Dining

Will I pay the check, I wonder
while you’re in the restroom or somewhere
risen to leave me to ponder
if I will pay the check.

Scatterings on this white-clothed table
and a squirt left of wine in each glass;
butter but no bread, the waiter
admiring his nails.

I will pay, I say to myself
but I will still owe someone somewhere;
for I have dined and not paid
a hundred or more times,

and my kindness to you
is no more than the dregs of the wine.

*

After reading Robert Creeley, "For Love in the Selected Poems:  "Can I eat/what you give me. I/have not earned it. Must/I think of everything//as earned...."

...dedicated to the many I still owe dinner to.

Postcard

This postcard is about the paragraph of gulls
over the seiner, especially its topic-sentence gull
trailing all the rest by the approximate length
of a second and invisible paragraph.

He is an argument perhaps for slowing down
or for returning to the pier or shoal.

At my feet lies a single days-dead gull
gutted no doubt by his own kind
or so I surmise from the ideographs of gull-
footprints pressed around his form;

or if not a non-alphabetic script
then choreography for this dance of death;

one foot it almost seems to have been,
a one-legged angry gull
repeating tarentellasmically the same
three-tined jot beginning where it ended:

such is passion at least in sand
until wind and rain remove it.

And now I have so filled my postcard
no room is left for the address
but who is where specifically
when your courier is the wind?

*

Different from the last poem -- more like what I really should be writing, perhaps: seeking a lyric tension, balancing with more risk between meaning and form.

After reading varied poets -- Billy Collins, who is good and fun when he isn't just imitating himself; Joshua Corey, a new book called Severance Songs that I am enjoying -- abstract verse to Collins' representational; Veronica Forrest-Thomson, a Brit critic/poet who committed suicide in 1975 -- she was young, but very sharp; the poems are playful, often responding to Wittgenstein; they are a balance between abstract and representational, in a different way. Also, an interesting little find at Half Price Books -- Pierre Seghers, Piranesi -- semi-abstract lyrics inspired by the semi-abstract etchings of the artist.

So -- what I feel as a problem to solve: how to be clear (an urgency I feel in poetry), but also make it new (for myself, anyway); how to find the balance between the physicality of language and the security of making sense?

The gulls, though -- they came out of a very old notebook I pulled from the closet recently; notes and drafts from twenty or so years ago, most of it flailing about, abandoned. One of the poems in Mad Flights is a letter of sorts to Paul Bowen, a sculptor I knew in Provincetown. Yukiko (my wife) had sold some of his work in Japan in the early nineties; she arranged a lucrative commission for him, and asked me to write a poem in collaboration. Paul's work is native to the Cape Cod beaches; my gull was some of the discarded matter from the poem I wrote, tryign to capture the same smells and textures of Paul's work.

So in this new poem -- cannibalizing failed efforts from my earlier self, you could say (with a little animal cannibalism in the poem); combined with my own memories of Provincetown, long walks alone on the dunes and beaches -- a postcard, meant perhaps for that earlier self, who is truly in the wind. 

Walls

While I was writing on the wall some angry words
at whoever was in charge of things

someone I didn’t know but might have been related to
was writing angry words across the street

about the other guys – across the aisle,
“the opposition,” as if the guys in charge

weren’t equally to blame, no matter
which side of the aisle they claim.

We noticed each other across the street,
looking to see who was looking at us;

but it was only us, the street was still,
and we were angry only because we had

time to kill. I could have finished his line,
and he mine, and the intent would have been

the same – one wall for those coming
and the other for those going

to or from their work. I thought my opposite
something of a jerk for dirtying up

a perfectly good wall, whereas my words
were my wall’s reason for being.

As of now, however, it’s no longer standing.

*

Half-cocked rhymes, echoes of Ogden Nash -- a much-neglected Modernist poet -- and of course a simplistic, wise-ass political allegory. But the real trigger of this poem was simply the name of Robert Walser, about whose works I have been reading (as opposed to reading his works, which I will do as soon as the Amazon order arrives).

Being Alone

No such thing as being alone; everyone
always has his own company and the voices
get incredibly loud the lonelier one is.

Loneliness depends on scene:
walking the edge of the pond I see myself
on the other side, a slightly younger fellow,
someone I wouldn’t mind having a talk with
if circumstance were as round as its name.
But my younger self is always slightly less
or more ironic than I am now, a falter
or veer, and so we are like hockey pucks
just missing each other: no ice, no players,
no spectators – just pucks and a swoosh.

In the library decades ago I slept
with a worn copy of Whitman in my lap
while outside the window a fern tapped the glass.
I slept into the Scotchgard of the couch-cushion
dreaming in parallelisms and beautiful
bird’s-eye views. Whitman was my own
TV movie, America a judgment on our loneliness
and yet we walked together and the fern
was our promising child. Tap tap tap
and the fern was heavy with rain drops.
Even the couch had a personality
for the first few seconds after I woke.
I remember its rasp on my skin;
I cherish its sameness from dream to waking
through all the cycles of aging to now.

*

Reading Bob Hicok's "How Origami Was Invented" (in Animal Soul, 2001), I noted a few lines in the poem on being alone; putting the book down, I doodled a bit on a poem of my own, and wound up with the above specimen.

The few acres outside, with its horses, trees, pond, cattle egrets (they come and stay from eight in the morning until four or five, then return, I guess, to their rookery at the lake about a half-mile away), frequently presents itself as a matrix for my poems, however abstractly they may start out. So it does here, for one stanza.

No idea where the hockey pucks came from.

Then, a memory; of the sort that has no apparent value as a seminal experience: more representative, and chosen by the mind to serve as an emblem for a categorical experience. As a student at Sarah Lawrence, I used to spend a lot of time in one of the several nooks the library provided (it was a great place to sequester oneself, like most libraries), and one such nook was in a small room with light from a window that looked onto a sort of Japanese garden -- some plants, but mainly rocks and pebbles, although I have probably redesigned it in memory. I sat with Walt Whitman in my hands -- maybe it was the first serious effort to read Whitman, I don't know -- and was caught up in the grand Americana of the poetry; then lulled to sleep by the afternoon quiet and the slight rain against the window, waking with book in hand and a dream just exiting the room of my mind, a fugitive figure, doppelganger, or the Poet himself.

For mood and to some extent the rhythm, I had in the back of my mind D. H. Lawrence's "Piano" -- a magnificent small poem, with a strongly captivating cadence, I have always felt. Also, it's unashamedly sentimental, nostalgic -- my weaknesses. 

Some poems are touchstones, even when they're not great poems, but somehow connect. you'll carry them around, and they measure out a range of possibilities for poems not yet born. So, in the above exercise: a good poem, part of the current poetic discourse, the colloquial voice of now, though by a celebrated poet, initiating my own urge to write -- the trigger poem; then going out toward a familiar landmark -- the touchstone poem; and defining (awkwardly, perhaps unsuccessfully) my own space between them.

Keep trying! --

Last Will

Granny, you had a great big house for decades,
then an apartment for a few years, a single room
at the home for a couple of months, now a coffin
indefinitely: smallest residence, longest lease.
You died of cancer but I blame the mortician
who wants to kill us all with inch-thick make-up.
Funerals are crap, burial is a waste of real estate.
When I come to this somebody burn me but
make sure I’m dead before you sell my books.
Put my last drafts in a random volume
then give my library away to anyone who knows
what a book is. I moved about all my life
but I lived well in books; so scatter them as my true
and long-lived if not entirely eternal form.

*

I was reading Stuart Dischell's poetry today, off and on while grading; but there's more of Alan Dugan in the above, at least from line five on. I can't possibly attain as stoical/skeptical/jaded or Brooklynesque a voice as Dugan, but I can try.

This poem hijacks a memory of my grandmother's funeral many years ago (well, one of my grannies -- I had three). I was remembering how disturbing her visage was, there in the casket; as if she had been hijacked. 

But if the poem is elegiac, it's noting the loss of books, not grandmothers; a premature mourning, sure, but one worth worrying about in our digital age (he said, on his digital blog site). 

Lying

My lying winds like a river from one side to the other,
a force of nature meant to overflow, then taper back,
dry up, leave a trace; return in slightly different form.

My lying is to my soul as my smile to my face.
Falsehoods like small fires can be seen for many miles;
signs of presence, warm but dangerous, dying out.

My lying has tip-toed, shuffled, stomped
me through life; that lie was a sprint and lunge
around the corner, this one a dive and cower.

My lying leaves scars; it counts my digits
and comes up short or over. My lying isn’t clever
but gets me by when no one cares.

Your lying is night and the cracked ground
past the dead end. Your lies are vermin in the house;
mine are the house burned down.

*

I was browsing a book last weekend called Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science, ed. Robert Crawford (OUP 2006). Some interesting essays, which I will ponder in the near future; also, a poem by Paul Muldoon which you can find here, with some discussion of the project that spawned the poem.

Muldoon writes long difficult poems, as well as short difficult poems; he also writes short delightful poems now and then that are fairly transparent, as this one is (meaning: its surface offers a definite reward, whatever underling complexities it might hold).

I look for concepts that feel as if they already hold the poem I want to write inside them -- as Michelangelo felt the stone already held the sculpture he wanted to carve? -- don't know; it's partly a form of laziness, partly a necessary superstition -- something that tricks me into writing. This Muldoon poem sparked in me the healthy feeling of poem-envy (gee, I wish I'd written that!), but the nice thing about a concept-poem is that you can write it -- steal the concept and off you go. All that's needed is to back up a certain distance from the immediate circumstances of the model. Here, it's more about MRI (as a synecdoche for "science") as a prompt and poetic figure, which, though I find it interesting, was less inviting than the broader motif of lying/truth-telling itself.

As with "Waiting," then, it is a phenomenological exploration -- and again, much more could be written as to the natural history, the anthropological details of lying than I have included, by far (the Wikipedia page on Lying, by the way, is fairly interesting). Once again, I might write more on the theme; lying, in particular, seems an essential aspect of personhood. (I recall the line near the beginning of The Great Gatsby -- "If personality is a series of successful gestures..." -- in my case, mostly unsuccessful! So many of my poems, lately, are songs of the id, perhaps because as I go through the world I am falling through the cracks, them climbing back to continue on my merry way.)

Waiting

Waiting is a thing at first smaller than I am, then getting larger
the longer I wait, or perhaps I make it larger, it grows
from my growing anger and frustration, or I grow smaller
from losing control of my time which I had foolishly thought
my own, from the space of my waiting become a vastness,
end unseen, and for all I know I’m traveling backwards
through the space of my waiting, my destination nothing more
than not waiting, and that lies behind as much as before me.
In offices magazines are the windows of waiting,
mainly flipping from back to front without much reading
because they rarely have the subscriptions I want. Other people
are waiting, some from before me for God knows how long
because waiting drags us to the bottom of ourselves
within minutes and we are as drowned in it from thirty minutes
of waiting as much as from an hour of waiting, and anything longer
is not waiting in my book, but simple abandonment. Some people
come after and start their waiting on top of my own, I am sandwiched
between the elder and younger waiters and am struck by the fact
that I have no knowledge or wisdom to pass on except how long
I have been waiting, which is nothing more than the numbness
of numbers. Some people wait with children who are the demons
of waiting, or who are in my more generous mind bedeviled
by waiting on adults who wait and who often know no more
than their children exactly why they wait, but are more beaten down
by the concept and the rules of waiting, to wit: that one waits one’s turn
(such mindless equality, and yet I suspect there are people
who never wait at all nor use the same door, just as there are people
who never go to jail or pay their taxes); that one has the right
to complain after a certain amount of waiting but that
complaining does absolutely no one any good at all
and might even make one wait longer; that one should be resolute
about not waiting forever, but should instead leave
after a certain number of hours to preserve a modicum
of dignity and sanity no matter what one is waiting for;
that one cannot say when one is finally called: “My turn?
Really? Well! Now you’ll have to wait a bit for me, I’m afraid!”
as it would not be the least bit funny; that our waiting is compounded,
not shared; and that a room full of people waiting is a room
full of something short of despair, but that all the same
we wait in this world as we leave it, each of us entirely alone.

*

Poetry as phenomenological investigation; or, wringing what you can from the common experiences -- except that I tend to get distracted by the sound of the language, as do many poets, which subverts the phenomenology, I suppose...

This draft has a certain arc to it, suggests a particular archetypal scene of "waiting" (mainly, of course, a doctor's office), but as I wrote, I felt the possibilities of so many other forms of waiting: waiting for a bus, a particularly nightmarish form of waiting for anyone who has lived in a city like Houston and not had a car for any period of time; waiting on hold on the phone -- although that's much easier, now, with Speaker Mode; waiting in a clothing store for your partner to finish shopping; waiting for your meal in a busy and extremely obnoxiously trendy restaurant; many many more -- what would you add to the list? Maybe I'll do a series of "waiting" poems.

As for form: a much longer line, increasing the challenge of maintaining linear integrity (some sense of a regular beat, some sort of symmetry built around some sort of caesura or at least a strong forward thrust, helped along by a high frequency of enjambed lines), very long sentences over those long lines, all toward recreating the psychology of waiting, I suppose; and as always with me of late, a fugal pulse -- "wait" or "waiting" repeated thirty times in a forty-line poem, across all but twelve of those lines; creating, I hope, a kind of reverb, an aural environment that vibrates backwards and forwards in the poem -- because a poem, by definition, is a text that backscatters as it evolves -- like Antarctic ice, or Saharan dunes.

Meanwhile, I have this book on my To-Read list, but am waiting for the price to go down a little bit; but the Google Books preview is certainly a delight: On Waiting (Thinking in Action)