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).