Slow News Day

"We will never again be under their control.” – Q, 7/25/18

Fiji folded, Europe blinked, Facebook naked took a chin,

The bankers capitulated without saying a thing,

The long-awaited trials can begin.

Even the President glints some ring

Instead of the ass he usually lets us see

As he stanched the traffic in blood through Long Beach,

Dismantled clown caves from a triggering breach,

Offered the blackmailed a chance to be free

From bloodlines that report up to star frequencies.

Peace is a weapon when war is the prize

In islands offshore where on children they dine

And supplies now are low on ceremonial wine

And their symbols can't save them, known now to the wise,

And no one senses their fear. The sun on the rise

Won’t betray the game played among spies.

It goes on without need of us hearing the cries

Or knowing the crimes of those we trusted

Or even our own minds, daily crop dusted

‘Til our efforts fed death and division, envy and lack,

As if our desire is to smile as we pull the clip back.

How will we know that it’s safe to be free?

When do they tell the country,

When so many people scream in their sleep

And the sentries awake still so lonely?

So long we have waited for what we had already,

The chains on all we see unsheathed finally.

The eyes of those who see are enough I guess;

Universes were created from less.

On Q's Reference to Revelations

The corporeal trees are

Equally non-corporeal

Such a simple thing

For those who see

So hard when it’s a matter 

Of belief

The tool of the spy

Is your mind

How it only perceives

What it wants to believe

And what it believes in

Is others

Who know of the trap doors

The guises and plays

And can guide it to

Somewhere that’s safe

Where one can evince

At the evil in man

To the face of a member

Of a different clan

And feel that the truth

Is in hand

What kind of lamb

Stands above them

Prodding them on

Like rocks?

The shepherds have pilfered

Their flocks so long

No one expects anything

Anymore from God

Just a well-deserved

Spare of the rod

But the world has ended

Only to begin

The kept reptiles of

The Vatican

Can’t pour enough concrete

To erase the bones

The theorists of an end

Must dip into the fund

Of infinite debt

To make ends meet

And now the light

By which we read

The palpable word

And its no-longer mysteries

Will play on the eyelids

Of those who sleep

And the mind that can be freed

Can wander freely

Where the visible

Can be seen

And the formerly real

Can be allowed to be invisible

The chimeras we spent

Our frequencies chasing

Turn out to be no different from

The rituals of the mighty

It's kingdoms for a story

To believe in

The only problem

We want to know the end

So badly we forget

In the waiting is the meaning

Odes by Hölderlin: The Poet’s Vocation

The banks of the Ganges heard the joy of God

Triumph, as from the Indus came the highest

Supreme, the young Bacchus, with healing

Wines to awaken the peoples from sleep.

And you, the angel of the day, do not wake

Those who are still in slumber? Give us laws, give

Us life, prevail, master, but you have

Only the right, like Bacchus, to conquer.

Notwithstanding what is mankind's skill and woe

Inside the home and under the open sky,

Man, nobler because he’s prey, fights back

And feeds himself, an equal kind of woe

To that entrusted to the care of writing

Poems! We’re suitable to the highest one

By bringing Him closer, ever new

In song, and heard in the welcoming heart.

Yet nevertheless, O you heavenly all,

And all your sources and your shores and groves and

Wonderful plateaus, where first the curls

Caught hold, and the unforgettable came

Upon us in its unexpected genius,

The creative, the divine, that silently

Became sense to us and, as of a

Radiance stirred, the skeleton trembled …

His unsettled actions in a wider world!

His fated day, his severing, when the god

Of quiet beginnings directs where

The gigantic, drunk with rage steed brings him,

We should not tell him, and if, from the steady

Stillness of the year, in us melodies sound,

That's what they’re for, to echo how brave

And futile is the child of the masters.

Are the pure, consecrated chords touched in jest?

And that's why you have, belonging to you, poet,

The Asian prophets and the Greek songs

And have newly heard the thunder, so does

Spirit require the service of your presence

To rush to the good, in ridicule, and to

Disavow the stupid, heartlessly,

And herd the hunted in a venal game?

Until you recall, goaded by the sting of

The original fury, and cry, and call

The master, before you’re called under

Overgrown death, lifeless you will be left.

The divine has been subservient too long,

And all heaven’s powers used up, thrown away

By the gentle, with desire but

Without thanks from the sly, who think they know,

When the more sublime is formed upon their fields,

The daylight and the thunderer, and who peer

Through the telescope and count only

The stars they’ve given names to in the sky.

But the Father blankets with a holier

Night, so that we might want to keep closed our eyes.

He does not love beasts, but never forces

The far-reaching violence of heaven.

Still it’s good to be too wise. He knows your thanks.

But He does not keep it easily alone,

He gladly returns it, so you’ll know

Help, to another Himself a poet.

Alone before God, man remains unafraid,

Such that He must protect their simplicity.

He needs neither weapons nor deceit,

As His absence for so long will sustain.

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

Dichterberuf

Des Ganges Ufer hörten des Freudengotts

Triumph, als allerobernd vom Indus her

Der junge Bacchus kam, mit heilgem

Weine vom Schlafe die Völker weckend.

Und du, des Tages Engel! erweckst sie nicht,

Die jetzt noch schlafen? gib die Gesetze, gib

Uns Leben, siege, Meister, du nur

Hast der Eroberung Recht, wie Bacchus.

Nicht, was wohl sonst des Menschen Geschick und Sorg

Im Haus und unter offenem Himmel ist,

Wenn edler, denn das Wild, der Mann sich

Wehret und nährt! denn es gilt ein anders,

Zu Sorg und Dienst den Dichtenden anvertraut!

Der Höchste, der ists, dem wir geeignet sind,

Daß näher, immerneu besungen

Ihn die befreundete Brust vernehme.

Und dennoch, o ihr Himmlischen all, und all

Ihr Quellen und ihr Ufer und Hain' und Höhn,

Wo wunderbar zuerst, als du die

Locken ergriffen, und unvergeßlich

Der unverhoffte Genius über uns

Der schöpferische, göttliche kam, daß stumm[47]

Der Sinn uns ward und, wie vom

Strahle gerührt, das Gebein erbebte,

Ihr ruhelosen Taten in weiter Welt!

Ihr Schicksalstag', ihr reißenden, wenn der Gott

Stillsinnend lenkt, wohin zorntrunken

Ihn die gigantischen Rosse bringen,

Euch sollten wir verschweigen, und wenn in uns

Vom stetigstillen Jahre der Wohllaut tönt,

So sollt es klingen, gleich als hätte

Mutig und müßig ein Kind des Meisters

Geweihte, reine Saiten im Scherz gerührt?

Und darum hast du, Dichter! des Orients

Propheten und den Griechensang und

Neulich die Donner gehört, damit du

Den Geist zu Diensten brauchst und die Gegenwart

Des Guten übereilest, in Spott, und den Albernen

Verleugnest, herzlos, und zum Spiele

Feil, wie gefangenes Wild, ihn treibest?

Bis aufgereizt vom Stachel im Grimme der

Des Ursprungs sich erinnert und ruft, daß selbst

Der Meister kommt, dann unter heißen

Todesgeschossen entseelt dich lässet.

Zu lang ist alles Göttliche dienstbar schon

Und alle Himmelskräfte verscherzt, verbraucht

Die Gütigen, zur Lust, danklos, ein

Schlaues Geschlecht und zu kennen wähnt es,

Wenn ihnen der Erhabne den Acker baut,

Das Tagslicht und den Donnerer, und es späht

Das Sehrohr wohl sie all und zählt und

Nennet mit Namen des Himmels Sterne.

Der Vater aber decket mit heilger Nacht,

Damit wir bleiben mögen, die Augen zu.

Nicht liebt er Wildes! Doch es zwinget

Nimmer die weite Gewalt den Himmel.

Noch ists auch gut, zu weise zu sein. Ihn kennt

Der Dank. Doch nicht behält er es leicht allein,

Und gern gesellt, damit verstehn sie

Helfen, zu anderen sich ein Dichter.

Furchtlos bleibt aber, so er es muß, der Mann

Einsam vor Gott, es schützet die Einfalt ihn,

Und keiner Waffen brauchts und keiner

Listen, so lange, bis Gottes Fehl hilft.

The Day the Cheek Didn't Turn

Good always loses
          because it only has one side,
                    the truth that needs no defense.
Evil needs the dual,
          the invisible mirror, the forking line,
                    to show that you are not who you pretend,

That you are no different, in fact,
          than your enemy, who
                    loves you just the same,
And compels you with those petty
          deceptions of the partisan
                    to prove him wrong

Instead of tending, say, your garden,
         but you can never prove him wrong,
                    there are no words to save him
From hurting other people for an idea,
         diminishing the mind for a cause, throwing
                    truth on a bonfire if it promises justice.

The light dissolves all temporary things,
         makes poetry manifest.
                    To walk to it, can you turn away
From the glare, the not yet said,
         the victim in the shadows helpless
                    and needing to be wrong? 

Ocean and Poppy

Tide blooms embossed in rocks ...
Exploration as a recollect,
The rose scent wind recalls
Another coast, another age ...

Cave bells can conjure
Any mysterious witch.
The sea that seizes
Seems universal.

To let go of this nostalgia
Is to find what little there is,
To be cataloged
For spellbound eyes,

While beachcombers keep theirs peeled
For what is new,
The eternally recurring
Crab.

Stevens Textplication #43: Floral Decoration for Bananas

Let’s get one thing straight before we begin: Floral decorations with bananas, as shown in the picture above, are ridiculous. Faced with this, how can our refined flaneur transcend such an ennui-generating presentation? One could righteously and humorously complain about the total breach of aesthetic protocol, something that would make life more rich in that moment, or one could elect the approach Stevens took, mine the situation for as much symbolic and intellectual material as possible, thereby creating a work of art that is still thought about 95 years later. Here it is:

  Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do.

               These insolent, linear peels

               And sullen, hurricane shapes

               Won't do with your eglantine.

               They require something serpentine.

               Blunt yellow in such a room!

               You should have had plums tonight,

               In an eighteenth-century dish,

  And pettifogging buds,

               For the women of primrose and purl

               Each one in her decent curl.

               Good God! What a precious light!

               But bananas hacked and hunched....

               The table was set by an ogre,

               His eye on an outdoor gloom

               And a stiff and noxious place.

  Pile the bananas on planks.

  The women will be all shanks

  And bangles and slatted eyes.

  And deck the bananas in leaves

               Plucked from the Carib trees

               Fibrous and dangling down,

               Oozing cantankerous gum

               Out of their purple maws,

               Darting out of their purple craws

               Their musky and tingling tongues.

The poem is crystal clear by Stevens’ standards, a few exotic words, ambiguous phrases and irregular rhyme schemes aside. The speaker is a comic guide in the proper table etiquette. He explains in stanza one what’s wrong with the setting, in stanza two what a proper floral decoration with eglantine (sweet briar rose) would look like, in stanza three why the banana decoration is so detrimental to harmonious relations, and in stanza four – with precise detail – how a banana should properly be presented.   

What lifts it beyond this surface, of course, is the rich suggestiveness the poet brings to the discussion. It’s clear from the start that, with apologies to Freud, sometimes a banana is more than a banana. Poems about sex by great, long-dead poets are somewhat analogous to the thought of sexual relations between one’s parents, but sexual torment practically screams at the reader from the outset. Even the use of the archaic term “nuncle” (meaning uncle) calls to mind how the fool addressed King Lear by this term when talking of perverted things:

LEAR: When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?

FOOL: I have used it, nuncle, ever since thou madest thy daughters thy mothers. For when thou gavest them the rod, and put’st down thine own breeches (sings) Then they for sudden joy did weep / And I for sorrow sung, / That such a king should play bo-peep / And go the fools among. Prithee, nuncle, keep a schoolmaster that can teach thy fool to lie. I would fain learn to lie. 

LEAR: An you lie, sirrah, we’ll have you whipped.

As the fool tells the truth to the king of his own debasement, so the speaker reveals how the emperor has no clothes when it comes to the placing of phallic objects (“linear … blunt”) in the midst of femininity. The speaker prefers the sexually charged alternative of “plums … buds … (pink) primrose … curl” as if female sexuality should not have a male involved at all. “Bananas hacked and hunched… stiff … noxious” forces women to be “shanks … bangles ... slatted eyes”, almost an exact description of a hand job. Instead, bananas, like the forbidden fruit in Eden, should be covered in leaves. But that leads to the even more suggestive reveal – in an exact description of a banana tree – of “cantankerous (cankerous?) gum … oozing … out of purple maws,” where “purple craws” have “musky and tingling tongues.” One way of parsing this soft-core porn poetry is to say: If the male sexual organ is to be so prominently displayed, so should the female genitalia.

In the sexual reading of this poem, stanza one shows the “insolent” and “sullen” male desire, “blunt yellow” (erect) instead of “serpentine” (flaccid). Stanza two shows female desire, dressed and prissily prepared but only “precious light,” something only to look at that is somehow false in the artificiality of its expression. Stanza three presents a “bunch” of men, like sailors from a “plank” having to be rudely serviced by women/prostitutes, as opposed to, in stanza four, letting the natural coupling of male and female occur, however garish it might appear.  

Such a seemingly straightforward account of the differences in male and female sexual response would have had to be disguised behind a socially acceptable cover (a table decoration, for example) to be discerned in the more puritanical times in which it was written. One would think this reading would be more readily embraced today, when sexuality is frankly and openly discussed. Ironically, however, contemporary critics view this poem’s view of sex as very complex and problematic, mostly because this age no longer protects women’s power with modesty but by calling attention to the imbalance in the relative power positions of men and women. The viewpoint that patriarchal privilege fundamentally oppresses and controls women has to dismiss as a theoretical possibility the extraordinary sexual power women have had over men throughout history. Thus the common sense suggestions in the poem – so daring in its day – are largely viewed from today’s lens as nonsensical.

Less nonsensical – but even more offensive to today's tastes – is the idea that the speaker is gay. The poem indeed can be read as a caricature of the gay fusspot hypersensitive to even the smallest violations of taste. That the disgust ("an ogre") resolves naturally to a condemnation of heterosexual relationships in general seems less than coincidental. Better to leave the bananas alone to themselves! 

If this line of thinking makes you squeamish, fortunately there are other readings available. The poem, in fact, is a good example of the open-ended way Stevens used symbols. Bananas can be read in artistic, political and even spiritual terms, in the same suggestive but non-dogmatic way they can be read as a sexual drama.

Eleanor Cook put it rightly, “this is another Stevens poem on how the tropics affect someone from a northern temperate zone.” Stevens however isn’t content with mere contrast. He uses the strange primitivism of the tropics to signify the exotic core of modern art, a subject Stevens and others felt compelled to explore, as it represented a new way of expressing and thinking about art. Bananas, like the African and Asian motifs that inspired the modernists to reinvent traditional Western forms, co-exist uneasily with an antithetical (“eighteenth century”) tradition. The starkness, crudity and dynamism of modern methods, in fact, can come to dominate the aesthetic landscape, as they undoubtedly did in all the arts, from African American blues forms to the simple lines of the International architectural style. Their “musky and tingling tongues” denote a more natural and powerful language of expression than the strict meters and straightened subject matter of pre-war poems. The point, to Stevens, is not to make them “fit” the old, but to make space for the new in a more supportive environment (like the revolutionary Measure little magazine in which this poem was first published).

   

If this is too hypothetical for your taste, bananas can also be used to provide trenchant political commentary. The term “banana republic” was coined by O. Henry around the turn of the century to capture the abuse the colonies had endured at the hands of white exploiters. Bananas became a commercial product almost accidentally. In 1871 – eight years before Stevens was born – American businessman Minor C. Keith was given a rich land-holding opportunity in Costa Rica if he could do what no one had been able to accomplish to that point, build a railroad line from the coffee growing regions to the Caribbean port of Limon. He accomplished this, in part, by growing bananas on the side of the tracks to feed the workers. He also included bananas with the coffee he eventually exported, and it became an instant sensation, becoming one of the dominant commercial crops of Stevens’ times. Unfortunately for the native populations, technically savvy entrepreneurs like Keith had negotiated extravagant deals with the poor host countries that kept banana workers living under abject conditions, without any power to compete, to the point where companies like United Fruit (where Keith’s interests were later merged) essentially ran the countries. Increasing awareness of this social injustice was like the unwelcome guest to the well-made American table, which was by and large trying to imitate European models and spoke a language of equal rights and democracy (except where Jim Crow was concerned). Bananas intrude on such a fragile comity by reminding people of the violence and injustice used to bring such pleasures to the American people. Once the injustice is known, the people become, as the poem rolls on, complicit, no better than the harsh banana traders and dehumanized workers, becoming the “purple craw” of a primitive society trying to scream out its enslavement.

If this is too strident for you, you could look at bananas as the original fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, as the Koran proposes, or the secret to fecundity, as the Hindu religion believes. We resist them in our civilized denials, but must ultimately accede to their primal truth.

There are many interpretative possibilities here, all created by the contrast between the simple facts depicted and the emotionally charged rendering. How could bananas cause such consternation? Why would table decorations be such a matter of good and evil? It comes down to the poetic urge, which seeks to express the largeness of emotion hovering just above the surface. Such emotion may be, as in this case, comically false as to the details at hand, but it opens up an uncomfortable truth all around the facts that cannot be so easily suppressed.

Stevens, who wrote this poem as he was preparing his first book for publication, was almost explicitly pointing to a larger and richer interpretative field with which to view his work, and the work of all poets.

Objectification and its Discontents

There is me

And there are billions

Of little me’s

Looking in, judging,

Seeing how I relate

To them.

Do I provide

A story they can steal,

That has what they need

To tell about themselves,

Like an offering of bread?

Or will they, seeing

My kind, knowing eyes,

Want to talk to me themselves,

Share their stories, dreams and

Overheard facts and data?

I can’t see how

The me that’s here

Cannot but be dissolved

By the me out there.

Will they keep me

Next to their hearts

Like a long-lost amour

Or a campaign pin?

Will they quote me

As an authority

Or as a soft place

To help others land?

Will they take my name in vain

When toiling in the fields

And growing every moment

More angry at the commands?

It seems, in contrast,

My lot is to be ignored,

As if I am a scraping leaf,

Nothing in it for them

Of use,

Except perhaps

For maybe a poem,

About the words that

Seem to come forth

From the trees.

When the Town Turns Gray

It could slip, in an instant, from your grasp

Because it wasn’t real to begin with,

All those things you thought your worry and

Work had earned: game tokens!

At some point there are no more other people,

There is only the you that you can never see.

You’re not even an extra in your movie like Stan Lee

But a theory, like Duality or Mercy.

There are patterns to investigate, yes,

Where the rules are less concealed:

The same number twice in one day,

Two cars that cut in front of you the same way

Are the guns in act one to be fired in act three.

Aren’t you curious how the story will end?

Or are the decisions of the moment too momentous

To have faith in any conclusion?

Always the past and what it should have been

Acting as if now is finally its time,

And always the pieces that move to the future by themselves

In the only way hindsight can justify.

At last you’re on the path, you say, to vindication,

And can reconcile God with your lot.

But the player of your role doesn’t know you,

Or even realize you exist, much less 

Your unshakeable need to have a reason

When there is only sun and wind as evidence of a mind

And the auteur of the film is invisible amid the

Gaffing umbrellas, bust of Abraham Lincoln and such.

These are the things to talk to, to express what you know 

In a safe zone, with no hidden cameras

Or script doctors needing to be right, 

Where you might be noticed in fact 

By surrogates at least, if not the real empressario 

Lurking behind your eyes.

Still Life with Pathos

Bonfires at the pink hour
As the white sun drops purple from the clouds,
Gulls tiptoe the shore,
Another day of trickery done.

At each drape of wave another one
Digs at bubbles with an orange beak
To swallow crabs whole along the ribbons of suds.
Scrappy and heartless, feathers ruffled
By the wind, they shine in molten light
Feathers of surf bring in.

There are always others watching,
They mill around atop the rise
As if outside a bar, waiting for trouble
To reveal itself in one of its many guises,
Heartless their black eyes below the thick
Marine conspiratorial clouds.

Some beige and white outcasts forage for sand fleas
Around the uninterpretable scrapings of humans,
They appear to be starving, poor heartless things,
As they drop balls of kelp like hair ties loosened
By a woman too full of desire and irritation
Thoughtlessly, its rat tail snaking across
The fabric of sand, as if to be returned.

The gulls have perfected walking
As their preferred communication
But are quick as razors to lift away
From any asks in gusts of black formations
That glide below the peach translucence
Shining through the ocean greys.

Heartless, they put it all on you
As usual, the one who shows compassion,
The plastic bag taken elicits shrieks
Of heartbroken accusation,
Their creaking rasps so strong
It reminds you how you agreed
Long ago to take this on,
To bear a thankless karma
That seemed somebody else's
Without a hesitation,
Not knowing what it would feel like
To see the painful trudging
To some impossible goal, unaware of
Who they are or what they are doing.
You only knew there was something
In it for you, to learn.

Odes by Hölderlin: Sung under the Alps

Holy Innocence, you the most intimate

Loved one of the people and Gods! You like them

Seated before your feet, out of doors or at

                                            Home, the ancient one,

Full of imperturbable wisdom; in some

Things man knows what is good, but is astonished,

This wild peer, even to the sky, how clean, pure

                                            All things are to you!

Look! The rough animal of the field gladly

Serves and trusts, the tongueless forest speaks to you,

As if still in the ancient days, its sayings

                                           To teach the mountains

Your holy laws, and what even now to us,

Who have learned so much, is obvious, when you’re

Called the great father you can brightly proclaim

                                           To us by yourself.

To be alone so with the heavenly, and

Look beyond the light, and stream and wind, and time

A constant rushes to the scene before them,

                                           To possess an eye,

I’m blessed to know and wish for nothing, so long

As I’m not taken, like a field, by the flood,

That I will be well taken care of, lazy

                                           Sleeping in the waves;

But there remains at home, she who gladly holds

The divine in her loyal breasts, to be free

To sing, as long as I’m allowed, all her tongues

                                           Of heaven to you!  

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Unter den Alpen gesungen

Heilige Unschuld, du der Menschen und der

Götter liebste vertrauteste! du magst im

Hause oder draußen ihnen zu Füßen

                                           Sitzen, den Alten,

Immerzufriedner Weisheit voll; denn manches

Gute kennet der Mann, doch staunet er, dem

Wild gleich, oft zum Himmel, aber wie rein ist,

                                           Reine, dir alles!

Siehe! das rauhe Tier des Feldes, gerne

Dient und trauet es dir, der stumme Wald spricht

Wie vor alters, seine Sprüche zu dir, es

                                          Lehren die Berge

Heilge Gesetze dich, und was noch jetzt uns

Vielerfahrenen offenbar der große

Vater werden heißt, du darfst es allein uns

                                          Helle verkünden.

So mit den Himmlischen allein zu sein, und

Geht vorüber das Licht, und Strom und Wind, und

Zeit eilt hin zum Ort, vor ihnen ein stetes

                                         Auge zu haben,

Seliger weiß und wünsch ich nichts, so lange

Nicht auch mich, wie die Weide, fort die Flut nimmt,

Daß wohl aufgehoben, schlafend dahin ich

                                         Muß in den Wogen;

Aber es bleibt daheim gern, wer in treuem

Busen Göttliches hält, und frei will ich, so

Lang ich darf, euch all, ihr Sprachen des Himmels!

                                        Deuten und singen.

Forbidden Beauty in Huntington Beach

Why does poverty shine so brightly down every street,

Screaming “pay attention to me” with blue balloons

And 50’s finery, some weeds in parking cracks

If one is lucky? The rusted bus stops with sun-bleached

Canopies, where shopping bags hang swaying in the breeze,

Are all one can bear not to see, and the carts parked

Too easily at Blue Wave Liquor across the street, next to

The pet cemetery that’s been there forever, and a vacant

Field for lease. It’s not the rot and mildew one has to

Attend to soon, in the cool drive through this clean and sunny

Boulevard, that’s even cleaner and even sunnier

Than the one’s one used to know, when one still thought

About the homeless under cottonwoods, and the

Hammered scraps of planks and boards  

High up the neighbor’s tree, not fit to be a crow’s nest,

Instead a squatter’s flag, that advertises, in the quiet

Smirk of green, the maw of what was never said,

The forbidden beauty of want on which one could not

Look away.

End of Day in Canyon Park

The residents pretend there are no people here.

Birds whistle to be heard above

The sirens and the floating children cries,

To be heard at all, with the hiss of acacia,

The whispering oaks: So much to say,

So little told. The moments pass too quickly

Not to be remembered continually

To swirls of wind that lift the leaves already lost,

As if what hadn’t yet been said was too sacred

To allow a past at all.

Still the giant lifeless fronds hang down

Ominous and golden like they own the place,

And their brown blades on the ground

Release the green to be taken by the sun,

Leaving summer’s dead, the unholy ones,

To bask in piles of dust.

Stevens Textplication #42: Stars at Tallapoosa

The May 31, 1890 issue of Scientific American featured the small town of Tallapoosa, Georgia on its cover. This tiny hamlet, located on the then-main railroad line between New York and the South, had a bright future according to the journal, due to the modernization industrialization had wrought. Stevens undoubtedly rode that same rail route in his travels through the South settling business insurance claims, and almost assuredly spent enough time in this poetic-sounding locale to gaze up at night skies still presumably unobstructed by the lights wrought by the same industrialization.

One may even speculate this laudatory article may have been left in the depot as late as 1922 (when this poem was written) for waiting business travelers by an enterprising Chamber of Commerce to showcase the progress the town was making (and to this day has yet to realize). For the adjacent story in the issue was “Position of the Planets for June.” This is just the type of non-linear combination of topics that could spark a frisson in our enterprising poet, and result in a meditation on the relationship between the fixed stars and ever-industrious humans. 

The poetic meditation in question follows:

The lines are straight and swift between the stars.

The night is not the cradle that they cry,

The criers, undulating the deep-oceaned phrase.

The lines are much too dark and much too sharp.

The mind herein attains simplicity,

There is no moon, no single, silvered leaf.

The body is no body to be seen

But is an eye that studies its black lid.

Let these be your delight, secretive hunter,

Wading the sea-lines, moist and ever-mingling,

Mounting the earth-lines, long and lax, lethargic.

These lines are swift and fall without diverging.

The melon-flower nor dew nor web of either

Is like to these.  But in yourself is like:

A sheaf of brilliant arrows flying straight,

Flying and falling straightway for their pleasure,

Their pleasure that is all bright-edged and cold;

Or, if not arrows, then the nimblest motions,

Making recoveries of young nakedness

And the lost vehemence the midnights hold.

The poem opens with a sharp demarcation between the stars and humans. “The lines are straight and swift between the stars” refers to the common experience of stargazers, who can almost literally see the mythical facsimiles of lions, crabs, etc. outline the constellations. It’s easy, in other words, to see an order in the night sky, even a higher astrological purpose. The heavens, however, have limited impact on humans because the earth is our home: “The night is not the cradle that they cry.” Double meanings here for the words “cradle” and “cry” suggest both “the stars are not the protective crib where we express our deep emotion” (such as making poems?) and “the stars are not the originary force we declare them to be.” For we, “the criers,” can only express ourselves under the limitations imposed upon us by our earthly home, “undulating the deep-oceaned phrase.” Thus our relationship to the stars (and by extension God and the heavens) remains vague and fanciful, however awestruck we feel and however thoroughly the celestial bodies have been mapped out by the ancients: “The lines are much too dark and much too sharp.”

“Herein” (in this earthly location) “the mind … attains simplicity.” This is a clever reversal of the normal assumption that abstract reasoning – the ability to link seemingly disparate phenomena into a coherent essence that can be categorized as a whole – is a higher mental function. Instead, it is human’s inability to do this – through being aligned to the earth and its multiplicitous manifestations – that is the higher attainment. Thus, “there is no moon, no single, silvered leaf.” There are so many phases and appearances of the moon, and so many distinct appearances in all the illuminated branches in the forests that we can’t say it is one connected thing, as we would say of a cluster of galaxies, for example, that it is Canis Major. 

We can't even accurately perceive ourselves. “The (human) body” is not a celestial body we can see in the sky, in fact it can’t be seen at all since we are part of it. We are only the Emersonian “eye” that sees what’s around – or, rather, doesn’t see, but “studies its black lid.” As a night sky can be only faintly perceived, our “studies” of what is around us are limited by the fact that 1), we can only sense ourselves sensing, and 2), our eyes are closed, aka we are living in a dream. This idea of both waking and sleeping life as being equally a dream or illusion appears more definitively in the poem “Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion,” written about the same time.  

This inability of humans to perceive or conceive of their world should be a “delight,” somehow, to the “secretive hunter” introduced in the third stanza. There are actually two secretive hunters. This figure addressed as “you” is revealed to be Orion, one of the brightest constellations periodically passing through our night skies, known, because of its bow and arrow, as the hunter. There’s also the more earth-bound trapper of sustenance referred to as “these,” who, observed from starry heights, go “Wading the sea-lines, moist and ever-mingling,” an evocative picture of a fisherman breaking the ripples of the ocean, his encroaching wetness part of merging with the water.

Extending the description, the earth-bound hunter goes “Mounting the earth-lines, long and lax, lethargic.” In case one was wondering what the term “earth-lines” means, the poet helpfully supplies “long[itude]” and “lax[itude]” to indicate we are talking about the imaginary lines around the earth. “Mount” in this context suggests navigation – historically accomplished by tracking the stars – something that all hunters must eventually do.

“Lethargic” is a curious word here until one considers its Greek root of Lethe, the river of oblivion where the dead forget their earthly life on the way to the Underworld. From a distance, humans seem lethargic – like astronauts in space – because we wander around in forgetfulness, dreaming and misperceiving the world. “These lines are swift and fall without diverging.” The speaker speculates that the quickness, isolation and finality of human lives are what would make them such a delight to the higher being looking down on human affairs.

The next stanza clarifies the relationship. As poets and philosophers have noted from time immemorial, humans are inherently separate from the earth that imprisons them in its bounteous life (“the melon-flower … dew … web”). Nothing of nature is “like to these.” In contrast, humans are just like the mythological archer, “a sheaf of brilliant arrows flying straight,” aiming at truth for their Jovian pleasure. Unlike Orion’s cold and inaccessible lines to humans in the night skies, the real and imaginary lines humans make are something the observing hunter can genuinely relate to.

The poem progresses from alien stars and familiar earth to familiar stars and alien earth so subtly one can hardly notice the play of imaginative sympathy the speaker engages in to get there. Only by looking at humans coldly – from a star’s eye view – can the stars themselves warm up, and the connections between stars and humans be revealed.

The fifth and final stanza deepens the relationship further, to the point where the separate realms become interdependent. “Their pleasure,” that of humans, is also “all bright-edged and cold.” But, no, those aren’t actual arrows (for either side). The “nimblest motions” of humans are instead a drive to recover something of their starry home. What is recovered is described in a flash of poetry: “young nakedness / And the lost vehemence the midnights hold.” The midnights are where the constellations reside, with their almost human passions and drives, which they hold in continual, vehement expression.

The genius of this poem is to suggest the state of unattainable wisdom the stars possess is ultimately the same as the pure state of innocence (“young nakedness”) for which humans, far down the cosmic chain, are prized by the Gods. Humans seek both equally, caught in a nether world between the two, utterly unable to comprehend the simplest of facts about our place in the universe, that, as TS Eliot wrote, “in the beginning is the end.”

The key is the word “lethargy.” We have forgotten, and things like the imaginative transport of poetry help us at least to know we’ve forgotten, and to comfort us, as all great poetry does, from our loss.

This obscure little poem set in a small town covers a lot of ground, doesn’t it? How much can be made from a delay at the train station on a magical night.

Partisan Cinders

It’s like they believe in

what they know won't

exist,

filled like plastic

with gas so light

it makes them smile.

What they take to be true

no more than a cartoon

drawn on a nondescript wall.

That’s what visitors do,

find in every tchotchke

at the bazaar

some valence of meaning,

else they miss the place

entire.

What they must wear

as a scar to prove

they belong!

The yesses grow

from passive whispers

to paling roars

as no’s grown 

inside the heat

tumble against them in circles

turning like a whirlwind

of ever-veering, ever-

contending spin.

Something brings the question

of their purpose

to a boil.

They hear in every platitude

a response to

words they used

and injustice in

the indifference

that comes of not being heard.

Only an orphaned soul

can look until it sees 

what it wishes to be,

to take that much in,

just to will away the wisp

that contradicts.

And all to want,

sincerely want,

the other to be right,

to shake off the haze 

of unshared beliefs,

and not be belied 

by the mind

and its savory 

tongue,

so they can look once again 

on the blood-drenched streets

and see in it only beauty.

And I am referring,

of course, to me.

The Penalty for Being Wrong

That quick flick of hair … is a piece of the whole,

Each off-the-grid urge intrinsic to the thought.

Wanted: Mistakes, Perversions, Lies,

Perspectives that cancel each other out,

Oooh, those especially.

The God of large numbers uses them all

In his blindingly full calculations.

How can a mere singular know

What problem it resolves

Or what multiples it factors,

How it can be substituted or subtracted,

Or if it’s imaginary, virtual, abstract?

Our job is to fix things, His to spit on our fixes

As a cloud of polynomials spill out stochastic haze.

But a compiler of weights sits behind it …

We can stand for ourselves,

Or be different from what we represent,

And the formulas will reduce and adjust

And we’ll have made it all different somehow,

Though the code is so vast it’s impenetrable,

And the directive to calculate continues unabated,

Everything on every side systematically cancelled out.

Haunted Anniversary 2

The dust of the other floats like a feather.

What grandeur the unreal has.

All this time thinking that I was observed

When the blind eye that turned was mine.

Things stay on like surface smoke, cling to memory

To cloak what used to be with semblances of meaning,

For the mind strives valiantly to know the feeling

That is loss, that is emptiness, that is that that never was

But seemed to be. There must be some proof somewhere

That the love I felt was shared.

Is the record only shadows, the implacable loved

Still resisting her entombment as ideal?

So like the dead, she refuses to budge, says she must be

Who she is, only, a force of tangible flesh and moving blood …

As vaporous as clouds, in other words, like I must relive
In fading waves the day she disappeared.

Odes by Hölderlin: To Eduard

Second Version

Old friends overhead, of the eternal star,

Heroes, I ask you, how is it I am so

Subservient, subjected to him?

And thus I am called by the mighty one.

I cannot afford to forfeit much, only

A few things I can offer, my blessed fate,

Its single aim, to commemorate

Days in hindsight that were more abundant,

And this I would give, if he needed it, this

Other one, my chord would go where he willed

And follow with singing, brave even

To the end, when the dearest things go down.

"With clouds," I sang, "does the thunderstorm soak you,

Your dark ground is stained, but with the blood of man;

So silent he rests, as his equals

Above and below do, free of the charge.

Where is today’s symbol of love? Where does the

Heart speak? Where does it rest finally? And where

Does it turn true, what we, night and day,

Announced from a burning, long-ago dream?

It’s here, where the victims fall, dear ones, it’s here!

And the solemn train rolls! Already flashing

Its steel! Its clouds of steam! They fall and

Echo in the air and earth praises it!"

If so singing I fell, you’d avenge me then,

My Achilles, and say, "He lived thus, faithful

To the end!" The earnest word, it’s the

Judge of my enemy and of the dead!

Although you and I rest; still it rescues the

Wood, saves the mountains, is as earnest as you,

The maternal, still the one noble

Pupil who is held secure, the wisdom

That sings the old song of the cradle, it weaves

All around you, holy, dark, but see! The clouds

Blaze molten, ringing the distance from

The god of time’s admonitory flame.

The storm stirs up its wings for you, it calls you,

To take you up to the lord of the heroes;

O to take me too! With you! And bring

To him that smiling god, the easy prey!

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

An Eduard

Euch alten Freunde droben, unsterbliches

Gestirn, euch frag ich, Helden! woher es ist,

Daß ich so untertan ihm bin, und

So der Gewaltige sein mich nennet.

Nicht vieles kann ich bieten, nur weniges

Kann ich verlieren, aber ein liebes Glück,

Ein einziges, zum Angedenken

Reicherer Tage zurückgeblieben,

Und dies, so ers geböte, dies Eine noch,

Mein Saitenspiel, ich wagt es, wohin er wollt,

Und mit Gesange folgt ich, selbst ins

Ende der Tapfern, hinab dem Teuern.

»Mit Wolken«, säng ich, »tränkt das Gewitter dich,

Du dunkler Boden, aber mit Blut der Mensch;

So schweigt, so ruht er, der sein Gleiches

Droben und drunten umsonst erfragte.

Wo ist der Liebe Zeichen am Tag? wo spricht

Sich aus das Herz? wo ruhet es endlich? wo

Wirds wahr, was uns, bei Nacht und Tag, zu

Lange der glühende Traum verkündet?

Hier, wo die Opfer fallen, ihr Lieben, hier!

Und schon tritt hin der festliche Zug! schon blinkt

Der Stahl! die Wolke dampft! sie fallen und es

Hallt in der Luft und die Erde rühmt es! «

Wenn ich so singend fiele, dann rächtest du

Mich, mein Achill! und sprächest: »Er lebte doch

Treu bis zuletzt!« Das ernste Wort, das

Richtet mein Feind und der Totenrichter!

Zwar hab ich dich in Ruhe noch itzt; dich birgt

Der ernste Wald, es hält das Gebirge dich,

Das mütterliche, noch den edlen

Zögling in sicherem Arm, die Weisheit

Singt dir den alten Wiegengesang, sie webt

Ums Aug ihr heilig Dunkel, doch sieh! es flammt

Aus fernetönendem Gewölk die

Mahnende Flamme des Zeitengottes.

Es regt sein Sturm die Schwingen dir auf, dich ruft,

Dich nimmt der Herr der Helden hinauf; o nimm

Mich du! mit dir! und bringe sie dem

Lächelnden Gotte, die leichte Beute!

On the Overriding Importance of Meetings on the Left Coast

Here I am at the far shore

Where the gold retreats towards

The ocean called indifference.

I no more exist here than I did there,

But back east there was always the other

To say how there’s no evidence I exist

In a colorful range of drawls ...

There’s no such resistance to non-existence

Here, the desert just concocts mirage oases

Where blond figures stare right through me,

Muscle cars represent what is now only memory,

Wedding-cake white script whispers in neon

“Maybe”, the eternal maybe, the free and always lucent

Possibility …

Such as Crème Tangerine, a vinyl stand in an Airstream;

I’d stalk a DC week through unrelenting heat

To chase down tuneage so celestial 

And for weeks it would linger

Like evidence of heaven. Here it passes

Like bikinis on the beach, the daily red

Shoes on the yellow brick road of excess,

Beautifully false, perfectly meaningless,

Just tangible enough to keep away the ghosts,

Tenuous enough to peer right through …

You need to, the dream is too close

When there’s no waking up, when you know

That the dream can’t escape.

No longer the slow afternoon

Thinking how the mind, like a key,

Could one day turn.

American Sonnet From Your Past and Future Assassin

A response to Terrance Hayes

Every day you wake up to write

A brand new poem about white people,

How our problem is: we are white

But seem oblivious to that fact.

You call it the privilege of whiteness,

An easy assessment to make
When we’ve become, in your eyes, less than human.

I must become abstract for a rage so pure

It burns without need of a fuel.

You say you hate me. How can I reply

When whatever hatred I possess

Isn’t spread out like yours across

The Sunday supplements? My voice,

In fact, has been silenced by the mob,

And goes quiet when you decide to be free

With the truth and the motives of others.

There aren’t enough martyrs in your mirror

I guess, but there’s no sense in putting my face there

When it’s only the idea of yourself you despise,

The idea, you say, of America, that burns so strong

You can’t wait to set fire to the next belligerent

— Even the pretense of a trial is obscene.

But the fake Confederate flag you wave

And the KKK wannabe's you want to place in charge

Can’t save you now, for

We can hear the Mockingbird talking points

At 4 am from the Adrenochrome dens

Noosed up for you in a bow,

Have films of those you follow

Sawing off the face of a conscious child,

And know their plans for the mass extinction

Already so far along you can see it in the sky.

And we grieve how they've enslaved your mind,

Chattel for so long, a slavery you urge

To make perpetual, as natural as death

You say, or war, or division, a game to play

When there’s nothing at stake but the zero

Sum gain of the power we crave over others,  

What you call justice, of which, thankfully,

There is none here, only the opportunity

For healing. Like you, for example,

May have once strung up Negroes on trees,

As I might once have felt blessed

To have taken my master’s seed.

The life that it left for us is our lives today,

Glaring with fortuna’s cards across the table.

To eat your anger would be to destroy

My own. To embrace your suffering

Would mean I must forgive my own.

Here’s some black coffee in a china white cup.

Write another poem.

Mimosa Trees on South Arcadia

When I woke, the world was meaningless.

People laughed and grabbed at silences in space.

The pain that could be a real thing
Could never quite rise to exist.

The streets became abstract, something to extract
A feeling, without a practical purpose at all.

The passersby light as summer air just waited for
Another breeze to change who they are.

There was no trace of mind on the leaves or flowers.
They resisted even the sun and jostling wind.

All waters headed down.
This is what surrender looks like.

See how everything seems to play in a hidden field.
There is just no wanting it anymore.

This place is yours now, the blank you drew
So you can give birth to the actual.

The Happy War

There is a war of great happiness,
Where the women cup their breasts with flags,
Say "make war, not love,"
And build bonfires on the beach
As a prayer.

There is also a war in the public square,
Where colored shrapnel fills the sky with smoke
And the townsfolk with awe. They too smile,
Thinking of how the war lives and grows,
And they move together as toward battle.

There's another war in the neighborhood, where
Through the night explosions bloom in each backyard.
The families in chairs are glad invisible armies
Fight for the just cause. The side they themselves will take
Can be decided again tomorrow.

Solmar Verses X

Children carry mesquite branches to the highway.

Arches glow like pink history above the dark sky.
Storefronts capture silver dogs in the middle of their baying.
Under moonlight, the black swans never sleep.

So the lines bristle, in aquamarine stanzas
And the chaos of shore makes scavengers of all
Who are caught in Mexico’s Howling Coyote sun
When even the palms whisper “stay away.”

Life here consists of a yellow rope, where on one side
White-robed martyrs sell marionettes, Christian ornaments,
Sarongs batiked with skulls, twisting fish-lure bottle openers,
On the other side the drunks, who mimic their children’s shrieks of glee,

Helplessly, before the sun turns the sand prints into shadows,
The gimcracks into gold, each day, to the passing jet ski rhythm.
The joy of being lost, and floating, eventually becomes the same
As the joy of manta rays that leap in play, hovering and scudding,

And stilled by photos like the watercolors stilled Old Mexico
Like time that moves so slowly it doesn’t move at all –
It’s safer that way, to not leave that much of ourselves behind,
Only take what we never had, that scrub of land we call identity.

The philosophers who sit around the pool, proffering their sage
Elucidations on what is real and illusion aren’t heard
By those inside the pool, who can only detect
The raucous disruptions across its surface.

Neptune’s fishes work for Neptune, and the water that takes you
In takes you out, in the notes of the blue trumpet
On the blue veranda, which says something of the blue breeze,
But is drowned in the incessant shishing of the sea.

Solmar Verses IX

How could I possibly explain
Why I drink upside down,
Balance on the flute of one leg
And snuggle my head in the nether regions of my body?
The world out there is not so pretty,
Its mudflats, lagoons and mangrove trees
Are like shit to a lotus
Where I, to quote you humans, hide,
You who attribute my pink milk, egg and feathers
To the peculiarities of my diet,
As if you don't go crazy like a bovine at my rose.
But tell me why am I always adjusting my sticks of legs
To achieve some ineffable harmony?
How can my infinite curve of neck take my head in every direction
Yet I keep the same bittersweet expression?
And why, in a world of pink, are my eyes orange?

The truth is, I am hideous
And cursed to wander a place even uglier than me.
I seek the most negligible of things, the beautiful,
And never find it, so I preen and poke at my outrageous feathers,
As close as I will get to living in my own skin.

Solmar Verses VIII

What are the monumental sculptures littering the beach
Where California ends supposed to teach us?
Songs hum through them far from human pitch.
Their faces have turned monstrous.
Demon angels stare down the crushing surf
From far above this intersection of oceans,
The folds of their stony robes veined with gems
Like the fabric of thundering foam below,
Where huge black femurs and pelvises lay shattered
And dripping sand has petrified to pillars
To tell us who we are, before the friendless horizon
Where cormorant white wings are transparent in the sky.

It's beauty, whatever land's end is holding.
The splash and sparkle of this catastrophic merging
Is not, somehow, for us.
We return, as we must, to the beaches
And crowds and the white hotels and towels,
Passing on the way an ornamental garden
With translucent lizards, vivid hibiscus,
Golden koi...
At last a beauty we can contemplate,
As delicate and fraudulent as we pretend we are.

Solmar Verses VII

The moon is a hard thing to step away from.
To look at its clarity from a dark nest
Is to lose the inevitable self
In the flare of its city of glass
Across the black ocean.

The games don't understand the people who play them
As kings don't understand their subjects
Except in what they do, the wishful steps 

They take from their personal void, to say
"I exist" to an indifferent sky.

To see the moon, what they desire, as only light
That displays the jeweled coldness of ocean
Is like the faithful kneeling at the gates
Waiting for the rapture that never comes
Finally sensing the slow drift of flowing mind.