Reading A1: Reading A1—Poetry Corner

With the outrage meter pegged

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:42:18 GMT

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.

Suddenly feeling bereft

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 00:50:14 GMT

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.

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:07:49 GMT

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.

I've been suffering

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 15:15:35 GMT

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.

For Patti.

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 00:28:39 GMT

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!

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 14:56:12 GMT

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.

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 03:10:12 GMT

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.

I've been writing

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 02:35:03 GMT

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.

Literary hubris.

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 18:23:08 GMT

One thing that English grad students at Yale did (still do, I'm sure) to earn a bit of money in the summer was to serve as screeners for the Yale Press's annual Younger Poets Series competition. Hundreds of book-length manuscripts were submitted; you'd plow through as many of them as you could, as quickly as you could while getting (you hoped) a fair impression, grading them on an A - F scale (though anything C or below was failing) and writing a paragraph for the judge on the submission's merits, or lack thereof. Every manuscript was assured of at least two screener readings, to correct for anyone's idiosyncracies.

A very few manuscripts you'd feel like going to bat for, and you'd give them slightly longer writeups. Funny thing is, I don't really remember any of those: I don't even recall checking the Series results to see if a winner ever passed through my hands. No: the ones I remember are the cranks. The best thing I ever saw screening for the Series was a collection of poems on the sole subject of Brooke Shields—not dedicated to Brooke, mind you, but treating her, from every possible angle. This was not some sort of self-conscious, Warhol-esque exercise, either. The MS was divided in three sections—I believe they were "Child-Woman," "Mega-Star," and "Goddess"—each section prefaced with its own title page featuring, no kidding, a crayon drawing of Brooke in the appropriate phase of life. I had an instinct to hold on to the MS and call the FBI on Ms. Shields' behalf. I had an instinct to filch the thing for myself as an artifact, return policy be damned. Sadly, I did neither.

Yesterday, in the course of some aimless surfing, I stumbled into the Schneiderverse: the poetry world of Dan Schneider, at Cosmoetica.com. No, Dan's not the long-lost author of Brooke Poems, but he is a world-class poetry crank, and highly recommended. In particular, I give you his series "This Old Poem," in which Dan—who is confident that he's a greater poet than Walt Whitman, or practically anybody else who ever took up pen—plays literary contractor, engaging himself to renovate the atrocious, cliché doggerel of old and contemporary masters and bring the structures up to his own rigorous standards. And you've got to admire his moxie: the first old boy he takes on is none other than W. B. Yeats, one of the great poets in the language. Here's a glimpse of the results, as Dan spruces up the lovely early poem "Into the Twilight"—Yeats first, then Schneider:

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Outgrown part, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh there, again, in the grey’s delight,
Sigh then, again, with a dew not the morn’s.

That first bolded revision practically defines the term "tin ear." So does the clotted mouthful of "with a dew not the morn's" (say it aloud if you don't believe me). And how do you sigh "with" (in the sense of producing) a dew: isn't that less a sigh than an expectoration? [But who am I to quarrel? Dan appends a score to each of his reconstruction projects, the original versus his revision: Yeats gets a "Bad to Terrible" rating of 55 on a 100-point scale, while Dan manages to bump the poem all the way to an Excellent 87. Clearly, the objective numbers are against me.]

Dan runs a poetry group in Minneapolis, dedicated apparently to hacking away at candidate poems until they bleed, which on the evidence of Cosmoetica must be the workshop equivalent of Jim Jones' People's Temple. There's a long and uncondescending article on Schneider from a few years back in the Minneapolis City Pages, if you want to get more a flavor of the man than his own pages offer. Me, I wouldn't ever want to meet him, but I'm glad he exists.

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 18:44:00 GMT

on the night in question

Sealed tonight in the sweet thought
of familiar, violent Paris, our lapsed fingers
tell a remoter story.  This is the dawn
of time, and we have outlived
our metaphors.  Each grain
of silver that lifts us
into light is another's
genius:  flow, river, from your bed
of spies, lest someone
capture you.  You follow
your old routine, we
follow ours.  And the sky, though it never
addressed us during its
long seminar on flight.  We are as hollow
now as it said
we were, and nothing
comes between us but a habit
of transcendence:  we have neither
wine nor salt for our
theoretic meal.  What will it take
for you to share yourself with me
again, in all your
retro glamour?  For I am scarcely
myself, love, and you
are barely a gesture of you.  And still the window
looks lovingly past us, into
the garden of our
thwarted history:  and we are remembered.
So much happened
on the night in question, and none
of it for a reason.

Hot product, just written this morning. Since I think it helps crystallize the poem, I'll mention that there's a kind of key to it: the idea that was with me as I wrote—possibly a dream artifact, though not one I can remember—was that the speaker was a figure in an old photograph. (Hence, e.g., the "grain of silver" thing.)

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 21:24:03 GMT

to my partners in crime

Who knows what lustrous shadows
we may have to resist?  The eye
makes its way slowly
over a landscape, repaid
in the sound of water.  Our deft
appropriations are suspended
in mid-air.  When did we become
old; when did they sky
stop taking its cues
from us?  When did we become
the keepers of this desert?  I watch
in silence as you detach
your limbs, knowing it's only
going to get worse:  what we have
to repay we've forgotten
how to steal.  There are no remedies
left in my magic box.  Only,
when the lamps come on will you tell
them what become of our
unfleshed ghosts?  For we are
dying by stages, and our rent
is in arrears.  Keep me
safe on the burning path
to your door.  I feel sick
of wandering in the
houseless wind, like my
vain forebears:  teach me
to have a place.  I have no control
over my direction.  Clothed
like a mote in the conscious
light, I catch fire and dissolve.

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 20:25:15 GMT

a history of poetry

What passes for a jungle was falling
around my heels:  and such wastelands, hard
to come by, were reaching
like a hammock or a rip-
cord to take me with them, because nothing was
a token then:  and falling and keeping
on falling was the job of an egg crate
when only grown men knew
what an airfoil really looked
like ...  Sometimes a dark sermon
erupted from my shoelaces, and the ceiling
went transparent—it was only a life-
boat, Mom said, don't
worry—but the sun, that skinny
kid, always knew how to turn it into a joke
with that phony nostalgia-radio
sniggering of his.  His laughter chased me
a mile a minute down
corridors, across parking
lots, it fell on the tiles and spread
restrictions, like incense on
a jumprope:  not feeling steam-rollered
exactly, but the linoleum had
to be careful, edged the way it was;
it snuck around the room not
saying anything, not wanting
to provoke him.
                       So
he headed east to the copper
mountains, and what he found there
would have rung like a saw
if its history of inspired dance
maneuvers had had license to
repeat, like an Austrian ball-
room.  Purple with his face
done up in that modern
drag, he ascended
in his terrible go-cart.  And the sky
was pinioned up behind him, monkey figures
positioned themselves elaborately at
his heels:  but he always had more courage
than song-writing savvy, the ski-
jumper, though it was his job
to be distracted—and he ended up
just another victim of
gravity, just hanging there
all balled up in someone else's borrowed
confetti-suit.  Then
there was that trek in reverse, but that's
not part of this
story.
         And what happened
to that dream-of-falling poem that got you
locked in the cellar among tentacles
all those years?  Those gate-keepers pressured
into bas-relief, just a pair
of old hands really, just
because they were stoned and
the night at the end of the quay glared
blue-silver, the night of rental
vans, and then look at them too falling with their big doors
into self-criticism!  "You look like someone
that got let out of school on an imitation
stomach-ache," o but
it was a medicien to me of all
my days, a beggar's banquet
that defined "fin de siècle" as
a shoebox is made much
of, in being removed:  hard to be returned
with all its mint-condition yellows
and gold in order, it was
a swing! laboring in mechanical
uprisings:  because it shattered
so easily, it was like a criminal's stop-
watch, all secondhands.
                                  And it was
his hope, when the parable
of his youth had recommenced, that
his challengers would be met
and abolished under the stone
of his hard-won increase.  Reader,
whose house was it anyway?  When the weather
joked with me about my size,
I let it pass:  because I was a brave
boy, I had a casino
in my pocket.  What matter if the roof
fell in on me?  We'd just
have to get another.  And then the gun
sounded, and we were caught
in the flowing night, in its tide
of error, the mysteries of the sun
were shut off from us
by its legions of pensive ghosts:  I
was no more fruitful than they
had been, with
or without your intervention.  And the cream-
colored stars come and
go, playing their turkey tunes
above the ice melt, and the withered palms
of the collectors are stretched out
for any shards that might want to
impale them:  and my useless inspiration
finds itself with another
drastic mess on its hands.  Page
One:  How I Failed to Thrive.

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 16:28:56 GMT

nautilus

Let everything that is of water
cast its stone.  Like a dubious
art of birth, I am with you
in your spirit of negation:  run, run
to the water, let it sound you
out.  You acquire a deeper
meaning with every breath
you draw.  I am lonely
like you; the water covers me
and I can only echo
its violence.  I was its voice
of reason before the storm
surged in us, the storm
of the century, and broke
our boats and left us
limp under a death-pale sky.
Our original impetus
had been expended.

This is where the artist in you
has to decide:  for
or against your elaborate
life.  Death would solve
so many problems.  Hidden
among the pebbles and shore
grasses, your clock shifts
toward the mode of decay.  The wind,
too, in its ceaseless covering
and uncovering, is eager
for comfort.  What was lovely
before will be lovely
again, it repeats.  It puts a hand
to your hair, and leaves you
to your place.  Keep falling in
to your secret heart; so long
as it doesn't know
anything, it will continue its song.

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 21:03:25 GMT

Peace, moon:  you have nothing to lose
but your gravity.  Your eyes are the workshop
where you exhaust your interior heat.
I am a dumb animal
like you; my breath languishes
on the doorstep of my heart.  Peace,
moon, your silver rockets
have come undone.

I missed you inside the
weather, in your usual place.  What penance
could take you away from me
at such an hour?  Peace,
moon, your prayer rug
will wear itself out with grieving.

This is the battle we lose, again
and again:  your face vanishing
seasonally from my mirror.  Your pall
and your purpose are carried away
on the hysteric wind.  Where do your children
go, when your tides
devour them?  Peace,
moon, in this scattering I remain
your awful friend.

Thu, 02 Sep 2004 20:44:24 GMT

What will you say when your animal
runs out, and each finger
that shows you to the world is lost
behind the black screen?  What will your search
orifice say to the planes
that are up there investigating you? 
Their candy-coated lozenge
of surveillance is about to come undone
in your throat.  What force did they exert
to get you to marry me?

On the steep ridge of my culture
of complaint the doomed voices
are rising, rising:  you never managed
to take them seriously.  The night flows its juices
onto the lawn.  The devil
is standing up in his borrowed
red dress, waving his tresses
in your face:  what use does he have
for your mortal exchanges?  All my vows
have been caught up in his
slow fire.

The world is already in love
with you, says the microscopic
dancer, Why you have to get
on your high horse?  Now they're going to walk
away with the moon, all because
you weren't nice enough to me.
Take off your wedding band
and let's be friends.  This bitter hill
we have to climb is our
permanent home.

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 16:04:05 GMT

Swing with me, said
the bird, I have a golden
trumpet in my throat.
Much rain, less
room, was his motto.
He took a bite
of my liberty, and spat out
the rind on the pavement.
It was his way
of making good little soldiers
of us all.

I avoided evil thoughts
in my marriage, till the rain came
and taught me to broker
my lusts.  It's a wise penny
that knows how not to get drowned
in that flood.  Yet I'm not saying anything
about personal apparatus, understand?
I want the Supreme Court kept out of it.

Lose your hurricane, cried
the bird, and its
unsound music.  Your nightmare
overture is being played
in another room.  When the call
comes, will you be ready
to answer it, you
on your pastel horse?  The fashion slaves
have signed you up for their
latest revolt.

Fri, 14 May 2004 17:06:46 GMT

Much worse than this—oh far,
far worse—the planets
betrayed their lines of rare
old music—for a sky
of more elaborate manufacture—
that kept its lawlessness hidden
in its purse—that tore the
starved ground with its
spiky mumbo-jumbo—that arranged us
to receive its message, as lamps
receive the impulse of
the day—before withdrawing
into themselves—and we were
roiled underneath that
surf—while it plied us
with its riches—and its
departing grace—no, we were
no easier in mind for having
expected it—like the ravaged
wet shore, forever
in retreat—from the
foaming world—as we retreat
from the claims of our
former selves—when the light
breaks on them—and the vengeful mirror
refuses to endorse
our celebrity makeovers—

Sat, 01 May 2004 21:19:47 GMT

Final poem in my recent dithering-about-these-poems "sequence." This one really should get a title—wish I weren't so bad at that.

A beautiful stoppage, in the service
of this documentary vision:  like a crazy
jacket that fits over
your half-head:  the men
are antique, their vows of consequence
are laughed at under
the crucible of stars:  yet much
of what they tell you is true.  Their lives
function like a dazzling sentence
with no period.  (Let me go
to the city, I said, let me taste
its liquid core of noise, let me walk
on its helmeted stones and be
worn smooth.)  As you evade
another dawn, racked
in your superhero costume:  as you complete
your archenemy collection:  the noise
that taught you how to earn is
pulling away, and leaving you
to eat your mayonnaise sandwich in fear.
(I lost the sense of myself
when it turned cloudy, and the rain
confronted me in the street.  Why
did it want to take so many
steps?)  All that bright paralysis
fixing you to your place
in the sky!  Cousin, I'll make you a bet
that the first dumb thing
they try to do is talk you down.

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 15:20:09 GMT

Another of those poems I've been dithering about.

A story you tell yourself
about a horse, and people
knocking down the walls with their intense
dimestore-speak:  the sudden invitation
writen in snow, in the mind
of the down-pointing geese:  and your electoral coat
ready to replace its
winter lining, that held you aloof
from your misery, that followed you
down the swollen path to your
actual dream-cottage, to the nightmare project
hidden in its walls:  to its
one-of-a-kind silk hangings, that you threw away
when you were ten, in your
childhood delirium, your hair
hanging loose before your eyes
like a failed battery:  and the life
you held in your drowned fist
is suddenly rendered transparent, your eyes
the color of salt, and that
became your mantra:  My van
was reported stolen.  My missing tapes
were inside it.  Leave me to die
on my marriage bed; I too
am one of these lost.

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 21:25:46 GMT

Been dithering about adding a few new pieces to the list. A friend asked for a poem titled, or containing the phrase, "road of feathers," to fit with a graphic project (as yet unexplained) that he's doing—this wasn't written to order for the purpose, but it seemed to fit. A very unresolved poem, which means not so coincidentally that I feel unresolved about it: but there's also a lot here I like, and sometimes you just have to let these things go.

As many particles move,
without sense:  as we are united
in a brand, by our
fictions, as this is clearly
the way to go:  as the sauce
is perfumed with orange, as the meat
is pink and scented
with failure, as we lived
all our lives in the smokestack:
as the mute carollers
thumb their noses
at us, and retreat
across the lake of spun
sugar, down their road
of feathers:  as we say hello
to the modern mess of this
most difficult dawn:  as the dawn
itself relaxes within us, its
minions, as its stupid
consonants collapse my
speech:  as the tongues of reason
de-link from me, as all
that heavy rope extends
down the passage, as the human
speech is labored
with allegory, as in an
auto-da-fé:  as my grip loosens
on the harvest
of random event, that you
left me with, as the snow
boils away in mid-
sentence:  and the light is done
with our malingering, and
makes itself scarce:

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 15:31:15 GMT

Another shortish poem, sonnetlike but a bit longer, simply the product of the morning's writing yesterday. I like the fact that the first line is iambic pentameter—I don't usually do that. (So is the last sentence, though it's broken across the last two lines.) In fact, I noticed that the line was metrical when it came to me, and that kind of generated the next thing, "my foot/slipped," which is (maybe that's obvious) a pun on the metrical foot. Anyway.

I took the common resource of the rose
to annotate my page:  my foot
slipped, and the gross machinery of day
erased my song from the blackening sky.  A new winter
wrote its hardships on the land.  As we
released its messengers from their
leaden shells:  as the lake's wide margin
betrayed our hands:  we were increasingly
turned aside, like the haunted waves
turned aside from the shore.  Their roofless mouths
could find no passage into speech.  I stood
with my back to them:  I let their promptings
go unpaid.  The light burned
through my hair in advance of its departure.
And we were stunned, like you, at the size
of our debt:  all that annihilated beauty!  I lived
my second lifetime in its shade.

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 15:38:29 GMT

This is a morning free-writing poem, intact except for one or two minor adjustments, from maybe three weeks ago. I've been dithering about it ever since: sometimes it takes me a while to decide that a poem meets whatever my current inarticulable standard is for legitimacy. Don't know how much I actually like this one—it seems like I've been writing too much of this sort of thing lately, and I worry about range—but for what it's worth ...

In the winter
it'll be real again, this time
it'll be real:  it'll be
enough, for all your lies
and discontent, to be led
under the sway of the ruthless
elements:  the sky races
up and down, and the fix
is in, the fix is
definitely in.  "All my life"
and "what I've been
for you" and look where
we are:  as at the beginning
of the service of the
dead, where we struggle
to seal them in behind the
metal door.  And the force
they wielded in life:  look away
from them to your own
thing, take your refreshment
where it's offered.  The sky
reaches out a pale hand
to you.  Its sense of mission
is blurred:  it wants reminding
of who it was before the rain
sliced it open.  I can steal
you another few moments
with it.  If we live
we can trace together
its historic fall.

Wed, 04 Feb 2004 17:26:18 GMT

This one I finished last night. The poem basically comes from December, but the original last stanza didn't work, and it took me about a month of trolling through my notebooks/hoping for a small writing breakthrough to assemble one that did. I mean, one that I think works, basically, for now. (Do I sound firm enough about the thing being in its final form?) And then, when I got the last sentence, the two-thirds of the stanza that I'd already worked up had to be changed, and I had to lose a line I really liked about Jesus's prosthetic feet. For a short poem, this has caused me fits, in other words, but I'm still fond of it.

The title, by the way, is cribbed from the new book American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, which I haven't read and bears no other relation to the poem.

american jesus

Jesus came to me with a whirlpool
in his mouth, and a system of gears
in his left hand. "Pardner," he said, "ride
with me to the next station." It was mortal
day when we got back.

I took the train to Elephant Town
to see the fair. Jesus stirred up the ladies
against me. He held them back
by the jukebox, waiting for the opening
that would carry us all into karaoke heaven.

Jesus says my own vicious assumptions
condemn me. The golden impeachments of autumn
have twisted my head off its
throne. There are military
songs to be sung, and the War
of the Cats to be waged
in a crevice of the moon.

And Jesus gives me a look like, You fucking
tax dodger. I was wearing my sharp
pants to throw the hippies
off our scent. I'm not going anywhere
but a little farther into the earth,
I told him, but we both knew
there would be no bottom to it for me.

Wed, 04 Feb 2004 14:33:24 GMT

Second January poem, from a couple of days after the first. A piece about waking. No title.

How were we to feed
a dialogue, with nothing
on our backs but
lint, and all our plants
consumed as with their
space duties?  It was long before
the intervention, it was the age
of the guaranteed ripoff.  And now
the poison is in my side,
doing its work
of calling men and horses
to account.  I won't open
my eyes, I won't
open them, I said
to the rock-hard night:  but
I lied.  It was a pill
we all had to swallow sooner
or later.  Carefully the sky
wrapped up its menace
in an orange ball, and
we were caught in its
force field:  the sun
in its intolerable slow witness waiting
for us to make the first move.

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 19:49:33 GMT

First poem of the new year—actually written mid-January, but I'm just getting around to poem posting now.

the electric version

I have no fruits
for you now, said the ghost
of music.  Please take your complaints
elsewhere, I'm short-
staffed as it is.  The pale sky
behind her glowed
in its elevator mood.  Fragments
of song drifted in
on the weather, like routine
assignments; some would be eaten
at the next day's fair.  Some were the property
of our too stringent
alter egos.
	         The night danced
in its chains, unable
to conform itself to customer
demand.  This is all
I was able to choose, no
more, it said.  Brick by brick
we had built its house, out of our
bad rhythms and longing.  We came back
to it once they released
the electric version.