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)  

Toothache

My tooth, as if I had just one, this one that hurts,
speaks to me, as do all addictions: Come to me, stay away,
return! it says; and I, a fervent listener, obey.

Closing my eyes to ease the pain, to study it and get inside,
I see it risen like a tomb or monument
without inscription, heavy on its mound,
backlit by steely bulbs
throwing shadows as from angry searchlights.

Soft-maker of my food,
masher, grain-grinder, jewel of my jaw
on fire now and I am melting –

your heart is one electric nerve
and you have lost your crown; your pain is eloquence,

though of one word only; I sit inside you,
you are all I am, my enameled brain
with its solo thought: here, here, here
that stabs and throbs –

pain, our most private possession,
making seconds into years.

What if all the air were nitrous oxide?
Each day we’d fall in love with nurses, every one
with Ethiopian or Irish lilts, and stardust
sparkling through their mascara.

Who knew God was a bald, ham-fingered tooth-farmer
with nose hairs thick as trees?

Mean molar, when you’re pulled,
I’ll bury you in a jar of gobstoppers
and they will eat you always.


*

Ah, Poetry Month! I have let you down. Too many essays to grade and students to console & shepherd through the spring semester, so I'll be fortunate to write one or two poems this season, in sad contrast to my 30 or so efforts of last year -- mediocre, mostly, but bravely posted, day by day through April.

It's already the Ides of Poetry Month, 2011, but here we go -- "Toothache," inspired by my chipped molar, now behaving nicely, thank you, through serious conversation between us, and so I will continue to evade the horrors of dentistry, as I have assiduously for many years. Why? Not from fear of the drill, but rather as an extension of my claustrophobia: being caught in that chair, unable to move for half an hour or more! Horrible, horrible. I have been known to shriek from panic when bound in dentist's chairs, so I try to eat well (I abhor sweets, in any case -- tarts -- little hussies!), I have a rotating, vibrating toothbrush, and I am a wizard with my Waterpik.

As for other inspirations, points of craft, etc: as always with me, an exercise in reiterations, echoes, nonce rhymes, fugal rhythms and all-around rhetorical self-consciousness. Also, hyperbolic, ecstatic address, peripheral faux-philosophical nods, and one or two beautiful women. (Once, when I had to endure the horror of an MRI exam -- I went in unaware of what tortures they intended to inflict on me -- it was the steady IV of Lithium, the panic bulb, and most of all, the attending Irish nurse that got me through the ordeal, So, I have paired her with an Ethiopian colleague near the end of the poem).

Poems can be meditations, addresses, invocations, exorcisms, curses (the Irish tradition holds the best examples of the latter), prayers, memorials -- I read Erasmus' De Copia and Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria Nova, Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, etc., for inspiration, even if it is misprisioned. Maybe I pull too far away from the plain style, but at least I'm having fun.