Dec 032012
Dec 032012
Going to view the storm damage-- On the doorknob, A single evergreen leaf. Stepping outside.... After the hurricane, only the grass Looks the same.
It turns out, just by taking a few steps beyond my door there was no end to the incidents and adventures available in my own neighborhood. Going down one street, trees had been felled by a troop of invisible lumberjacks, holding their deep roots up for the most minute inspection as if they were being robbed of their underpants. Getting near a big evergreen that had gone over, peeling back as it had fallen a sinuous line of sod along the driveway’s asphalt edge like foil peeled back to reveal a meaty lasagna, the overwhelming smell was not of mud, despite the wet (nor of lasagna, despite the image)–the smell was of fresh dry loam and mossy roots–a sunny day on a broad fairway and a clear shot to a golden layup. I was pinged back to warm June possibilities–and the busy nest of maggoty worms (or whatever they were exactly) seemed distressed to be so turned out of their summer home–and on such a prosaically rainy day too!
After the storm's destruction, My neighbor looks out from his doorway Holding a big broom. Finicky seagulls Pillage bins of spoiled meat, Discarding the lesser cuts. This reminds me of a haiku by Joso, to wit: Among blossoming cherries A woodpecker pecks-- Hunting for deadwood. The long wooden fence Torn open by the storm-- Must've been a gate In another life. Through a crack in the fence --A new shoot Of green laurel.
Crossing into Keyport, I stopped at the local WaWa, the only food outlet for miles with a generator, which allowed them to open their doors that day–cash only. The only line was for coffee, caffeine being the mental health drug of choice among adult Americans. And the line snaked through the whole building and out the door. Regular or decaffeinated? The theological debate in the line was fierce.
Waiting for hot coffee A hundred pairs of muddy shoes Face one way. People pulled To the WaWa, the wifi, the caffeine, And each other-- Black bees on a crowded sunflower.
It was in this line that I got my first dose of stories. A few shore residents had seen the actual storm surge make landfall, a green tyrant thirty feet tall, wearing a crown of white foamy thorns. Tony, a naturalized American from Costa Rica, had watched from his second story apartment window as the “tsunami” poured though, pushing boats with abandon and hitting the bay side of Ye Olde Cottage Inne, waiting for a beat of four seconds, and then bursting from the far side by the road, spilling the guts of the place out like mouthwash filled with dinner detritus, and leaving the once grand facade smiling toothlessly at the town like an idiot cousin. There were a dozen or more stories, all told with a survivor’s relish, and the hot expectation of a daily fix of coffee. When I stumbled through town a short while later, I saw what was left of the Inne; I knew I was getting close by the small flotilla of French onion soup bowls that had been sent out nearly half a mile in every direction from the destruction. Picking one of dozens up, it was still dry on the inside, and muddy on the bottom.
Where the weak reed rebounded A dragonfly hesitates-- After the hurricane. Kids touch the tacky sap-- Counting aloud the cut-open rings Of hurricane trees. Mist on the sea-- Just where the hurricane came in, Storks float home. Bright orange safety jackets Move over the wreckage in Keyport-- I feel I am helping.
Crossing back out of Keyport, with acres of bay-blasted wreckage behind me (and acres of wind-wrestled wreckage before), I bumped into a reporter for the Star Ledger in front of Bob’s Hot Dog House. Bob’s was squished flat as a runcible tophat–only the faded red painting of a hot dog survived as the fecund marshland unrolled behind the flattened trailer. We kibitzed about the whole area, and she gave me some good details about what had happened in other areas of New Jersey, where the newspaper had sent out its fleet of note-taking snoops.
A reporter on the road Lifts stories from the locals, Shaking gloved hands as she goes. The hurricane crow Darts brilliantly about-- Dodging raindrops! In the burnt-out house --Swung wide open-- A perfect red door. Penitently, Through the flood-busted churchdoor ...A lost frog. The Long Branch beach-- An ice cream sandwich Licked clean out! Ribbon-painted boats, Piled like discarded kites Drawn by a single string. Storm-tossed boats Jump playfully as dolphins-- Over the bridge. Loud out of nowhere-- On top of an overturned boat, A wild sparrow! Their sails like moth-wings, Little boats pile up overnight-- Attracted by the full moon!
Later in the day, as I toured a tree-decimated neighborhood littered with windfall and tangles of powerlines like the discarded ribbons from Christmas packages, I was able to take a surprisingly comfortable sunshine-nap in the topmost boughs of a downed evergreen tree. When I woke up from my doze, I discovered that I had been joined by a stray cat curled up near my feet. Good news always finds a friend, as they say.
After so much hurricane worry-- Sleep seeps in anyway, at noon, Under my eyelids. Following the disaster, Muddy footprints track back To my doorstep. Broken spines, These chainsawed cherrytrees-- Bones of the hurricane. Whole streets, houses too, Painted very minutely With mud brushes. All this mud! And still no butterfly ....Nope....Not yet. * * * * The refreshing cool Of the water coming in Washes the feet Of the water going out. ~~Ransetsu
The poem above and the poem below go together. Ransetsu takes the common conceit that “all things change,” and shows that these changes can be accepted with grace, with washing the feet of the new thing by the old thing; I think of a combo retirement-baptism party. In Ransetsu’s verse, both the thing coming and the thing going are water–again the common conceit that “all things are one thing.” I think his would be a great poem to carve at the cool water intake of a nuclear plant. The second poem plays with a similar element of graceful acceptance of the changes the hurricane has made.
Taking careful pains to wash Hurricane tchotchkes in a puddle, I place them back in the mud. Clearing the debris-- Children hold fallen shingles And look up. Still there-- Under a storm-tossed shingle-- The dewy grass. Grateful enough to make it through, The whole sky looks Like one color. Every town window reflects A world at sunset-- Destroyed. Walking home at sunset, The ruined town turns gold a moment As the wind dies. Eh, not much scarier Than dying-- This gigantic storm.
Dec 032012
Dec 032012
Entering The Highlands had a sort of purgatorial air, with police officers standing by road-flares reflected in the still-fresh puddles, waving cars away from a scene that looked like Godzilla had just finished shooting a Tokyo travelogue. We parked some distance from the town and had to make our way downhill toward Sunny’s neighborhood rather carefully. Live power lines still sparked here and there, and many buildings were surrounded with jagged triangles of broken glass from their busted-out windows. The Post Office, I remember particularly, was filled with undelivered bales of soggy junk mail, and the door was bending out of its frame like a playing card bowed between a dealer’s fingers.
The Post Office flooded-out-- Rainbow-finned mail Noses the bowed glass.
Workers passed through, already handing out MREs (meals ready to eat) to local homeowners whose food supplies had been rendered inedible by flood and mud. Boats tilted on front lawns, geese paddled down the middle of streets; many notable incongruities were on view as we worked our way toward Sunny’s small shotgun-style house located less than 100 feet from the ocean. We went in through her kitchen, and I helped myself to a few perishables out of the fridge while Sunny assessed the situation with her avuncular landlord–an importunately chipper Irishman named Mike.
Even with no power, Chocolate pudding Stays chocolaty. Heading south-- In a conveniently flooded backyard, Geese float a few hours. Deep in the overflow, An overturned birdhouse Warbles bubbles. Stoplights out-- The ripped-down street sign By the overturned trike. Seems like all the hurricane rains Have left the Atlantic Ocean Just as it was. Where the flood has been, Mud and destruction. --An unattended child Picks her nose.
There was a kind of homely beauty in the slovenliness of the neighborhood–an ugly uncle who lets his toenails grow, but who looks you in the eye when he shakes your hand hello. The people of the town, freed from their usual duties, and taking up new, more urgent tasks, seemed to have more than a few moments of unexpected contemplation foisted upon them–like refugees who notice the delightful fragrance of the pine-tree air freshener in the rescue truck that escapes the notice of the truck driver who hung it from the rearview mirror in the first place. To be a stranger at home is the essence of poetry; and these flooded-out folks found themselves reluctantly rushed into their usual streets which had suddenly taken on the scary characteristics of Dante’s infernal stanzas. Even the birds, having the somewhat officious appearance of housing inspectors, looked twice from the mezzanine of an intact rain-gutter before returning to their storm-struck nests.
From an intact rain-gutter, Birds eye their storm-beaten nests Hanging on broken branches. Returned to her drowned house, My old friend cries hard tears-- Flood after flood. Nobody says much-- Carrying the washed-away porch steps Back to where the porch had been. Holding a busted broom, The older lady fits it carefully Into an overloaded trashcan. Visiting with my friend-- Cheerfully she points out where The sea has visited her kitchen! All across the flooded floor Galaxies spin and swirl.... --Fresh mud! You can see here How this big tree and the power line Played jump rope! In the flooded street, Sewer lids quietly become Bubbling fountains.
There were many picturesque scenes to be viewed when walking through the newly configured town, the sidewalks squealing under your shoes. Here, a teenage girl pecked quick at her phone, annoyed at her lack of incoming texts. Just across the way from her, and still wild about the hurricane, skinned-kneed kids screamed and stomped in every puddle. Their spirits were as whirly as the leaves blowing down the broken streets. At the occassional functioning filling station, long lines of mendicants stood carrying red gas cans; a whole tiered class system arose between those who tended small electric generators in their basements and those who did not–or could not. Charles Dickens would have understood the social implications of these equations of capability and suffering. It was a most sad case, again, to contemplate in the increasing cold of the late evening–however purely the stars shined down.
The gardener goes by With his wheelbarrow Full of shingles! With a wet broom We sweep the flotsam From the car roof. A tilted hat Perched atop the rubble-- The roof of a house! My homeless friend, After so many dull nights together, I am finally glad Of your company.
The next morning after our visit to her muddied and messed-up home, Sunny drove off to storm-battered Staten Island for what turned out to be several unexpected days of work and sleepovers. I kept expecting her back after that first night, and that expectation whetted my sense of isolation, of being cut-off and incommunicado with the others of my world with whom I had formed fragile loyalties.
For the next few unplugged days and overcast nights, only the radio spoke to me. It was, frankly, quite surprising–I was often better informed concerning the status of the overall recovery effort than my few remaining neighbors, who had family and friends stuck in the nearby buildings with whom to talk.
Governor Chris Christie At the disaster press gaggle, Yelling encouragements! Geraldo on the radio Outdoes The sirens. Once again, the moon Swims over the sea, Confusing the tiny fish Hatched during the hurricane. Clear night after Sandy-- Once again I can feel the moon Against my skin. After the disaster.... We shrug Back into our lives.
Dec 032012
Dec 032012
Under this moon, the fuchsia orchid Grows slowly pale until I dream Only of it.
Now that the crisis is past, the orchid, which had been so perfectly pink–and poised as a butterfly over the evening candles of the hurricane–has dropped all her blossoms at once in a crumpled heap, a Salvation Army supply of donated petticoats, haphazard and bright as a flock of sleeping flamingoes. This beautiful companion of my solitude has now left me only its two broad green leaves, thick as elephant ears, and an ugly stick stem stripped of blossoms, embarrassed-seeming as a wet cat. I tried to laugh a bit at my sentimental attachment to this minuscule bit of life, but found myself instead staring at the fallen flowers for quite some time in silence, hoping they would speak to me.
What was I turning into in my frozen solitude?
To examine in my cold hands This old dented cup, First I must pour out These contents....
We put words on top of everything–as if the whole world were just a shelf for our words. After a big catastrophe, everybody has to talk about it to everybody else–to sort it out into little cubes, little syllables, of understanding. I saw this all over the place after the hurricane had blown through, wrecking houses, trucks, and lives. And I am worse than most–I felt compelled to write this booklet. That’s how desperate I am to keep from seeing what’s right before my eyes!
Basho has a poem that puts me in mind of this problem of living and seeing and talking. Somehow, his poem feels like a moment of “eureka!”, a resolution to the difficulty, and at the same time an invitation to more troubles, more genuine experience, more reality than the mote before us.
Through spring mist, Without its name I see The shapeless hill. ~~Basho Post-storm afternoon-- Is anything all that different? Even sniffing, The dogs can't tell. The next day, an old man Draws transformer explosions Excitedly in the air. After hurricane Sandy, We huddle together ….As if to ask.... Behind the rain-snail, His snail-trail widens Into flood plain.
Nature’s storms unweave our homes; time and illness unweave our bodies. Where will we go to make ourselves whole when all the world must come to the same undoing? Is a snail without his shell still a snail? There’s a well-known haiku that touches on this evanescence of appearances, but seems to affirm strongly that there is a bigger reality behind the appearances we accept–even if we’ve only accepted them for a moment, the duration of a play.
Outside the theater–
The kabuki mask is smaller
Than the actor’s face.
Perspective plays an important role in what we call real or unreal. I am not a confident Buddhist, and hesitate to believe that all we see is “unreal.” But, I do like to stay loose like a big league pitcher, and am always peering about for unusual perspectives that can open up and let a moment be more itself, less of a thought in the mind, less of an inherited opinion or precept.
No room for recycling-- The trash bin is full Of houses! So many twigs! Birds must be wanting to build More luxurious nests. Days after the hurricane, My little palmtree still sits Windless behind a window. With the hurricane gone, There returns the pattern Of my shadow.
As I had stood in my round-heeled sneakers a few days before, watching the sea whoosh back and forth sludgy and brown against the broken shoreline below Sunny’s small house, I had felt smaller than I ever remembered feeling outside of childhood. From higher up by the highway, I looked around The Highlands and thought of Ozymandius and his “trunkless legs of stone.” My identity was sucked out of me by the reconfigured context of the surrounding disaster–my individual voice was no more than the autumn wind into which it went. Even the sea herself, though vast and changeful, had been, in the distant past, a desert on the very shore where she had raged that day. Give up the names you call yourself, oh brother snail, oh animal man!
This unbelievable flood-- Even so, There's a dryness in it. Standing at the ocean's edge, I....-- The wind of autumn. Where the beach was, There's a wet, sour smell --Over there.
I made it into the Cranford office for a single day on what turned out to be my last tank of gas for a week. Most of the others there were dealing with some version of my same circumstances–sometimes with small children. This one had a fireplace to face in the darkness, that one had a gas stove they kept roiling vats of water upon sending steam into cold rooms; a few had packed up the entire family to move in with in-laws. One co-worker, still roughly unshaven himself, mentioned that as soon as their freezer went out, they moved all of the good meat up to his mother-in-law’s house in Bergen County. I was intrigued by the number and variety of impromptu arrangements everyone had made, and it reminded me of the woman who left her cats floating on an air mattress with a dish of dry food and water! The cats survived fine, their paws only wetted by their careful cleaning licks. I felt surprisingly unself-conscious in my curiosity about everyone else.
After the hurricane, Everyone wants to be back at work To discuss it. Gazing thoughtfully At my scraggly co-workers-- I, too, scratch my stubble. In the sparse light, My hurricane beard comes in Quite white! * * * * The silent orchid In my cold apartment Keeps trying To teach me.
Dec 032012
Dec 032012
Opening another bottle Of stale hurricane water-- My life tastes sour.
No more storm, no more lights, no more phone. And no gas. Other than the increasing cold at night, brisk as a cod’s backside, there wasn’t too much difference from my usual solitudenious routine in the hurricane’s aftermath. I read books by candlelight and on my long-lasting Kindle. The transistor radio battery held out very well, and I heard from the opinionated broadcasters of New York City, and the occasional gubernatorial announcement from Christie or Cuomo. But somehow in the dark–which was far more absolute than usual–and in the united time of quiet–which held together much more solidly now that so many families had left to join relatives in Philadelphia or South Jersey–my regular “me time” began to feel like I was being haunted by ghosts of my old selves. My spirit felt erratic, half-mad–a soul on ice as Eldridge Cleaver put it.
I was lonelier than I had supposed–now that it was just me and the daylight, just me and the dark.
His many eyes sightless, The old fly stumbles-- A lonely night. Still sleepy in the grey dawn, Even after a full night practicing Staying awake! It's bearable by day, Watching people and birds hop about --This alone silence. Until the sun goes down I read, and then Label my thoughts in the dark. So cold-- Even this little flea Jumps into bed! In this silent time.... I watch icicles on the eves Lengthen. In this long darkness I force myself to enjoy A handful of cold peanuts. Last candle Of the hurricane stash-- Spent reading Basho.
I’ll mention the cold again here; it seeped into you the way water seeps into a shoe on a long, wet walk. You know it’s there. You think it’ll be fine, that you can handle it and keep your equanimity and presence of mind. But, eventually, it wears you down. If someone gives you a lift in a car with a working heater, your muscles thaw out like blocks of ice left on a rotisserie–at first wonderfully loosening as a massage, but then you disappear entirely, melted back to the constituent goo you crawled out of during earth’s primordial era. In the cold, you become no more than a frozen tooth–dead bone tied to consciousness by a roaring nerve. I began to identify with my outer jacket and loyally hand-knit scarf; I was an expression of my winter hat, of the shoes I slept in, the gloves I watched heat up instant coffee over a few broken candles. What self I did posses beyond the painful coldness I lived within, the proverbial joke fly trapped in an ice cube, lay in my mean, blue watery eyes. To see all things as your enemy is clarifying, as well as limiting. To be snapped awake from this perception against your will by the random imposition of beauty, is more vivifying than a hard slap to the chops. It’s like waking up in your coffin and smiling.
Night after night.... Silence.... Darkness.... What are streetlamps for? The storm has passed. Each night, I get more used to it-- This unplugged quiet. The wispy drapes Still shine in the moonlight-- Over my window, over me. Under the worn comforter-- Unlighted night leans in, Cold nose to nose. So long without power-- Cold fingers kneel and pray At the manual typewriter. A cold noon-- I doze Under all my winter coats. * * * * Writing haiku, I think of brushing my fingers Against your skin. Reading a used book-- On the otherwise clean page, A blood thumbprint.
Reading and writing became the masters of my life-rhythm. Not since I’d been a sickly teen, spending months at a clip laid-up in bed, had I known a solitude as complete–a strangeness, a remoteness to the active and social aspects of life. And, it was not at my choosing, which, like illness, can leave one lurching and at a loss. Others had lost their homes, their livelihoods, I merely my momentary freedom, the electric or gas power to flee from the persistence of my thoughts. I didn’t adjust well, casting about for any activity that would allow me to put a playful or pitiful interpretation on my dingy hours in the dark, the icky frozen minutes of my daytime. And yet, poor as I felt in choices, I found much to bring me directly into the path of life, the singeing and singing third rail of existing in the minute-moment. Birds especially had me laughing with their antics–and kids when I spotted them seemed perfectly content to return to 1900, or even the Middle Ages–completely happy with a bright ball or wiggly hula hoop.
With my eye on a page, I could deluge my mind with Tahitis and Mt Fugis. Confined as I was by my situation, I only felt free when I confined myself even more–damned to the gossipy rectangle of a book. Writing, too, put me right with existence, made me engage where I would wither. Where my eyes and senses reached, my words could turn a phrase that ordered the spectacle. Words helped me to execute spastic-tastic pratfalls like a comic, rather than simply stumble like a bum.
Up past midnight-- My bleary urine Is all echoey. So quiet now.... I finally notice: No wind. Tonight The only lanterns are the eyes Of a stray cat. The flea's eye Looks up piteously-- From under my thumbnail. After a long night Leaning toward the radio.... The Star-Spangled Banner! Watching cats After the hurricane's devastation-- I, too, will sleep on it. Even now-- Rainwater still hurries To the drain. Alone in the cold room The single candle flame Shivers!
I was going to waffle on here about “spiritual knowledge,” how hardship focuses the mind, but I was distracted out of my thoughts by a simple click of a light switch from the hallway. My homeless roomie is home and about to start sorting though a few big plastic storage boxes removed from her washed-out apartment. I think I should put some tea on for us in case she wants to share stories as old items rise like ghosts from her boxes–a red turtleneck with hanging arms, the watery whicker of a cubic zirconium bracelet, some dry photos fortuitously rescued–any small thing that speaks of home.
How much better to make tea than to go on prating!
Sometimes I can come off sounding more pompous than I really feel–that’s my Achilles’ heel. I’ve always been too fond of the kettledrums! Being a bit of a sorcerer’s apprentice can get you into some fine adventures, but when you trip up, everyone notices that the starry robe you are tangled up in is two sizes too large for you. That’s how it is when I think of living a spiritual life, of directing my feet the way greater feet have gone…. It’s all very much mouse-tracks lost in a dinosaur footprint!
These haiku, these little mouse-tracks, have helped me to remember my keel–though my boat be overwhelmed, the seas feisty and white. I’ll send them out to others done-in by this hurricane, or perhaps to those enchanted by the tragic magic nature has mastered. I’ll send them up my ratty mast–signal flags in the storm. Perhaps a few of them will join the sunken booty abandoned beneath the skinny bridge into Keyport, where even now a fallen Mercury engine lies, its black prop spun only by the passing current.
No matter how late I look out, At least one car creeping. Unseen In the lonely night-rain-- A white, wet snakeroot-flower. At cold midnight, I wake to the faint smell Of snow. A gnat, No matter how small-- My attention. Carrying a candle-- In an unexpected mirror, My burning face. After Sandy, This simple blue sky… Feels mistaken.
My ignorance and lack of freedom of movement left me with a very difficult personal crisis, a crisis of conscience: I knew people were suffering, but not what to do about it. Where was there a place to volunteer? How could I get there myself? One of the saddest things I saw during the blackout and the days of the odd/even rationing system for gas, were a few dogged FEMA pickup trucks rolling through our silent, storm-trashed apartment parking-lot one dusk, just as the deeper cold was coming on. They seemed like some Stephen King parody of the ice-cream man, handing out MREs and bottled water. It just felt so wrong to be taking any charity–to need any charity. Although my one neighbor did her best to persuade me to grab a few as she sent her kids running back to the idling FEMA truck for seconds, waving a red box in the air over her head and calling out “Cheez-Its!”
And so I have composed this sort of prose rosary, linked by twinkly haiku, to hold my hurricane experiences and prayers in a single loop of words. There is a hope in me that seeks restlessly for a perch–as a bird flying many days over the sea seeks landfall–that those unhoused by the hurry-up of this hurricane will also find a loop to hold them together, a warm abode for the spirit as well as a bed and roof for their bodies.
What had started out as a distraction from daily routine had been transformed–one exploding electrical transformer at a time–into a confrontation with my existential self. Who was I when the lights went out? When my world was drowning and the ship’s captain was nodded out on rum-tumblers of cuba libres, to what disastered dingy did I cling? On an horizon without an end, with myself but a dot in the matrix, what continued of my essential being? Of what our crafty, absent Creator had crafted, what of me had survived–and how did that surviving dot get on with it?
As cold as it is, Still, today, the wind is littler --Flapping this torn eyelid Of Tyvek. Deep inside the sunny rose-- A shadow, A bee. Under the grassblade's shadow A little finger of frost Persists. Winter mind-- To the frozen flower I send a butterfly. The leafblower men, Small hurricanes on their backs, Return to work.
Dec 032012
Nov 142012
Knowing how way leads on to way,
How time hesitates, but never stays,
I pause to acknowledge what had me play,
--Beyond the ache of loneliness--in the grey
stormy day.
I have never been a fan of the small art of texting. Hovering bumbling over awkward keys, tapping out an oblique morse code, three times on the five key to get a J, three6sforanO, two5sforaK, andtwo3sforanE. It just seemed like a joke to me.
But my dear friend, CPH, who knew about the possibility of a major power outage, suggested that I keep my peeps updated throughout whatever the next days entailed by texting haiku to the universe. The jittery mouse-steps of this tapped-out trail lie in your hands.
GGB Nov. 25th, 2012, my birthday
Nov 142012
Oct 262012
Reading at the Telephone Bar, NYC, March 6th, 2006 [Banquet and Ascent to be read aloud.]
Tonight’s selection will be two poems of opposite tenor. They tell weird interior tales of consciousness stretched to the uttermost. The references beyond the dome of one soul’s feelings are erudite, scattershot. The thread of the feeling must be noticed, and followed, for these experiments in lyrical insistence to work. Once the thread has been caught, and pulled tight between you and me, here in this room, tonight, together we may strike a chord and hear the heavenly music which is always part of poetry’s supposing.
The first poem, “Banquet,” is the dark, devilish core of the exploded poet. A withering inward glance at the toothless uselessness of poetry. How, when the thread’s not grasped, or when the poet in too hot self-contemplation incinerates the thread before it can be grasped—only the drama of the pyre can satisfy. As when Hamlet, at the close of his trials, drowns the disaster with a refreshing blood-bath. This is how a failure to communicate must end.
The second poem is, instead, a “loaded ode to limitlessness and light.” It has some beatific banter, and some instructive couplets. This is what may arise, phoenixlike, from the auto-da-fe of the first poem. There are longish passages of scenery; the inner feeling has suffused the world in its hopeful glow. The goal of universal love is presented as a given, and the world itself must be the context for that love, today as every day. The soulful voice in the second poem, “Ascent,” seeks to incite a response to the poet’s coo and call. Good luck to us all.
BANQUET
[Available elsewhere on this site]
ASCENT
[Available elsewhere on this site]
THE CURSE OF THE GILDED LILY (AFTER-HOURS)
The reading at The Telephone Bar was a blazing success. It’s no exaggeration to say that I was smashed; I mean, that I was a smash. There’s something about poetry reading events that ignite all the ambition and envy in my soul. Although, ambition and rivalry is nearer the mark. I don’t really feel a negative envy of the other readers. I enjoy their soarings and homilies.
But I do feel a bit left out—seated on the curb as the parade rages on. Harold, the MC of the evening, walleyed and tall in his vintage red sweater, said I’d’ve fit right into Mardi Grais (from which he’d recently returned), and promptly furnished the fireplace with the remnants of my reader’s notes. The goldenrod pages flared a moment and then joined the eternal ashes in the grate.
Somehow, even when people dig what I do, invitations to participate, or gestures of connection, rarely follow the brief fellow-feeling. It was quite unusual for Julie Androshick to ask me up to New York to be a featured reader after listening together to a previous poetry event which she had hosted in the toasty backroom. Most people seem to think that I’m already some kind of success, or that I’ve got “my own thing” going on. That happened even in college, when by definition every writer’s just a callow hack full of egocentrically tender self-regard. My professors thought I didn’t need or want any encouragement or too- close guidance or helpful hints simply because of the radiant bliss I experienced in poetry’s presence. I’m the snagged and angry Daffy Duck, but come off as the brazenly bouncy Bugs.
It might just be that because I enjoy myself so immensely and intensely at these outings that people empurple with a wry shyness—almost as if I’d find them out as fakes or dime-store swamis. I’m always holding myself back, way back, yet am full of a very visible, if not risible, “mire and spark.” I’m going to call this the curse of the gilded lily. Too much shine to actually be divine.
But, unlike the Music Man with his biblical tarrada-tant-ta, I have not found a way to turn my spurious shine to good effect. Oh, poetry’s just not about hosing the wogs in Iowa for a sheckle. (Not anymore, eh Homer?) It’s all about sifting the shiftless from the shineola; those moments of drifting like a thought, a golden straw flitting down from the haypile.
If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a success. 1200 rejections in a single year bear pop-eyed witness to that. Weary years of wringing words from turds have taken me precisely as far as I could walk in a desert unaided and unwatered. No phoenix will rear and arise here, only more of my alienated longing for beauty will occur.
I’d love for my words to wend their way somewhere other than to the fiery pit; to sigh a sonnet from a teleprompter, or band-aid my hands from book-signing injuries. Anything that would extend, enhance, or deepen those solid moments of eye-to-eye embarrassment that I live for. But those I meet who enjoy a buoyant success, only offer me their scorn and condescension. Ah, yes, it’s the back of the hand for me—and you, too, my readers—and then the lily’s in the wastebin.
The heat in the room was more oppressive than a Swedish sauna. It was Hell, with mittens. Women with their wonderful slopey breasts were in evidence, and I was a hit with the geriatric set. Those soonest to die love the poets best.
Signing off,
Prof. Harold Hill
March 7th, 2006
Oct 262012
Chained to redemption by the individuality of each human consciousness
Slaves of Glory
The very astonishing hour has come.
The very astonishing hour indeed!
Green Heinekins, jade brain and rose-coral vodkas
--Exhausted! In one final, fantastic evening.
Hosannahs invade the empty windows,
spurs of blacks, mysterious
As the tender invitation of the body.
Bright, alcoholic after-haloes sift
Timid ash upon stale, upraised lips.
Sobriety has entered us
As mourners enter a white church.
Enough of this pathetic quietness!
This simpering, dog-like wish for 'temperament'
The madness of faces full of 'sound judgement.'
I forgive all disasters, all accomplishments,
Every disguise that announces 'I am finished!'
Choking its inhabitant as a mirror chokes beauty.
Songs of sporadic intensity, wicked verses,
The poem of flayed skin, blind eyesight
Mutes imagining laughter, I forgive you!
Pathetic quiet!
Bring tympans, wild sibilants,
Drunken elephants of sound, mists,
the harsh clangour of brass.
New eyes, new hearts, new senses!
Bring a speech of bloods, the invention of Angels!
Why was one ever afraid of waking?
Eh! a little daydream I had in the haypile.
But now the new era has arrived--this moment!
Let us revenge the sky for an hour!
Let us run out, muds of new births upon us,
And seize in hands of ice the very flowing waters--
--Dreams of incorporeal perfection!
Dawn leaves splinter in my eye
Enacting the death of Satan.
Vertiginousness in the closet!
Very astonishing!
It is the witching hour in this poem of rebirth. This is the “very astonishing hour” when anything can happen, and does. There’s an echo here of Goethe’s Walpurgisnacht (“one final, fantastic evening”). There’s a Satanic suggestiveness in the darkness of the scene, and in the exhaustion of ribald modes of stimulation. The Bacchanalian means of inspiration and change of one’s mental state through alcohol have ended… and yet the desire for change, for growth, for experience continues, if anything, more intensely. The soul searches for new forms of re-invention, new means of exultation; for connection with the “infinite” as Baudelaire would say.
A stanza break occurs at the moment of “giving up,” when the exhaustion of the previous celebrations and vineyard methods of ecstatic outreach are at their peak. A moment of silent nothingness… the death of all mystic oneness with that which “makes the world go round.” And then….
“Hosannahs invade the empty windows”–the windows are empty, the mystic connection is dead, the speaker is in a world where what surrounds him is the void; there is no ultimate referent to anchor his searching. “Hosannahs” is used in both the Jewish and Christian sense. In the Jewish sense as a plea to God and to the more modern, pagan Beyond to “save me now” from this state of exhausted disconnection. And in the Christian sense of praise and excitement that “the One,” the Messiah, has come–as is evidenced in the rest of the poem. “Hosannahs” sit at the fulcrum of the poem. But this second sense of “Hosannahs” hasn’t fully dawned on the speaker yet. We are to accompany the speaker on this journey to ecstasy. Right now there is a wary sense that something new has entered his consciousness, something not necessarily easily distinguished from the “blackness” of the windows looking out on nothing. There is only a dawning sense that some alchemical change is starting to occur–and this new beginning, after the death of the old forms of ecstatic insight, is “as tender as the invitation of the body.” This is a parallel to God’s being made flesh in Jesus. This is as curious and crazy a newness as when we ourselves first arrived to experience life as babies. Everything is unknown and seems unknowable.
The death of the old way to ecstasy, the “timid ash” of Bacchanalia, is taken in faith of its being about to be renewed, with a teasing reference to the “new life” of the Catholic communion; but here, instead of crackers transubstantiated into the flesh of Christ and symbolic of a “new life in Christ,” we have phoenix-like ashes, the sour mash taste that sticks to the mouth after a weekend bender. Is the speaker being ironic? The speaker at this point registers the “death” of the old way, and joins that mourning in sobriety. It is a painful experience of grief, to give up the known to embrace what may be–for all the speaker knows–nothingness itself.
Then, with the irritable brashness of a new convert, the whole parade of human life comes in for a sober reassessment. The speaker will no longer be silent about the variety and extent of falseness apparent in our communal human life–everything from status-symbols (“accomplishments”) to our private vanity (“as a mirror chokes beauty”) become obstacles to the new life, the rebirth, of the individual. Although he doesn’t know what this new life might yet entail (the empty windows), he knows that the old chemical passage to heaven is done, and that the status quo does not provide any enlightenment on its own. This is the psychological atmosphere of all destructive revolutions, and “the people” are ripe to be ripped-off by any huckster passing off a latest-edition paradigm shift. The “pathetic quiet” of the status quo is condemned not once, but twice, as if merely raising a hullabaloo will help forward the project of rebirth that is at hand. “Make a joyful noise!” goes the old psalm; but there, the reason for joy has already made itself evident through a process of revelation–either via Moses com in’ down the mountain, or by Jesus being crucified to the skies and then defeating death in his own body. Here there is no such revelation, only the ground-clearing destruction of the status quo.
As if “tympans [and] wild sibilants” aren’t enough, the speaker calls for metaphorically questionable “drunken elephants of sound.” What is being demonstrated in this poem is the very process, the very moment of revelation itself. Every truth,”every disguise that announces ‘I am finished!’,” has been abandoned or destroyed in a process as madly methodical as Hamlet’s ripping through excuses for inaction and his stabs at attempting to get to the truth of the past through various rhetorical stances and the linguistic investigations of his one-off soliloquies. Deliriously radical in approach and existential in stance, this is the antithesis of a poetry of string emotions “recollected in tranquility” as such as Wordsworth recommends. This poetry has more in common with the confessional poetry of the 1960s, perhaps the reportage of a drug trip, or the witnessing of a baptist tent revival than with traditional poetic forms and resources. Intent, intensity, and the willingness to report from the edges of self-knowledge, seemingly without any guess as to where this reporting will lead either the reader or the speaker all combine to give this piece an almost tragic tension.
The danger of such a far-out technique, of course, is the arousal of frustration in the reader. Religious conversions have a set script and goal that the entire community of believers is deeply aware of; Greek tragedy tells stories similarly well-known, although the catharsis is tragic rather than ecstatic in nature. “Slave of Glory” leaves us in doubt as to what the final outcome will be. Are we to become mystically empowered by “new eyes, new hearts, new senses”, or is this attempt to synthesize a fresh religion on the fly going to leave us as disastered as Icarus? I believe it is this very uncertainty, and this willingness to explore the edges of experience and insight anyway that this poem is hoping to make explicit through its uncertain technique. It has something in common with jazz, but the original melody itself is improvised; there is no variation on a theme here–all themes are consigned to the wood-chipper of history, failed ecstasies, old golden moments no longer valid. As ambitious as this project sounds–the founding of a new religion or new mode of consciousness–the speaker seems, once roused to the task, to take it in steady stride:
Why was one ever afraid of waking?
Eh! a little daydream I had in the hay pile.
Then a series of fantastic, indeed hardly creditable actions and incitements are listed, ice hands holding water, revenging the sky, all contained under the oxymoronic rubric of embodying “dreams of incorporeal perfection.” Indeed the tension of ambition vs. realization reaches its epic height (at least, as codified in the Judeo-Christian tradition) when the speaker claims to see his new world “enacting the death of Satan.” This is the apotheosis! And to think, only a few moments ago, the speaker had just awakened with a cracking hangover! Has Time itself been put to the sword? Since, however, we are in the linguistic tangle of a poem, the reader may feel prompted to recall Wallace Stevens’ observation that “the death of Satan was a tragedy for the Imagination.” With this cautionary note sub-consciously struck, can irony be far behind? How are we to take the next, deeply ambivalent (ecstatic? spastic?), stanza:
Vertiginousness in the closet!
There’s no telling. The poet is keeping his cards guardedly close. Does your life satisfy without the blast and lambast of a new religion? Are you interested in defying the cage of bones and memories that define your personhood? What do you think you want, and what do you really want? Is desire itself a fool’s mission? You’ll get as many definitive answers here as you will re-reading The Tempest a trillion times. What is left to say when our limitedness meets with the infinite?
Very astonishing!
Oct 142012
An exploratory twirl across a precarious bridge of words in “The Suspension”
The Suspension bridge being by its nature incomplete at either end without anchors heavily laden and the wide context of connection of place to place like a man webbed to his life birth to death pegged feeling traffic tickle across him as he sways daily going nowhere-- Watch the wind now playfully wake it singing!
The punctuation of a pause. An incentive in the incompleteness of a phrase broken across the spine of several lines of verse. Like the tense energy of a bullwhip that gathers to a crisp crack that then echoes in the listeners’ ears, “The Suspension” attempts this trick of suave timing and intention. The effect is to leave a suggestion of multiple meanings and insinuations in each line far beyond the mere sketch that the words themselves provide. Laid out and read as a simple pair if sentences, there’s not a whole lot of intensity in the language. But, strung across the intervaled frets of the line breaks, the language gains enough tension to be play many different tunes without breaking the basic sense of the piece.
Read aloud sensitively, the voice is pulled toward a monotone. The monotone is a way of testing each word by its own merits, without prejudice. Each word adds its plink to the melody beyond (or absent) any assumed speaker’s intentions; like a tune clawed from a Japanese samisen, the spirit of the listener finds itself eerily manifesting in the perfected intervals between each line, word, and syllable. This method of versification trends toward the use of monosyllabic word choices since that lets each meaning-and-sound unit most easily have its maximum impact of implication.
In this poem, the tension of multiple meanings and implications begins right in the title. Let’s speed through the lines with some initial possibilities before we consider how all of these multiple meanings and some of the sound values add up to the sort of sculpture-in-motion of one of Calder’s merry mobiles–a stiffened, crafted and finished shape that still can change is outline even though the observer keeps his mind “still like the hummingbird.”
The Suspension(motion tensed to stillness; a paused act; implicit indecision; being let go or released from one’s usual work or task;)
bridge being(the physical object of the poem surpassingly introduced, the bridge; essence of the object, or being, is connection; connection between two of what, though; connection itself as a form of stasis; oxymoron of this stasis, which pulls the meaning in two directions at once; a suspension bridge is the lightest and most aerial kind of bridge, a tightrope across an abyss;)
by its nature(both naturally and in the outward manifestation of its interiority;)
incomplete(pulling away from the implied completeness or fullness of ‘nature’ in previous line; emphasized by its placement at the end of the stanza; having in air like the suspension bridge itself, a natural manifestation of the oxymoron;)
at either end(changes the focus from the bridge to its end-points; neither end is itself the focus, which keeps suspended feeling going; question arises: how exactly is it ‘incomplete / at either end’; the eye can look only at one end at a time, and so shifts back and forth; the mobile is twirling;)
without anchors(the nature of the incompleteness is modified: anchors remove it, complete the connecting nature of the bridge; raises the contemplation of an anchorless bridge; would it be like a kite let go in a storm; would it simply collapse;)
heavily laden(nature of the anchors; the lightness of the bridge requires weight too, like a kite when guided by a fist holding its twine; sense of oppression; loss of freedom; the weight of the past; a burden spiritual or physical;)
and the wide(opening the viewpoint; wideness of river; bringing in the existence of whatever is bridged over; bridge overcomes an obstacle, this is at least implied;)
context of connection(meaning, context, occur only beyond the actual span of the bridge and its anchors; no man is an island; riding the mobile is a game of blind-man’s-bluff; pattern requires perspective;)
of place(the context, albeit in a generalized noun;)
to place(place is doubled, like the anchors; origins and destinations are definite, but is the bridge equally real;)
like a man webbed(major simile of the poem is introduced: the bridge is like a man, man is like a bridge; continuation of slight anthropomorphization of “heavily laden”; “webbed” is an unusual word choice, the only metaphor in the poem; stringiness of suspension bridge referenced; man and bridge are tied down, laden; whether spider or fly remains unclear;)
to his life(life is the place of human context; destinations;)
birth to death(place becomes time; length of a man’s life is the width of his context;)
pegged feeling(subjective aspect of connection emphasized; burden underlined; suggestion of crucifixion, sacrifice;)
traffic(quick switch back the literal context of the bridge; many things, many thoughts, many feelings travel over the bridge of a man’s burdensome existence; once an electronic circuit is complete, information flows;)
tickle across him(quick switch back to the subjective context; “tickle” implies it may not all be suffering; annoyance of tickling; implied laughter too;)
as he sways daily(indecision of being pegged, webbed between obligations, burdens, anchors)
going nowhere–(man’s life, like bridge, although a means of connect is itself inherently directionless; induced oxymoronic meditative state; threat of meaninglessness; dash emphasizes stoppage;)
Watch the wind(first new clause, capitalized for emphasis; the invisibility of the wind is a hidden context of the suspension bridge, the medium of its swaying; like time is man’s invisible medium of his existence;)
now playfully(return to lightness of “tickle”; context of bridge is beyond bridge’s, or man’s control;)
wake it(invasiveness of windy context liberates the bridge from its burdens; no “patient etherized upon a table,” the bridge, the man, is conscious in his suffering, the necessities of his connections;)
singing!(wires of the suspension bridge hum and sing in the playful wind; reminiscent of Coleridge’s Aeolian Harp poem, which was a metaphor for the soul; trapped between places and contexts, weighted at both ends, run across by purposeful others, still expression, freedom, patterns of meaning and feeling are possible; )
Oct 022012
The Ever-Arriving River How do we know we have arrived? No gate blows open, no trumpet swings wide Giving boogie-oogie oogie-boogie to the countryside. Our horses must feed on grass, or perish. So, too, our souls. Having gone down the long defiles All night, in a night that is not sure of ending, Our souls paw their bellies and howl. Even a ghost craves ghostly sustenance. Have we arrived then, when midnight creaks And starved souls howl at the wolvish moon? Or must we still, in our hunger, kneel and pray? Must a glittering track shiver in the sleepy pines For the last mile shimmied on our knees? Bend at that track, and drink with tragic hands, With hands encased in silver to their wrists. Drink and drink; drink deep, O traveler-- Tomorrow we must find this river again.
The themes of this poem can be said to be paradise, pain, and persistence.
The first line of the poem immediately creates the context and then throws it into question.
How do we know we have arrived?
In the title it is the river that is arriving. In the first line the question is about our arriving. There is some confusion between whether it is the river arriving or us who are arriving. What is the relationship between these two arrivals?
What does arriving mean anyway? If the river is ever-arriving how do we know we’ve ever gotten anywhere? If we don’t know that we’ve arrived somewhere what is the problem that creates? These are the sorts of questions that are created by the tension between the title and the first line of the poem.
The reader and the narrator of the poem both seek reassurance on this point. The second stanza begins with a frustration of that seeking reassurance. Traditional signs of arrival, signs of having completed your journey, are denied the speaker and the reader both. “No gate blows open.”
“No trumpet swings wide,” the horn of Gabriel, the official welcoming at the gates of heaven, is absent from the countryside. There is no sound of welcome available to the traveler. Indeed the silence seems to mock the reader and the seeker. The “oogie-boogie” of 1940s swing music is unavailable to the traveler, and hides another pun in the poem only a footnote can provide.
This lack of welcome, this lack of acknowledgment, this lack of arrival, then create an intolerable tension in the poem. We are not only mocked, we are in peril. “Our horses must feed on grass, or perish.” The horses, representative of purposeful onward motion, must find some sustenance or die. Our sense of arrival is frustrated. We must seek a way to go forward even one more step in this unwelcoming countryside. The analogy to the spiritual context is made explicit in the first half of the next line. Our souls are directly compared to the horses which carry us onward. The long night of the soul is vividly evoked as “the long defiles / all night.”
The spiritual context of the seeking, the lust for Paradise, is underlined in the last line of the stanza “even a ghost craves ghostly sustenance.” So here we are. We are suffering, we are seeking. When will we arrive at this fabled “ever-arriving” river? The ever-arriving nature of the river is reminiscent of Heraclitus’s observation that one may never step into the same river twice. Will the river be the place of our renewal, our welcoming? Is it truly to be the destination that we are seeking?
The hope is set up in the poem that indeed the river will be the paradise our souls are craving. But on what sustenance Olar soul survive in the meantime? Is our desire for paradise itself the sustenance we seek? The third stanza asks these very questions. The conditions of “arrival” are mixed up with the conditions of seeking, the “starved” nature of the spiritual quest is itself considered a sign of arriving someplace. Our hunger for spiritual fulfillment has lifted us out of the ordinary daily context of our lives. We’re no longer simply mortal. We are mortal and spiritual creatures, locked into a quest. This seems a bit medieval and some ways. Like Parsifal with his vision of the Grail, we are beset with a vision of an overflowing, ever-arriving river. Our thirst is great in the darkness of our long spiritual night.
But mere spiritual hunger, mere spiritual seeking, are not enough to fulfill the requirements of arrival. We must still “in our hunger, Neal and pray.” To wish for spiritual fulfillment to seek the river is not enough. We must, even without the grass that are horses require, even without finding anything yet, we must “kneel and pray.” We must, even in the midst of our suffering, be grateful. But this is jumping the gun (or the gate) a bit here. First the poet ratchets up the tension of the seeker’s dilemma a few more notches. The pervasive use of the the communal perspective, “our horses,” “our souls,” draws the reader into alignment with the speaker’s quest. It is not dissimilar to the old preacher’s trick of addressing his disparate congregation confidently as a single community, a united entity, small before the greatness of The Lord.
In the desperation and tension created by the prolonged absence of paradise or the goal to which the traveler is headed, a vision of this final destination appears. In the middle of the woods, in the middle of the countryside a “glittering track” appears uncertainly in the moonlight. Is this the long-awaited “ever-arriving river”? Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. But our approach to it (whether it is real or imagined only among the “sleepy pines”) must be prayerfully attempted; we must move forward the “last mile” on our knees. But even here, even in extremis, the mocking humorousness of the situation is not neglected by the poet; this last mile, oogie-boogie style, is “shimmied on our knees.” It seems that we are to chuckle at ourselves in our spiritual seeking, our thirst to arrive. Perhaps there is some nobility in such a sly acknowledgement of our perpetual “shortcomings.”
This uncertainty of our arrival–emphasized from the first line of the poem–is no doubt why we are instructed to drink with “tragic hands.” And then there is the brilliant image of the hands, wet with this very ambivalent arrival, after our midnight creeping, after the anguish of our hungry souls “howling” for sustenance, “encased in silver to their wrists.” Our desire has brought us here, has manacled us to this destiny of seeking. Even in the very act of fulfillment there is to be no satiation; we are locked into a cycle of spiritual seeking. It is a rather grim image of that meditation many traditions label a spiritual practice or discipline.
But what other choice does the howling soul have? Given the poverty of our spiritual circumstances, given the hunger for arrival, we can only continue to seek. But now that we, with sufficient gratitude and desperation, have arrived at this temporary river, we should drink. Tomorrow we may seek, but tonight we drink!
Drink and drink; drink deep, O traveler–
Tomorrow we must find this river again.
Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]
Oct. 1, 2012
Sep 242012
On Being a Human Bean
On Being a Human Bean,
Or, why Jessica Smith should finish her book My Sweet Demise
A wedding present
When, in the course of childhood and the berating onset of adolescence, an individual human bean becomes gradually, and then gratingly, aware of her self as distinct from other selves–a new necessity is born.
Each human bean is, by definition of being separately countable in the big jellybean jar of humanity, unique. This is fine, as far as it goes, and the dim sense of having one’s own color and taste while rubbing against the sweet mass of humanity is often enough for most human beans. They require no more expression or self-justification than an Oprah-endorsed self-help book and a new pair of slinky sandals can provide.
But for some human beans, simply being accounted for in the crush, one member of the “How many jellybeans are in the jar?” contest, is not enough. It is not satisfying; the tailored undershirt of peer-pressure, for these human beans, is an itchy fit. A noticeable discomfort grows behind their eyes; they survey their life and the lives of those around them and try to figure out why they no longer feel like they fit in. Why is life in the jellybean jar no longer enough?
How many jellybeans are in the jar?
Were they wiggled too long against the glass of the jellybean jar, giving them visions of tastier horizons?
Were they accidentally isolated until their thoughts became loud as a drumbeat in their ears?
Were they shunned and spurned for being too tall, too short, too smart, too something?
They may ask their parents and siblings for an answer. Most likely they will get responses ranging from “It’s just a phase” to “Stop whining for attention–geez!”
And so our individual human bean is left to her own resources. Now, all the while she is living and loving and riding her bike to the park, she is also thinking about the why of her differentness. She is imagining answers for her questions; she is watching the edges of the jellybean jar for an escape hatch, some hidden way out that will let her see things more clearly, more cleanly. She watches herself thinking and feels herself feeling.
Maybe I am a Mexican jumping bean! She postulates.
A Mexican Jumpin Bean
Maybe I am a pebble painted pink and mixed in with these beans, she wonders.
Maybe I am really a gumball with a bend in my middle, she considers.
But none of these possibilities is the answer. She is just a human bean, just like all the other human beans. And yet…. Her sense of being different just won’t go away. And then she discovers that, as painful and problematic as feeling different can be, she doesn’t want her differentness to go away. She wants to be just as different as she is. Heck, she smiles, I should write down just how different, how special I truly am. And I should do it in my own special way.
She wants to be herself, and nobody else. And she wants to share that self with everybody else. Her color, her flavor; her own sweet demise–from one human bean to another.
My Story by a Human Bean
Sep 142011
Last Tuesday, for kicks, the cachinnate sea-crew Downed an albatross, a vast sea-bird, The indolent companion of our wake, who lazily traced Our ship's slippage through bitter breakers. Once deposed to the common planks, This king of the wild blue stumbled in shame, Piteously dragging his white infinite wings Like chalky oars unmoored beside him. Winged voyager! Now dementedly frail! O royal one! Now splay and exposed! One sailor crams His Highness' beak with a burning pipe; The next limps and mimics this cripple who soared! The Poet is one with this swift prince of the clouds Who haunts the tempest and mocks swart archers: Exiled to earth's low hoots and threats, His giant wings hobble each inch of his step. --Charles Baudelaire
Sep 142011
Dear Reader:
Let me elaborate (without belaboring) my point in print. Let’s say one questions the status quo: Hey Quo, what’s up with that, yo? The question, by its very nature, throws doubt upon the validity and durance of the status quo, or things as they are. Maybe things should be arranged otherwise, maybe other arrangements or interpretations would be more penetrating and correct, or would open avenues of action that would be grander or more satisfying. Questions, in this respect, are like headlights that can help us sketch out the dimensions and "give" in the fog that surrounds us.
What questions, in and of themselves, cannot do in these circumstances is prove anything about the validity of the status quo one way or another. Because one can formulate a question about the status quo does not, in itself, undermine things as they are in any way. Hey Quo, are you sure that the ground is under my feet? This question does nothing to remove the ground from under your feet–it is simply a question–a question that can start a process of discovery that itself should be questioned and not simply assented to because it undermines current understanding. This is what I meant about "questioning the questions."
A question is simply the first step on a path that may eventually lead to the heady heights, and vast new perspectives, of disproof of the status quo; but the question is not the map, the donkey, the traveler, the sweat and the path all in one. The ground under your feet is solid until physics comes to eventually prove–through assertions and demonstrations (the sweat and donkey, etc.)–that in fact the ground is mostly made up of empty space between those tiny head-spinners, atoms.
Questions start the discovery, but the doubts are only worth paying attention to when evidence begins to solidify their guesswork with a bridge to a new reality, a new solidity. This goes on forever and ever, and even our views of bridges past begin to be swallowed up in the present fog and our next new journey can be to re-tread the paths of discoveries "past."
But then, what is Time, really?
Gregg Glory
Sep 142011
"The rat I wrangled from my womb has wronged me! Bit me! Bled me! Hear a mother's cry to kill her kid! Choke the sopping monster who goes glued to Fate By my very blood! Sucked from my very teat, milk and blood both-- bitter, bitter! O Aegiesthus' ghost-- where are you? Hold my breasts and fuck me! These same breasts that came with my pubescent blood, Oresetes nuzzled-- his skull-top as soft as his pea of a nose. Unfinished he flooded into a turgid world, Torn by troubling dreams; I built him from boy to man, I And I alone touched him wonderingly, wantingly: That this star should fall from my fuckholeÖ. Damn him! Damn him! What is it to be a mom If men may treat their mothers thus? Curse him! My identity's stripped to ifs without him; without him Numbered and known as my son, my son. Hard the travail, hard the happiness, and now hard the death-time Of mothers and their motherhood. Sleepless across the groined earth I groan, Loneliness airless and endless. Not mother, but murderer My son--that damned man--proclaims me to finally be. His insistence on Justice is a sinkhole of sorrows Burying his Mommy for God. Ah, God-- No; no refuge there; no clouds, no angels, no respite For a woman torn and scorned. I'm jammed into my gender: First, pollution of the menstrual punch, then sex Wished-for in waiting, not sought in warm arousal But closeted and kept close, moldy with hoping-- Thin mystery of the singing clit mixed with sorrow-oh! Known then as Agamemnon's woman, addendum to majesty, That which cleaves and is cloven--flickeringly split in loving-- His arms the margins of my seacoast--no more, no less. And no woman knows another; slakers and takers of the defining phallus-- Competitive finessers of the clamping circumstance. Came Helen, and away went our hairy thousands, All the wood echoing like a troubled drum. Men marching into the sea! Seaborne, sea-torn, So many with no fluff on their chins, little wrigglers. War-widow I was then, alone as a lion, Stalking the beaches at dawn, clubbed and stunned By the night menaces; the sins of the dreamless hours, My mind a shifty shuttle on no holy loom. What was I in this absence of passions? Unkicked, unlicked. No nobility rolled, lucid and lovely, from my hurt hollows. I was uncoiled and void; knowingless, dirty, and numb."
Sep 142011
An old-time, small-town hardcore "con" polite enough to jigger mint juleps in tinking silver cups rubbed smooth by lips ribbed smooth with talking. Politics, aesthetics, jeremiads, history's candid tangle of catastrophes --any subject that nights ripen and split enough to show the sense of meaning at the snapping seams; thought stretched taut until articulation sang. O the million nights chattered ruefully through to human truth! Rhythm's doubled thrubs send the heart-beacon out beneath the boards, like your troubled and beloved Poe moaning lonely for his Annabelle Lee, lovely ideal resurrected from the dead real. Your life-plot's coiled as Rosencrantz', a labyrinthine mind of steel and twine following each God-doled bread-crumb clue to God's appointed apotheosis; intent as a atheist pimping out a principle. You loiter with stories forever unfinished, once started, not knowing "how way leads on to way." Each enunciated principle's broadened with tributary amendments, altering precursor and course upon reconsideration; Rabelaisian babble nipped and tucked tidy by a laser-guided philosophy. Long ago in your yeoman youth you started dreaming past the dragon's hiss, the dragon's tooth, to inner virtue's unvarying, vibrant truth. Now an earnest father gone haggard at the world's lies-- you sit a spastic Little Hamnu down to talk-- and finish grinning and whistling in the dark, stuck, like Coleridge with his quaint Constancy, or an aim-awry Orion facing West, stark as a marker in the stars' fixed rigging.