Typewriter Ode

Cast-iron Royal, weighty and not regal at all but seriously proletarian, ostensibly portable in your anonymous black case: my secret unmusical instrument, which I lugged to cafes before they were wireless or even wired;

typing there rather ostentatiously my long poems that no one would ever read except me and, years after, the saintly Adam Zagajewski;

and interestingly, another Pole, the unknown sculptor Dariusz Lipski, whose wife, Monika Kulicka, I coveted, and who herself made strange books out of homemade paper and leaves, bark, and the dirt itself, which she tried valiantly to glue on paper and board;

and in those long poems, often given to deep digressions, I made and measured worlds; and you, cast-iron Royal, were the crucible, the forge, the many hammers, each embossed with the soul of a single letter, though you were yourself, I suspect now, illiterate and blind;

there before me, your reverse-amphitheater of symbols in packed rows, DNA of unwritten letters and novels! Strike, and the commanded soldier swings forward, self-catapulting, branding the onion skin I loved for its whispering gauze,

blank pages of ethereal fabric already suggesting a voice and aurora: scrims of my late-Romantic wandering lyric, always so wonderful before it was written, as if my mistake were in not having learned the art of writing backwards, from finished tome to the precious egg of invention;

onion skin, you were so like the many pale-faced girls I loved in college, a few microns thin but profound with possibility;

cast-iron Royal, I rubbed your black shoulders for inspiration; I scanned your exhausted ribbons for the masterworks I knew I had lost there; I thumbed your platen, thrust your carriage stage-right so many thousands of times, a slap across your faceless face! – and you kept working, and might work still, except that I gave you before leaving Manhattan to the painter Jeff Adams, who does not Google, so I can’t write him and ask for you back;

best if you lie like a wreck at the bottom of the sea, foundation and host to coral fantasies, the many polyps and skeletons forming themselves on your hull after letters in languages not yet invented.

*

Like "Telephone Ode" (below), a Whitmanesque effort. Composition by accumulation and rapid association, but staying close to the emblem: the object of memory explosively liberates its broad environs.

Here is the actual animal, ca. 1981; under my loft bed in an apartment on East 11th Street, East Village, which I briefly shared with the soon-to-be famous David Wojnarowicz (a third Polish name for this post). After he moved in, I came home to find the living-room couch upended; he said he needed wall space for painting. I said I needed couch space for sitting; he was amenable.

Entropy

More than wear goes into things breaking;
more than mistakes, more than the roughness of earth
when machines match wits or witlessness with it.
More than poor engineering, manufacture, maintenance;
more than honest use, but less than atoms wearing out
or what’s inside them. (Nothing, too, gets tired -- tired
of being nothing, and so came everything,
and the first act was shattering, and all light is decadence.)
Machine and I meet at a fashioned edge: this is my hand,
I say, and mind; this is my design, a symphony of shapes,
abandoned to your need, it says. Machines are not slaves
and we are not masters. The doing lacks a narrative
and closure is a lie – pretty, like a satin bow or metal clasp.
Everything breaks; nothing dies. Design forsakes. Makers are unmade.

*

A bit serious for me, of late. Also, a bit discursive, but a philosophical poem now and then is fine. An agnostic's manifesto, perhaps with a bit of complaint belying the skepticism.

I spend a lot more time, lately, dealing with machines and tools, since we live in the country on a small bit of land. I am NOT by nature "handy," or good at fixing things, but have had to get better at it to avoid going mad or broke from hiring handymen for everything. 

Agnostic? I'm more of an animist. Things are alive, they conspire against me; feel spite and sometimes pity.

The inner workings of some machines are better known to me, now: the balance, the cause-effect, the feel. But of course, "machine" is any device, including the human body, which also breaks down. And the poem; I'd like to be able to grow them, but they need making.

The Poets

          - Provincetown; a second-hand account


When Alan Dugan met John Logan,
a straight man and a gay-straight man,
one dead-dry and the other sickly-sweet,
the two of them drank everything
from the table and in the coolers
and stood there staggering drunk
like O’Dionysus and his cousin Paddy McSatyr
while everyone else sat staring
through the iron bars of a forced sobriety
at the two Irish-Americans
bookending an arm’s-deep shelf
of poetry good and bad between them;
and they said a great, loud poetry of curses back and forth
like the raw electricity of god against god,
incoherent, mutually cancelling,
sulfurous songs of self-love
and love for whomever you might let
under your thick, alcohol-oozing skin
one autumn night and the next morning and afternoon
of everyone else’s foul and unwarranted hangover.

*

I heard this story from Judith Shahn, Dugan's wife and Ben Shahn's daughter (all are dead now). Whatever it was she told me has of course been altered. Why write a poem if you're not going to lie a little?

This is, you'll notice, in the category of one-sentence poems (see Frost's "The Silken Tent" for another specimen -- quite different!).

Dugan escaped his alcoholism -- though fairly late in life; Logan never did, and died miserably.