Poem # 30: The Distance

The distance from one side of me to the other
was too far to cross
so I stayed here, where the words are,
but no pictures
and not very many other folks
worth chatting up.

Food gets in somehow;
not much sex.
Water is everywhere
because the self is like an amniotic sea,
fortunately fresh
if a little rotten-eggy to the taste;

and all the light I need,
given how cozy it is here anyway
(just me and Shakespeare
in the front row,
and millions of Elvis Preseleys
in the back),

comes through the many, many cracks
caused by the pressure from outside.

*

Maybe not a bang-up conclusion to this month-long sojourn, but I kind of like my little (obvious) allegory. It's a bit exaggerated, at least as an actual study in my own alienation. I was reading a little-known poet named Hunt Hawkins, who published one book in the early nineties. It's an odd tome: a little like Cheever or Carver in its simple drawings of "The Domestic Life" (the book's title), but only if Cheever and Carver had never heard of Chekov. Sometimes the vignettes fall flat; sometimes the flatness is perfectly framed. Overall, though, there is a lack of tension -- which might have come from a different series of formal strategies, perhaps -- as in Larkin, for instance. But I like the book: possibly, I have yet to delve into it sufficiently to appreciate its charms. In any case, my little poem above most certainly came out as a response to reading Hawkins, though it is very different, and in now way (that I am aware) an answer to his style or sensibility. A spark -- merely a spark, and who knows where they come from?

Read, read, read; and don't be afraid to write, to fail. Let that be the main lesson (which I must have already known, but let go of) from this thirty-day marathon.

Villers: Young Woman Drawing

This is the painting I must have remembered; mis-remembered, naturally. Perhaps I've conflated this one with others I've seen over the years:

young woman drawing

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Poem # 29: Raccoon

Housesitting years ago

for a beautiful and wealthy heiress

I went downstairs to the kitchen

to prepare a late-night meal.

As I opened the refrigerator

a raccoon poked his head

through the pet door intended

for the heiress’ Airedale

presently asleep upstairs in the bed.

We stared at each other

and I believe we both

wore the same slightly-embarrassed

look: him for his trespass,

me for my after-hours

eating. No doubt it was food

the raccoon was after

and this was not a first-time

incursion. Our shared gaze

lasted possibly a second

but afterwards seemed much

longer. He backed out

discreetly, though quickly,

and seemed to me touchingly

fastidious in the deferral

of his need. In my bemusement

I forgot about my hunger

which was in any case not real

but only a nightly routine.

*

I don't know why this rather slight memory stayed in my head (the experience was a quarter-century ago); it was, though, an uncanny experience. The timing of the whole thing felt odd, as I recall. I had been by myself in the house for a few days, writing and reading -- in someone else's home, a rather nice one (funny how we grow quickly accustomed to elegance, particularly when no one is watching us). So, my mind must have been made ready for strangeness.

Beyond the actual experience, the above poem is most likely under the influence of a little-known (in English) 19th and early-20th-century German poet named Christian Morgenstern. Here are two relevant poems, found online:

The Birth of Philosophy

The Moorland Sheep just stares at me in awe

As if she’d never seen a Man before.

Our looks lock on. We stand as if asleep;

This feels the first time that I’ve seen a sheep.

(Translated by David Cram) 

Searching for the above poem, I found another on Wikipedia, translator unknown:

Vice Versa

A rabbit in his meadow lair

Imagines none to see him there.

But aided by a looking lens

A man with eager diligence

Inspects the tiny long-eared gnome

From a convenient near-by dome.

Yet him surveys, or so we learn

A god from far off, mild and stern.

*

I especially like the mise-en-abime of the second poem. 

I'm not sure why I've left the lines about the "heiress" in the poem. (The house-sitting was for a novelist whose family is famous for their chocolate). I think this bit of documentary detail is important to the poem precisely because of its irrelevance; at least its irrelevance to the ostensible theme. "Heiress" adds a faint touch of fairy-tale frame to an otherwise mundane context, and possibly doubles the raccoon's uncanniness -- foreshadows or echoes it, I mean.

Oh, the poem doesn't yet do what I want it to do; but the frame I'm attempting, or should work on in revising, goes all the way back to a painting I saw at the Met, just after I had arrived in New York, when I was 17. Right now I can't recall the artist; she was a woman, so that should make it easy to search it out. The painting must have been late 18th or early 19th century: A woman stands at a window, coyly looking back at us, through the outer window of the painting itself; back through the painted window where she stands, the viewer sees, far off in an architectural field, a woman and man standing near a door, conversing or perhaps romancing one another.

Paintings are mute, as Horace observes; nor can they move in time, like poems or novels. But the effect of the little scene, centered but small in perspective, is to throw us back in time, or into a recent encounter of the woman herself who stands smirking at us at the window; she is sharing a secret of her own, but in the plane of the painting it is fused into one moment.

So, when I was seventeen, and wanted to be an artist myself, I was struck (without having the words yet to describe it) by the magic of this painting, the smiling woman, and also by the elegant transcendence of limits (the Horatian contest, that is, between blind poems and mute paintings); it was a lesson in economy of means, in the conventions of art -- and in the complementary relations of visual and literary media. More comes from within the narrow frame of a successful painting or poem than a first encounter can reveal. Decades on, I'm still struggling with how to pull it off.

Books: A Revision

The old public library has bricks outside
and books inside. Perhaps there’s a brick
for every book. I haven’t read all the books
or counted all the bricks. There’s no reason
for counting bricks, but it’s the kind of thing
that certain people do: a patient in a waiting room
counting ceiling tiles, or a convict counting flecks
in cinder blocks, having counted already
all the cinder blocks themselves. And the bars:
beneath counting, but each one named
and fondled daily. Do the flecks stay still?
An insect might impersonate one, or a thrown object
might give rise to previously-nonexistent flecks.
Such a number might be, as it increases,
as vivid and dramatic as a movie. I hope
I never know. As for books, I’ve met people
who can make you think they’ve read
every single book in the library. It’s a trick,
I’m sure: a melding of personality
with the surrounding intellectual mood.
Perhaps they’re like convicts in a larger cell –
this present day, this world –  and only
such superior minds can see the walls,
and know that measuring time is counting
every fleck. I’ve made lists of books
and worked my way proudly through them all:
such an effort turns books into bricks.
I once knew a writer whose apartment
was furnished mainly with books: some arranged
as tables, stacked books with opened books
upon them. I buy books faster than I read them;
perhaps half by now of what I own
I’ve never even read. But it’s comforting
to know the books are there, waiting,
perhaps speaking silently to each other:
four walls of books collected through a lifetime,
many with random photographs-as-bookmarks
in them, or notes (my own and previous owners’),
or receipts from all the bookstores in all the towns
I’ve been to, most of those stores long closed,
since many people these days are as likely
to count bricks as they are to read a book.

*

...resulting from my usual next-day regret of bloat, and in particular, of unnecessary documentary detail...

Poem # 28: Books

The old public library has bricks outside
and books inside. Perhaps there’s a brick
for every book. I haven’t read all the books
or counted all the bricks. There’s no reason
for counting the bricks (someone must
have done so before the walls were built),
but it’s the kind of thing that certain people do,
like a patient in a waiting room counting tiles
in the ceiling, or a convict counting flecks
in every cinder block, having finished counting
all the cinder blocks themselves. And the bars:
beneath counting, I imagine; but named,
each one, and fondled daily. Do the flecks
stay still? An insect might impersonate one,
or a thrown object might give rise to previously-
nonexistent flecks. Such a number might be,
as it increases, as vivid and dramatic as a movie.
I hope I never know. As for books, I have met
people – Richard Howard, Susan Sontag,
Frank Kermode – who could make you think
they’d read every single book the library
might hold. It’s a trick, I know: a melding
of personality with the surrounding intellectual
mood. Perhaps they’re like convicts
in a larger cell – this present day, this world –
and only such superior minds can see the walls,
and know that measuring time is counting
every fleck, whether you complete the task
or not. I have, myself, made lists of books
(a kind of wall, I suppose, as in a dollhouse-library),
and worked my way proudly through each brick –
that is, each book; in such an effort,
books are similar to bricks. I once knew
a poet, Thomas Lux, whose Yonkers apartment
was furnished, basically, with books, some arranged
as tables, stacked books with opened books
upon them. I am now surrounded with books,
all of them also entered into an online database
so that when I’m shopping for more books
I can use my iPhone to see if I own a book
I’m eyeing in the store. I buy books faster
than I read them, and perhaps half by now
of what I own I’ve never actually read.
But it’s comforting to know the books are there,
waiting, perhaps speaking to each other silently,
four walls of books collected through a lifetime;
many with random photographs-as-bookmarks
in them, or notes (my own and previous owners’),
or receipts from all the bookstores in all the towns
I’ve been to, most of those shops long closed,
since many people these days are as likely
to count bricks as they are to read a book.

*

A bit different...Ashberyesque, in fact (although I can't meander quite as well as he can in a poem; this stays more or less on its "subject," which is rare in the Ashbery canon). Also, to connect to a comment I made earlier about repetition in poetry: a fugal effect, a reduction of sounds -- "book," here, forming a bass line beneath the chatter.

The pastiche -- I'd like to see a book of poetry that's all a series of imitations of other poets' styles. What would be the unavoidable fingerprint or DNA of the poet as he passed through other voices?

My early career was copycatting James Wright, or sometimes Walt. Bishop has also possessed me; and Plath, and several others. Read enough of any poet, especially someone with a distinctive line or peculiar source of imagery, and they'll infect you for a time.

Two more days of this! It's been an interesting game; I hope to keep at it, fairly regularly -- but not every day. Never mind the products: the process has been good for me, like swimming every morning or doing yoga. My brain has lost some of its flab, I think.

Poem # 27: Rings

Having developed ring phobia,
I no longer wear my wedding band.
Here it is on the spice shelf
next to what remains of our saffron,
a few precious specks.

As for my wife,
she lost hers long ago:
took it off to go jogging,
she said (why I don’t know),
and left it at the foot of a giant oak.

When she went back
the ring had vanished!

One would think that a giant oak
already had enough rings.

*

One might do an entire series of poems on the phobias -- particularly the fringe ones, those that don't even have Greek/Latin names listed in the latest DRM (although anyone could make them up: in the case of rings, annulaphobia, perhaps).

Rings aren't necessary to a marriage; ours were cheap bands, anyway. We got married by a defrocked Catholic priest (he'd been cohabiting with a nun for thirty years before the relationship was discovered, he said) in our living room in a townhouse we were renting from a Japanese Seventh-Day Adventist church -- reduced rent in exchange for boarding one of their foreign students.

I was fine with my ring for years, but felt panicky one day: a feeling similar to being trapped in a tight space (I also have claustrophobia, and have always had it). So, I put the ring on a shelf and occasionally check in on it to make sure it's still there.

When Yukiko lost her ring, I went to look for it; while I was rooting about in the grass around the great big tree, I decided that if I was looking for something to confirm my marriage, I was looking in the wrong place (If the ring had been worth more, I might have looked a bit longer).

So, whatever keeps us together is stronger than gold, I guess. maybe it's imagination; we have our own poetry. Sometimes it's a sad poetry, sometimes it's downright surrealist, but we keep composing it.

Poem # 26: Knots

Not nautical speed but

the tangling

not mere tangles but artful

turnings

not turnings but

something like

writing all on the same

spot: the knot.

*

Another light one; I'm getting tired! 

But I like the language play. Perhaps I can find a pattern to develop here in a series of vignettes; knots seem symbolically charged, to me: a craft, like writing; deceptively simple.

Poem # 25: Interregnum

The first stars
emerge

ministers
of the new regime.

*

Something small today; unusually so.

The danger of epigrammatic poems is that they will seem too slight for the page. Typically there is one quick gesture, observation, play on words. Why not go further? Usually, I do -- often losing the initial spark.

These poems depend on white space: the reverb in the reader's perceptions. Here, stars appear against a darkening sky -- the negative of the page, I suppose. But my own pleasure in the poem is in discovering the near-anagram: "emerge" to "regime" -- one letter short of a match! It makes for a slight mirror-effect. I had "appear" instead of "emerge," and tinkered with other verbs before realizing the metaphor itself (centered in "regime") offered a solution.

One of my mystical aesthetic principles about poetry is that the poet should aim to minimize the number of sounds in the text; to seek out fugal repetitions at various levels (not only rhyme, but consonance of other kinds) as a sort of purification of the poem -- a necessarily failed effort, of course. I suppose it's a Swedenborgian notion having to do with angelic dialects: the Old Mystic (as I recall) imagined the angelic tongue as consisting of but one word (Om, no doubt).

All poems will necessarily fall short of some vision or plan that sparked the process; each individual work is a record of "failure." That failure is the reason to attempt writing another poem, or for another poet to keep writing after you.

Poem # 24: 3 am

A murderer lives above my ceiling
which he makes, with heavy tread,
his floor. I read about his crimes
in tomorrow’s papers in my dreams.

Sleep is the spoils of war.
A dozen devils fight for the claim.
The last one standing
is my champion and secret name.

To me, insomnia’s just as gory
as the hands of the psychopath above.
(In truth, that’s somewhere else I lived:
presently I have no second story.)

I’ll make the murderer in my head
believe I’m already dead
and possibly he’ll let me sleep.
I’ll count anything but sheep.

*

There's a long tradition of poems about sleep and insomnia: most recently, Bishop, Simic, Collins, Hicok. I've written a couple in recent months -- during bouts of insomnia, of course.

The subtext of such poems is often something to do with anxiety, regret, and such. Dana Gioia's "Insomnia" is fairly standard. Here's its last lines:

The terrible clarity this moment brings,   

the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

It starts off better; but the neoclassicist Gioia has to spell things out. It isn't clarity so much as an inability to make leaps in his poetry, I think.

Anyway, mine's in need of work -- leaps? --more like stumbling! Next sleepless night (one will come soon, most likely) I'll tinker with it. 

Poem # 23: I'm Listening

From your eyes an entire city appeared
as I listened to you sing my praises.
The rain had stopped. Its last drops
quietly spelled out my faults.
Your words were pedestrians
passing in the street.
Some I knew and some I did not.
Your eyes seemed more distant
than the bridge lights.
People joined us in the bar,
leaning their umbrellas by the entrance.
Some would later be abandoned.

*

This one has nothing much to do with my present-day reality; but a lot of the poems I've written over the past year or so revisit my youth -- seventies, eighties -- and this one is vaguely (in my own mind, anyway) Manhattan, my geographic and emotional center of existence, long ago (though I haven't visited in nearly twenty years).

Also, it's an experiment in capturing nuance, of balancing interior and exterior. If I have any religion, it's animism: everything's alive, and participating in our mental/emotional lives. Yes, that chair you stubbed your toe on is malicious! And when someone's breaking up with you (or trying to), yes, the rain is in on it, and every stranger, too.

Ruskin called this the Pathetic Fallacy, but most artists know it's merely human, not fallacious.

Poem # 22: My Thanks

For all the times I bored you torturously

and your mouth was tattooed with a thin

but compassionate smile,

thank you. Why did I keep going?

I knew each time you were in pain.

No, I am not an evil man.

I might say it was the cold days

and my words were like logs

I kept throwing on the fire

of your generosity. I kept

cutting and splitting logic-logs,

ideas and anecdotes and random pages

from all the books I’d read

with enough heat in them

to sustain a far-north city for the entire winter.

Here I am, doing it again! Ah, well.

You seemed to absorb it all.

I imagine you flying home

to that cold country of yours,

converting your suppressed sighs

to the cleanest fuel

the world has ever known.

Your countrymen

need not send their thanks;

it was all your compassion

and patience, with which you are

natively endowed.

Come back: the days

are growing cold again,

and I have much wood to burn.

*

Well, perhaps I'm too hard on myself! Consider it hyperbole. I am thinking, specifically (with some fictional recasting, particularly with regard to climate) of dear Adam Zagajewski, who, as a mentor in the late nineties while I was working on my Ph.D., used to meet me for coffee and listen patiently to what must have been meandering nonsense at times. In those days I had little contact with my fellow grad students, and Adam tried to take care of me a little.

# 21 Revised

Childhood

is where we’re going

not where we’ve been.

That’s suspiciously

Wordsworthian and

backwards

I know

but sometimes a poem is best read

in reverse.

Then

you discover somewhere between

in the up and down of it

meaning

or rather the balance

which is generally

what we’re needing

when we pick up the poetry book

and start reading.

Poem # 21: Poetica Ars

Childhood is where we’re going
not where we’ve been.
That sounds suspiciously Wordsworthian
and backwards
I know
but a poem is best read
in reverse.
Then
you discover somewhere between
in the up and down of it
a meaning
or rather the balance
which is generally
what we were needing
when we picked up the poetry book
and commenced reading.

*

An "ars poetica," with the title lamely reversed, since the ditty itself uses the figure of backwardness...naturally, the Wordsworthian reference is to "Ode: Intimations of Mortality," in which the bard quotes himself from the earlier "The Rainbow" (writing backwards of a different sort): 

'The Child is father of the Man; 

And I could wish my days to be 

Bound each to each by natural piety.'

"Reading backwards" is what i call a critical device I try to teach my students. Really, all it means is "read again," I suppose, but with a sense of the totality of the text in your mind: how does what came before connect to what comes after, at various stages? How does this text (within discourse, or talking between texts and authors) connect to what precedes it?

..but that's too heady for my "Poetica Ars."

Poem # 20: Coyotes

Coyotes are lost
inside their own strange noise:

a yip or a howl
or neither,

as the coyote
is neither wolf nor dog.

Their voices
blister the sky.

The coyotes
are neither day nor night

and hide between.
A donkey’s

distracted kick
routs them.

*

An attempt at rendering. Most nights, we hear the sound of coyotes somewhere out beyond the trees that border our land. They could be near or far; sometimes in the day we see large paw prints in the mud, and know they've visited. They can harry horses, but so far no trouble for us. Many people with a horse or two also keep a donkey, because they drive the coyotes away. If we had chickens, we might draw more visits from them; our ducks take shelter on the pond.

I want, somehow, for the animal to be a symbol of boundaries, of phenomena lost between worlds; and for the poem to enact that and not merely describe it. It's not there yet.

Poem # 19: The Faces

I leaped into the river
and wound up in a room
wallpapered with all the yearbook faces
of everyone I’d ever known.

I could still pick out the ones I’d loved,
the ones I’d admired,
the ones I’d felt contempt for,
the ones who’d felt contempt for me.

Life still felt warm
and only minutes ago,
but all the yearbook people
were dead, too;

maybe each in a room somewhere,
papered ceiling to floor
with faces, including mine.

The room was narrow and long:
almost a hallway, but going nowhere.
The walls were high,
but height didn’t matter;
I could reach the topmost row of faces with ease.

I’d known thousands:
this had been the world
from my humble perspective.

Some of the people I’d loved
were in color, some were not.
A few I’d barely known
were vividly hued: why some
and not the rest?

The floor was wood, very clean but scuffed.
The ceiling was creamy white
and gave a general light – no bare bulb
and no grand fixtures.
No door; and of course
no windows.

Eons passed.
If I slept, it was like turning a corner,
going around the block
in some city from long ago,
a city suggested by a single face
among all the others.

I wasn’t bored, scared, or worried.
I wasn’t angry
and I had no regrets.

When I wanted I could stand up
to look at the faces,
and it would keep me going for hours
or years;

it was getting to know some people
all over again, and knowing others
for the first time;

forgiving,
being forgiven;
finishing long-ago conversations.

*

Plain -- perhaps too plain; an effort at staying quiet, white, in a poem, which is hard to do and still create anything memorable.

This is spun out of a waking dream I had; a memory space, trying to fit everything of value in my life into one room in my mind; a morbid thought-experiment, but a useful way to handle the occasional dark, suicidal moods I enter: what happens after? Not heaven, but an annex to life; something vague and unpleasant, as for the ancient Greeks, but not hell, and not heaven.

Well -- it's a poem about Facebook, really.

Poem # 18: Generations

My mother’s stepmother wrote the family history
on shirt cardboard and the insides of cracker boxes.
The Great Depression did that to people:
it made them turn anything into paper.

The family history she wrote was not even hers
but her husband’s, whom she’d married
after the War, after my mother’s first mother
had died. She took the job of scribe

along with wife and mother and nurse.
The family history she wrote
started with the Todds of Virginia
and wound up with the Jacobs in Tennessee

where they’ve been for ages
all the way down to the bottom
of the inside of a cracker box.
The names, with partial dates

and scant but sometimes curious details,
crawl down the cardboard page
like sure-footed mountaineers
which they generally were.

The bottom of the crackerbox cardboard
was not far enough, so she turned
up the left side as the generations continued
and around back over the top

where she’d started, down the right side
to our mother; and in tiny print,
upside down and just barely fit in at the bottom,
my siblings and I hang like bats.

*

My wife was talking to me late last night about something -- and I was, indeed, listening -- but at the same time, most likely from a notion tangential to what she was saying, the poem above spooled through my head. It's fairly straightforward. In fact, I need to work (when I do this seriously, and not just as part of the NaPoWriMo thing) on getting more tension in the lines -- I know. But: I want to stay CLEAR. I love the mere surface of language, but without a pull toward or away from simple meaning, it usually isn't worth putting on the page (though that seems to be a key aesthetic these days).

Also, I was reading Ted Kooser. I love the simplicity, the clarity...and yet, there is almost always a twisted image or figure, a mystery, a horror, a sadness, or a tragedy that hooks the poem into your unconscious.

Poem # 17: Noppera-bō

My father-in-law’s common-law wife
had been a geisha in her younger days.
When we stayed at their seaside cottage
on the Boso peninsula
I went snooping around one summer afternoon
and opened a tansu
standing alone in an otherwise
empty room.
An old, retired geisha wig
tortured by cobwebs
and green with a livid mold
stared back at me
accusatory and too much
of the thing it was:
a head without eyes
is all eye.

*

The title refers to a type of Japanese spirit that seems normal when you first encounter it (and might be disguised as someone you know), but then wipes its face away, staring back it you with a featureless face.

This was an actual (if less supernatural) experience I had, ages ago, when Yukiko (my wife) and I had just moved to Japan, when she was pregnant with our son (Dugan, now 17). It was a hot summer, but the sea was just steps away; the village (Chikura) was mainly farmers and fishermen and ama (diving women), but tourism was just moving in. I was the only gaijin.

Yukiko's father would show up at all hours (usually the very late ones), often with an entourage of gangster-looking types, and we'd have to go hunting for shrimp and crabs at his whim (Yukiko was as big as a beach ball at the time, and not fond of these surprise midnight visits).

Every morning at 6 am, the village was collectively awakened by a loudspeaker playing rousing music. The villagers were friendly, and a bit curious about me at first. The mayor dropped by with fish he'd caught himself; an elderly neighbor lady stopped by and, without warning, slid open the door (it didn't even have a lock) to present me with a round melon upon which she had drawn a smiley face (a tradition of welcome). I was stark naked, and in shock, but took the watermelon and immediately put it to good use as cover. (I imagine the smiley face was facing outward.) The lady was also smiling, and seemed not a bit nonplussed. She chatted a bit (my Japanese was not so fluent yet that I could do anything but smile, like my melon), and then bowed and saw her way out.

Adam before His Mirror

(by Ned O’Gorman, 1929 - )

You are my glove and waistcoat,
my boot and diamond pin,
my starched and pleated blouse;
my anchored collar, my scarf
and woven stocking. You are
the buckle on my hip,
my lacquered heel, my mask
for bees. You are my alb,
my amice and my hood, my walking
stick. You are my lute and drum,
my arbor and my bell, my rain
and sun, my season and my zoo.
You are circle of my hoop,
my scissor and my loom, my junction
and meadow, my sign, my darkness
and my light. You are hyssop
and mint, my crown, my hurdle.
You are the stillness
and the moving in my brain.
You are the span and fathom
of my chest. You are the arch
and vaulting of my skull. You are
root of my hand and exultation
in my reins. You are my image.
I am stress and raiment of clay.

*

From one of the books I purchased at Half Price earlier today (actually yesterday, by now). I love the catching back and forth of sounds; and the collage, that is somehow out of snapshots by a young man circa 1960 of the environment around him (an existentialist sort of Christian man, in New York, who spent a lot of time in churches, museums, and books). And yet, somehow, in the linkages and accumulation, he captures a brief liaison between History and Myth;

– and I hope he won’t mind me posting this here.

Poem # 16: Mirror

The mirror was not an invention or discovery
but a creation
on one of those days
the Bible is too bothered to mention.

The calendar was a mirror
and we looked at its days
as we wore the apron of hours.

Turning the page
or turning it back
is the mirror I would have made.

*

Rush job -- amazing I can even get such hack-work done when I'm teaching, being a husband and dad, and running in fear of myself (my main job).

Something good will come of this, I'm sure --

*

Meanwhile, I brought Dugan into Austin today to buy supplies for the Curry Cook-off he's attending tomorrow (homeschoolers have weird hobbies), we stopped at Half Price (it's near the Indian Grocer's), and I found a little gem -- a poet from long ago, Ned O'Gorman, one of whose poems I'll post next --

Poem # 15: Birthers

Let us show each other
our birth certificates,
let us test the other’s papers
and deny their provenance,
you mine and I yours,
neither one real, nor his
nor hers, all of us aliens
trying to hide,
all of us liars and frauds,
our documents false,
our accents faked,
our complexions painted,
our pledges pretenses,
our every word orphaned
and all actions, offenses.

I am the last speck of sovereignty
in the Republic of My Own Lower Intestine,
and your shadow cast in my presence
is undeniable evidence
that you have one
and that shadows are in existence.

Prove me and I will prove you!
Certificates are circumspect,
all documents dubious,
passports fail,
licenses lie;

therefore let us each validate the other
with a simple and manly handshake,
a cross-transfusion of molecules
skin to skin,
your germs mine
and mine yours;

a transfer of sweat
and of this sweet American dirt
we declare in unison to be natives of.

*

Ah, the list poem! When you feel blocked, it unblocks you. Always expansive, Whitmanesque...like traveling with the roof down, every time: the convertible of poetic forms. And then, it rains --

Today was tax day; I hit a snag while (late, I know) preparing my 1040, and became miserable upon learning that I owed Uncle Sam some $$. Alas.

So, composing my tax return ate into time I might have spent composing poetry; that, and the usual work responding to students, commenting on their writing, etc., etc. 90 minutes before the deadline, I decided to improvise.

The typical (for me, of late) word-play; a certain measure, not entirely arbitrary, within the list-dynamics: essentially, a minimal repetition of the same joke, fit over a faux-logical phrase, "this, therefore that." Take a simple list, fold it over a few times, put in some kind of hinge -- a curve, a turn as the sonneteers call it, a serif to declare the end. If you hear the end of your poem coming, it will rise to meet you.

"Therefore..." as a turn certainly I owe to James Wright, who, after forgetting about him for a while, I have returned to, prodigal; he's where I started, after all. I am thinking, naturally, of:

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

...Wright's "Autumn Begins in Martin's Ferry, Ohio," which is mother's milk to a poet my age. I hear it as spoken by my friend Phil Brady, who speaks poems from memory the way the rest of us breathe air: for dear life. 

As a final note: I know some "Birthers" down here in Bastrop, although they haven't said much lately about that strange notion. Oh, I could do odes on health care, evolution, gun control...I do hear alternate versions of reality -- it keeps me fresh and sharp.

Poem # 14: Untitled

As an ex-Protestant
I used not to believe in Purgatory
but now I do.
No – I’m not Catholic,
not even with a small c.

There’s no religion for me.
But there’s always purgatory,
small p –
and the mortgage on it
that never ends.

*

A ditty; but at least I got something done early today.

This was perhaps initiated by the mere word "purgatory" in a poem by one of my favorite poets, Bob Hicok, which otherwise bears no relation to the poem above. I read the Hicok poem yesterday; standing looking out my window just half an hour ago -- at my little plot of purgatory -- the poem entered my head.

Poem # 13: Lake

Swim through the lake
microscopic:
no one sees you.
In water we’re not wet
but splayed, loose,
under-gravitied.
Wet is water’s regret,
wistful and lingering.
Floating takes faith
though we need not float fervently.
Flying, though, takes prayer.
Fathoms below
a bass swims by a plow.
The town is dry
and forty years drowned
to make this reservoir.
Swim above Main Street
and pretend you’re sky;
pretend you’ve no regrets.

*

Language play: and thoughts of summer, I guess. I love lake water, though I nearly drowned in a lake. But near-drowning draws one back to the scene. Being born: lakes are amniotic. When we come into the world, we nearly drown from air.

An exercise -- but these daily efforts exercise my ear. Sound of sense: Frost's idea that we hear the rhythms of lines, like voices on the other side of a door, and fit words to them to find the poem. But you still need to seek your theme from somewhere. There's no objective correlative above; I have no idea what regret might be, but as in a dream, everything is some part of me. Some poems are peeled-off outer layers of poems yet written. Let's see what kernel I find tomorrow.

Poem # 12: Center Field

Standing under the softball,

end of summer, end of the day,

you leave the planet for that place

where your success is as small

as the moon come down so fast

it hits you in the face;

you got under it, sure,

they way you’re supposed to,

but were too amazed at how everything

for that instant put you and only you

smack in the middle

of the only thing that mattered;

and SMASH the full moon

comes down like a million nows

and time turns around and you’ve been

living backwards ever since

wondering how the moon

got so close and you missed it.

*

I'm too tired to comment much tonight...was reading Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven. The word "softball" popped out in one poem, and before I even started reading I saw the poem I needed to write tonight. This came from the simple, hypnotic experience of remembering myself at a certain age, standing in the field, under a descending pop fly. One arc, one gesture, one moment: the poem was folded into it somehow, so I stood under it and waited. I let the sounds acrete, echo one another, and the images fell into service to the allegory.

I'll look tomorrow when I'm not so fatigued to see if I still like it...

Poem # 11: The Art of Living

The art of living, Marcus Aurelius wrote,
is more like the art of wrestling
than of dancing. Wrestling has an art
though it is not an art. Dancing has an art
and is an art. Is that equivocation? –
as when our words slip gears.
I’m a living equivocation: years ago
I was one thing, now I’m something else.
Some still call me by my name;
at times it doesn’t sound right.
I used to harken to it hopefully, expecting conversation.
Now I hear my name and fear the chore
I haven’t done. The art of living is the art
of doing chores. There’s no art to that
you’d say; but yes there is!
The art’s in doing chores so poorly
you’re never asked again.
You could say that living such a mean, deceitful life
results in never being asked again for anything.
I might refute that, but what’s the point?
There’s no one listening, anyway.

*

I woke this morning at 4:30, which hasn't happened in a while. Actually, my particular insomnia, when I am afflicted with it, is to wake at 2 am and struggle with my anxieties and obsessions. Eventually I learned to get up and do something: read, write. lately I've slept well, but the buzz is always there; fears, regrets, hauntings. 

Anyway, I woke too early, and got up to write the day's poem.

It's just a persona, I might offer as a weak defense; but really, it's a darker part of me, and at 4:30 am, that's the part that floats to the surface. He's self-pitying, a bit solipsistic; I hope for a slight humor or irony that counters it, redeems it -- but maybe not.

Regret; for what? Either it's a long list, or the general feeling inhabits me. I am the kind of man who can feel guilt for the crimes of others, as well as my own; your suspicion of me would breed my own suspicion of myself. I think that's an added characteristic of the obsessive personality, sometimes.

To my ear, the poem is Larkinesque, but he's both darker and funnier, I admit -- and has a better ear.

Germination: I picked up an interesting-looking book at the used bookstore yesterday: The Vehement Passions by Philip Fisher. Have so far only read bits and pieces, but it looks wonderful. One essay, "Time," begins with a reference to the Marcus Aurelius observation. I have the Meditations on my shelf, and have picked at it for years, but didn't recall that passage. I bought the Fisher because I came across that page while browsing in the store; driving home (the 2 1/2 trip from Houston), while listening to poetry tapes, I also had the Marcus Aurelius marinating in my head. It might be what woke me up at 4:30 am, in fact: to flush it out of my system.

Here's a translation of the line itself:

"The art of life is more like the wrestler's art than the dancer's, in respect of this, that it should stand ready and firm to meet onsets which are sudden and unexpected."

Poem # 10: Come as the Cloud

The dogs are in a tumble on the grass
matched to the fur of haze a cloud
shapes in the sky. The dogs fall out
and run three ways to nowhere
then return. The cloud stays the same.
Day after day we feed the dogs,
dote on them in precisely equal measure,
watch them play ferociously,
then doze: repeat times three
and start again. The cloud absconds
when no one’s looking, or disperses:
I call it one, but a cloud is many.
Our dogs are three: one we found,
one we paid good money for,
the last found us. Together
they’ve made their pack complete
and are a Cerberus blend of terror
to all strangers at our gates.
I don’t mean this is hell,
and you’re no hero coming here
for gain; if you visit us,
come as the cloud that seems
not here nor there,
and the dogs will know
you’ve always been,
were always one of us.

*

Yesterday and today I was forced to write in 90 minutes; yesterday, because I had 20 essays to comment on, and today because I had to drive to Houston to meet with our Writing Center tutors, then return. After that, I have to help my son with his home-schooling; he calls for assistance, I respond -- no matter what. He's got one more year, and is finally into college mode, so I have to keep vigilant as a dad in this final, crucial time.

So, poems churned out like memos...well, if I did this for 100 days instead of thirty, would my chances of writing/chancing upon a decent poem be higher?

Even if they all end up in the trash, the process is valuable -- somehow. It focuses my mind.

I'm too busy with work and parenting to waste time: on the drive -- 2 1/2 hours each way -- I had my old cassette player mini-plugged into the AUX on the car radio, so I could listen to a bunch of old poetry tapes: an early-nineties series by Joseph Parisi with Ginsberg, Maxine Kumin, Karl Shapiro (the ones I listened to today), etc; then, some old Caedmon recordings of thespians declaiming various poets from Shakespeare to Browning. I hadn't pulled those old things out in years; glad I still have them, because they're hard to find on CD, mp3, or tape. 

The highlights: Sir Ralph Richardson doing Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale." He hit just the right balance between performance and conveyance. Richard Burton butchered Donne, Gielgud ground up Blake into bits, and Dylan Thomas mangled Milton; but Ralph did it right. Also George Mason doing Browning: I'm not a huge fan of "My Last Duchess," but Mason showed how the poem is really a small bit of theater; pre-cinematic, though -- the voice actually presents montage, I think -- the shifts are photographically precise. 

Anyway -- writing makes me want to read (and listen) with the same curiosity and ardor I had in my youth; and reading, listening suffuses me with poetry, and writing is almost an exhalation. Not easy -- certainly not easy to get right -- but it feels more like catching into something that's already there, warm and moving, rather than something that's cold and dead, and I'm trying to resuscitate it. 

Enough of that. We really do have three dogs, and they drive me crazy, but I love them anyway. Three dogs, three horses, three people: that's my life.

And poetry -- again, after some long disputes between us.   

Poem # 9: Intersection

A man on an appaloosa

hastened across Highway 71

so they could climb the hill east of town.

Past there it’s a nice ride through the cemetery

and on toward the river.

Smack in the middle of the road

the horse reared at a flying plastic sack

and I braked hard in alarm.

But the horse made it across

and was over the hill

and out of sight

before I reached the light.

*

Ok, I admit, this one's not even close -- I couldn't finish in time, and flailed about in search of the poem that I knew was somewhere in front of me...I'll hunt it down some other time. 

Poem # 8: Messiah

At night I put myself to sleep
by pretending I am the Messiah
or that I am not the Messiah,
which are equally narcotic reveries.

As the Messiah
I enter the hearts of women and men,
shaping the distance and inevitability of dying
into a narrow pass;

through this pass each day of life proceeds.
As not the Messiah
I enter the back doors of their dreams
like an old friend

whose fervent, youthful aspirations
were never realized;
now I am merely a laborer,
but a laborer within their dreams.

I take apart the Messiah’s work
like a dismantler of houses,
so that life, aloof to its daily motions
through the narrow pass,

is undone into the general flow.
Then I find myself asleep,
and someone playing Messiah
or not Messiah

greets me in a long hallway
or is caught removing the copper wire
and pipes in my brain,
pilfering them for his own profit;

instead of stopping him,
I offer my assistance
and we work side by side
in silence, until morning.

*

I do indeed put myself to sleep, most nights, by performing various thought experiments. Most recently, there's the "Messiah/Not Messiah" thought experiment. Of late, it has gotten rather ridiculous (even for me), but as a soporific, it is truly effective. Lately, After some sort of anomalous event (a lightning bolt is usually sufficient, if hum-drum; no radioactive-spider bites for me!), I engage in some sort of world-saving activity, and I am then interviewed by (a) Larry King, (b) Oprah, or my favorite, (c) Katie Couric. Sometimes Katie asks me, somewhat suggestively: "Are you REALLY the Messiah?" And I reply, somewhat dryly: "No, Katie. And you -- are you the Virgin Mary?" I have no idea what that really means, but the scene is played out with sufficient suavity. Anyway, before the thought experiment ever gets too far along, I am dead asleep.

Oh, I have played out various other thought experiments (the name is perhaps too intelligent sounding for my cogitations; "cogitations" is also too intelligent sounding for them): for a while, I was --ho-hum, I know! -- stranded a la Crusoe (or Tom Hanks) on an island. The fun of it, though, was simply that I got very down into the details of my survival -- diet, daily labors, efforts to leave the island, journal entries (a previous island resident had conveniently left a nice big stack of blank diaries), naturalistic discoveries, and my evolution as a skilled guitar player -- finally, on a desert island, I was learning to play! (The previous resident had, conveniently, left his guitar -- in fact, most nights his skeleton was holding it in the rocking chair that he also conveniently left behind. Each night, a different assortment of canned goods and tools were to be found in Victorian cupboards.).

In another thought experiment over many nights, I was one of several hostages being held in a joint venture between members of Al Qaeda and an anonymous, but very nasty, Mexican Drug cartel. Naturally, after a rather long ordeal, I save us all ( a sort of Hollywood Squares assortment of celebrities, usually), and survive my wounds. Then I am interviewed by (a), (b), or (c) above.

More recently, though, I have simply (and more usefully) been studying Japanese "kanji" as a sure-fire way to get into a peaceful slumber, without long hours of anxiety and regret for the now-greatly-accumulating errors of my long life -- which include, no doubt, wasting more time than Walter Mitty on a long series of absurdist daydreams that James Thurber would have been embarrassed to put down.

But I -- I have no shame.

*

Meanwhile, as to form and process:

I write pure "free verse" less and less often; generally, I prefer to start with something at least slightly formal, even though I eventually end up "on the ruins of meter" (that's C. K. Williams quoting Adam Zagajewski to a bunch of FAWC fellows many years ago; except that in his NJ accent, it came out "runes of meter," which, as a proud Anglo Saxon, I was much intrigued by).

Jonathan Holden, poet-critic, proposed many years ago that free-versers work from analogues of various kinds -- patterns, templates, matrices...I don't recall his precise language, but I have taken his ideas and worked with them over the years (in fact, you might call it a thought experiment). Basically -- and this is mainly Holden, I guess, rephrased -- free-verse poets fulfill certain forms: confession, prayer, petition, epistle, etc. -- and what they lose in structural dynamics by forsaking meter, they gain (partly) from the rhetorical dynamics of the analogical form.

I don't remember much else about it; and have probably altered it a bit, mixing with my own notions, and with elementary classical rhetoric: progymnasmata. It's the precise dynamics, the stages and boundaries within a particular analogue, that are interesting and fruitful -- but always depending on the tension that one discovers between the analogue and the poem itself; or, between one analogue and a "shadow form" that counters the more overt form.  

The above poem might be, then: confession (although refashioned as the kind of confession one might give to a shrink), but also, of course, dream vision (as in Chaucer, the Pearl Poet, etc.), underworld journey (Odysseus, Aeneas), hall of mirrors, mise en abime...or, just a stripped down video game, with two simple bifurcations -- a gate of horn, another of ivory. Also, this process is like "arts of memory" narratives that use journey, spatial structure, or other forms of concomitance, as steps in preservation or invention.

It's all very simple, very ancient -- and very effective, when you study such things intently, and then push them into the periphery while writing.

See the classic Triggering Town of Richard Hugo....and Holden's Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric, and (in addition to many other wonder Arts of Memory books -- see my Library Thing page!), Frances Yates' The Art of Memory.  

Poem # 7: Crossing the River

Crossing the river was being crossed
by the river, or something that moved
in it: not downstream, but a counterforce
that I imagined a film, a foreign one,
without subtitles.

I was on horseback, wondering
what the horse might think
about my figure of thought.
Horses are extremely subtle beings;
too subtle for thinking, really.

He tried to go deeper
and more upstream where the film
was going, not downstream
with reality or whatever
was opposite the film.

I reigned him in: this was my ride.
Though sometimes I let him go his way,
today was a day to get over.
Down with art, and reality as well!
Aim your horse between.

*

A bit cerebral, I suppose. Maybe even pompous! Well, I'm a risk-taker. Mr. Intrepid, from that last line.

But not as adventurous as my wife, Yukiko. She's the river-crosser in the family, not I -- though I'll get around to it, some day. It's not exactly on my bucket list, but something I'll get around to, anyway -- Yukiko will make me.

Me, I just ride around sometimes here on the property, and hang around with the darned horses -- feed them, lean on them, try not to get stepped on by them, etc. The young one -- a two-year old Arabian named Zephyrus -- he likes it when you blow in his nostrils. He won't leave as long as you blow in his nostrils.

But river-riding -- I'm not ready for that yet. So, I borrowed from Yukiko's experience. here's a recent photo:

The horse is Sunny; the river is the Colorado (Texas Colorado). Normally Yukiko's in a cowboy hat, but the park required helmets.

Another Revision of "Sand"

From where is sand spilling?
I have no holes, I am not leaking.

Still, at this moment
I’m wet with sand; I am Shakespearean
with it, we are creating each other
and forming nations.

Brush it off: intimately sand.
always wet, a little bit;
always more than one.

We deny it emotions.
Sand is what we are not.
It borders, it bags, at its finest
sifts seconds;

face of an angel the singular
sand-speck, particle of human spunk
and birth of resistance;

sand that fits my unthinking
and spills for me
points enough to fill a book.

Omit the words
for sand alone will last:
world’s gift to itself,

pure, sibilant sand.

*

Two concerns: first, to make it even more concise; second, to reduce the sound-spectrum, or to find intersecting points of consonance. Ex: "words" echoed by "world's" in the last stanza, after replacing "universe's."

One of my obsessions, which I define as an aesthetic principle, is with keeping the "sound spectrum" as spare as possible: discovering the palette or spectrum of the poem, and then trying to keep to it, or keep it minimal, and see how much will still come through.

A tension between few and many; the rule of economy, as if we're packing a spaceship when we write a poem, and must keep the payload light.

Also, it is a way to watch myself: my tendency is toward copiousness -- bloat -- and knowing that, I focus in various ways on paring down. Probably not enough, sometimes; but I've gone from working these past twenty years mostly on long poems with heavy conceptual content -- research poetry! -- back to small lyrics, as I used to write, when I was a fresh young poet. Life is a circle; albeit a lumpy, banged-up circle.

Poem # 6: Terrorist

Brown man with black hair
stopped at the scanner,
his white caftan a curtain
to what dangers.

Here I am pulling my cowboy boots
back on, sitting down
at the end of the gauntlet.
When I look up

the fat wand is hovering
over the brown man’s chest.
His heart, an explosive device,
has drawn concern.

Oh, any brown man
might be a terrorist.
And women? – all women
are worth scanning

with your big bad wand.
Even the women in blue shirts
have them, and their thick belts
are black mirrors.

I always want to run
through the gauntlet, yelling
“Catch me! Catch me
if you can!”

but the urge is easy to suppress.
The man in the caftan
is holding out his arms;
he is not a Christian

but he looks crucified
and as the wand
writes humiliation
his eyes melt ice.

*

I guess this one's a bit edgy -- for me, anyway.

Sources/prompts: I'm not going to AWP this year, but many friends are; getting ready at this moment to fly to Denver, first passing through Security. So, flying and airports are in my brain, since I'd like to go and see my far-flung pals....

I have indeed turned a couple of times on my way through Security, and seen over my shoulder a Middle-Eastern-looking person paused at the portal. Naturally, I kept walking, wondering only for a moment what would become of the hapless traveler.

But more directly: I was entering the elevator at school yesterday; to the side there were two older men, white men in jackets and neckties, beside a table upon which were many little Bibles, and a hand-scrawled sign that said "Bibles -- Free." They looked a bit anxious, but perhaps for our souls. Nothing indicated what organization they represented; I wondered why, at a state-supported college, we we allowing religious solicitation, if that's what it was (but didn't wonder long). Then, beside me at the elevator, a tall Muslim man in a long white caftan and a kufi appeared, a look of embarrassment in his eyes. I don't know that it had anything to do with the two elderly Christian gents; my guess was that he was not offended by their religious display, but merely reminded that he was not, as they say, in Kansas anymore (or whatever his equivalent of "Kansas" might be).

Anyway, on my drive home, I pondered what poem might come from these flickers of observation and memory; got home, and tinkered with one of the earlier poems from this marathon; went to bed, woke up, and wrote the poem above.

Some aspects to the creative process here: first, my "front burner/back burner" theory: that one way to work on Project A is to turn to Project B after setting the flame under A, letting it simmer -- and then turning one's attention back to A, which has "cooked" a bit on its own. Also, start the process, sleep, and let one's unconscious marinate things overnight. Cross-fertilization: seemingly unrelated things inform one another. (And it's probably no coincidence that the poem I was revising was "Sand").

To encourage and pursue cross-connections: that's the main lesson I got from my Sarah Lawrence days, and it has served me well in all creative efforts for years now.

Poem # 5 Revision: Retooled While Driving

Reading in my Chair

This floor lamp measures my days
and I am Ptolemaic in my praise
of its centrality, though I have enough
left over for the book I’m perusing.

Armchairs are floating islands
and when I sit to read or sleep
my chair is a landscape
to which I am the far horizon.

My life is an armchair situation:
Archeologists will need
only clean under the cushion
to write their investigations.

If the chair and I could trade places
such a high degree of dedication
to a singular vocation
might be liberating for one or both of us.

I might as well be one with my chair
but it is good to stand up now and then
if only to enjoy the pleasure
of sitting down again.

*

Is it dangerous to revise a poem while driving on the freeway? Not with pen and paper -- or netbook or laptop, God forbid; just running it back and forth through my brain. Anyway not much different; I just tinkered with the sort-of rhymes.

I'm reading a little Kierkegaard, so we'll see if he filters into some poems over the next few days.

I have a MASSIVE amount of essays to grade this week! Even though the number of courses is smaller now, it just turns out that I scheduled three deadlines at the same time -- one in a double section. So what: I'll grade five drafts, then fuss with a poem. Can't stand those lazy bums who complain about teaching two or three courses (usually with a dozen or so students), and say they can't get any writing done when they're teaching! Lightweights, huh? You know who you are.

Poem # 5: Sitting in my Chair

This floor lamp measures my day
and I am Ptolemaic in my praise
of its centrality, though I have
enough praise left over for electricity.

Armchairs are floating islands
and when I sit to read or sleep
my chair is a landscape
to which I am the far horizon.

My life is an armchair situation:
Archeologists will need
only clean under the cushion
to write their investigations.

If the chair and I could trade places
such a high degree of dedication
to a singular vocation
might be very liberating for me.

I might as well be one with my chair
but it is good to stand up sometimes
if only to enjoy the pleasure
of sitting down once more.

*

Only Day 5 -- and already I'm turning to light verse! Ah, well -- it's fun.

Facts: the chair in question is very comfortable, but actually a certain dog occupies it more often than I do, and I generally don't have the heart to eject him. So, I read on the couch. But the chair is VERY cozy, and perfect for curling up with a book. I wish the dog would share.

Poem # 4: Lost

What I have lost
that is not anatomical
but still essential
I cannot count –

losing fully even the memory
of what mattered
sometimes only momentarily,
it’s true: some valued notion

or instantaneous passion
for a vision across the room:
lost, walked away
even without legs –

my feeling and memory;
and she, they, the station full of them,
departing every night
in a dozen directions,

taking the station with them.
 
*

Started from a spark after reading more Herbert; but the spark itself (a reference to legs) is now no more than the word "legs" itself. The "missing link" element in creativity; what starts you off eventually gets jettisoned. I suppose there can't help but be an echo of Bishop's "Art of Losing," and what for me is an equally intriguing "losing" poem -- Derek Mahon, "Matthew V, 29 -30." But merely an echo...

Revision of # 3: Morning After

Sand

Where does the sand come from?
I am not a sand bag. Sand is not alive
and I am not sand. One can
count it or not – still it is sand.

From where is sand spilling?
I have no holes, I am not leaking
nor am I the leak.

Yet at this moment
I’m wet with sand; I am Shakespearean
with it, we are creating each other
and forming nations.

Brush it off: intimately sand.
always wet, a little bit;
always more than one.

We deny it emotions.
Sand is what we are not.
It borders, it bags, in its finest
it sifts seconds perfectly;

the face of an angel the singular
sand-speck, particle of human spunk
or birth of resistance,

sand that fills my unthinking
and sifts for me
points enough to fill a novel,
periods of strength and grace.

Omit the words and rhythms
for sand alone will last:
universe’s gift to itself,

pure, sibilant sand.

*

Aiming at concision and a pattern to the stanzas...

Poem # 3: Sand

Sand

It bothers me that I don’t know
where the sand comes from.
I am not a sand bag.
Sand is not alive, and I
am not sand. But sand
is intriguing, in that one can
count it, or not –
and still it is sand.

From where is this sand
spilling? I have no holes,
I am not leaking
nor am I the leak.

And yet at this moment
I am wet with sand;
I am Shakespearean
with it, we are
creating each other
and forming nations.

Brush it off: intimately
sand. It is always wet,
a little bit; it is always
more than one.

In the end, we deny it
emotions. Sand is what
we are not. It borders,
it bags, in its finest
it sifts seconds perfectly;

the face of an angel
is the singular sand-speck,
the particle of human spunk
or the birth of resistance,
sand that fills my unthinking
and that sifts for me

enough points to fill a novel,
periods of strength and
grace, omit the words and rhythms
for sand alone will last,
the universe’s gift
to itself, pure,
sibilant
sand.

*

Might regret this when I awake: a little drunk (three Anchor Steam Torpedoes, India Pale Ale) -- celebrating the visit of some good friends from Houston to our country abode...what the hell! They've all gone to sleep, and I slip into my little book-lined room, open up the amazing Zbigniew Herbert Collected (coolest book cover ever printed), and read: purely to cannibalize. Steal from the best: that is the essence of writing. My thefts are, thankfully, always askew. In fact, having written the poem, I can no longer identify the prompt that the dead Herbert bequeathed me, except, simply, the word "sand." Anyway, the poem in question is "Writing," page 158 of the Collected; I was reading Brodsky, skipped over to another part of the Slavic poetic empire, and here I am.

What I value most, I think, is repetition. A poem is a way to stay. Try never to leave where you are: rhyme, cadence, parallelism, euphony, figures generally -- all a way to maintain, to arrest the moment of intensity.

Funny, I never much cared for April, never even granted it cruellest status. But this year, my 51st, I'm enjoying it. Perhaps May, too, will be the Mayest of Mays; and on.

Poem # 2: Rain

It knows me, and gathers around
with constant introductions. We have been familiar
for years. I say: no need to stick so close.
Rain is without memory, though it has the complexion
of past things, it seems to me (and I
am all about the past! Walking backwards
is my favorite thing, so I can see the wreckage).

Tonight’s storm was introduced by wind,
of course. It tried hard as the opening act.
Then the rain began as one well-aimed drop
right above my eye, almost stinging;
it seemed to stay there and look around
before the others followed and made the rain
uncountable. Weather: it’s what outnumbers us.

I stayed out in it, raking manure,
while the horses stood around the hay ring
though they were not eating. I stopped
as they did, without moving,
without a sense (as much as I could reign it in)
of when this rain might end:
rain the eternal circumstance.

Always raining, always standing in it;
the damned horses have stalls now,
though – we just finished them!
They go in when they think it’s time to feed.
Rain, it seems, is fate, and cannot be escaped.
But I am not a horse. Time starts up again
and in the house I go.

*

Ok, this might be a good thing -- pushing my self to write a poem a day! I kind of like this one. It's got a cadence...a few good lines and images. I'm writing from what's right here -- the only "fiction" above is that it's Yukiko, my wife, who rakes the manure; I have other duties, plenty. Anyone notice the "steal" from Walter Benjamin -- the angel of history in "Theses on the Philosophy of History"? I cheapen it, I guess, and take it out of context; call it burlesque. Anyway, here's the passage conveniently located on Wikipedia (ctrl + F to find "angel" and you'll see it).

Ought to take some photos of the darned horses...I'll go do that.

Poem 1: Dead

Look how this tree throws off the weight of the sky,
shouting silently about everything in reach:
winter, daylight, the shadowless birds or rather
birds that are their own shadows. Should I
climb into its arms and wait for some brilliance
to burn through the celestial sop, the milk
pooling all around up above, making it difficult
for me to shine through to you, Oh Sun?
Sclerotic, one of us; and flesh peeling,
sloughing off like bark from a dead tree.
Yes, it’s dead – not dormant. Dead
in a dead spell. Time to cut it down.
Such work makes winter warm!
By nightfall, I’m in flames.

*

(Odd, I know, to start April off with a wintry poem. I was fussing with a dead tree today, easier to determine as such now that the living ones are leaved; and the setting I wanted, the "spell," was winter, which frankly I am sorry to see go. I spent many a night, from last November to just last week, burning most of the dead wood that remained on our land. I'll miss the fires....)