Telephone Ode

Praise to the old telephones in their heavy black formal wear, their Bakelite or nickel skins;

two-fisted candlestick phones, wall phones with twin bells like warrior-woman breast cups;

poles marching their long vees into the world, tar-streaked and cross-limbed, lines drawn on the low-down sky, cat’s-cradling cities;

phone booths, capsules on night-corners, human cinema; the roomy British booths, the wood-paneled train-station-booths for last goodbyes;

the many-eyed dial, hooking the numbers in sweeps, arduous rounding of eights and nines;

ratcheting pulse, wrist-dance, finger-spring, release – life of static, wrong numbers, busy signals, phones that never ring and the ringing without end;

the angelic operator, Mademoiselle O, so curt and businesslike and yet at times so kind! – her lovely unseen face, compassionate syllables of eyes;

dimes dropping, palms full of change; return slots and their sometime treasure, and the true coin-prospectors trolling the streets;

praise to the old phones, their bodies with heft! We did not carry them, we went to them, made furniture for them and gave them nooks as for idols and icons;

today, some of you are no more than your voicemail: I want never to leave messages but only to reach you, or to play out your absence to the number of rings that I choose;

old phone, your gnomic squat, casket or samurai head, homunculus, furniture and work of art; cartoon phone leaping and shaking with business and passion;

click of farewell, cradling of goodbyes, each of us the same tinny voice, dial tone of possibilities, and the one ring for all.

*

The sight of an old phone in a movie sent me off into a bit of research on telephones -- mainly images, to draw inspiration from the lost object-life of the telephone, so different as tool, thing, and household prop from the cell phones of today.

The method of composition was mainly to CUT. I assembled a lot of impressions, images, and memories of the Telephone as history, then cut or chipped away like a sculptor to find the proper angles. Or, to use a film metaphor: to find the right jump cuts or leaps. Just as important, as always: the concatenation of sounds, the rhythm and measure of lines (within and between); though instead of seeking a fugal repetition of key words and tones, as I usually do, I think the process in this poem was somewhat opposite: aside from the word "phone" itself, to avoid repetition at the lexical level. Still, looking through, I find an isochronism framed by loose rhyme.

Whitman, of course, is the primary fuel for such a poem: the energy of series, of broad inclusion, of public declamation or recitative. But the children of Whitman such as Sandburg, Neruda, and Francis Ponge are contributors as well -- especially Neruda (Elementary Odes) and Ponge (Siding with Things), for their dedication to the ordinary object, and how to rhapsodize it.

Who are the other great poets of things besides Neruda and Ponge? 

Body and Soul

When I say soul I mean mind and by mind
I mean brain. When I say brain I mean the meat
that thinks, but then my hands say “wait!
What about us? WE contribute to that!”
and I tell them thanks, and to give themselves
a round of applause. Then my feet
chime in to ask about their part,
and then my heart, who ought to be in charge
of everything; and of course my gut,
the General of this army of one,
who has fought for every cause
and lost, but carried on heroically.
The genitals sit stoically still
as they are a one-eyed dictator in exile.

*

A form of self-portrait, or self-caricature: anatomy as armature for the poem, the warp woofed with over-the-top, self-deprecating irony. A loose, skittery sonnet; a cartoon in words.

Words

If I could remember the order in which I learned the words I know,
what sort of poem or prayer would it be? The verbs might not
fit where grammar says they should, the nouns might not furnish
a house or town or playground very sensibly. Maybe the narrative,
the dark side of the moon of my life story, would reveal itself
in the organic list of words. Maybe the world’s truth, like a vein
of some as-yet-unnamed precious ore, would be exposed
for plunder. Did I learn lightning before thunder? Did father
come so long after mother that I had to do kiddy detective work
to fit one to the other? What sort of madness was the alphabet
when I was four? How did the letters find one another?
Still, sometimes, driving through deserts or great plains,
I search for the elusive creature, Ellemenopee, whom I now
believe to be a microscopic being with many eyes, all blind.


*


I was reading Robert Pinsky's Gulf Music, a nicely conceptual series of poems that doesn't force its motifs upon you. As you read, you discover the formal and thematic counterpoints without much difficulty, but still, they (generally) show how repetition can be such an inventive, compelling device in poetry. Also, it has the right degree of disjunction: enough to tilt you into confusion, but not so much that it leaves you there. You come back with a fresh eye for the field of view each poem offers.


Anyway, I was reading a poem in the collection called "Rhyme" that starts of simply enough --  series of declensions, but subtly abandoning that for something referential -- the art of Joseph Cornell -- becoming, I suppose, a slightly effaced ekphrasis, or at least an inspiration from Cornell: a word-box to match Cornell's thing-boxes.


It starts:


Air an instrument of the tongue,
The tongue an instrument
Of the body, the body
An instrument of spirit,
The spirit a being of the air.


Then, as the poem continued (as I continued reading it, I mean -- looking, cannibalistically, for my own poem of the morning), I entered the Cornell box of the poem: objects in my mind displaced the objects in the poem, and another sort of declension or pattern of growth took over. The "theme" somehow was origins, and -- as so often in poems -- the poem itself, or, more broadly, language. One good game to play in poetry, in art generally, is to flirt with navel-gazing, but not fall into the navel. Or: the ostensible theme, "words," is itself metonymic of other things that are found in the origin story. Fear, love, disappointment, wonder, quest -- I've tried to enlist them, above.


There is a modality -- question series, suppositions; and a faint sense of time: the lost past, the unlikely future, and the recurring effort in the present to move, and avoid ruts.


Poems always have so much more  in them than the lines can show. That's what a poem is. A good poem finds a balance between visible and invisible.

Fail

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
- Samuel Beckett

I want a tattoo eraser, and make it painless.
A bad-sex Undo button would be nice,
and kids should come with a refund clause
good till adolescence. Sell chainsaws
with limb-replacement coupons, and please
somebody invent a break-away noose
so I can avoid negative consequences
of any mayhem I might unloose.
How about refunding gambling losses?
Just slip them under the door, thanks.
So I make mistakes! I wear my scars
with sheepish pride and thank my stars
for second chances. My learning curve
is flat; I get what I get, not what I deserve.

*

NaPoWriMo took a lot out of me; on the other hand, it gave me momentum -- as long as I aim more for one poem a week, instead of one a day. That still counts as prolific for most poets, I guess.

The above: I was reading Kim Addonizio; beyond that, I have no idea what sparked the poem, other than the words "bad sex" or maybe "gambling." But clearly, I have read far too much Philip Larkin in my lifetime, and am channeling the old Brit fart, albeit with a Texas twang.

The Beckett line I have always loved; "fail better"! I try, I do try. The other day a horse sideways kicked me in the head and left a rakish wound above my left eye. Getting in the saddle seemed much safer after that -- I rode fairly well! For a while, I looked half Neanderthal, which is generally how I feel, anyway. The golf ball's gone now, and I just picked the scab off my eyebrow. (I love picking at scabs, especially when they come off whole.)

"Fail" -- in our Web 2.0 era, evidently a noun as well as a verb. So be it.