rising from the mist
Are just some Hindus from Pomona
Selling frozen rats for albino pieds,
Trying to turn the fern chameleon blue.

A Card Game with Mr. Rothschild

The ripples of death
In the sand, in the sky
-- It's nothing to fear,
The old architect cries
But not quite like the seagull,
Who knows the higher mind
In the wrap of kelp.

A photographer strains
Against her bloodline
To capture what is,
A sunset, to share with
The world, what is not.

The trash rolls up
On the obstinate terns
Shrieking their victimhood
At what is not natural law,
Though its rules were observed
To the letter.

They can choose to survive
On the barrenest beach
Or fly further, holding the will
Of the manipulator
In opposition, never to use
The key to get out
Of the prison, thus,

Accepting the rules
Cos they must,
And maybe, if fate
Is sweet, to shape
A twisted pearl
Of hatred, that will
Stand for eons
As a beacon of truth,
Worth sacrificing for.

Rooster Redux

I wish you a dream as real as mine

So strong we could call it the same

And sense in the bread of each other’s minds

Something to share and to claim.

But all you can hear is my fear for you

How you can’t know the peace I can see

And none of my longing can ever get through

For the chains on your dream to break free.

There’s no you in me, as there is none in you

But there is how you feel, what you know,

And that is what love is, to enter that, true,

Without any vestige of shadow,

And if it is cracked, to wish for repair,

Knowing I can’t, knowing it’s damned

To want that, or to pass you like thunder

Even though that is what I am.

Dog Beach, New Year's Day

Notes elope
Not self
Not one

White grass
Not spirit
Not world

But the muzzles
Are equitable
In the gallop

Of social graces
Across the mirrored
Sheet of sun

Art ... Descending

Our rubber-toed soles are holes,

The sandpiper tracks a language.

They surf the ridges

To the envelope's edge.

They know their invisible flight lines.
Our eyes are helpless to the setting sun.

They won't stop their hieroglyphic tread
For anything but wave fold,

For the truth of alphabets holds
But a moment.

We see the water's baby blue
Long after the red ball dissolves.

Hope and Low Tide

Waves like stairs
Widening like a bow
To some target in the warp of ocean blue
An equation on a shivering graph
That maybe someday will explain
The Sunday feast for seabirds
On the plateaued glass beyond

Glitch

The smoke on the hills defies
The words we use at a distance —
The fire never knows its cruelty.
The skyview forces a remove.
The truth
Is always invisible.

Chemset Left Unrecorded

When you read a poem a second time
It's a different poem
Because you forget where you've lived before

Though the tracks are entrained
With experience's trance.
It is for some other pupil.

Our eyes hold such light
For the lords of our ways,
What we call unrecoverable.

Poem with Saxophone

People try so hard to make it through the day,

Listless sheets of feeling, like stains along the road,

The heart would break for every face if you let it,

The unreachable, individual madnesses,

The brave in not knowing, the strong in being wrong,

Forbearing themselves without forgiveness,
Wanting others without a way to trust,

Sensing mercy in the turning of machines,

Chasing information, in a mess of tossed-off messages, 
Like the sniff of cheese, with the will to twist
The surface noise to meaning. The fountains bubble,
As if to tell the story, but they drown in moving engines
To become a larger structure, clattering with patterns,

Something for the palm fronds to comprehend

And for the sun to finger through mesquite
A tune, what lantana blows to blue agave hands. 

After-Breakfast Back Yard

The clouds want to pick a fight. The light
on the stone taunts me to make of it
what I can. The black peppers glisten
with intent, decline to respond.

I try my hand at meaning,
imagine a discourse, hold what's heard
in the drape of my shadow.
The indifference is not unkind.

It's different with those who, prompted too
by inarticulate force, slop blessings from
bowl to bowl with remorse, for they need
to think of what is not as what is.

Tower Without Workers

The bars across the sky are your prison.
Unresponsive eyes guard your thoughts
From extending past your expanse of breath.
There are no words that are yours anymore
— The books now read "Property Of ..." and say you're wrong.

It's as if you've woken up
In a cottage on an endless field.
This is freedom — unyielding and cold.
How unappealing the evening heaven sky seems.
How easily everything burns.

You must turn away
For the fire inside your being,
Leave the alluvial shores behind
To where there's only the One,
A club that only the unescorted can join.

Talisman

Imagination is the truth beyond
           appearance that seeps through,
Dispatches from intelligent light.

Can't we hold it in our hands
          the way we'd cradle an idol,
Make it glow its emptiness away?

A Clear October Evening

The only ghost I see
          is my own reflection in the glass,
Which doesn't look like it could ever be real
          much less hold some key to nether worlds
Folded like cards into air

The night construction crew beyond the glass
          looks slightly less likely to
Disappear at any moment, though it does

But still the pull of the unseen
          calls through the lamp-lit boughs,
These bodies moving down the ramp
          must have something pulling them through,
A force to feed the stream or move the leaves

The past's crouched like a tiger
          in an empty field
Although you can't see that either

MacArthur Park Morning

Here's to the wounded ones
That the world moves too quickly to heal,
Who wait in line for the liquor store to open
Or break bottles on the concrete
Because the screaming's never loud enough,
Who travel the ring of hotels like feeder suburbs
To the pure rolling hills of sleeping sacks
And backpacks near and ready
Trying to be still.

There's nothing in this for them but pain
And the ways they can widen the sensation
To make it not hurt.
Human debris roll like logo-wrappered tumbleweed
As if they've never been sampled at all
Just moved from rejection to rejection
To a home where their plans don't have to make sense
And the geese in the pond forgive them
And the bars on the men's room aren't locked.

O love that drops from the sky
That I can be unworthy of the ones
Who've fallen so completely.
What a waste my life has been.

Vers Gnostique

What misdirects us is our need to know,
The only thing concealed by glaring sun,
Blinding paths illumined like blue runways,

For in the "not for us to know"
Lies the thing the whole grieves over,
What was lost on our way to here

And is not recoverable
Unless it was never real at all;
That's the way most grieving is.

Blackpatch Implications

I would deliver autumn's grapes to you
But fall is somewhere else
And so the force I would assume,
Your source for transformation,
Exists as perverse myth alone,
That's how quickly I turn
From steward into threat:
A sky that is not spoken for
Must not exist.

I was not content to have touched the garment
That glowed with how the greatest shame
Came with the greatest ecstasy;
I saw the weave as in fragrant sun
And found the words that stepped into others
But it was the thing not what it captured
I couldn't bear not to have,
The voice from another realm
Was not enough to merely hear.

A child, they said, can't think immortal thoughts,
The Gods are to be worshiped not adored,
And finally they stood apart, like toys too high
Holding back their joy as we rode the dirt
And became in coldness of distance a flame
Nursing the veils of our feeling
And all I could do was to turn to the light
With everyone else, and see in the faces
The thing that they lacked, the memory
Of what was lost.

Waking Up In Catalina

When I see myself in the Avalon Ballroom

It’s always 1936

And I am gloriously pearled,

On a champagne baron’s arm –

That’s the way it always is,

The present light is stolen

Like the tickets of dead invitees

For more detail in the tapestry

Where eyes become one gaze,

Worthy,

Not unlike these murals

Restored against the forgetting salt

With garish colors and distended forms,

What was never celebrated,

As if that’s all there was.

The real lies buried, never recoverable

Even in the moment it was alive,

And the light is only in the other

So we conjure a glow around the shadow

To madly reflect an outline in abstentia,

For shadows always hang on the goldenest fruit

And what they told us of this striving world

Was never true,

The impoverished were really holy

As the famous were cursed

But there were no lies to yearning eyes, we believed

In a purpose, in a value to life,

As cold and uncertain as that role made us feel

We were hungry to share a dispensation

That labors partook of the Gods

And not just the lots of the fallen

Bequeathed so we could learn together

The horrors we were capable of

As well as the wisdom

So far away

That deigns sometimes to buzz through our bones.

That is the diamond we want to steal,

The firefly in the Skippy jar,

It exists here and here – moving from body

To body – let’s give it a name and a plot,

As if what disappears

Could conquer, at least in mortal hearts,

The structures where the damned reside,

What we call heaven, in the moments

When the present melts

And ghosts assume a nostalgic glow

And there’s nothing outside the window but shapes

Of what we allowed ourselves not to be.