With the outrage meter pegged post-Katrina, much to my (almost physical) discomfort—and feeling lately, again, that it makes very little difference whether or not this particular patch of the blog commons gets tilled or not—I've been going through another spasm of Blog Aversion. Not sure where it'll end up: I could come through with half a dozen posts in short order (I've certainly had that many on my mind lately), or I could continue to be seized with that stone-in-the-gut sensation every time I contemplate opening my HTML editor. Though the fact that I've been thinking posts through in my head means that posts will likely get written again, to whatever small avail, more or less regularly before too long.

Meanwhile, if you're into this sort of thing, here's a recent poem, in the orphic-elegy vein. It's in no sense a poem that's about Katrina/New Orleans, or even that attempts to make reference, but uncontrollably there's a lot of flood imagery that's been getting into my writing lately.

Your average correspondent moves
from being born again to being
undone:  that's the power
of the waves.  They have nothing
in mind but they are all
you know.  Like you
they swing between design
and indifference.  Be patient
with them:  if this were your
only skill, to be cast
down, where do you think your appetites
would leave you?  Like two
houses, one dry and one
wet, like the paranoid crowd
that follows you:  like the storm
as it flings hosannas
into the sky, this is all the damage
you'll ever do.  Take a good
look around.  That's your picture
being torn up and
dispersed.  From this point on
you are just your community
of mourners.  There may be days
yet of uncertainty, but on the streets
of this sodden town
this is the only game going.
You are as incomplete
now as the waves
always promised you'd be.

posted by michael  1:42:18 PM  
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Suddenly feeling bereft of political energy—possibly because I'm going home this weekend to help (as much help as a weekend will give) cleaning and excavating my parents' house, which has been unlived-in since my dad's death nearly a year ago. Thirty years and more of accumulated stuff in that basement, a slow tide that rose to all but cover the suburban-obligatory pool table, and any of the spaces we played in as kids. It's the only house any of us ever lived in before adulthood, so the work ahead isn't just physically daunting.

In lieu of politics, then, another poem: one of mine, this time, that I got just this morning. Lighter than my usual thing, even romantic in a way. Yeah, I usually segregate this stuff to the Poetry Corner, but I don't feel like it this time.

newcomers

I'm on the southwest corner, across
the street, looking at you
through a hill of glass.  I'm eating
my soup with the giant tongs
of the setting sun.  I'm singing
"Sweet Caroline" at opera
volume to the passing
squad cars.  Someday, when I'm no longer
of earth, you'll rescue
this page from the dumpster
and go flying with it:  over houses
and Kwik Stops, over marketing scams,
over trees and the statues
of trees, as one of the
possessed:  and they'll send
for your husband and tell him
to take off work, because the traffic
lights are broken and the lake
is moving in from the shore.  Let me be you
a little while longer, as in truth
I was hardly ever
myself; let the clangor
of unresolved song subside
around you.  The day is being wheeled
into its vault, and across the street
the eyes of Paris
are open.  This is a swell world
still, for us newcomers to it.

posted by michael  7:50:14 PM  
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Sail into the dawn from your compelled
interrogations; sail into the seat
of the west from your landslide, and let
the victory out.  They've come to know you
as the font of cruelty, but in your
religion the air is colder, and has shed
its wings.  There is so much more
of a spotlight on you than
when you first started.  Like the original face
of the moon, that kept close
behind you the whole long
winter, you were nothing
to me but heartbreak; you were the predictable
lag of inspiration, once the collar
tightened and there was no sleep to be found.
Tell me what they said to you
at the shrivers' convention, how they zeroed
in on you for your least lapse.  How the sky
got lighter, and refused
to take you into it.  You were the failure
of its project of self-realization, its
structural flaw.  Is there someone
else you can call to come
get you?  Sail into your last
legitimate song, and let the engines
out.  If they ask, say you're a refugee
from the city, where somebody's
always trying to frame you.

posted by michael  10:07:49 AM  
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I've been suffering from a (hopefully mild) case of Blog Aversion this last week, which manifests as an internal cringe every time I think about composing a post. So instead I've been allowing myself to enjoy my unemployment for a space: easy to do, since I'm a cheap date—a cloudless, cool Chicago spring afternoon, a baguette, and the leisure to walk wherever, and I'm reasonably satisfied.

I have three regular practices that sustain me, intellectually and creatively: Zen sitting, poetry writing, and blogging. (And of these, the least consistent practice is blogging. Probably because it's the one I'm most dubious about, in terms of its intrinsic worth and its impact on my psyche and disposition. It's just not good for anyone, over the long run, to be constantly stoking your political anger.) The job-and-money stress of the last couple of months has had an impact on all of them; in particular, I hardly feel like I've even approached a poetry-writing groove since practically the end of February. (Some of that has to do, beyond immediate circumstances, with the rhythm of the practice itself: I write in the morning, while I'm still drifting half asleep, trying to ride the linguistic fluidity of that state as long as I can, and as it gets lighter earlier that's harder to do—it takes time to adjust to the new shape of the day, as it takes time to adjust again when dawn starts retreating in the fall.) That's hard, because—though I've never published, don't know whether I ever will, and can't really know whether anything I'm writing is especially worthy—poetry is vastly more important to me than any other kind of writing I might do, and very close to the core of my self-concept.

Anyway, I don't usually do this on the front of the blog, since it's not what people really come here for, but I'm posting one of the few complete poems I've come up with in the last couple of months (one of the few I'm currently sure is complete, anyway)—short, and it speaks to the condition of semi-alienation from practice that I've been struggling with in the last little while. Take it as an earnest that some more regular blogging schedule will emerge here before too long.

Without its gorgeous implications the show
is over.  The old life has somehow ended
but we keep coming back for more.  
He finds that his property
is like the rain, which is speaking in tongues
no one will ever use.  (Being rational,
it does its best never
to stop.)  He writes it
as his obituary, I'd rather
be doing both, then steps aside
to answer the dull reassurances of the day.

posted by michael  10:15:35 AM  
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For Patti. I've been feeling uninspired these last few days, for posting and for most other things—strange, that I had to jog my memory to know why. I always tend to fall into an eclipse this time of year: tomorrow is the anniversary of my sister's death. Thirty-five years ago she was eight, just a week from her First Communion, and I was almost ten; she and I and our two younger sisters had all had chickenpox, but Patti got sick again as the rest of us recovered. (Some weeks after her death, I heard the word "encephalitis"—from a friend, who had heard it from his parents; my own parents never spoke Patti's name to me again, or even alluded to her having existed, after she was gone. It was only many years later that I learned that it was Reye's Syndrome, little known at the time, that had killed her.) My last memory of her alive is of a little girl, delirious with fever, stretched out on the back seat of our big Chevy, my sisters and I crowded in the front. My mother has Patti's head in her lap, trying to cool her with a washcloth and ice. We're on our way to be dropped off at my grandparents', where we'll be staying, before they take Patti to the hospital. An image presents itself to me, a gravestone with my sister's name on it and the year, 1970, marked as the second date. In a guilty panic I try to shove it out of my mind: days later, when my priest uncle comes to tell us she's died, my first thought is that it was my imagination that made it happen.

For Patti, then, and because I have no power to write it for myself, Emily Dickinson: even if it's a poem of romatnic mourning, still the most intense, compressed expression of grief I know in the language:

I never lost as much but twice,
And that was in the sod.
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!

Angels — twice descending
Reimbursed my store —
Burglar! Banker — Father!
I am poor once more!

posted by michael  7:28:39 PM  
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genesis

The salaryman who thickens under his heel
a lit cigarette, and drops it up to his mouth
to draw the smoke from the air and filter it
into paper and torn leaves.  The lone gunman
watching his chance to fire, and erase his name
from history.  The ballplayer shedding stats
with each trip to the plate, who culls a homer
out of the lights like a lost memory:  the crowd
gathers the stadium’s trash
and drifts away, happy
before another game splendidly forgotten.

I speak and my voice
withdraws, and you turn aside,
having no further need to understand me.
Whatever I think I know, I know
will have forsaken me by the next time
we meet.  I age
as we all do, toward the womb
of a mother I have only touched in dreams.

Someday the last photograph will be released
to light, the last book unprinted; the pyramids
will yield someday the last secret
of their unbuilding.  The long trail
of giving back will reach its final step.  The last one of us
will see a world charged
with mist, and all things breathing,
waiting as if for a word to be unsaid.

posted by michael  9:56:12 AM  
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This is the real teeming
of the mind, this
lucid rain.  Just as I sang
that song for you, before my lips
gave out:  so the field
of poppies blew, and every one
made its soft presentation
to the air.  You
are all surface, even
to the inmost.  The light
that cleaves around you
dulls, exhausts itself
with searching, the path
is overgrown!  but you were gone
before we started, and there was
no one looking
anyway.  There are no
more voices but the rain's
to hear.  Love, you must learn
to be absent even
to yourself:  let the air
claim you.  It has nothing
but its need, its time, its will.

posted by michael  10:10:12 PM  
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I've been writing a decent amount the last few days, but none of it here: I registered over the weekend with a couple of poetry-workshop forums (Gazebo, and Poetry Free-for-All), and I've been spending time there, writing critiques and recovering the pleasure of actively engaging in criticism. (And trying to decide whether I'm going to post my own fairly un-workshoppable poetry for review.) It's a bit of the kid-with-a-new toy syndrome—even if the new toy in this case is incredibly geeky. So, I've been neglecting the Times and the politics, but not abandoning—it's just that there's only so much writing I can manage in a day before my head starts to throb.

Oh, and also I'm trying to figure out the making-a-living thing in my spare time.

Anyway, pending another dive back into the media-critique waters, I'm posting this here, from a forum session discussing how to read John Ashbery. Because I like what I formulated, and because it's one of the very few pieces of actual literary criticism, short though it is, that I've written in a long time:

The trick with Ashbery—I think he's said it himself—is to avoid focus. It's not the ordinary way you read poetry, at least not if you're an engaged reader, and if you come to the poems with the ordinary expectation of getting clear about them you're likely to hurt yourself. I think of one of those stereograms, if you remember that fad, where the only way to see the image was to focus past the image on the page. My touchstone here is "Loving Mad Tom," from Houseboat Days, which seems like Ashbery's instructions to the reader—his creating the taste by which he's to be enjoyed:

You thought it was wrong. And afterwards
When everyone had gone out, their lying persisted in your ears,
Across the water. ... Their word only
Waited for you like the truth, and sometimes
Out of a pure, unintentional song, the meaning
Stammered nonetheless, and your zeal could see
To the opposite shore, where it was all coming true.

That's the great pleasure of Ashbery, for me: the "pure, unintentional song" (how beautiful is that phrase?) that, at moments, is on the verge of bringing something into focus on the opposite shore—and the focus fading again without ever having quite coalesced, without leaving any certainty that the thing was actually real. That flux of attention and insight is Ashbery's response to the Wallace Stevens dictum, about the task of poetry being to make the visible a little harder to see.

posted by michael  9:35:03 PM  
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