{"id":5282,"date":"2015-08-27T19:02:06","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T19:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/wordpress\/?p=5282"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:42","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:42","slug":"the-pilot-light-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/the-pilot-light-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pilot Light"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pilot-light-thumbnail\"<\/a>Purchase from Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/span>Divers missives to absent others<\/em>\r\n\r\nBY\r\nGREGG GLORY \r\n[GREGG G. BROWN]\r\n\r\nPublished by BLAST PRESS\r\nCopyright © 2014 Gregg G. Brown \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
\n~~S.T. Coleridge, The Nightingale<\/p>\n
Bear witness for me, whereso’er ye be,
\nWith what deep worship I have still adored
\nThe spirit of divinest Liberty.
\n~~ S.T. Coleridge, France: An Ode<\/p>\n
The Parable of the Parable-Teller<\/h2>\n
\r\n\r\n <\/span>...of lovers and friends\r\n \t\t\tI still can recall\r\n\r\n<\/em><\/pre>\n
\nNeuro-science and linguistics have found, more and more, that the portion of ourselves that we recognize as uniquely our own, that we carry with us as the turtle his horn-bone home borne upon his back, is the story of our life that we continually create and edit.  It is this most portable portmanteau companion, this kitchen gadget of enlightenment and self-definition, this word in our own ear, that is us to us.  In Shakespeare, the most vile Iago gets in-between the naive Othello and his perception of what his love is, what his love means;  Iago takes the place of Othello’s own consciousness by his whispered innuendo.  If Othello had been more mature in love, as he was in war, he would not have been so malleable to another’s voice, another’s vindictive agenda.  He would have recognized Iago’s stratagem for what it was–Iago’s implanted concept of love was simply war by another means.  And so we are all vulnerable to the virus of other voices, other selves.  Indeed, we change ourselves through the same methods that Iago infects Othello, but usually with less ulteriority in our motives.  (As an aside, a situation in which this is not the case, in which we self-consciously adopt a new posture towards our current reality, is when one voluntarily submits to the re-programming of a twelve-step, diet, or other self-help or self-improvement campaign.)\n<\/p>\n
\nWe live in a mist of continual whispers.  And these whispers bring us news of the world, and arm us, Galileo-like, with telescopes to view our inner landscapes: our pasts, our nattering presents, our dreams and desires–all at once, or in a movie-montage series that takes on the serried wheels of the kaleidoscope for its deployment and re-deployment of pattern in the search for meaning. Childhood faces, lovers breathing intensely close, the lick of an insistent pet, all compete for their place in the panorama, their time in our arms at the square-dance of selfhood.  What fiddler calls the tune?  Will we always respond, stomping in time to the quibbling ifs that life presents?  This is all process, the creation of context from which our daily self emerges: the hourly display of faces from which Shakespeare chose his masks, and where Dickens lived amid Pickwickian semi-visionary laughter.\n<\/p>\n
\nLayer on layer of this-was and what-ifs bring us the twists of our private narratives–not the blatant debasement of power-narratives and privileged perspectives and voice that Derrida derived, but the rich exploration of ears of the self, the continual God-slog of “the examined life” that Socrates instilled into the DNA memes of the curious West.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe parable of the parable teller is simply this: that our attention, our focus changes, and the parable-teller, like Chaucer chuckling gently from on-high, remains aware that the change is occurring. Coleridge in “Frost at Midnight” demonstrates well the process of place and inner space.  First he is alone in a frosty midnight;  then, looking at the fire, he recalls other scenes, and in one of those recalled scenes, he remembers wishing for yet another presence, another context.  In “The Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” Coleridge imagines the walk his friends are taking and describes that walk.  Similarly, Stanley Kunitz imagined the first moonwalk–and when hearing and seeing reports of that walk in actuality, Kunitz claimed he didn’t need to change a syllable of his poem since he had “already walked on the moon” in his imagination.  In this same way, we invent the self we are and the details of our lives that stand out for us and become incorporated into the currently active self we are always oh-so-busy experiencing.  In poems that follow here, there are usually at least two stories told side-by-side–a current context of speech in which the narrator is speaking or being caused to write, the context of the person being addressed as imagined by the narrator, and the remembered details of events experienced in the past by the narrator (often a past memory of being with the addressee).  And all this symphony of whizzing whispering brings the speaker to new views of the self he could be, the creature he is creating in his lab of solitude.\n<\/p>\n
\nOne of the ablest spaces for this refreshing and re-experiencing of the self is in our nests, our tidy homes, with the latch shut and the world feeling far-off and safe.  Here there is no imperiling snap and swap of swordplay, no train bearing down on our vulnerable colony of cells.  Home means comfort, and ease, and feet up on the couch as we break out the stereoscope and review what wisdom is given to us as our portion of the greater mystery.  There’s a warmth in the hearth, a harvest in the home, that no other domicile can quite capture or match, whatever its majesty may be.  Niagara Falls or zip-line volcano tours will have to stand beside and wait in memory when the yellow light of a suburban home beckons the leg-tired jet-lagged traveller home.  Home to zoning-out, home to the spatter of expected talk, home to regular rounds of coffee, the simple fellowship of your nearby hand, denizens of ease in winter’s sparkling twilight.\n<\/p>\n
\nAnd so the parable perpetuates itself in an onslaught of ontologies, tabulations, diaries, vivid minuscule distinction upon distinction without end.  Frame within frame, story within story, the multiple perspectives switching with an effortless turn of the tongue, the change of metaphor made flesh, the story made bone and standing up, a stacked skeleton that had been rummaging the veldt on all fours.  Do we remember the perspective of the lungfish, the metaphor that had us leap to land, grow hand and hoof, still carrying the seas within us?<\/p>\n
\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Gregg Glory\r\nMarch, 2014\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nGo, little heart
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nGo, little heart, into a song\r\nThat flies away the while,\r\nChirruping with the dashing catbird there\r\nWho flits through a country stile.\r\n\r\nMy eye her errant ecstasy\r\nFollows along a dotted line....\r\nStretched to cotton majesties of cloud\r\nWhere she disappears like Time.\r\n\r\nWhen my song comes singing back\r\nTo me, from frosty Everest returned,\r\nNote how my voice at highest pitch remains\r\nTill I'm ashes in an urn.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nCONVERSATIONS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nThe Pilot Light
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nMy Jenny, my jewel, the house echoes\r\nwith your wintery tread, a diamond rolled\r\nloud on an overturned aluminum canoe;\r\nyou walk about like one who is school-tired \r\nto the point of ill-temper, a scholar\r\nflopped among her hundred books.\r\n\r\nHow often I recall my own school days\r\nin dry colloquy with old professors,\r\nghosts of poetry who remain spirit-limber\r\nin my reminding mind--strong with witch-words\r\nthat evoke in me heaven-pastures \r\nwhere angels nod don-like over tomes\r\ncloud-lovely and limned with golden words\r\nas if sunset were always nigh, yet never\r\nsetting into that charlike dark beyond the page\r\nwhere thumb and gilding meet and part.\r\nAnd so I see you, conversing briskly\r\nwith rows of unknowing pupils, tipping\r\ncups of milky knowledge into empty mugs....\r\n\r\nHere beneath our roof of snow you move\r\nin moody silence, heavily, from chair to chair,\r\narranging tests and essays like a stack\r\nof X-rays shimmering to heart and bone\r\nof your young charges now dimly abed\r\nand dreaming--while wild outside\r\nthe February wind whistles wickedly,\r\nand I sit meditative in a half-daze of dream,\r\nremembering with the flickering wind\r\njust how young (how young!) I once was\r\nin poetry--knowing only that I didn't know \r\nthe myriad ways of verse, but loved all\r\nthat poetry somehow made me feel--as a child\r\nknows nothing, but knows that love is there\r\nin the downward glow of its mother's downy face.\r\nIf I could contain so much of ignorance\r\nall at once, surely one day my knowledge\r\ncould grow as great?\r\n\r\nThe book has flattened on my lap\r\nthat kept me wondering while you worked--\r\nairy fancies that troubled old Coleridge:\r\nhis fire's stranger-ash floating over \r\nflaming bars as he watched lost in thought\r\nin his humble Cot, all his guests asleep,\r\nhis singing-self a stranger like the rest!\r\nHere, the wind-berated moon huddles low\r\nover apartment eves;  each push and punch\r\nof night-wind tells--not of strangers beyond the sill,\r\nbut how alone we are when we are ourselves!\r\nI see my ignorance with sleepy eyes\r\nand measure new ignorance by those stars\r\nranged primly distant, too far to touch\r\ntheir fire--almost too far to see....\r\nWhat passion keeps them steady in their skies,\r\nastral marks that tell us where we are?\r\nWhen it's all too much for me, too many\r\nconfusions and cavilings railing in my brain, \r\nall I can think to think, or think to say\r\nas the Little Dipper sinks and darkness greys\r\nconfusing eye and atmosphere,\r\nis that a flame grows narrow at its tip.\r\n\r\nJenny, I look about me once again,\r\nrising itinerant until I find my final bed\r\nbeyond these rooms we share and shape with life.\r\nNearby, you bend to the stuttering stove,\r\na companionable grace in increasing night,\r\nquiz-work kept neatly stacked at the long table,\r\nand strike a fresh match to the unprimed grate--\r\nover-watching the tiny flame with as careful eye \r\nas God might over-watch the infant heat \r\nof Adam in early earth's so-cold bowl--\r\nand soft! within the iron grate, with whisper\r\nsweet, bluely ignites the tender pilot light,\r\nset to burn as long as attendant gas serves as wick\r\nto what your human hands had clicked awake.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nThe Graven Path
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nLittle Michele, little friend, little missed miss,\r\nI'm readying a flapping knapsack to meet\r\nthe changes time has made to friendship,\r\nand to hug what cannot change or pall\r\nuntil death entreats a final retirement to all.\r\nLittle Michele, who first unveiled\r\nthe graven paths of Yosemite to me, the deep\r\ncrisp chiseled sky squared above\r\nmendicant hikers filing up the Great Falls'\r\nnarrowing way!  Falls whose mists surround\r\nme still, wooly polyester fluff of a winter coat\r\nnear as hair, as white as my new beard now\r\npuffs in mirrors.  Sleep keeps you in Sacramento,\r\nat rest from day-long hospice rounds\r\nwhere time lies blanketed in neat-tucked beds,\r\nwhile I wake in winter-gripped New Jersey\r\nwhere houses huddle together against slush,\r\nmarooned amid mirrored sheets of old ice\r\nthat sweat slick at noon only to find the moon\r\nskating re-hardened silvers nigh midnight\r\nwhen all the over-busy Garden State is silent.\r\n\r\nIt is out of such silence that I write,\r\nmy bamboo desk turned tundra by the racing\r\nmoon that pulls at my recalcitrance like a leash.\r\nI resist these dim hours of witting speech\r\nwhen need and time conspire to eke forth words\r\nfor one both dearly near and distantly absent--\r\nRight now, I'd rather sit speechless with thee,\r\nbrimful of meaning tears and politely quiet,\r\nthere in the granite dell where age elides to age,\r\nour feet stuck out dry before the campfire, pines\r\nleaning in inquisitive with the burst faces\r\nof old men shouldering down for warmth,\r\nmyself yearly learning their wrinkled ways....\r\n\r\nA tin wind tat-tats at the window-frame\r\nas I adjust my worn robe and note the snow\r\naswirl with words against the blackened panes;\r\nhow nature moves no matter how still we seem!\r\nEven in this dead of night, I think again\r\nwhat times we spent along the reeling shore--\r\nbright trash wrestling the tideline, wrangled \r\nwrappers skidding in the static grip of sand,\r\na benediction in the beating surf perhaps\r\nas we pointed out new futures for ourselves\r\nbeneath the dome of stars--the varied constellations' \r\nlines growing real as we traced them,\r\nthe faces of two strangers maturing into friends.\r\nShall we walk and talk that way again\r\nwhen California flits beneath my jumbo's wings,\r\nafter the soft halt and hiss of wheels on tarmac \r\nwhen your round mellow face emerges \r\nsmiling from the airport parking lot?\r\n\r\nAfter our fellowship of decades, I'm coming out\r\nfor your investiture as chaplain.  Long you tramped\r\nthe dismal ways of youth, pathless, a-thrist,\r\nseeking in granite lanes for a seed--your spirit\r\nat last made plain in hospice corridors:\r\nhands and long-tried lives held to their denouement,\r\nas when a low corner in close woods is turned\r\nand Half Dome rises revealed, a pale presence\r\notherworldly as a planet, yet placed\r\nin the same precincts as us, sharing the same\r\noft-shouldered air, in vestments streaked\r\nby spring rain that scents all afresh.\r\nSo your chaplaincy seems to me, your old friend\r\nwinter-gripped and griping lonesomely,\r\ngetting to know again your slender grandeur--\r\nthe presence of a life made complete by purpose.\r\n\r\nA life brimmed, and, at the brim, over-\r\nfilled till the light within quivers, quivers\r\neven when some infinitesimal breath overplays\r\nits tautened surface howsoever gently.\r\nSo, too, are you full, little Michele, so stretched\r\nwith love and life divine, a filled cup\r\nof teary dews scooped from roaring falls\r\nthat navigate craggy canyon rocks with white work;\r\nfilled, too, with dews salted by New Jersey's ocean\r\nwhere a child's barefoot steps stitched minuets\r\nmany sunny days beside the prolonging surf--\r\na young woman's hand I held in the dew-light\r\nof the quick eternal moon as we walked\r\ncompanionably at peace before the dawn.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTwo Renegades
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA snowy day brings us rarely close, in domestic\r\nconfine caught, the sizzle-slip of small hail\r\nsliding from the eves in beaded curtains\r\nuntil beamed rainbows ring us round\r\nand the canceled day is filled with more than light.\r\nWhen hot coffee whistles in its pipping pot\r\nthe day displayed seems open to us\r\nand closed to the humming hustle of all\r\nthe outer world at once.  \r\n\r\n                            We two\r\nconsider our chance to read, catch up,\r\nmake patterns of extended feet entwined\r\nwith layabout mirth on ruffled covers\r\nconfused as ski trails.  We look outside\r\nand see, beyond the pane fogging at our faces,\r\nhow hurrying snow comes, obscuring all       \r\nbut us, our inner vision's variableness--\r\nthe vast differentials of our too-human light\r\nthat kindles immanent behind kind eyes\r\nthat view their refuge of two complete,\r\nand with how steady, how stroking gaze\r\nswim eons in an hour, two who know\r\neternity in a kiss where wedded lips\r\nconsign and keep all aspects of their love.\r\nWrapped in whiteness as within a cloud,\r\nrosy nose to nose and breath to breath we breathe,\r\nthe wildered world beyond our known globe\r\nof filial affection left unseen, as if within\r\nthe whitewashed castle walls of a lightbulb\r\nwe two commenced in love, and in love continue--\r\nblind to ugly outer circumstance, blares and scares, \r\nseeing only, touching only, our mutual hearts'\r\nintimate disturbances, whose orbit is our sum.\r\n\r\nLove doesn't come rowdy and crowding\r\ninto our lives, but steals with silver stealth\r\ninto living eyes and lips, and with softest brush\r\nwrites its miracle in silent subtleties,\r\nlimning argent inches of moonlight on the soft\r\nreceptive pages of each heart's bound book.\r\nLove leaves its milky trailings like a sigh traced\r\nin innocence upon a cheek by a child's finger\r\nwarbling blameless upon her parent's chest.\r\nLove is not made alone by Nature's doing,\r\nthough it moves among Nature's byways and shades,\r\nlingers along Nature's lemon lanes at sunset,\r\nor, more gorgeously, more fully and less fitfully,\r\nstrolls boldly below each midnight moon\r\nwhose cheshire sliver catches in a maple branch.\r\n\r\nQuick as mischief, you slip the sash up,\r\nsmiling wild as the shivering air invades,\r\nand laughing grab me back, and, simple,\r\nlook upon the winter swirl outside.  And so\r\nwe hold hands at the now open window,\r\nletting large new snow touch and dissolve\r\non our upturned faces, feeling our heat\r\nand the cool emptiness of other lives beyond \r\nour small life together.  Here we clasp,\r\nhere we feel each peck and speckle\r\non our hands and hearts, two renegades\r\nwho await each day with sly patience, \r\nnor rush to tomorrow when snow today stops the clock, \r\nand time is made all quiet as an owl asleep.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nFirst There Is a Bridge
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nOnce again the world is gifted white\r\nwhen wily April shoots should show\r\ntenderer green to eye and wanting heart.--\r\nHow brittle the perfect dryness of the air!\r\nEvery inch of existence primly trimmed\r\nwith just an airbrush dust of snow,\r\nflat as eyesight in a photograph;\r\nthe perfection of new Nature, stilled.\r\nLife's ever-active riverflow of being\r\ncontracts molasses-like to one chill pond,\r\nstopped in pre-sentiment of what pebble?\r\nThe million-thronged trees' unbudded\r\ncandelabra, the fine artifacts of grassblades\r\nglassed and frosted in a frozen breath,\r\ntransform from windowsill to edgeless space\r\nin this final winter etching, this landscape\r\npostcard all in white and pencil-grey outline\r\nheld in single view as I awake with daybreak.\r\n \r\nThe house is silent as the dawn.\r\nAlready Jenny's made her weary way to school, \r\nburdened with a bustling brood whose seasons\r\nreel through one long unrepeating era,\r\nyoung buds who will not sleep or freeze\r\nuntil their age is in its autumn-time.\r\nBefore me is this image of life suspended,\r\na moment held fresh as in a crystal ball\r\nstamped with a year and place, and handed\r\nover, with all its little glitters in a tempest.\r\nMy eye inspects what whiteness \r\nis presented: what unexpected extra blank\r\nat the back of last year's calendar!\r\nWhat clock put wrong;  what skipped day resurrected!\r\n \r\nAt my eye's periphery brood \"houseless woods\"\r\nwhere I send my grieving soul to dwell.\r\nColdly I brood on all my love has lost,\r\nwhat friendships stripped that'd been the shred\r\nthat kept my poor humanity's modesty intact \r\nwhich had been stick-figure naked otherwise.\r\nAnd on lovers lost in unloving spite, I brood:\r\nlovers lost to other moons, other moods.\r\nOf those inevitable shrivings shorn by death:\r\nthe loss of parents, the storm of mourning.\r\nMy mind's a crowd of moaning ghosts;\r\ntheir razor keening strikes unanswered.\r\nI can imagine no one who will know me here,\r\nhere in the heart of hurt, but you.\r\nAnd so I write to you, CPH, remembering\r\ndays unnumbered of comfort and of calm,\r\nof sympathy dripped in intravenous balm;\r\nI sit in meditative state like a static dream\r\nuntil all that is is only seems.\r\n\r\nLike an anchoress rudely caught\r\nin her cell of thriving thought\r\nyou come, a lady-maiden,\r\nto my reviving hive, honey-laden.\r\n \r\nA lady white in a sparkled gown\r\nacross the frost, across the frozen ground,\r\nyou glide unspeaking to my icy window,\r\nand I am left in speechless mists--\r\na traveller without a tale to tell,\r\nunwelcome come to the Magic Mountain,\r\na little engineer enmeshed in the kicking\r\ncogs of my own circumstance!\r\nI reach for meaning in my winter world\r\nand recall your caution, often sung\r\nwith a little cornered smile and saddened eye,\r\n\"First there is a bridge, and then\r\nthere is no bridge,\" for how our connections\r\ncome and go, how what we mean today\r\nmay seem meaningless tomorrow,\r\nhow light may fade and dark may grow....\r\n\r\nLong our converse might have been today!\r\nMany the complaints I've harbored home,\r\nmany the restless thoughts that pester\r\nglum tongue and pain-spiked skull.\r\nInstead I find myself in ensorcelled silence,\r\nquiet as real around me as a deadened pulse,\r\nall the world without neither snow nor spring,\r\ntime itself neither then, nor now, nor anything.\r\nAnd yet, having added my misery to thee\r\nin absentia, and thinking of such speeches past\r\nas my catastrophes have cast into your ears, \r\nand of such listening as you have often given, \r\nwhole-hearted--whose only recompense \r\nwas to weep in fulsome sympathy, \r\nI feel fresh, unburdened, although no secret\r\nhas escaped my scraping pen. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nThe Vanished Embankment
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nTonight I write you, Daniel, and cannot expect\r\nquick reply, or even any the logic-laden world\r\nwould count as counter-speech!  Many the years\r\nthat have smoothed thy unsoothed grave, and given\r\nunsure rest to you and those you loved;\r\nstray waves of darkling violets shadow \r\nthe stone that brackets your too-trim dates, \r\nthat keeps a night-dim weight of white \r\non death's uneasy guest.\r\n\r\nTonight I drove toward shore, the moon untombed,\r\nand lean in summer damp debating words\r\nto bury here beside you, as each year I do.\r\nMelancholy mission!  Yet, with one so missed,\r\na comfort comes springing among the mists\r\nof hurt--and words that feed the tubers\r\nand the blooms that make the funeral dunes\r\ntheir only home, may dissolve in service\r\nwhere living words do fail....\r\n\r\n                                 Dammit, Daniel,\r\nforgiveness too eludes the language that I bring\r\nto pile beside a corpse too gross to contemplate.\r\nLong ago I ought to have been done with tears\r\nand tirades, gashes in a golden mask as fine,\r\nas final, as Tutankhamen's.  A beetle crawls\r\nacross my naked ankle until it tickles;\r\na gust of laughter bursts within me, and the echo\r\nflattens against the small stucco church,\r\nrough as sea-rock.  Who else is left to share\r\nthe visions we had voiced, pirouettes\r\nof young spirits untiring as the playing spray?\r\n\r\nAnd so I come to you, you the older brother,\r\nappealing to you for wisdom--even from\r\na stone gone mossy.  Carved in memory,\r\nI see the beginning kiss that came to stand\r\ntall as your two kids, Troy and Pat,\r\nwhose limber adolescence sails as swift\r\nas a catamaran's twin-hulled lullessness.\r\nI have their father in my memory kept\r\npacked bright and tight against the acid \r\nof childish questions.\r\n\r\n                        \"Lord Dermond,\"\r\nI'd called you--how many times across the years--\r\nlaughing-serious at the rightness of the royal\r\nsound that crowned you above the cut of men\r\npeering out their dusty place to lie and die.\r\nAcross the years we moved together,\r\nbound not to night but to noon\r\nas we loaded down the leaf-weight\r\nof our birch-bark canoe, throwing\r\nits long blade into the dirty light\r\nof old Bowie Place's muddy reservoir \r\nwhere many an ancient branch bent to stir\r\nreflectless shadowed waters, for us\r\nas for the chanting indians who paddled\r\nand left their slate arrowheads aslant a brook\r\nfor us to find and finger, with still-stinging-sharp \r\nedges to blood an unwary thumb.\r\nLong the weightless hours drowned\r\nin that floating stillness!  Long the lists\r\nof lines sent echoing into the dusk,\r\nhands alternately dragging, sweeping,\r\npiling high light-lines of freshest wet\r\nwhile poetry rolled boundless within us\r\nand boundless trumpeted into nature's\r\nleafy overhang.  No hand, no stirring,\r\nnow you rest forever who had sculled \r\nthose waters--how many times?\r\nOur paddles lie rotted behind the house;\r\nand rotted out among the moss-backed oaks\r\nthe very vessel that had sustained\r\nthe high talk that made our friendship leap--\r\nthe reel of mutual thought unwound\r\nlike fishing line to catch what pulled us\r\nheavenward and homeward.\r\n\r\nOur kicked-off Keds crossed clumsily\r\nin the uneven gully of the craft, running\r\nno more than an angel's sandals might,\r\nanchored crossed in passing clouds above.\r\nParadise had fallen with the late shafts\r\nof butterfly afternoons;  page upon page\r\nof distaff poems we let drift about the boat\r\nserene as swans in the brown current;  flare\r\nof sunset, and then, soaked, they swirled\r\nblack and unmoving on some low tarn of tar.\r\nNight's dark amplitude had found\r\nno fit answer to the sky's starred expanse.\r\n\r\nNow my own prow creeps to ground again\r\non your death's bleak bank of bonded marble....\r\nMy beak of meaning gawps in agony,\r\na cadaver cannibal attempting to eat at\r\nyour sculpted David's sepulchred and whittled flesh.\r\nThe dune grass that springs afresh about you\r\nwhispers sweet of mere eternities unmet\r\nthat I shall never meet--as I shall never see\r\nyou again, good friend gone, befriending yet\r\nmy orphan heart tonight, keeping one\r\nsolitary flame aloft till greeny dawn.\r\n\r\nThese passing shapes and shadows please, \r\nbut cannot ease what mind of mine attends \r\nthe salt-sharp night, these ragged knees\r\nkneeling in the hard sea-grass, in the wet\r\nthat leaves your grave at sea, and me at sea,\r\nand makes the misty moon an albatross to shoot\r\nwith what words I yet may aim at heaven.\r\nLa!  an old man's thoughts, an old friend\r\nlying before him, unadorned in dead earth--\r\nI chew old bones of thought, while away\r\nin the crash and wash of the restless surf, cloud-hid, \r\na gull's hungry cry pierces repeatedly.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\n‘Round Midnight
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAnother old poet, old friend, I conjure:\r\na second Daniel to write to, while I sit\r\nat my pondering pints, pink with drinking--\r\nmy ruminative mind returns to me\r\na hundred hundred hours merrily heaped\r\nwith cocksure colloquy, pecking in the shade\r\nof the lion's den, two aging pagans\r\nhailing Pan.  How often we mocked \r\nthe very teeth of death with foamy vows\r\noutrageous as their sudsy birth. At midlife, \r\nour fortunes pile up silver dust to fill \r\nour untrimmed temples, a wealth of thoughts \r\nenriched by alpine crowns of time, as if \r\nwreathing clouds consented, trailing\r\nharmless sparks, to be our thinking caps!  \r\nYears are mounting as we mount the years:\r\nour sacrifice is to live, and remain alienate\r\nfrom pop culture, embracing what was great.\r\n\r\nTo linger on Olympus in our skivvies,\r\nour discarded skis set beside the fire;\r\nexchanging grapes with the gods, while midnight \r\npurrs plush, is triumph enough for us.\r\nSway-stacked and furred with congenial\r\ndust, familiar books look out from under\r\nragged racks of antique antlers \r\nand bad gags at this seaside pub--\r\nthe creak of memory loud underfoot,\r\na tub of button daisies declaiming spring\r\nbeneath the wind-waved sign: Ron's West End.\r\nAt this cratered sea-cliff's visionary height,\r\nsummer nights, still softly unborn,\r\nand windy winter's diminishing end both\r\nblow round our glowing table talk, whispering \r\nwisdoms between the elbowed \r\nmellow beers and bossy Brunhildas\r\nwho rule the roost as if Chaucer never \r\ndied, nor no clock ever tolled a verse\r\nbeyond Falstaff's everlasting thirst.\r\n\r\nWe'd talk until our literary prattle\r\nmounted, instance by little instance,\r\nto tallest universals: \"Little Man's\r\nimagination floats, lotus-like, seeming\r\nunbound in the water blaze, and yet at its\r\nroot, mud and blossom are integral; even thus \r\nis our little man's imagination integral\r\nwith Nature's nurturing phenomena--\"\r\n \r\nCheerly we keep the \"Al-Ron-Quin's\"\r\ncovenant of converse, alarming charm \r\nof riposte and counterpoint displayed \r\naround the flash and yellow leer of mugs.\r\nWordsworth's here emending mumbles, \r\nHamlet hums and haws 'til the deed is done-- \r\nboth dissed and up-ended by our roaring joy\r\nin favor of old Coleridge and fierce Lear,\r\none divining lines of logic in the infinite,\r\none wrangling bare humanity on an empty heath,\r\nbarking heartfelt metaphysics with a fool. \r\nAnd so we argue high midnight through to closing,\r\nand press each other's contention to a peak.\r\n\r\nAnd so a heightened speech is piled, \r\nword on word, and green on green, \r\nin the natural admonition of an oak tower-\r\ning over lesser growths.  Just as in humid June\r\nwe'd climbed far Nether Stowey's stones\r\nin scrambled haste, short-breathed, up\r\nbeneath the governing shade of woods\r\nso old and dense all stirring sound was damped\r\nuntil the hill's bare cap opened in a swirl \r\nof sky--blue and white and misted.\r\nThe mountain where we stood, and stand,\r\n(the round high hill where Coleridge crowed\r\nuntil a last disaster buried him beneath),\r\npours roundness down its sides, mossy coombs\r\nunmoving as the sweating stones they covered:\r\ngreen beyond the memory of green, everlasting \r\nas the grass where Coleridge strolled in glee.\r\nHow long our conversation that day unrolled,\r\nlaughing unmannerly as we hopped the brainy turf\r\nabove horizons where the sea sketched white\r\na limit to the vista, and to the sight--\r\nand all the open dome of heaven was mute,\r\nGod's own silence by piety magnified.\r\n \r\nWhat awful power moves unseen within us,\r\nblowing potent gusts through us, until we're left\r\nconsigned unprepared to pinnacles unguessed?\r\nAs music crests and crests to its crescendo,\r\nso poets' lives rise to one resounding note.\r\n \r\nOutside Ron's, the sea scowls pewter, too,\r\nan echo of those lonely Stowey views,\r\nagile as a drunken dutchman's fermented brew.\r\nHere, too, Dan, the decay of light and time\r\ndeclare a limit to the sight;  here the sea\r\nflashes crested in the softly silver eve, \r\nand our old talk billows hollow with the surf,\r\nhazarding new splashes at night's darkest onset.\r\nAbove, the unmoored moon--which calls\r\nheart and head and all to dream--repeats\r\nimpermanent feats in the expanding scale \r\nall dreams distort and no knowledge amends.\r\nOur littleness is echoed like a fractal's edge\r\nin the universal pattern--as yet unspoken!\r\nAnd so the jazz of chatter happens, again\r\nand again: sophisticated, false; brave, benighted--\r\n\r\nThe dissolute smoke that clouds the moon,\r\nthe dull confusion of stop-motion, photo-emulsion skies,\r\nwhere memory and meme are meeting this eve,\r\nis North-Star sharp by midnight, and we see\r\nhow monkeys fed on evolution's bread\r\nrow on the auroraed sea below, parting lights\r\nwith makeshift paddles, as if the whole Milky Way\r\ncould sit reflected in the pond out back!\r\nAnd indeed it does sit there, when we remember\r\nto look with Galileo's lens, or rheumy\r\nRousseau's ruminative glance.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nThe Well and the Echo
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe rain's continuous throbbing pours\r\nroaring as a cataract.  Inchling Spring\r\nis edging towards its green strength again\r\nand my thoughts turn to roots--To you,\r\nbrother, I turn my slow thoughts, plough-\r\nlike--to the soil where my brothers and I\r\nwere sown to growth beneath a beating sun.\r\n\r\nLong before angry time had made us men\r\nand carved hard marks in cheek and character,\r\nwe'd discovered an old abandoned well\r\nthat held hidden light below a wounded\r\nwooden lid wreathed in leaves gone black \r\nwith mold and oldness.  How strange\r\nthe intense interest each ragged crack contained,\r\nlightning-shaped shadows just open enough\r\nto let dropped rocks knock echoes\r\nup to our ears!   How strong the burning noon \r\nallowed slim glimmers of the sharded sky \r\nto reflect into our nook-invading eyes.  \r\nWild as fox kits, we'd swat afternoons away\r\nwith races through the castle-high trees \r\nof Dad's estate, crying 'cuckoo, cuckoo'\r\nback at birds we'd startled from their naps--\r\ncoming round again at eve's cooing onset\r\nto the well that had not left our thoughts\r\nalone for an instant.  Down the deep well \r\nwe boldly brayed our loud-sounding secrets, \r\nour canvas dungarees kneed a filthy khaki\r\nwith the daylong play of dirt.  What each said\r\nwas wrung lowing into a deeper register \r\nthan either knew or recognized--it was as if\r\nour future voices resounded brownly back\r\nin the brawny familiarity of manhood \r\nfrom the receiving deep of that black well.\r\nHow cool we thought it all was back then,\r\nour piping voices booming back like bulls.\r\nSworn secrets and youngsters' oaths\r\nwe hallooed a hundred times into the dark\r\nbefore the dinner bell of an inverted bowl\r\nand wooden spoon orange with squash stuff\r\nrang us back to Mom's steaming table.\r\nWhat oaths, and what secrets we dropped \r\ninto the welling earth, let our lives \r\nand thrivings show, fruit of buried truths.\r\n\r\nOutside, the storm is still coming on, a bleak\r\nconveyer belt of darkness on the news\r\nstretching back half a dozen states.\r\nMy regrets, too, go far into our past,\r\nshadowing the many memories of life\r\nthat trained our vines to twine as close as twins--\r\ntwo brothers blessed, and best of brothers too\r\nfor a time when time was young.\r\nWhat has made us break with what we were,\r\nuntwine what sun and childhood had braided?\r\nIs not this night, spent undreaming and alone,\r\ncontiguous with the ten thousand darks\r\nthat have marched in line before tonight?\r\nThe sound outside is like a wall, a thick \r\nwet against the walls of my condo-abode.\r\nYet there is a silence in the flailing rain,\r\nas if too much sound must cancel sound,\r\nand repetition wash drummed distinctions\r\nto silence in the night.  So, too--too full\r\nof memories I write, and all that's past\r\ntransforms from stories lived and told, to one\r\nreminding tone of feeling sounding over all.\r\n\r\nI listen down the well of years, and hear\r\nhow time has brought us onward and light-\r\nward, through a void we did not understand--\r\nbands of doppler effect expanding blandly\r\ninto the numb enamelling of now.\r\nOutside, a ripple of hitting wind unveils\r\nhow the universal rain, invisible, still\r\nkeeps ringing down in loud-dim chains,\r\nlinks of the unknown mating then and now.\r\n\r\nThese days we nod or share a cordial laugh\r\nat politics, renew some well-chewed gristle\r\nof family gossip--secrets no one but us\r\nstill keeps or cares to hear about.  Despite\r\nthe change of costume that flesh and accident\r\nhave rendered to body and embodiment,\r\nI see us crowded round that boyhood well even now.\r\nYou at a steep fantastic angle as you lean\r\nag\u00e9d but dapper on the silver orthopedic cane \r\na reckless SUV leapt a Jersey barrier like a salmon\r\nto deliver to the shady eddy of a hospital bed,\r\nyour body pooled crooked as a questionmark.\r\nMe, thick-waisted with grim reading\r\nat my remote IT management screen, thickening\r\neyeglasses aiding my old-man myopia;  me,\r\nthick-tongued despite my serial confessions\r\nof pen and of poetry nimbly repeating:\r\n\"me!\"   Soundless I hold you, folded\r\nround by arms as I take my Easter leave\r\nof thee and Holly-- a half-dozen empty, \r\nriver-green Heinekens gracing the lace placemats.\r\nWe two old brothers wait a beat, \r\ntwined deep in the years steeped \r\nbetween us, our now silent vows \r\nechoing well in hidden hearts.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nApple Hours
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nNow, when cherry and apple boughs begin\r\nto swing weighted double and triple with blossom\r\nlike hard-arced deep-sea lines pulling \r\nmarlin and swordfish and blind leviathan\r\nup hungry from oblivion by mouth and hook,\r\nO mothering, all-consuming sea, I enter the wide \r\ngrove to pace awhile and speak my piece.\r\nNow, when orchard air betrays no too-rich scent\r\nof ripening death, too-ripe life--no loaded orbs\r\nhang glistening all the harvest-moon midnight\r\nas when I sang easy between the bee-busy trees,\r\ntoo alive to sleep those onward autumns through--\r\nnow I remember and honor the hours the days\r\nmy Mom's proud ghost walked and prayed.\r\nNow, Mom, when of we two only one\r\nmay play a speaking part, I seek you out\r\nin Spring among these oft-deserted aisles\r\nof souls whose sails flag plainly on the wept sea\r\nof massy grasses not yet scotched and cut,\r\nunevenly alive, each green blade its own green height\r\nat Holmdel Cemetery.\r\n\r\n                    Now I in the prompt of warmth\r\nwalk an evening vigil I cannot choose but chase\r\nso many mourning hours beyond departure.--\r\nStill you stand at the kitchen counter, peeling\r\nglad apples, small russets, pears, lambent carrots,\r\nall picked by your brazen squad of boys in the sun,\r\nwashing each, rolling each in careful hands\r\nuntil their inner shine shows showered in the \r\nsink-rinse, all laid white on the cutting board\r\nor minced into copper-bottomed vats for quibbling soups.\r\nHow many and intricate the apple-hours we tolled!\r\nYour hair its own silver feast of blossom-curls\r\ndamp in the happy chatter of meal prep\r\nwhere boiling things poured pellucid, spouting\r\nthrough colanders I held unably at any angle,\r\nstanding at your elbow, low, listening\r\nto water fillip and drip, tipping the big yellow\r\nbowl, your sharp wit apt as the paring knife \r\ndancing against your thumb.\r\n\r\n                        I never knew you,\r\nthe dark-haired darling who danced\r\nin your father's Welsh eyes.  I knew you alarmed\r\nand laboring lion-hearted in a hospital bed,\r\nsmall hands at the chained triangle\r\nto leverage and lift yourself to some easier breath\r\nthat didn't come.  But I knew you best, and know\r\nyou still, in a wordless kaleidoscope of worlds\r\nwhere each small turn changes all, the pattern\r\nresplendently renewed by light, the pattern\r\nof broken chips and needy details, rainbows sawed\r\nto pebbles--as when light through leaves\r\nentertains and blinds, so I see you, Mom:\r\na hand, a heart, an eye alight.\r\n\r\n                            And so I walk,\r\nmyself shelving shore without ship or mystery,\r\nswept haphazard among coral shoals of memory,\r\ntunelessly whistling in the ruminative night,\r\ntapping a foreign California apple in my pocket\r\nas I count out time to no song I know,\r\nhum no uplifting lyric to the unnameable tune,\r\nalone at your elbow, just we two, \r\nand the April moon standing mute.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nRouge Moon
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWinter's roughened touch has left us, though still\r\nin dreams we find its echo, harsh remembrancers\r\nthat we are, recalling all by pain and indignity.\r\nHaving set alarms to catch the current moon at full,\r\nshe arises from her slumbers, aroused and drowsy,\r\ntrailing gossamer glories of her nightgown\r\ninto the dim unlit living room.  She stands silent \r\nbeside me, we stand blandly, woozily wooed to do,\r\nto be, in all the accident of time together--\r\nourselves and in love--searching for the red moon\r\nwith our pajama bottoms off, the whole quiet room\r\nluminous as a dish of water, surrounding curtains caught\r\nin a fabulous haze as almost-fog envelopes us,\r\nhas us feel as if we exist within a cloud,\r\nour breaths heavily lunged as if still asleep,\r\neyes squinted and salty as cracked pistachios \r\nand every window glowing cold.  Like a captain,\r\nher hand shading out brimming halogen lights of the lot,\r\nJenny breathes against the glass, slow one, slow two,\r\nand searches the skies for any trace of rouge.\r\nWe are looking for that rare, red moon\r\nevinced from a thousand sunsets at once\r\nwhen earth trails her infected fires like a kiss\r\nacross the silver deserts of Diana's moon,\r\ntoo perfect-pure to blush back at us.\r\n\r\nI had hoped, as we turned and pli\u00e9d about the room\r\nthat I, that we, would stumble across the moon\r\nas I had once before stumbled into such looking luck\r\nwhen walking alone the still edge of a wood\r\nI came across a sleeping dappled fawn quiet as leaves,\r\ncurled simple in an unattended nest.\r\n\r\nMy walking-stick stopped like a secondhand tricked\r\nat the loss of time, my eyes gone wide in delight\r\nto see this dim thing that seemed but shadows\r\nof the sun, sun-flecked, white-floating spots\r\nof indifferent light, the dappled overcast of a low-\r\nhanging dogwood tree confusing all, confusing me,\r\nuntil the creature curling there seemed no more\r\nthan an intensification of the grass, brown-white\r\nbelow, before me, its fallen breath a breathing\r\nof all the earth herself, those long careful legs\r\nsnipped together like sleeping shears, the paired ears\r\nleanly alert: focused, still and present, upon myself\r\neven as my whole attention fell to it--our mutual life\r\nof a moment's dewy duration--and then led on\r\nby a sort of baby-snort, a twitch around the muzzle,\r\nI came all at once to see--those eyes!\r\nI cannot tell their oil-depth, their ink-heart--\r\nhow all the dappled mini-cosmos round our wooded cove\r\nwas distilled to highlights in those grand eyes,\r\nyet not diminished, not in the least diminished,\r\nas I stared.  And I came, in time, as my wildered\r\nconsciousness grew more natively attuned,\r\nto know that I who watched was watched,\r\nthat all I had thought was hid in me was plain\r\nas paper: all deeds known, all recorded there--\r\nall no more than a single spark of light\r\nin the dark surface of that fawn's calm eye.\r\n\r\nIn all our moon-excitement, did I say how we\r\nfound the ground that April at three a.m.?  \r\nThe ground of crocus bud and of daffodil\r\nnewly come to their spring bloom, first bloom\r\nsweet as Easter candy newly caught unwrapped?\r\nA whiteness as of a wedding-walk was gifted everywhere.\r\nA still, sudden frost, an April frost, was over all.\r\nAs if, because we'd missed the rouge moon,\r\nthis other, lesser blessing was bestowed--yet more\r\nthan bestowed if I think on it aright--strewn\r\nlike bales of dogwood petals littered everywhere.\r\n\r\nWe never found the moon that night, nor any\r\ntippler's tainting tint of pink in all\r\nthat cloud-strewn, cloud-molested sky\r\nthat stayed a starless haze, although we stared,\r\nfinding our orientation by iPhone app and guess,\r\nstanding together on the little balcony there,\r\nlistening to trees meekly creak in their sleep\r\nas all light drifted down to our upward eyes.\r\nSoftly, her sudden hand was at my back--\r\nher breath a wordless whisper in my ear.\r\nI knew, despite the sky's cloudy recalcitrance,\r\nall I'd found.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nReading Emily Dickinson at Dawn
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA bee drones in the cowslip \r\nNot more happily than I,\r\nWho into your honey mouth has slipped\r\nAnd let the hours by.\r\n\r\nLong I thought that blue most true\r\nOf saddened evening skies,\r\nTill you winked ope' horizons new\r\nIn azures of your eyes.\r\n\r\nNow I wing to courts of love\r\nAnd press my buzzing case\r\nBow by bow before the purple judge\r\nWho whirls me by the waist.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDEFLATIONS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nEarth never grieves!\r\n~~Thomas Hardy\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nIt Should Have Happened Like This
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI'm tired of living backward, carping \r\n\"It should have happened like this.\"\r\nNobody's left who gives a crap.\r\nNot her, not me.  I don't give a piss.\r\nI can't think about her face.  And I shan't\r\nThink how things should have happened, but didn't.\r\n\r\nHer face wasn't exactly pretty, exactly pale.\r\nMore sallow, celery yellow, stale--\r\nLike hungry roots had sucked her blood \r\nBack into impatient earth. \r\n\r\nI loved her once, as I thought I should.\r\nI loved her in my body, in my breath.\r\nNow, I'm tired in my bones, my marrow\r\nStuffed with regret and meat and sorrow.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nPromise
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIt isn't difficult, dying perennially disappointed. \r\nThere's a comforting ooze that cozies okay, \r\nDown here at the bottom.  Promise. \r\n\r\nWhy fidget in time's indifference anyway? \r\nLie calm in your slippers like the rosy anointed, \r\nNote the replete applique of your surplice.\r\n\r\nPerhaps a fashionable coffin will ease your unease.\r\nGet your tomb topped by a flattering bust--\r\nNo more nude, embarrassed mirrors.    \r\n\r\nAfter all, dying leaves no one else to please.\r\nYou needn't, you must not, fear her; \r\nDeath's just being ground resolutely to dust.\r\n\r\nRepeat after me: whatever was said, was said.\r\nLovers only say lovely things in the night\r\nFreed from harsh, photographic light.\r\n\r\nRepeat after me: whatever you did, you did.\r\nYou'll get on alright, my dear, my dunce, \r\nWhen you learn to love your ignorance.\r\n\r\nIt isn't difficult, dying perennially disappointed.\r\nAnd, let's be honest, it's not as if you shot\r\nFor the stars--and almost, but never quite, made it.\r\n\r\nPlease, drink your tea while it's still hot.\r\nAround the next corner is a bus with your name on it.\r\nWhen we bury you, we won't inter your sonnet.\r\n\r\nPromise. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA Death Day Poem for Mom
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAs near as breath can be to ceased\r\nAnd still inspire,\r\nShe, solitary, tended\r\nHer failing fire--\r\n\r\nTo the sipping ventilator tethered.\r\n\r\nHer hands are not quite blue as yet; \r\nThe ironic, flowered gown\r\nHalf rumpled, half patted-down....\r\nHer honied forehead wet--\r\n\r\nBathed in freezing sweat.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nRed Wings
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe devil is red, his wings red flames.\r\nGuilt harrows the heart, pulls shut its little gate.\r\nEden had a gadfly Adam couldn't name.\r\nThe devil is red, his wings red flames.\r\nBlue is the sea, to drown your sin and shame.\r\nSo love your brother;  Able be kind to Cain.\r\nThe devil is red, his hellish wings aflame.\r\nHurt harrows the heart, shuts its slutty grate.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nFirst Snow
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA colt in the downfall\r\nWill whinny and jerk\r\nAs if each flake\r\nWere pins of hurt.\r\n\r\nIts brown coat shivers\r\nWith galvanic grace,\r\nA whistling whinny\r\nEscaping its face.\r\n\r\nWhen done with wheeling\r\nIn circular panic,\r\nIt waits while the whiteness\r\nBecomes emphatic.\r\n\r\nBreathing steam in fits,\r\nNeither cursed nor blessed,\r\nIt stands too still--\r\nListless, indifferent.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nRoses All the Way
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSpring days come smelling\r\nOf thawed dog;\r\nRivers unfreeze;  a fringe\r\nOf flowers crowns the bog.\r\nPark chains relax and life arrives,\r\nAll ages and every look;   \r\nLife invites the worm to wriggle,\r\nThe fish to leap its brook.\r\n\r\nNew lovers find the river\r\nAs rivers find the sea;\r\nWith picnic hampers and beer\r\nThey leisurely fish or leisurely pee.\r\n\"Spring must give way to summer,\r\nWhat's good must give way to great,\"\r\nSo they think without a thought\r\nAnd fish where they did skate.   \r\n\r\n\"It's roses, roses all the way,\"\r\nLaugh the lovers young.\r\nThey dangle lines from warping docks\r\nAnd with casual thumbs\r\nShove small-hearted worms on hooks.\r\n\"Just look at how they strive!\"\r\nThey say, and drop them in the drink.\r\nThe old say nothing, having lived.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nCreeping Sleepward
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere's a turning in turning-in\r\nWhen dreams seem almost possible:\r\nThe bed untucks, and we fall in\r\nWithout fuss in the evening drizzle--\r\nIt's then that the landscape of a pillow,\r\nIts hills and valleys creased and curled,\r\nGive our giant, sleepy eyes a world\r\nInaccessible tomorrow.\r\n\r\nThe day gets lost like a blown balloon\r\nBursting adrift above the Atlantic--\r\nA casement ope's, and, eftsoons,\r\nExtruded dreams are real as plastic:\r\nMe the hero, you adorably bereft,\r\nAdrift on a lifeboat from the Titanic--\r\nDeath-aware, but not too tragic.\r\nAll in all, it's nearly something perfect.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nIn Disuse
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI stood unlost where the orchard breeze\r\nPushed too-long limbs unevenly.\r\nMy desire had shaped this stand of trees,\r\nLaid apples out in careful, measured Eden;\r\nCross-referenced to find the best of breed;\r\nSpread by hand the enchanted seed.\r\n\r\nI kick tussocky humps, ungainly trip\r\nOver years of ungathered gold retuned to grass.\r\nA mom, sick, bed-ridden, had stopped the snip-\r\nPers that trimmed, the tan hands that passed\r\nAnd paused beside each apple like a beloved face,\r\nReady to roll the unblemished to their place\r\n\r\nBeheaded in the picker's tipping basket.\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nPalace Amusements
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nKilling time after work, I take the public \r\nboardwalk to get back to our seaside carrousel\r\nbulking abandoned on a sandy Asbury bank\r\nwhere a month of Sunday sales circulars\r\nchase each other like kids on summer break,\r\nplaying Mother-may-I as the wind says stop or go,\r\nhissing \"Yes, you may\" politely as a snake.\r\nThis whole scene's some kind of shipwreck mistake--\r\nthe old CASINO sign neglected to NO,\r\nmyself tilting blear-eyed on the swarming deck....\r\n\r\nThe electric arcade sign's pulled almost down,\r\nits underpowered arrow pointless, dim,\r\nlost, as the sullen lemon horizon\r\nsours to sunset, day's entertainment done.\r\nOur dumb sibling fistfights broke out here once;\r\nperhaps when the wrong kiddie ride was chosen,\r\nand father took sides.  Or was it mother?\r\nGoodbye to scenes of joy and innocence,\r\ndropped cotton candy, crying when you didn't win.\r\nA moody shadow uncoils from its corner\r\n\r\nas I duck the \"Keep Out\" tape's red border\r\nwhere eternal chargers wait at parade-rest ease--\r\nresigned to dust, resigned to time's disorder:\r\nfloor-tiles split by fistful tufts of marram grass,\r\nrandom bald patches checkering the ponies' gilt \r\nwhile popcorn saltiness blows in from the sea,\r\nthat roaring gorge impossible to fill....\r\nSuch gold and grandeur makes one think\r\nof our insufferable need, unrelieved,\r\nfor knight and steed;  noblesse oblige, et al.\r\n\r\nIt's my \"Charlemagne\"--and your \"Wonder-Horse,\" say these\r\nplastic plaques beneath the hovering hooves,\r\nCharlemagne's eyes chipped blind and colorless.\r\nDarkness streaks through a broken window\r\nneighborhood urchins had deemed too gladsome,\r\ntoo rainbow-colored, for their self-despising lives;   \r\nsuch aimless boredom chucked the breaking brick,\r\nleft royal gelding and princess mare unridden,\r\nthe bright brass ring unclaimed.  What survives\r\nbeneath this smashed stained-glass gone black,\r\n \r\npast time's accumulation of details, dusts?\r\nI mount the mare amid stable shambles,\r\npeer in a cracked funhouse mirror that reflects\r\nno recoverable image of our old asylum.\r\nEven the rats have decamped, eager to shit\r\noutside, enjoy the ocean, and eat the meat \r\nthat creeps in crabs.  I snare shivering reins\r\nand trace the finery of the bridle's hurtful bit--\r\nthe pain in painted flesh that repeats\r\nthe colt's breaking, the trainer's coercive love.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nSpectral Lines
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nOf course retirement's a prize,\r\nThe wreath at the end of the race,\r\nA box filled with Time, all sizes--\r\nDays of unhurried pace.\r\n\r\nYour less-firm face...is expressive;\r\nEach grin encompasses a grimace.\r\nCastrophes fade to comeuppance.\r\nCheckers is better than chess.\r\n\r\nThe primrose promise of a rainbow\r\nFeels suspect, a joke out of Duchamp;\r\nHowever blurred the fiddler's bow, \r\nMore sit than stomp. \r\n\r\nAge's bitterest despairs\r\nLie whittled to grey shavings;\r\nOur afternoons to quiet raving\r\nContract in isolate air.\r\n\r\nWe know the hourglass' quicksand brocade\r\nWill catch us in its wrinkles;\r\nThat we will not be saved\r\nFrom the sinkhole.\r\n\r\nLife seems, not sears--\r\nWe have veered wearily to where\r\nAt a voyeur's balustrade we stare\r\nAnd leak no tears.\r\n\r\nAggravated vanities are all that's left\r\nOf what had swelled.\r\nReality wriggles, unbereft,   \r\n--Will not be quelled.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nRECOLLECTIONS
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\n“…in a house of such prospect, that if, according to you and Hume, impressions & ideas constitute our Being, I shall have a tendency to become a God–so sublime & beautiful will be the series of my visual existence.”\n<\/p>\n
\r\n~~Coleridge, in a letter to Godwin\r\n\r\nA sleepless swain of fifty, with a brief romantic notion\r\n       May retrace a track so dear.\r\n~~Thomas Hardy, The Revisitation\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAll Summer in a Day
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n     \"One boy you can get some work out of,\r\n     Two boys more.\r\n     Three boys, none.\"\r\n          ~~Dad's rule of thumb\r\n    <\/em>\r\nWorking through sunsweat and neckburn,\r\nWe unrolled a fence against rabbits,\r\nAgainst animal life conniving and hungry,\r\nAgainst raccoons and clever black hands.\r\n\r\nAgainst the vindictive eating and shitting of birds,\r\nWe worked with our father all summer.\r\nWe were impaling our vegetable kingdom\r\nOn the graves of the grass we had buried.\r\n\r\nWith chipped rototiller and rust-red tools\r\nWe bit at what had remained unbroken,\r\nChurned arrowhead up, tore taproot to loam--\r\nDad's spat tobacco as brown as his coffee.\r\n\r\nWith raw shoulders turned to the wheel,\r\nWith shovels like diamonds scraping \r\nLayer after layer of untrammeled dirt,\r\nWe called forth the spirit of seed\r\n\r\nWith spray hose and angry commandment.\r\nWith sky our indifferent accomplice,\r\nAnd time our old friend and enslaver,\r\nOur trowels dibbled like stitchwork\r\n\r\nTearing the mother's side just enough.\r\nOur bleeding was part of the bargain,\r\nKnee and knuckle and elbow,\r\nBright splinters left burning like auras.\r\n\r\nLate, late in the day, our sun-dragged\r\nBoots kicked off into brambles,\r\nSunhats tossed down by pond-blackness,\r\nThe mud medicinal, efficient,\r\n\r\nCovered us to knees, and our gossip\r\nWas smiles creased behind wheat grass.\r\nFrogs boomed cool and obtrusive,\r\nEchoes of wood and of shadow\r\n\r\nWhere peep toads woke to their work\r\nAs night fell on our dreams and dominion.\r\nOn pillows as wide as those fields\r\nOur dreams saw tomorrow's tomorrow,\r\n\r\nSaw sunflower and carrot and rhubarb \r\nBurst plaintively furiously perfect\r\nBehind chicken-wire straight as a razor,\r\nThe field churning all colors in sunlight,\r\n\r\nThe dirt lifting life in a triumph:\r\nThe bones of our enemies bleaching,\r\nSqualid tomatoes impossibly red,\r\nStaked pea-pods that rattled out victory.\r\n\r\nOur old buckets were full of new freshness,\r\nThe trembling of too-much brightness-- \r\nBurnt cheeks were hitting cool linens,\r\nOur faces delighted and keen.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nOut Early
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe flat-bottomed rowboat\r\nSwung through daft cattails\r\nHigher than our heads--\r\nDry hotdogs, clubs almost, poked\r\nOn primitive spear-ends\r\nWhile the boat made wavery water-echoes\r\nUnevenly level\r\nFrom our communal rowing.\r\n\r\nThe estuary was dawn-fresh, wet\r\nAs we slid by; my father, my brothers, and I--\r\nFour hulked shadows quiet in the smell of burnt coffee.\r\nOur breaths steamed like our cups,\r\nHands cold around the weird weight of 4-10 shotguns,\r\nThe river all lazy Ss of yellowy light\r\nRich as streaked paint, the eely detailing\r\nOn my brother Gil's busted-up Ford Mustang.\r\n\r\nAn ear-splitting squeak\r\nOdd as a strangled doll's\r\nFlared from Dad's palmed duck-call,\r\nHeld close as a harmonica, the army-surlus\r\nCoat elbows tucked to his heavy sides neatly\r\nAs our holstered oars.\r\n\r\n\"Hup!\" he said, lifting his shotgun quick.\r\n\r\nDucks exploded from the dark cattails,\r\nWings expansive as flamenco dancers' arms,\r\nThe white underwing vulnerable as eyelids,\r\nThe pale bikini triangles\r\nOf fourteen-year-old girls \r\nAs they rattled skyward,\r\nCalling forlornly in their rubber voices.\r\n\r\n\"Hup!\" he said again,\r\nThe blast leaving us deaf as statues,\r\nOur amazed eyes still, widened white, mouths\r\nBroken open as cattails grazed us,\r\nAnd we skimmed to where the water had shot up\r\nWhen the duck fell.\r\n\r\nIn after-blast silence,\r\nThe duck's humping of the water seemed hypnotic,\r\nThe touch of a masseuse to an ancient scar,\r\nWorking the stiffness out \r\nFinger by finger.\r\n\r\nGil pulled it into his lap like a doused shirt,\r\nThe web feet raincoat yellow, the blood\r\nSwirling with spilled coffee, and handed him to me\r\nBy the neck, his flapping nearly stopped.\r\n\"Wring his neck.  He's in pain now.\"\r\nI cried and let the musky bundle fluster me,\r\nMy hands full of green-golden, blue-molten feathers,\r\nThe wild eye small as a pencil-tip, as black.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nA Handmade Heart
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nJammed in with the other chucklehead kids\r\nElbow to elbow along the blonde wood bench,\r\nWe listened to our smock-draped art teacher\r\nPrattle on unmocked,\r\nDipping old hands in a big water bowl, wetting her thumbs,\r\nDigging mean-faced into a skull-ball \r\nOf gooey grey clay\r\nUntil she, and we following puppylike,\r\nHeld up hands dry as moondust\r\nBefore faces streaked with smiles and tempera.\r\n\r\nShe showed us how to mold a thumbed cup\r\nWith hands too little to palm a football,\r\nHow to perch the harp-shaped handle\r\nLike a sipping hummingbird\r\nTo the completed cup's fine side,\r\n--Fingertip-push-and-smooth-it-out--\r\nUntil, looking up at her, I could see \r\nHoneyed nectar\r\nLoading the tumbler\r\nI was tasked to shape that day.\r\n\r\nAs the worked clay squirted \r\nBetween my worm-white fingers, I remembered\r\nThe model of humanity in science class,\r\nA plastic invisible woman\r\nLimberly naked and displayed on the windowsill.\r\nAfternoon speared her crystalline,\r\nLung and tongue,\r\nIlluminating the swift delta veldt \r\nTucked unseen\r\nBetween assertive thighs,\r\nHer veins ribbons from heel to hand.\r\n\r\nAnd I remembered,\r\nThere, among the blue tubes\r\nAnd red pipes and ribs like playground slides,\r\nThe plum heart lodged,\r\nAwkwardly unglued, but lit a sweet pink\r\nWhen pinned by daylight--\r\nAnd I noticed, looking down at my hands,\r\nHow my own clay lump was heartish,\r\nLobed like her's, like her's\r\nHeavy and wet.\r\n\r\nI slimed and shaped my raw thumbed cup\r\nIn a fever-fervor, glazing runnels of water\r\nOver twining layers of aorta and vena cava.\r\nI rushed to paint my heart alive and leave it\r\nTo be made glossy by fire in a silver kiln\r\nWarm as a giant can of Sterno\r\nUntil I carry it home another day\r\nTo lay before you, waiting for you\r\nTo fill my handmade heart\r\nWith honey.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nThe Willow-Switch
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHe spat the words. \"Go get it.\" \r\n\r\nI approached tree-fringe and felt\r\nThe willow, green and supple,\r\nLay knots across my knuckles,\r\nMy throat a knot of guilt.\r\n\r\nI've forgotten what misdeed\r\nLeft me standing blank,\r\nMy father at my back,\r\nHis breath as loud as bees.\r\n\r\nI returned in tears and dread.\r\nThe willow-wand I held\r\nWaved more fishing-rod than flail\r\nPassing hand to hand.\r\n\r\nI determined not to flinch, \r\nNot to give my Dad an inch. \r\nI thought only of the flensing switch, \r\nHow it would lay into my fear \r\n\r\nAnd tear. And tear.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nPlaying War
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe Walkers' backyard was green as emeralds,\r\nEach grassblade fire-lit in dawn-light,\r\nThe smell of summer come completely into our bodies\r\nAs we drank down the last of the Captain Crunch cereal,\r\nPure pearly milk sugar-laced, gravid with sweet.\r\nA squeal of Keds against the flooring\r\nAnd out the banging screendoor like milk-pod seeds\r\nWe floated to the line up, saluting, stiff-backed,\r\nOur ankles uneven with socks' lax elastics.\r\n\r\nDavy Walker paced up and down \r\nBefore the at-attention boys,\r\nBlack curls close as secrets against his skull,\r\nOldest and always leader, \r\nAlertly at home in the winner's circle,\r\nCalm as an ancient Greek at Salamis, as lucky--\r\nBlue eyes tucked tight as dual pilot lights \r\nAbove freckles, below a pale Tyrone Power brow.\r\n\r\nWe knew what was coming, once everybody was picked\r\nAnd an opposing general assumed command \r\nAt the Costigan's swing set:\r\nDirt bombs, forts under the picnic table,\r\nClear cricket cries of \"I'm hit!\"\r\nLobbing pine cones and counting ten, the grenade\r\nPin sticky and sharp between tense teeth;\r\nThe possessive assertion of \"fire in the hole!\" \r\nLaughter behind a maple tipping off an attempted ambush,\r\nChoruses of \"ka-pow\" and \"brrrbht!\" machine-gunning\r\nAcross the fenced backyard filled with lines of kids,\r\nKids clean-limbed and pale, \r\nBright shorts and dirty Adidases,\r\nKnees scuffed with maneuvers among the leaves.\r\n\r\nI hid beneath lilacs, wet leaves for a face,\r\nA crooked dry cottonwood stick my fine rifle,\r\nA spur of knot at the trigger.\r\nThe day hums bloodless blue;  above, a scythe \r\nSwings an electric-arc of sky.\r\n\r\nCount to a hundred and then begin.\r\n\r\nMy mind is green\r\nAs marines, those two-inch plastic ones \r\nMolded hot in one go--\r\nStray flares finned leaflike along a seam,\r\nAuras you could touch.  Auras I cut,\r\nTrimming the small soldiers clean, shaving rifle and knife,\r\nCutting off weird ears of translucence \r\nWith a Red Cross pocketknife, squinting\r\nInto the miniature Hulk faces going \"Hoo-ra!\"\r\n\r\nStill hiding,\r\nI could feel myself going green\r\nFrom fingertips to face,\r\nInvisible but alive.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nAlmost Drowning
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe Res opened up in waveless acres\r\nHumid as moss, a brown clay color of eyes \r\nWide with surprise.  Our dock was a tumble \r\nof driftwood,\r\nGnarled spars nailed\r\nAnd creeping into the tame lanes of runoff \r\nThat gathered in this wooded pinch of land\r\nOwned by the water company.\r\n\r\nDown we went, loving to swim\r\nUnderneath the glimmering thing,\r\nBelow the splash and hash of daylit sounds, bird cries\r\nAnd brothers' blatant yelling at fish-pops far off.\r\nI held my breath best of the three of us,\r\nEnjoying the nervy push of air\r\nThat I kept wrestled inside\r\nLike a hit off a joint.\r\n\r\nUnder the dock's dark, I could see\r\nWater bobbing like a workman's jaundiced level;\r\nFloating in those shadows, my dunked head a cork\r\nLight as Pinnoccio in a web of strings.\r\nBoth brothers' legs dangled aslant the field of light\r\nAs they chuckled about pitching no-hitters all summer,\r\nDreaming endless baseball and knuckle balls.\r\nUp on the hunkered bundles of dock-wood, lines\r\nOf reflected light jumped like colored strings,\r\nCasting me in their net.\r\n\r\nMy ears below the surface, I dunked\r\nLower still, opening my sight to the algae-rich shallows.\r\nA beautiful orange pebble-stone the heft of a fist\r\nFell from my throw in super-8 slo-mo\r\nUntil soundlessly cradled again in puffing mud.\r\nPlowing forward like a pale mole, my arms motion-ing akimbo,\r\nI hit the limber fence of my brothers' million legs,\r\nKeeping me under the dock, the dark.\r\n\r\nTheir legs were alive as oars in the water,\r\nBlocking my bulleting exit,\r\nAgain and again like a game--\r\nMy clean yearning squirm from mud to air,\r\nMy blood beginning to lust for breath,\r\nMy lungs now lobed with wet cement,\r\nHeavier than souls in the scales of Osiris.\r\n\r\nMy eyes felt smeared heavy with grease,\r\nThe Res gaining a density of gel in my quiet fight.\r\nI smiled to feel the real need of air,\r\nThe water thick as the runoff grease Mom kept \r\nIn a coffee tin under the sink,\r\nGod knows why.  I couldn't see anything.\r\nI wished I had my X-Ray specs\r\nTo reveal a way up, a way out of the dirty churn\r\nOf water, water everywhere....\r\n\r\n...ring, ring around...ashes, ashes...we all\r\nfall down...he hit his head...and wished he was dead...\r\nand couldn't get up in the morning...\r\n\r\nHow long had it been now between... \r\nthe metronome ticks?\r\nMy under-legs felt cool on the flat black piano bench\r\nWhile Miss Naylor's veined hands arched \r\nNext to mine in mime, playing silently\r\nOur Silent Night as snow fell outside....\r\nBut, wait, wasn't that last winter?\r\n\r\nMy heart is in my cheeks, in my eyes,\r\nHammering like a hummingbird--\r\nA cold confusion feeds on me,\r\nMy swollen elbows are wobbly, numb.\r\nI close my underwater eyes,\r\nSwallowing loaded prayers as I kneel\r\nIn the soft, the slick, the silt.\r\nBefore me vast invisible hands find a swivel-space\r\nBetween Gil's long awkward legs, and I know which way\r\nTo torpedo.\r\n\r\n\"Please,\" I cry, my tears warm in the backwash\r\nAs a bubble goes goofy out beside my nose,\r\nA ticklish, licking trail of stale air,\r\n\"Please....\" \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTreeforts
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAs brothers we rode the high treetops\r\nWhere fields fell away forever.\r\nThe pines were not weeping with time.\r\nThe clouds stood still for the runner.\r\nAs brothers, we rode the high treetops.\r\n\r\nWe swam where water was giving,\r\nWhere light was dappled with deepness.\r\nWet rocks all echoed our chorus,\r\nAnd the river ran on in its sleeping.\r\nWe swam where water was giving.\r\n\r\nWe sang till we called out the stars,\r\nTill trees of our nighttime were shining.\r\nWe perched in their arms proud as owls,\r\nForever among clouds and flying.\r\nWe sang till we called out the stars.\r\n\r\nKnock wood, we were loving and living,\r\nAnd life was just as it seemed--\r\nThe fields fell away forever, \r\nAnd night was an endless dream.\r\nKnock wood, we were loving and living.\r\n\r\nThrough light that was quick as kindling,\r\nThe river ran on with a shudder.\r\nAll our days passed away like a dream.\r\nWe climbed every night like a ladder,\r\nThrough light that was quick as kindling.\r\n\r\nAs brothers we rode the high treetops.\r\nWe swam where water was giving.\r\nWe sang till we called out the stars.\r\nKnock wood, we were loving and living,\r\nThough the light went quick as kindling.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nESSAY
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
\nWinning the Welterweight Belt
\n<\/h2>\n
An essay on revising “The Willow-Switch” from epic to acerbic<\/em><\/p>\n
\nThis is a good example of revising down to detail to create the meat of feeling in the reader.  The original draft of the poem presented here is the result of a lot of its own revisions, but the sense of a story told only from the child’s point of view, out his fear and resentment, is all over the poem.  The story is a bit oversold, with the father playing the villain’s part, his teeth black with tobacco.  Who wouldn’t hate this beast?\n<\/p>\n
\nIn the revision, the father is a main actor, but is not held as exclusively blameworthy of the event transcribed by the poem.  In the revision, the speaker remembers feeling a “knot of guilt,” even if the reason for the punishment has faded.  In the original, the reason for the memory loss is part accidental, and part active repression.  The child, now grown, doesn’t want to revisit what seems to be some horrific event–and there is no real blame attached to the speaker;  he’s innocent as daisies.  While fine enough, the reader disengages with every loss of emotional complexity.  Details allow the readers to bring their own response to any given scenario.  If the author is able to hang back, yet be deeply re-engaged with the experience the poem relates, he can have some of the perspective of a director of a play sitting in the back row of the theater, waving his arms at the scene, the ultimate spectator.\n<\/p>\n
\nOn rereading the original version of the poem out loud, I found myself getting miffed at the whiny sense of victimhood that the speaker was demonstrating.  Now, I don’t like to be mean to kids any more than the next guy, but this kid was both bawling and blameless;  too much protestation left a whiff of suspicion in me as a reader.  So, since I liked the poem–and love being done with things–I hesitated to start a wholesale revision.  Instead, my editor’s eye began to look for details that just didn’t add up.  And, instead of glossing over them with a friendly “eh, so what, it’ll do” attitude, I let the inconsistencies prickle.  The editorial itch began to build.  Well, goddamnit, what was that business about the Dad undoing his belt?  This is a poem about getting switched on the backside, not being spanked with a belt.  I had had doubts about it before, and let concision win the decision, leaving the final detail as agnostically simple as I could manage with the bland line “Belt unhitched.”  But now, simmering with my editor’s misanthropy, that compromise wasn’t enough.  I’d have to deal with that detail if I wanted to lazily continue letting the poem wallow in its welts.  I unhitched my editor’s belt, and got down to work.
\nAs it turned out, one of the last things I was able to usefully address was the first thing that had prompted me to edit the thing: the belt detail.  It was late in shrinking this poem down that I came up with the “knot of guilt,” like a scarf tied too-tight, as the rip-rhyme for the simple “felt” and as the replacement for that dangling “belt.”\n<\/p>\n
\nThe first detail I excised, to bring the poem back into the main relationship of the moment it creates, and away from a cozy sense of joining in the reader’s condemnation of the punishing father, was each of the “tobaccoy teeth.”  The kid in the poem would be well-used to his father’s tobacco use, and probably thinks blackened teeth look cool.  The sense of menace in this detail is completely adult, imposed retrospectively by the speaker.  So, snip-snip went the editing shears.  In a trice I was left with a single line in place of an entire stanza:\n<\/p>\n
\r\nHe spat the words. \"Go get it.\"\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nBeing bit of an inveterate formalist, I thought I should balance out any singleness at the start of the poem with a one-line stanza at the end.  I took a look, and it seemed that luck was on my side–the last stanza was already a single line.  With the poem losing space for excursions and digressions (after all, I’m no high-flown Dickinson with her cochineal wheels and zipping trips to Tunisia “an easy morning’s ride”), I saw that the whole retrospective stuff about the photobook, which I had been at such pains to embellish with savory verbal details like “Kept bald by fresh erasures” just had to get deleted.  Down came the red pen, and washed the spider out!  I still had “What had prompted censure \/ Has faded to a blank” which itself had been an edit of moving from an abstraction of “pain” toward some more specific, though still unnamed, occasion for punishment via willow-switch.\n<\/p>\n
\nI played with eliminating the whole idea of not remembering the reason for the punishment.  Just stay in the moment;  let that be enough.  That’s the thought that had me finally untangle the second stanza from its belt-nightmare.  That belt had grown as troublesome as a wig-fitting for Rapunzel.  I imagined approaching the willow tree as a child about to be punished.  I clipped “hair” out of the description as too fanciful and romantic for a kid whose main experience of hair is smelling the barber’s aftershave, and threw the lifeline to the waves as too literary for the slim poem to save.  This second stanza felt great now–forthright–but it was only three, maybe two, lines long!  Perhaps I could trim the periwigs of the other stanzas down to three, or maybe four, lines apiece.  That way, if I had to, I could reabsorb that harsh first one-line stanza into the body of the poem.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe third stanza was already down to two lines, and hung on only because it added a mystery to the reason for the punishment.  And that’s how things long ago recalled as an adult often feel–significant, sharply etched in memory, but with the reason for it all faded grey, a dead appendage.  I decided to shut the father up, take away his petty advice to “stop crying.”  After all, most dads aren’t “The Great Santini,” and his speech made the poem too much about him.\n<\/p>\n
\nNow I had the bones of a good poem.\n<\/p>\n
\r\n\r\nORIGINAL POEM WITH INITIAL EDITS:\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nTHE WILLOW SWITCH
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHe spat the words.  \"Get it.\"\r\nHis blue-black chaw a seethe<\/del>\r\nBetween tobaccoy teeth.<\/del>\r\nDad repeated, \"Get it.<\/del>\r\nOr you'll get the belt.\"<\/del>\r\n\r\nLike hair<\/del> the willow switches\r\nHung, laying their supple\r\nKnots along lifeline and<\/del> knuckle;\r\nWhile, lightly, his leather-stitched<\/del>\r\nBelt unhitched.<\/del>\r\n\r\nWhat had prompted censure\r\nHas faded to a blank\r\nIn my life's photobook--<\/del>\r\nA dead spot bored in circumstance,<\/del>\r\nKept bald by fresh erasures.<\/del>\r\n\r\nI walked back in tears and dread,\r\nThe willow-switch flailing\r\nLimber as a monkey's tail<\/del>\r\nThat I handed to his hand.\r\n\"Get over now, son,\" he said.<\/del>\r\n\r\n\"And stop crying.\"  Then and there,<\/del>\r\nI determined not to flinch,\r\nNot to give my fear an inch.\r\nI thought only of the flensing switch,\r\nHow it would lay into my fear\r\n\r\nAnd tear.  And tear.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Purchase from Amazon  Divers missives to absent others BY GREGG GLORY [GREGG G. BROWN] Published by BLAST PRESS Copyright © 2014 Gregg G. Brown In nature there is nothing melancholy. ~~S.T. Coleridge, The Nightingale Bear witness for me, whereso’er ye be, With what deep worship I have still adored The spirit of divinest Liberty. ~~ […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1734],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pilot-light","category-1734-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5282"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7333,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5282\/revisions\/7333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}