at 1:46 PM  Alice said...

Allen, good stuff here. Enjoyed. Will keep me coming back.

Alice

at 6:59 PM  Martha said...

Allen, this is phenomenal. Thank you.
( a friend of Alice )

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A couple of weeks ago, I took three text books to the college bookstore to sell back, roughly, I guess, about $300 worth of books when purchased for my son two years ago. Two of the books were "out of date" (text books, what a racket) and wouldn't be bought back. Apparently no new secrets of American history (1777 - 1877 ) have been unearthed, since they did buy that one back. For $10. Text books, what a racket, or did I already say that.

One the unsold books was a complete waste. But. the other, Literature And Its Writers by Ann Charters and Samuel Charters turned out to be a poetry gold mine.

So, welcome to "Here and Now" number II.3.3, all of which, except for my own work and the work of several on-line poets, comes from the text book. Plus, since there's lots of good poems for future use, I'll be able to quit lurking at the used book stores looking for cheap material for a while.







Half of the textbook is dedicated prose and half to poetry, with about half the poety aranged by topic, convenient for me. The first topic asks the question, what is a poem. To answer the question, they go to many poets, including Archibald MacLeish.


Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

****

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig in the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind _

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

****

A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

A poem should not mean
but be.







From Adam Elgar, appearing in "Here and Now" for the first time, we have this poem on the power of words.

Adam lives in Bristol, England, where, when he isn't writing poetry, he works as an educational consultant.


Fear of poetry

Words rear up at me unfettered,
toy like cats with ear and eye,
knife through my carapace
and conjure planets out of motes.

They bring me news from the gnarl
of an old tree; an earlobe's curl;
a bird's hot, avid life; the cracks
that weren't there yesterday.

Tomorrow they will empty all the cages
in the zoo, switch land and ocean
buoying, sinking me at will, (not mine,
yet mine) not mine this curse, blight,

obliteration by the sacred machine
that other hands tune, turn, twist
with no pretense of mercy, the mouse's
pursuit of the cat that hurts like joy.







The textbook I'm using for this week's poems has a short section on onomatopoeia, illustrated by this piece from Scottish poet Edwin Morgan.


Siesta of a Hungarian Snake

s sz sz SZ sz SZ sz SZ zs ZS zs zs z






Here's a new poem of mine, written earlier in the week; still being workshopped, very mixed views so far, praise is not abundant, but some say it's OK. Others are scathing in their review.


another day

I'm walking the neighborhood,
my regular circuit,
on a very early mid-March morning,
cool, but not cold,
damp from the storm last night,
a real thunder and lightning downpour
with water roaring down the creek
with a low-pitched rumble that woke me,
this morning's evidence of the rush,
high-water debris up twenty feet,
from the normal creek flow, almost to street level.

I've noticed on these early walks
that none of the neighborhood dogs bark
as I pass, strange, the quiet,
like light morning mist,
adding to the lost feel of the morning,
as if reality
has tried to slip away,
caught in the here and now
only by a ragged thread

I stop halfway across the metal foot bridge
that spans the larger creek
and soak up the feel of the morning,
trying to find some message for me,
some truth or even some fiction
that will help me take the day,

sun to the east, just a shadow of a light
rising, in the west the half-moon sets,
as sirens start,
multiple wails cueing the dogs
who wake and howl along,
and I see two fire trucks and two ambulances
pass on Evers, heading for the loop,
two and two, a big one, I think,
someone is dead or dying,
right now in this morning, on Loop 410
near here, their death, the final knotting
of all the threads of their life, as inconsequential to me
as my continued living is bitter trivia to them

the moon sets,
the sun completes its rising,
and it's monday,
another day





Painting by Blas Hernandez Jr. and Rita Ramos


The text uses a number of poems in its discussion of the sonnet. One of my favorites is this one, by Rita Dove, the second African American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize and first Black and, also, the youngest, Poet Laureate of the United States.


Sonnet in Primary Colors

This is for the woman with one black wing
perched over her eyes, lovely Frieda, erect
among parrots, in the stern petticoats of the peasant,
who painted herself a present -
wildflowers entwining the plaster corset
her spine resides in, that flaming pillar -
this priestess in the romance of mirrors.

Each night she lay down in pain and rose
to the celluloid butterflies of her Beloved Dead,
Lenin and Marx and Stalin arrayed at the footstead.
And rose to her easel, the hundred dogs panting
like children along the graveled walls of the garden, Diego's
love a skull in the circular window
of the thumbprint searing her inimitable brow.







Here's a poem from Jane Roken, one of our most frequent contributors. Jane writes of her love of the daring young man in the flying machine.


Love in the air

I'll tell you about one thing
that really turns me on:
aerobatics

loops and turns
rolls and sideslips
nosedives, yaws and upside-downs
come on, lay it on me
I can never get enough

that very special sound
of the powerful engine
throttled down
up there in the air and then
the silver sparkle
of the noiseless movement
the awful
timeless
beauty of it -
and then the lusty roar
of the engine
kicked to life again
and the rise of the beast

one quiet afternoon
on a hilltop I heard
the familiar chant
of a single engine
of that very special kind

looking up I saw
a little biplane
of that very special build
and o, with giddy patterns
painted on the wings

he circled lower,
closer,
almost flirtatious

I waved up to him,
he dipped a wing to me,
it was galvanic!

he climbed, up, up, high up
I sent him a thought:
roll for me -
and o, he did
he cut the engine, banked
and rolled
for me -
perfect barrel rolls, triple!

ye gods, how I loved that man
in that moment

not so much for his antics in the air
as for that magic flash
of instant communication







Now, a poem from a couple of months ago. It is possible I may have already used it, but, even so, it is an excellent companion to this new photo.

The poem appeared in Mindfire Renewed, which has since ceased publication. Previous issues are still on-line and can be reached using the link on the right.


warrior queen

she walks,
no, not walks,
strides
with the air
of a warrior queen,
her short skirt
flowing
with every step,
swished
by her swinging hips
in waves
like froth on a swelling sea

her left leg,
firm and tan,
flexing
with every step
and the other
a construct
of metal parts
like the cyborg
in the first Terminator
rising
from the flames
free of artificial flesh
that hid the true power
of its titanium frame,
the girl's leg just like that,
a beautiful machine
of gleaming rods
and levers and joints
that move smoothly
like oil on glass
with every step

how can we not
be entranced
when something
usually dark
and hidden from us
is revealed
in all its unexpected
beauty







Elizabeth Bishop, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as two Guggenheim fellowships, wrote this poem, used in the textbook as illustration of a sestina. In addition to her other awards, she was also the first woman to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and, as of publication of the textbook, remained the only American to receive that prize.

Sestina

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove,
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood on the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove,
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.







Some months ago I was doing a reading in a coffee shop. Four or five of us had been invited to read that night. The reader before me was a young woman, maybe twenty five years old, but no older. She was a good reader reading a very good poem, but when she got to the point in the poem where she was talking about the last blow-job she gave her boyfriend, I began to look around, wondering if Toto was still with me or if I had left him in Kansas.

This level of self-revelatory honesty and directness in the work of some young writers can shock older poets, including even Bukowski and Rimbaud lovers like me. I mean, it's hard to imagine being more emotionally self-revelatory than most anything of Bukowski's and equally hard to imagine anything more explicit and direct than Rimbaud's Sonnet to an Asshole.

So why are we (people like me; people of my age) so shocked now. A couple of reasons, I think.

First, writers of my age grew up in a censor's world. Everything was vetted through a what-can we-get-away-with-today filter. We read closely our mail copy of Evergreen Review (when it could get through the postal censors) and we admired Nobokov and Lawrence and Miller and Genet and the rest for their art and courage, but we knew Evergreen was not going to show up on our local book and magazine shelves (hell, in many places, even airbrushedPlayboy had to be bought from under the counter) and we knew that, however much we admired them and their art, Nobokov and Lawrence and the others were not going to be making that art anywhere near where we lived.

And the other thing is Rimbaud and the rest are dead and therefore unable to be either embarrassed or embarrassing. Not at all like a pretty young woman talking about blow-jobs.

Younger writers not only do not live in the world I grew up in, they have trouble even imagining such a writing environment. To many of them, all words are pure in that they have meaning, period. They are artifacts of communication, period, free of social, legal or religious ramifications or acceptance.

But words are not pure and neutral and they have real power for good and for bad. The bad is found in things like the "eat shit and die" t-shirts you see on the backs of fifteen year olds at the mall.

The good is a tough poem like this one by Iowa poet Justin Hyde.

He's a first-timer here at "Here and Now," with this terrific, in-you-face poem I know is going to push some buttons.

Justin has a chapbook pending. When it is available, I'll include information here.


behind the times

i've never owned a
cell phone
or an ipod.
there's a satellite dish on top of my house
from the previous owner,
but i don't have a tv.
looking up from my notebook
i see
all the cows playing fiddlesticks on laptops,
i've got a computer at home
dried jizz on the keyboard
and dial-up siphoned from the in-laws account.
the wife finally got hold of the records
from my childhood dentist,
i put up with a-lot of your bullshit
she jams the paper in my face,
but you can't go thirteen fucking years
without seeing a dentist,
what are you going to do when all your teeth fall out?
i set my forty down
and explain how
loosing a few chicklets
might lead to winning a whistling contest
or better yet
make me hideous enough
to be excused
from the tedious duty
of dicking her.







The textbook uses several poets to illustrate the "imaginist" poets, including a piece by the original imaginist Ezra Pound, which requires a bit more imagining than I can conjure, and William Carlos Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow, which I love for its mystery and daring. The text also uses this poem by poet/insurance executive Wallace Stevens, which can be seen as a series of imaginist poems strung together on a common theme or image.


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds

III
The blackbird whistled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I don not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow the the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you so imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the woman about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be fling.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.







And now, here's a second poem from Jane Roken


Timeline

in the dreamtime there were no roads in the sky
only
scattered footprints on our days and nights
still damp from the fresh dew -
no demands did we know, no promises
no fear held us

but now
the rumor goes, of endless
processions, pilgrimages, migrations,
marching columns toward the frontier,
toward the heavy tollgates -
their eyes afraid and full of flight
like pigeons flushed from the wetlands,
heading up to town
finding the main street lined
with empty, somnolent balconies
blindfolded windows
visionless orioles facing blind alleys,
blazing sun, silvery blizzards
and rusty dust whirling everywhere

but
in the dreamtime
we shall know no roads
we shall need no guidance







This poem may also have appeared here before, but, again, a new photo seemed to me to capture the playful nature I had intended for the poem.

The poem is included in my book Seven Beats a Second, and, a couple of years before that, was published by beatnik, a neat little journal that has since disappeared from the web. This is a poem I liked that it seemed no one else did. Over a period of a couple of years, I submitted the poem to eight different journals who turned it down. beatnik was the ninth submission.


cowboys and indians

redskins on the warpath
   whooping
chasing cowboys
   across
bonyback ridge
   down
sidewinder trail
   past
that same big
saguaro cactus

     look
     there it is again

war bonnets streaming
cowboy hats flapping
   in the wind
shooting forward
shooting back
   whooping
horses falling
   goddam
   ain't
it fun to be
a movie star






One of the poems the text uses to illustrate "war poems" is this one by Randall Jarrell, possibly the best known of his poems, ending with an image later reiterated by Joseph Heller in Catch 22.


The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the state
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters,
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.







I wrote this a couple of years ago. Originally, I tried to make a poem out of it, but I think it works much better as a prose piece.


Neighbors


Ol' Miz Pritty was one of our neighbors when I was a kid. She was short, round as one of my mom's dumplings, with gray hair she wore in a bun so tight it looked like she'd have to work to blink.

She roamed around the neighborhood in a tattered house dress and fuzzy house slippers, waving her wattles in the wind, crazy as a hoot, nosy as a goat, always minding eveyone's business, telling tales on all us kids, even telling stories on our dogs.

"I saw your old dog (that was Scoot, my terrier/wayfaring stranger mix dog) out on the road yesterday," she'd say to me. "You better keep that old dog at home or I'll be having runned-over stew for sure."

I didn't like her, and ol' Scoot knew about her, too. Always ran for cover when he saw her coming.

Miz Pritty kept a careful close eye on the Blairs in the big house across the street. She was always taking them pot pies and king ranch casserole dishes because they were old and childless and didn't have anyone to watch out for them.

And they were rich.

And Miz Pritty was sure in her on mind that she'd get paid back for all the pot pies and casseroles when they died and she inherited all their money, which she figured would be pretty soon, since they were always so skinny and sickly looking and hacking and coughing from all their cigarette smoking.

"Smells like a crematorium in there," Miz Pritty would confide to whoever would listen, "and filthy, too."

But it turned out the Blairs were heavy drinkers, drunks, Miz Pritty would say, as well as reckless investors in Florida real estate, so they died almost broke, with just a little left over to take care of ol' Red Blair’s hunting dogs that he loved like they were his kids.

Miz Pritty died, too, about a week later. It was the disappointment, no doubt,that killed her when she learned she was still poor after all those pot pies and all those casseroles and all those years thinking she was going to be rich any day now.

Just about everybody in the neighborhood turned out to see ol' Mis Pritty put in the ground, mostly to see if her son showed up so they could see if all the stories she told about him being a rich lawyer with a big house in Houston were true.

Most folks weren't sure what a rich lawyer from Houston ought to look like, but most agreed that Danny Pritty, when he showed up, looked pretty seedy and not very rich at all.

But there was at least one person there who seemed really sorry to see the old lady gone. That was ol' Santiago from down the street, which puzzled everyone until they stated remembering seeming him and her all of a sudden having tacos together over at Dairy Queen several nights a week.

Could be there was something there, most thought. He was a good-looking man with white hair and a white mustache and a straw hat he wore most of the time, no matter what the season or weather.

Good-looking or not, most thought he was kind of strange, having not much English and rarely talking to the other folks in the neighborhood. The thought of him and Miz Pritty together made him seem even stranger to most everyone.

But me and my friend Rusty liked him pretty well. He'd give us a nickel for each blackbird we shot and took to him, so we thought he was just fine, even though when we asked him what he was doing with all the dead blackbirds he always said he was making a mess of blackbird pie and offered to give us some. I don't know, but my own feeling was that he just liked to give Rusty and me nickels or else he just didn't like having so many blackbirds around.

Rusty was a runty little redheaded kid with one eye brown and one eye blue and he was a good friend, my best friend, probably. We played together every day for three years until he blowed off two of his toes playing with firecrackers and moved away to Kansas or or Iowa or some place like that.

I sent ol' Rusty a real live horny toad one time, in a box with holes punched in the top, but never did see him again.







Gary Soto was born in 1952 in Fresno, California. Working in the fields and factories in the Fresno area, he went to college after completing high school intending to study urban planning. Instead he ended up a well-known and admired teacher and poet.


Mexicans Begin Jogging

At the factory I worked
In the fleck of rubber, under the press
Of an oven yellow with flame,
Until the border patrol opened
Their vans and my boss waved for us to run.
"Over the fence, Soto," he shouted,
And I shouted back that I was American.
"No time for lies," he said and pressed
a dollar in my palm, hurrying me
Through the back door.
Since I was on his time, I ran
And became the wag to a short tail of Mexicans -
Ran past the amazed crowds that lined
The street and blurred like photographs, in rain.
I ran from the industrial road to the soft
Houses where people paled at the turn of an autumn sky.
What could I do but yell "vivas"
To baseball, milkshakes, and those sociologists
Who would clock me
As I jog into the next century
On the power of a great, silly grin.







The text uses a number of poets to illustrate poems of protest and social concern. Among the most interesting is a poem by Russian poetAnna Akhmatova pen name of Anna Andreevna Gorenko. Born in shortly before the turn of the century, Akhmatova survived both the revolution and various purges of the Soviet era, although there was a long period (1925-1952) when she was not allowed to publish and many in the West came to assume she was dead.


Instead of a Preface

     In the terrible years of Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of curse; never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
     "Can you describe this?"
     And I said, "I can."
     Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been here face.

(Translated byRichard McKane)







The textbook uses a number of poems by Langston Hughes, including this one. I have used many Hughes poems in “Here and Now” because I like the elegance of his style and the soft way he can say hard things.


Florida Road Workers

Hey, Buddy!
Look at me!

I'm makin' a road
For the cars to fly by on.
Makin' a road
Through the palmetto thicket
For light and civilization
To travel on.

I’m makin' a road
For the rich to sweep over
In their big cars
And leave me standin' here.

Sure,
A road helps everybody.
Rich folks ride -
And I get to see 'em ride.
I ain't never seen nobody
Ride so fine before.
Hey, Buddy, look!
I'm makin' a road.







This is from several years ago. It's not a poem that any editor is going to put on their list of things they have to publish before they're lost to the ages, but it was fun to write.


made for each other

it's a wrap,
she said

                (she, a drama student for two
                semesters at Wharton Junior
                College, said that sort of thing)

but wait,
I said,
my best is
yet to come

                me, a late starter in most aspects
                of life, said that sort of thing)

your best done
be walking
out de door,
bebeyaba
doowapa
doowap
waa,ohhh
yeah....

                (she, a long time devotee of the
                late, ever so great Scatman
                Crothers, said that sort of thing)

and closed
the door
behind her

well, snap my
s'penders
and flap my
jacks on
grandma's
griddle, I
said, I'm
gonna miss
that little
lady, fer
sure, fer
sure

                (me, a true soul brother of
                Mayberry's ever so great Gomer
                Pyle, said that sort of thing)

and went back
to sleep, thinking
we were made
for each other







Also under the rubric of social issue poems, the text includes this piece by Audre Lorde, who we've seen before on "Here and Now."


Hanging Fire

I was fourteen
and my skin has betrayed me
the boy I cannot live without
still sucks his thumb
in secret
how come my knees are
always so ashy
what if I die
before morning
and momma's in the bedroom
with the door closed.

I have to learn how to dance
in time for the next party
my room is too small for me
suppose I die before graduation
they will sing sad melodies
but finally
tell the truth about me
There is nothing I want to do
and too much
that has to be done
and momma's n the bedroom
with the door closed.

Nobody even stops to think
about my side of it
I should have been on Math Team
my marks were better than his
why do I have to be
the one
wearing braces
I have nothing to wear tomorrow
will I live long enough
to grow up
and momma's in the bedroom
with the door closed.







One section of the textbook speaks of poets writing tributes to other poets. One of the poems presented in that section is this, from Allen Ginsberg.


A Supermarket in California

      What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down
the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the moon.
      In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
      What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night!
Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! - and
you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons!

      I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among
the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
      I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What
price bananas? Are you my angel?
      I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and
followed in my imagination by the store detective.
      We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting
artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

      Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which
way does your beard point tonight?
      (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel
absurd.)
      Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to
shade, lights out in houses, we'll both be lonely.
      Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles
in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
      Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage teacher, what America did
you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking
bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe.

      Berkeley, 1955







I wrote this piece in March, two years ago, and never did anything with it. That's the problem with seasonal things like this. To submit on a timely basis, you have to send it off months before the season because that's when journals are selecting poems for their seasonal issue.

I always forget until it's too late.


among the lessons of spring

new buds, tight
like little baby fists
emerge as seasons prepare
to pass, as another year
begins to slip away
like a river flowing
past the markers of a life,
all the moments of our life
large and small
passing by in the silence
of already done
our piece of the river,
passing
in ripples and eddies
that swirl and bubble
and are gone

new buds that will flower
with us or without us

this is among
the first lessons of spring







Every parent has lived this poem by Linda Pastan, known for writing short poems that address topics like family life, domesticity, motherhood, the female experience, aging, death, loss and the fear of loss, as well as the fragility of life and relationships.

She has published at least 12 books of poetry and a number of essays. Her awards include the Dylan Thomas Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Di Castagnola Award, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Maurice English Award, the Charity Randall Citation of the International Poetry Forum, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Two of her collections of poems were nominated for the National Book Award and one for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

To a Daughter Leaving Home

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while your grew smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.







We end this week with the unfailingly gentle and introspective work of Gary Blankenship. This poem is from his book A River Transformed: Wang Wei's River Wang Poems as Inspiration.

When channeling Wang Wei, Gary seems to achieve a melding of absolute reality, through use of specific, tangible detail, and a dreamlike feeling that the reality of the poem is about half a dimension separated from our reality.

Wish I could do that.


After Wang Wei's Lacquer Tree Garden (19) - Before A Teacher, a Student


I've harvested bitter weeds and broken rush,
my knives sharpened with ancient stones.
I've fed cats, studied the lyrics of crows,
and searched a gated corral for lost oxen.

I hold my left hand in front of me,
it does not clap.

My ears ring from sound of broken pottery,
my eyes dim decipher the difference
between blue and green, forest and tree -
The question unanswered, the hills empty.

I pruned an apple tree to its trunk,
its new fruit wormy.

Follow a bent old man through tall grass,
and trousers soaked, gather barbs.





Painting by Blas Hernandez Jr. and Rita Ramos

A couple of end notes:

The Second Friday on the Third Friday Poetry Table at Cafe Chiapas went about as well as could be expected, given the circumstances. We continue to try to increase participation at the table and are encouraged that people have come by Casa Chiapas to inquire. Now, if we could just get them to come and inquire on the nights we're there.

I'm convinced that if someone comes once, they'll be back. It's interactive reading as a collaboation with other poets, the best way I know of to read and be read to.

Also, I'm pleased to report that one of my poems I featured here several weeks ago, greetings, is appearing now in the Spring issue of Loch Raven Review. It's a great journal with some of the best writers on the web. You can get to it via the link on the right.

Until next week.

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Rushing Through Spring   Saturday, March 10, 2007

Number II.3.2. Here we are, "Here and Now."







We start this week with is a new poem from Christopher T. George. In addition to creating his own poetry, Chris works with other poets as one of the editors of Loch Raven Review. To visit that journal, click on the link on the right.

This is his second or third appearance in "Here and Now."


Bamboo Growing Inside a Big Glass Front

I smoke a cigar outside
the Marshall Federal
Judiciary Building.
D.C. reflects in its five-

story atrium, with its
lush forty-foot-high bamboo:
seagulls swirl the majestic
grandeur of Union Station

and epic statues that
take no prisoners
- meanwhile, in Bagram,
a suicide bomber tries

to blow up
the Vice President.
I remember

on Halloween
how a man disguised
as a banana navigated
the metal detectors
to the guards' laughter.







Frederic Louis Sauser, better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet, born in 1887 and naturalized French in 1916. He traveled throughout his life, visiting such places as China, Mongolia, Siberia, Persia, the Caucasus and Russia.

His writing career was interrupted by World War I when he fought in the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to the front line in the Somme where from mid-December 1914 until February 1915 he was in the line at Frise. He described this experience in his books The Severed Hand and I have killed. It was during the bloody attacks in Champagne in September of 1915 that he lost his right arm and was discharged from the army.

In the years after the war, he was friends with Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller plus many of the writers, painters, and sculptors living in Paris. He became involved in the movie industry in Italy, France, and the United States. Needing to generate sufficient income, after 1925 he stopped publishing poetry and focused on novels or short stories.

During World War II, tragedy struck when his youngest son was killed in an accident while escorting American planes in Morocco.

In 1961, Cendrars was awarded the Paris Grand Prix for literature and died, in Paris, later that year.

Cendrars is my "discovery" for the week (one of the advantages of being not particularly well-read in poetry is that it makes discoveries relatively easy and frequent)

All poems are from Cendrars' series Nineteen Elastic Poems and all were translated by Ron Padgett.

This is the first of the nineteen.


1. Newspapers

Christ
It's been more than a year now since I stopped thinking about You
Since I wrote my next-to-last poem "Easter"
My life has changed a lot since
But I'm still the same
I've even wanted to become a painter
Here are the pictures I’ve done and which hang on the walls tonight
For me they open strange views onto myself which makes me think
   of you

Christ
Life
That's what I've ransacked

My paintings hurt me
I'm too passionate
Everything is oranged up.

I spend a sad day thinking about my friends
And reading the paper
Christ
Life crucified in the wide-opened paper I hold at arm's length
Wing-spread
Rockets
Turmoil
Cries.
You'd think an airplane dropping.
It's me.
Passion
Fire
Serials
Newspaper
It's useless not wanting to talk about yourself
You have to cry out sometimes

I'm the other one
Too sensitive

August 1913







A new poem from me. Everyone who has read it so far hates the title. It's from an story in the New York Times Science section of several weeks ago where the term is used speaking of belief in some quarters that human beings are just "meat machines" with delusions of free will. That story led to this poem.


meat machines

that's what we are,
we're told

meat machines
with illusions of grandeur
and free will

love
joy
laughter
hope
charity
all just social ritual
to promote breeding
like a peacock's dance
or the cockroach courtship
twitch

honor
loyalty
empathy
all conditional
all tied
to the selfish need
to keep the meat alive
until it has fulfilled
its reproductive
purpose

but if this is true,
how do I write this
poem

and the larger question,
if this is true,
why do I write this
poem






Now, traveling back in time to Egypt more than 3,000 years ago to a poem credited to Akhenaten, a Pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt, especially notable for attempting to single-handedly restructure the Egyptian religion to monotheistically worship the Aten. Akhenaten's chief wife was Nefertiti, who has been made famous by her painted bust in the Altes Museum of Berlin.


Hymn to the Sun

A glory,
   eternity in life,
         the Undeposed.

   beauty
   flashing
   powers,

Love,
   the powering,
            the Widening,
            light
            unraveling
            all faces followers of

         All the colors, beams of
            woven thread,
               the skin

            a light that
            warms itself
            with life.

         The Two Lands
            shape themselves
               with Love

            flows
            to the
            making.

         Place, man, cattle, creature-king,
            & tree of every image
               taking place.


            Life-in-shining
            shining
            life

         The Mother/Father,
            sees the Seeing
               rise upon our

            hearts beat
            dawn lights
            earth entire

         As you made. And as you
            pass we settle
               equal to the Dead.

            linen wrapping
            head nostril
            plugged with

         Earth that waits
            return in Heaven
               rises overturned

            the
            uplift
            palms upturned to

         Light your being is
            the living
               Acts the

            Touch the voicing in
            all Land
            hears Man -

         Womanson en-
            throning
               Truth

            gives
            heart the
            Food.

         This One, we give, to walk,
            purely to your
               Will, all

         creatures
            dance you
            toward your coming every

         Day, you gave your
            Son, forever in your
               Form he

            Acts
            in
            Beauty, saying:

         I am
            your son, my heart
               knows you the

            strength
            the seat
            of powering

         Eternal is the Light
            you are the watchful
               Maker,

            solitary
            every
            life

         Sees light that breathes
            by light,
               flowers

            Seeding
            Wilderness
            light stunned by

         Light before your
            Face,
               the dancing

            creatures,
            feathers
            up from nests a

         Wavering in wing
            goes round
               around

         & praises
            living
               joy

            you
            Are.

(Translated by John Perlman)







Here is a pastoral piece by frequent "Here and Now" contributor Dave Ruslander, from his book Voices In My Head


James River

Silver-blue water boils,
pounds boulders
roils alive

Whirlpools swirl and
I taste eddies.
Vortices rush my ears.
My eyes skitter over whitecaps
that tickle running water.

Up a path through the trees,
away from the river
a stagnant green pool waits.
A weathered pier reaches
toward pond's center
where a white-haired man
swishes his fly rod.

Back-and-forth rhythm:
nine o'clock, twelve o'clock three.
He casts an offering,
an optimistic whim.

The bait skates
and the line floats after
nothing that I can see.







A tribute, written in 2000, published a year later in Hawkwind


Sheriff Jake Kane

Jake Kane was the picture of what a Texas sheriff
should be, six foot four and more in his pointed boots
and white Stetson, broad shouldered and rangy,
with a long, tan face all angles and edges.

He didn't care much for law enforcement
and, truth is, there wasn't much law to enforce.
Mostly he was a Peace Officer, keeping the peace,
cruising the streets in his '48 Mercury black and white,
v-8, sleek and streamlined, the fastest chase car in the county
even though he couldn't chase anyone more than two miles
in any direction without leaving his jurisdiction.

You can't be a Peace Office in Texas without a badassed car,
and small town or not, Jake Kane had the baddest.

He kept a clean jail and watched over all of us. He kept
the drinkers from drinking too much and the hot rodders
from driving too fast. He kept the family fights from getting
too loud and the bar fights from getting too bloody.
He kept the peace by being around, by being where trouble
might start before it got there, before anyone knew it was coming.

Jake was a single man, but watched over the kids in town
like we were his own, several generations of us, stopping us
in the humid dark of summer evening to tell us when it was time
to take our bikes and go home. He counseled us when our wildness
began to drive us and introduced us to the army recruiter when it took us too far.

Jake Kane was the law in my little town, keeper of the peace,
protector of our small town fortunes and guarantor of our public virtue,
killed in the summer of 1953, brought down by the bite of a rabid dog.







Growing up in and receiving my religious education from a conservative Lutheran church in the fifties, I was taught it was not just the divinity of Christ that was important, but his dual nature as both human and divine. That's one of the reasons I was surprised when the movieThe Last Temptation of Christ was so condemned by the publicly pious. It seemed to me that the movie had it just right. When the devil tempted Jesus, he had to tempt his human nature, since his divine nature could not be tempted. And, what greater temptation to the human side of his nature than the opportunity to set aside divine responsibilities and live a fully human life, there being no greater expression of a fully human life than love and family. I though the movie gave full and true expression the Christ story I had been taught as a child and, even as a nonbeliever, I was moved.

Poet (and former theology student) Cyra S. Dumitru gives this same attention to the humanity of many religious figures in her book Listening to Light.

In earlier issues of "Here and Now" she spoke on Eden and the curious Eve, Adam, Serpent triangle. In the three poems below she speaks to the Jesus/Mary connection.


Jesus Admits His Love

I thought she was an angel
when I first saw her ivory light
rippling through the crowd.
Yet those deep eyes carried gravity.

I have always known God's love
steady as my own heartbeat.
And, since looking into Mother's face
I have understood another love too.

But this - my skin quivers when she's near.
When the she leaves, the room grows dimmer.
Until I met Mary, I did not know I could be lonely,
thought the daily stream of God's voice enough.

When I close my eyes, release my light
to surge beyond these bones
I sometimes find her shining along the way.
We entwine, a pulsing orbit.

Last night, when she bathed my feet,
her thick black hair spread like a giant fan.
I longed to swaddle myself in her arms
and legs, live fully as a man.


But the longing of Jesus and Mary does not go unnoticed.


The Observations of Peter

He struggles because of her.
The part of him that is man.
I can imagine how she longs to lead
him into the orchard
unpeel the sweetest
of fruit.

The other disciples suspect too.
We see how he seats himself beside her
at meals. Praises the poetry of her prayers.
She says that because of his presence
her voice speaks clearly,
at hand.

God discloses constantly through him
a limitless well of pure water
in this arid land. To meet his eyes
is to fill with peace.
She will not be able to leave his side.


Others, also, sense the power of Mary.


Mary's Mother

What does a mother do with such a daughter?
She's not interested in marriage, having children.
Says she's too busy listening to God.

I've watched Mary sit with her back against a fig tree,
eyes shining, fixed on somewhere I can't see.
For hours she sits heedless to flies, dust, heavy sun.

Then suddenly she stands, shakes herself
breathes deeply and opens
her arms to the fading light.

When she embraces me
sparks flow from her fingers
down my arms and back.

I am afraid for Mary.
She speaks of hearing a voice deep within
of seeing angels as well.

I tremble because I believe her
but I am only a poor woman
who sees the way men look at her.







There is pain in even mundane loss, especially if it's loss of something you really, really like. Frequent "Here and Now" contributor Alice Folkart tells us about her loss.


A Very Good Orange

I sit and type,
not listening to
the bathroom tile
growing mold,
the dust sifting down
upon the furniture
and floors,
weeds sprouting
in the flower beds.

I sit and write,
and suck on
the very last orange
that made it to market
before the freeze,
the icy blast that wiped out a
generation of blameless, innocent,
oranges, grapefruit,
kumquats and lemons,
limes and tangerines.
The freeze of double aught seven.

Words flow onto the screen.
Tomorrow I'll clean, in the meantime,
this orange is very good.







And now, another poem from Nineteen Elastic Poems by Blaise Cendrars


3. Contrasts

The windows of my poetry are wide open onto the boulevards and in its
   shop windows
Shine
The jewels of light
Listen to the violins of the limousines and the xylophones of the
   linotypes
The stenciler washes up in the washcloth of the sky
Everything is splashes of color
And the women's hats going by are comets in the burning evening

Unity
There is no more unity
all the clocks now say midnight after being set back ten minutes

At the bar
The workers in blue overalls drink red wine
Every Saturday, the numbers game
You play
You bet
From time to time a gangster goes by in a car
Or a child plays with the Arch of Triumph....
I advise M. Cochon to house his homeless in the Eiffel Tower.

Today
Under new management
The Holy Ghost is sold in small amounts in the smallest shops
I read with pure delight the calico rolls
Calla lily rows
It's only the pumice stones of the Sorbonne that have never flowered
On the other hand the Samaritan sign plows the Seine
And toward Saint-Severin
I hear
The relentless bells of the trolleys

lt's raining light bulbs
Montrouge Gare d l'Est Metro Nord-Sud Seine omnibus people
One big halo
Depth
Rue de Buci they yell "L'Intransigeant" and "Paris-Sports"
The acrodome of the sky is now, all fiery, a picture by Cimabue
And in front
The men are
Tall
Dark
Sad
And smoking, factory stacks

October 1913







Bian Zhilin, born in 1910, was a teacher, poet and greatly respected translator of French and English literature into Chinese. He is credited with a strongly individual style, said to be the result of his study of 19th and 20th century French and English literature in combination with his background in classical Chinese poetry and Buddhist and Daoist philosophy. He died in 2000.

Here is an example of his work.


Entering the Dream

Imagine yourself slightly ill
(On a autumn afternoon),
Looking at the gray sky and the sparse tree shadows on the
   windowpanes,
Lying on a pillow left by someone who has traveled far,
And thinking of the blurry lakes and hills, barely recognizable on
   the pillow,
As if they were the elusive trail of an old friend who has vanished
   in the wind,
As if they were things of the past written on faded stationery -
Traces of history visible under a lamp
In a book, yellowed with age, in front of an old man,
Will you not be lost
In the dream?

(Translated by Michelle Yeh)







A poem by Howard Moss from his book Notes from the Castle.


At the Cafe

At the cafe, at an outdoor table
Fronting the last of the puppet shows,
We have come to sip a bit of brandy
And watch the rapidly descending evening.
Violinists scrape the bow of air,
Arguments begin and finish soon,
As if philosophy were running a cafe
Where nothing is served but old ideas;
Tensed against the wine-soaked washrag
Of the sky the trees erect themselves
In the last small oblivion of lights;
Talk grows animated....someone screams....
This passes, these days for Bohemian,
Still the knees of two bright things
Are touching....Everyone's lost the theme:
What is the mind compared to it,
To feeling's theater always in flames,
On the stage, its aging, ludicrous opera
Still faintly heard among the ruins?







Frequent contributor Jack Hill continues to write these achingly sharp love poems.


When love comes home

There will be, not so far from this place in time
a girl with soft hands, with sparkling eyes,
a lilting voice; the night will
whisper my name and
I will awaken to her touch.
An old man, that night, reborn
to the joy of a new old love....
we will be without end.







Next, from Cendrars, number 6 in his Nineteen Elastic Poems series.


6. She Has a Body on Her Dress

A woman's body is as bumpy as my skull
Glorious
If you're embodied with a little spirit
Fashion designers have a stupid job
As stupid as phrenology
My eyes are kilos that weigh the sensuality of women

Everything recedes, stands out comes forward into the depth
The stars deepen the sky
The colors undress
"She has a body on her dress"
Beneath her arms heathers hands lunules and pistils when the waters
   flow into her back with its blue-green shoulder blades
Her belly a moving disk
The double-bottomed hull of her breasts goes under the bridge of
   rainbows
Belly
Disk
Sun
The perpendicular cries of the colors fall on her thighs
"The Sword of Saint Michael"

There are hands that reach out
In its train the animal all the eyes all the fanfares all the regulars at the
   Bal Bullier
And on her hip
The poet's signature

February 1914







I mentioned last week a new challenge I started on the Blueline forum. The challenge is to write a poem or poems about a president.

We've had some good poems so far in response to the challenge, including some that will appear in "Here and Now" after the challenge ends.

In the meantime, here's one I wrote to illustrate the challenge.


Dallas

in Austin
where he had been
only two days before

we lived
the dark days
of muffled drums

watching
the black and white
of national despair

**********

it was my second
year
at university

waking late,
about the time
the shots were fired

rushing to class
through campus turmoil,
too late to wonder why

a friend called out to me,
stopped me short,
he's been shot

and I think
who's been shot,
what kind of joke is this

our teacher tried
to carry on with the day's history lecture
while all around history

was being made,
jerked into new patterns and new directions
at Parkland Hospital

where the words were finally said,
the President is dead,
long live the new President

sworn in on Air Force 1
by an obscure local judge,
oath taken on a borrowed bible

bloody Jackie
at his side
our witness to transition






Now, a poem by Jane Hirshfield from her book Of Gravity & Angels


For the Women of Poland: December 1981


I think of you standing
at the crossing of two streets,
where even the leaves have turned
accomplices of the cold.
You yield of yourselves
a patience, a hunger,
as other women might, at market,
offer a simpler crop:
robust ears of corn,
potatoes with green-sprouting eyes.
Everywhere there are lines,
people hoping for butter, or freedom,
or meat.
There are cards
with names printed on them
to be sold - cigarettes for flour,
playwrights for engineers.
It is a kind of love, your fingers
grown raw rubbing the wool of your coats,
the bark of these trees;
to touch anything
by now like touching yourself.
And the days draw on inevitably
as those lights of a once-great city
that tell you now stop, now go,
long after you've made up your minds
to stay stubbornly on,
grinding out an old music
on a hand-cranked gramophone
of a heart.






Now another poem from 8th century Chinese poet Li Bai.


Song of the North Wind

The fire dragon lives at Ice Gate
and light comes from its eyes at night,
yet why no sun or moon to light us here?
We have only the north wind howling furiously our of heaven.
On Yen Mountain snowflakes are as big as a floor mat
and every flake drops on us.
The woman of Yo Zhou in December
stops singing and laughing. Her eyebrows tighten.
Lounging against the door she watches people pass by
and remembers her husband at the north frontier
and the miserable cold.
When he left he took his sword to guard the border.
He left his tiger-striped quiver at home,
with its white-feathered arrows, now coated
with dust on which spiders spin their traps.
The arrows remain, useless. Her husband is dead
from the war. He won't return.
The widow won't look at the arrows.
Finally, it's too much, she burns them to ashes.
Easier to block the Yellow River with a few handfuls of sand,
than to scissor away her iron grief
here in the north wind, the rain, the snow.

(Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping)







Here's a poem from Don Schaeffer who has made several appearances here.


The Concrete Man

I try to just
be beautiful
and politics comes out.

My breathing holds
patterns of beautiful
in sighs and exhales,

but these just translate
into explanations. I am
addicted to theory.

I can't be beautiful
but yearn to,
envy you who are.







Another poem from Blaise Cendrars, number 8 in his Nineteen Elastic Poems series.


8. Mardi Gras

The skyscrapers are quartered
Way in the back I found Canudo pages uncut
For five cents
In a 14th Street bookshop
Religiously
Your improvisation on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
New York is seen as the mercantile Venice of the western ocean

The Cross opens
Dances
There is no free commune
There are no Areopagites
There is no spiritual pyramid
I don't understand the word "Imperialism" very well
But in your attic
Among the wistitis the Indians the beautiful women
The poet came
Colored word

There are hours that sound
Montjoie!
Roland's Oliphant
My New York dump
The books
The telegrams
And the sun brings you today's beautiful body in newspaper clippings
These swaddling clothes

February 1914






I wrote this poem in October, 1999. It was published in The Green Tricycle a couple of months later in December.

The poem refers to the first-earth orbiting satellite, built and put into space by the Russians. They called it Sputnik, which I was told at some later date can be roughly translated as "Traveling Companion."


Traveling Companion

There was no sunrise this morning,
because of an overcast sky.
It was dark, then light,
with only a moment between.
But during that moment,
a temporary thinning of the haze
let a single star shine through,
a single star that seemed
to race across the sky,
an illusion of the moving clouds.
Years dropped away, taking me back
to the cool October nights of 1957,
lying spread-eagle with my friends
on a football field, watching
the dark Texas sky, waiting
for the new Cossack star.
There it is, one of us would shout,
and we could see it, moving quickly
from horizon to horizon,
the material of our dreams,
manifestation of the paperback
prophesies of our secret heroes -
Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, Burrough -
there it was, bright among the further stars,
beeping, blinking, speeding
across the virgin sky.
We knew it would come.
We knew and we waited,
and the future passed overhead.







Robert Francis, born in 1901, lived most of his life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Mentored by Robert Frost, he won the Shelley Memorial Award in 1939. Francis died in 1987, leaving behind a number of volumes of poetry, including Stand Here With Me, The Face Against the Glass and The Orb Weaver.

Here are three of his poems.


Sheep

From where I stand the sheep stand still
As stones against the stony hill.

The stones are gray
And so are they.

And both are weatherworn and round,
leading the eye back to the ground.

Two mingled flocks --
The sheep, the rocks.

And still no sheep stirs from its place
Or lifts its Babylonian face.


Blue Winter

Winter uses all the blues there are.
One shade of blue for water, one for ice,
Another blue for shadows over snow.
The clear or cloudy sky uses blue twice -
Both different blues. And hills row after row
Are colored blue according to how far.
You know the bluejay's double-blue device
Shows best when there are no green leaves to show.
And Sirius is a winterbluegreen star.


Boy Riding Forward Backward

Presto, pronto! Two boys, two horses.
But the boy on backward riding forward
Is the boy to watch.

He rides the forward horse and laughs
In the face of the forward boy on the backward
Horse, and he laughs

Back and the horses laugh. They gallop.
The trick is the cool barefaced pretense
There is no trick.

They might be flying, face to face,
On a fast train. They might be whitecaps
Hot-cool-headed,

One curling backward, one curving forward,
Racing a rivalry of waves.
They might, they might -

Across a blue lake, through trees
And half a mile away I caught them:
Two boys, two horses

Through trees and through binoculars
Sweeping for birds. Oh, they were birds
All right, all right.

Swallows that weave and wave and sweep
And skim and swoop and skitter until
The last tree takes them.







And, finally, the last of Blaise Cendrars for this week, number 10 in his Nineteen Elastic Poems series.


10. News Flash

Oklahoma, January 20, 1914
The convicts get hold of revolvers
They kill their guards and grab the prison keys
They come running out of their cells and kill four guards in the yard
Then they grab the young prison secretary
And get into a carriage waiting for them at the gate
The leave at top speed
While guards fire their revolvers in the direction of the fugitives

A few guards jump on horses and ride in pursuit of the convicts
Both side exchange shots
The girl is wounded by a shot fired by one of the guards

A bullet shoots down the horse pulling the carriage
The guards can move in
They find the prisoners dead their bodies riddled with bullets
Mr. Thomas, former member of Congress who was visiting the prison,
Congratulates the girl

Copied telegram-poem in "Paris-Midi"

January 1914







Conrad Kent Rivers was born in New Jersey in 1933 and died at the young age of 35. His books of poetry include Perchance to Dream, Othello, Three Black Bodies and This Sunburnt Face, and The Still Voices of Harlem.


Four Sheets to the Wind and a One-Way Ticket to France, 1933

As a Black Child I was a dreamer
I bought a red scarf and women told me how
Beautiful it looked.
Wandering through the heart of France
As France wandered through me.

In the evenings
I would watch the funny people make love,
My youth allowed me the opportunity to hear
All those strange
Verbs conjugated in erotic affirmations,
I knew love at twelve.

When Selassie went before his peers and
Africa gained dignity
I read in two languages, not really caring
Which one belonged to me.

My mother lit a candle for King George,
My father went broke, we died.
When I felt blue, the champs understood,
And when it was crowded, the alley
Behind Harry's New York bar soothed my
Restless spirit.

I liked to watch the Bohemians gaze at the
Paintings along Gauguin's bewildered paradise.

Bracque once passed me in front of the Cafe Musique
I used to watch those sneaky professors examine
The populace,
American never quite fitted in, but they
Tried, so we smiled.

I guess the money was too much for my folks,
Hitler was such a prig and a scare, they caught
the last boat.
   I stayed.

Main street was never the same, I read Gide
And tried to
Translate Proust. (Now nothing is real except
French wine.)
For absurdity is reality, my loneliness unreal,

And I shall die an old Parisian, with much honor.







Back to Edward Lee Masters and Spoon River to meet a couple more of our neighbors.


Ida Chicken

After I had attended lectures
At our Chautauqua, and studied french
For twenty years committing the grammar
Almost by heart,
I thought I'd take a trip to Paris
To give my culture a final polish.
So I went to Peoria for a passport -
(Thomas Rhodes was on the train that morning.)
And there the clerk of the district Court
Made me swear to support and defend
The constitution - yes, even me -
Who couldn't defend or support it at all!
And what do you think? That very morning
The Federal Judge, in the very next room
To the room where I took the oath,
Decided the constitution
Exempted Rhodes from paying taxes
For the water works of Spoon River!


Penniwith, the Artist

I lost my patronage in Spoon River
From trying to put my mind in the camera
To catch the soul of the person.
The very best picture I ever took
Was of Judge Somers, attorney at law.
He sat upright and had me pause
Till he got his cross-eye straight.
Then when he was ready he said "all right."
And I yelled "overruled" and his eye turned up.
And I caught him just as he used to look
When saying "I except."







Here's a series of five haiku I wrote during the summer of 2003. They were published in Liquid Muse in early 2004.

At the time I had returned to the coast to take a job, commuting home to San Antonio every weekend. It was, mostly, a melancholy period, lasting for a year and a half. The middle Texas coast is a wonderful place to live, in fact, I did for fifteen years. But it wasn't home anymore.

Actually, assigning a title to haiku is considered a kind of a crutch and outside the tradition. But I don't remember if these were written as formal haiku or as short poems in the haiku spirit and titles are important to me. Besides as Lesley Gore might have said, I'm the poet and I'll title if I want to.


afterglow

cloudless sky
after summer rain
air neon bright


hang ten

fly high little gull
challenge the limitless sky
surf on gulf wet winds


morning sky

summer morning dew
rivulets on sun stained glass
blue through water falls


storm watch

summer clouds glower
trembling leaves in sunlight shimmer
waiting winds whisper


sunbright

tall grass burns brown
in fearsome summer sun
cactus blooms bask





Painting by Jose Segura


We had a last minute postponement of Friday night's Poetry Table at Casa Chiapas due to circumstances beyond poetic control. For this month only, we will be bringing our poetically active table to Casa Chiapas next Friday, March 16th, where we will pick up where we stopped off last month. Those who couldn't make it this past Friday, now have a second chance next Friday.

To those who we couldn't get to in time regarding the postponement, sorry, I hope your were at least able to get a plate at the wedding rehearsal dinner that was there when you showed up.

Try again next week.

Until next week.

1 Comments:

at 8:55 PM  SBMcDonough said...

I am enjoying Here and Now as a regular read on Sunday (my newspaper feels neglected). My favorites this week include: James River, For the Women of Poland: December 1981 and Four Sheets to the Wind and a One-Way Ticket to France, 1933.

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Like Lies of Lovers Is Spring Come Before Its Time   Saturday, March 03, 2007

Well, I have some plans for tomorrow, so I'm posting this "Here and Now" number II.3.1 a little bit early. Same stuff, even fresher than usual.





We start this week with a first-timer for "Here and Now," John Bellinger, writing from Syracuse, New York. John is currently Managing Editor of The Comstock Review. A link to the journal's website is among the links on the right side of the page.


Start this War

Sorrow is a thing without shoes. Weigh this dust
against redemption;
this barefoot thirst of miles.

If nothing is calling you,
listen again to the dry wind talking, at dusk
to the faint alphabet of twilight,
for all the screaming all across the unkempt world.

Stand in a room full of money. Stand

in a room filled with bright observations.
Gather nickels
in the undertow;
throw them at the poor. We are everything

on television;
the newspapers are full of us, full of us.
If not for wine and lack of time we could be holy.
Here I am

even now,
where the soup has gone cold, here
I sit, stuffing noise into delible stanzas.
This
is the heroism of the poet.
Throw down, you ganglion legions,

throw down.

We have filled these halls
with art and true, as ever my hands
have filled with words, have rested
in gloves
like small animals,
and words without task
or visible token
have fallen earthward, yet
the rice never grows,

never grows.

Give us dismay, our daily bread.
Everywhere a light goes out, you can see it,
you can tell that it has gone,
and there must be a way to bring candles,
there must be a way
for the villagers to love the monster
even with hands full of torches
in the dark.

They will stand on this hill until dawn.
They will sing something lovely,
like Oh, Shenandoah.
They will bring a frisbee. A good banana.
They will explore the possibilities of language.

They will start this war tonight.







Born in 1915, Muriel Rukeyser was a poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism.

One of her most powerful pieces was a group of poems entitled The Book of the Dead, documenting the details of the Hawk's Nest incident, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis.

Her literary career began in 1935 when her poem Theory of Flight, based on flying lessons she took, was chosen by the American poet Stephen Vincent Benet for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series.

Rukeyser was active in progressive politics throughout her life. At age 18, she covered the Scottsboro case in Alabama, then worked for the International Labor Defense, which handled the defendants' appeals. She wrote for The Daily Worker and a variety of publications including Life & Letters Today for which she covered the Popular Olympiad in Barcelona, the Catalonian government's alternative to the Nazis' 1936 Berlin Olympics. While she was in Spain, the Spanish Civil War broke out.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a time when she presided over PEN's American center, her feminism and opposition to the Vietnam war drew a new generation to her poetry. Her feminism was grounded in her experience as a single mother and bisexual.

The title poem of her last book, The Gates, is based on her unsuccessful attempt to visit Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha on death row in South Korea.

Although she taught university classes and led workshops,she never became a career academic.


Waiting for Icarus

He said he would be back and we'd drink wine together
He said that everything would be better than before
He said we were on the edge of a new relation
He said he would never again cringe before his father
He said that he was going to invent full time
He said he loved me and that going into me
He said was going into the world and the sky
He said all the buckles were very firm
He said the wax was the best wax
He said Wait for me here on the beach
He said Just don't cry

I remember the gulls and the waves
I remember the islands going dark on the sea
I remember the girls laughing
I remember mother saying: Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
I remember she told me those who try out inventions were worse
I remember she added: Women who love such are the worst of all

I have been waiting all day, perhaps longer.
I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this.







Here's a new poem of mine, written earlier this week, a bit of a counterpoint to this issue's title.


false springs are welcome, too

I was at the coffee shop
engaging in
suicide by donut
when I looked around
and noticed
that the place was
knee
deep in
fat old men with beards,
most of them,
the ones not dozing,
reeling
from the young girl
in little white shorts
who just walked through

it's a weather phenomenon
thing, you know,
false spring, bringing
warm days
and chill nights,
little green buds
on every tree,
and little twig nests
with little white eggs
and fierce and protective
mothers watching
every approach,
poor
misbegotten
little doomed buds,
poor little thin-shelled eggs
soon to be thrown to the ground
by the return of winter winds

but not so tragic, this false spring,
for the fat old men with beards,
for they only dream anyway
and dreams cannot be fooled,
will not freeze
or be blown away
by the fiercest wind,
so that long bare legs
scurrying
all around town,
like the bird
and the bud
on the tree
by the kitchen window,
only a whole bunch
better,
may return to winter
cover
soon,
but the dreams
they stirred will prevail








Without really meaning to, I selected several old time radicals and activists from the '30s and '40s for this issue. For a more contemporary version of those radical inclinations, here's Norman Nawrocki, a Montreal-based cabaret artist, actor, writer, and vocalist/violinist for the "rebel news orchestra" Rhythm Activism.


Make a Deal With El Tio

It's sugar cane liquor
in the early, early morn
but before you take a first swig
let a few drops fall
reverently
to the dirt floor at your feet
for El Tio

Some pray to the Virgin Mary
others stroke a lucky charm
but here in the highlands of Bolivia
in a mine so deep
you can never see the end
think before you speak
and thank El Tio

He owns the mine
and he owns all the wealth within
because "if God is in the sky
then El Tio is down below"
so ask no more
there's nothing else to know
just praise again El Tio

Out there he's cursed and scorned
he's evil they say he's a thorn
but in this mine down below
make your peace with him
and be happy it's done
or you won't make a dollar
from El Tio

Some say he wears a gold helmet
gold boots and a gold jacket
others swear he's yellow
made of sulfur so bright
with horns like a goat and a tail
but when you meet him you'll know
it's El Tio

Give him everything he needs
give him exactly what you use
to invite him to join you at work
or at home
but remember
strike it rich and you strike a deal
with El Tio







The Barku Challenge on the Blueline Forum is over, but I started a new challenge today, The "Hail to the Chief - or whatever" challenge. The challenge is to write poems about the president(s) of your choice. There's even a prize associated with this challenge. If you like challenges, click on the Blueline link on the right, then go to the Challenges Forum.

Here's a few more Barkus that came in after last week's "Here and Now."


From John Bellinger


Crucifix Barku

1.
Jesus
threw things
in the temple.
Then
he died,
sadly.

2.
Paul
found out
on his way,
wore letters:
Corinthians,
Ephesians.

3.
Constantine won:
raised banners,
broke
bread,
made holy
a book.

4.
You
still think of it.
Around
your neck:
crucifix;
string.


From Alice Folkart


Biting Words

I. Heated words.

Popcorn
words
jumping
sizzling hot
ready for
butter and salt


II. Grimmer Grammar

Primitive punctuation:
Pause. Stop.
Hesitate.
Neolithic period,
heavy
as stone.


III. Poetic Decision

Where
to turn
the idea?
Here?
Just
let it run!



IV. What He Heard

My words.
His words.
Yada
Yada
Is he listening?
No!


V. Promise

I said.
She said.
He said.
Yes.
No.
Maybe, Baby!


And a couple more from me.


Coffee Stains


1. story time

conversations
in twos
and threes
I listen
while
I write


2. cubicle vet

old man
sits alone
reading Dilbert
leans back
laughs
aloud


3. tattoo

she laughs
and laughs
butterfly
on her back
must
tickle







Randall Jarrel was born in 1914 in Nashville, Tennessee. A poet, teacher and critic, he died in 1965 after being struck by a car while walking along a road near Chapel Hill.

His creative work drew heavily on his military experience during the Second World War. This influence is seen in this poem.


Losses

It was not dying; everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes - and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac.
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts of pets or foreigners.
(When we left high school nothing else had died
For us to figure we had died like.)

In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores -
and turned into replacements and woke up
One morning, over England, operational.
It wasn't different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But and easy one for someone to make)
We read our mail and counted up our missions -
in bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school -
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, "Our casualties were low."

They said, "How are the maps;" we burned the cities.

It was not dying - no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: "Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?"







Now, writing from Denmark, a poem from frequent contributor, Jane Roken. I like her stuff.


divinations

lingering kisses, cloudscapes aplenty
and bagpipes, sounds of starless nights
there's always something there
and we're always eager to know what it is
the livid faces of black windows before thunder
the uncertain inventions of the dark
and the prowling wolves from the bay
slinking up the cove
they're here now, mighty close,
but we're safe my love, we're safe
and ever so hungry to know

the panorama fills the window, slowly
hinged with glowing harpstrings, heartstrings
sharpshooter bass strings
and beady blueprints of things to come

the unhurried strobe of Aldebaran
the sudden flame of Betelgeuse
fair galaxies emerging, merge again
in license, liberty, lodestone's light
lingering kisses, starfields galore

....and they still read chicken entrails down at the courthouse.








I usually save Bukowski for near the end, but things have been pretty dark so far and in need of lightening up.


pale pink Porsche

she's gotten very fat
since we split a year ago
(but I haven't lost weight either)

and she has her millionaire
who pays the bills
and I have my women that
come and go and then
return

she and I drink and
sleep together
but we no longer
make love

in the mornings I walk her out
to her Porsche

we were never married
yet now we are divorced

I wave goodbye to her
as she drives away

then I go in
fix breakfast
sit down
and type a
four-page love letter
to another lost lady in
Galveston,
Texas







Here's a poem I just wrote yesterday. It's so new, it's still being workshopped.

The workshops are great things, providing opportunity to read others' work and to get a wide variety of critique on your own stuff. Part of the pleasure and the value of workshopping is that others often see the work in ways very different from your own view and from each other.

This poem is a good example of the range of ideas you get to work with. Comment has focused on the second stanza, with advice ranging from delete the whole thing to don't touch a word. In the end, you have to listen to what others say, learn what you can from them, then do with the poem what your own poet's eye and ear tells you to do. In the end, I'm sure I'll do some trimming on this poem, but for now, I'm leaving it alone.


hypnodrive

I was leaving Austin
on Interstate 35,
heading west to San Antonio,
in the middle of three lanes
of packed traffic
cruising at 75 miles per hour,
hemmed in on all sides,
tractor trailer rigs to left and right,
a dump truck in front
and a bald guy with a scarf
in a Miata behind, so small
and so close behind
I couldn't see much more
than his shiny head and scarf
blowing in the wind, reminded
me of the story of how Isadora Duncan
died, strangled by her long scarf
tangled in the wheels of her car
and I can imagine the bald guy
being jerked out of his car
by his scarf hooked on the mud flaps
of some semitrailer rig
and I'm seeing this whole thing
as a metaphor (watch out now)
for modern life, as we drive too fast,
live too fast, forget too fast,
everything new gone before
it can get old, nostalgia now
what you did last summer,
all the seasonal markers
coming and going so fast
its hard to remember
what to do, is it time for Halloween
treats or should I be shopping for
turkey, not to mention the whole
Christmas rush thing that starts
right after Presidents Day

all the seasonal markers
I looked forward to
and marked my internal calendar by,
like graduations meant it was May,
the crack of little league bats
meant it was June and the slap
of shoulder pads on a practice field
brought September which meant
a new school year and a trip
to the five and dime for school supplies,
all these things now, the rhythms of a year
played out now at a tempo
that leaves no time for savoring -
what kind of memories
will the young people of today have,
will they remember their lives as
a music video,
frantic, jump shots, millisecond images
all played at double time -
all this is too fast for me,
driving my internal clock awry;
I wake up in the mid-night dark
and wonder why the sun still hides
and when the sun final comes
I often have to ask the day

and the rush continues on IH-35,
with UT students rushing off
for whatever they do now
and tired bureaucrats fleeing the capital
and all the trucks on their way to Laredo
to pick up a new load of something from Mexico
and I'm thinking, Jeez, I remember when
we got drunk and wrestled on this road at night
when traffic was so light we could have
a three-round bout before oncoming lights
sent us back to our corner, ah, the good old days,
as I lean back, engage cruise control and slip
into hypnodrive; as long as nobody stops,
we may all survive







Now, the poem I think contains the true essence of America's greatest poet, Walt Whitman, part of all, in his mind, and all a part of him.


There was a Child Went Forth

There was a child went forth every day.
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he
   became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a
   certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories, and
   white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe
   bird,
And the Third month lambs and the sow's pink-faint
   litter, and the mare's foal and the cow's calf,
And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of
   pond-side,
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below
   there, and the beautiful curious liquid,
And the water plants with their graceful flat heads, all
   became part of him,

The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and the Fifth-month
   became part of him,
Winter-grain sprouts and those of the light-yellow
   corn, and the esculent roots of the garden,
And the apple tree cover'd with blossoms and the fruit
   afterward, and wood-berries, and the commonest
   weeds by the road.
And the old drunkard staggering home from the
   outhouse of the tavern whence he had lately risen,
And the schoolmistress that pass'd on her way to the
   school,
and the friendly boys that pass'd, and the quarrelsome
   boys,
And the tidy and fresh cheek'd girls and the barefoot
   negro boy and girl,
And all the changes of city and country wherever he went.

His own parents, he that had father'd him, and she
   that had conceiv'd him in her womb and birth'd
   him.

The mother at home quietly placing the dishes on the
   supper-table,
The mother with mild words, clean her cap and gown,
   a wholesome odor falling off her person and clothes
   as she walks by,
The father, strong, self-sufficient,manly, mean,
   anger'd, unjust,
the blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the
   crafty lure,
The family usages, the language, the company the
   furniture, the yearning and swelling heart,
Affection that will not be gainsay'd, the sense of what
   is real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal,
The doubts of daytime and the doubts of nighttime
   the curious whether and howl,
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes
   and specks?
Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they
   are not flashes and specks what are they?

The streets themselves and the facades of houses, and
   goods in the windows,
Vehicles, teams, the heavy-plank'd wharves, the huge
   crossing at the ferries,
The village on the highland seen from afar at sunset,
   the river between,
Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs
   and gables of white or brown two miles off,
The schooner near by sleepily dropping down the tide,
   the little boat slack-towed astern,
The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests,
   slapping,
The strata of color'd clouds, the long bar of maroon
   siting away solitary by itself, the spread of purity it
   lies motionless in,
The horizon's edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance
   of salt marsh and shore mud,
These became part of that child who went forth every
   day, and who now goes, and will always go forth
   every day.







Jill Chan was born in Manila and migrated to New Zealand when she was 21. Her first book of poetry, The Smell of Oranges, was published by Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop in 2003 and her second book, Becoming Someone Who Isn't, is scheduled for release in July 2007.

She maintains a blog at http://navelorange.blogspot.com. I've set up a link to her site among the links on the right.

This is Jill's first appearance in "Here and Now."


Everything is a wind becoming strong

You've made me ignorant of biographies,
waking without a story to live in.

What are you doing now?
Perhaps looking into the eyes that awakened you, like I never could.
I've sent you away without meaning to, with my honesty.
You've taught me to lie.
Now even words have to be spoken, have to be turned into something we both
deemed unnecessary.







Poet and pacifist William Stafford was born in 1914. He didn't publish his first volume of poetry until he was nearly 50 years old. At the time of his death in 1993, he had published 57 books of poetry.


Serving with Gideon

Now I remember in our town the druggist
prescribed Coca-Cola mostly, in tapered
glasses to us, and to the elevator
man in a paper cup, so he could
drink it elsewhere because he was black.

And now I remember The Legion - gambling
in the back room, and no women but girls, old boys
who ran the town. They were generous,
to their sons or the sons of friends.
And of course I was almost one.

I remember winter light closing
it's great blue first slowly eastward
along the street, and the dark then, deep
as war, arched over a radio show
called the thirties in the great old U.S.A.

Look down, stars - I was almost
one of the boys. My mother was folding
her handkerchief; the library seethed and sparked;
right and wrong arched; and carefully
I walked with my cup toward the elevator man.







A tribute to Li Bai by 16th century Chinese poet, historian and scholar of the arts Wang Shizhen


Climbing Up the Taibai Tower

It is said in the past Li Bai
gave a long howl and climbed up this tower.
Once he paid a visit here,
and his high reputation remains for a hundred generations.
Behind the white clouds the sea dawns
with a bright moon, a celestial gate, and autumn.
As if to greet Li Bai's return,
The Ji River water flows with music.

(Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping)







This is a very new poem. I wrote it this morning and haven't even workshopped it yet.

Again, it's a rambler, but that seems to be what I do now. The style drives some people nuts, especially they way I seem to wander off tangent and into what seems to be irrelevant to the rest of the poem.

I understand and appreciate that criticism, but sometimes disagree with it. To me, a poem written in this style is like the conversations we used to have sitting outside at night before air conditioning, kids chasing lightning bugs while the grown-ups talked. Those conversations were not structured or sharply focused, but in the end, they all came together in a kind of loose, homespun narrative.

That's what I'm aiming for with this style. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.


a nice day for memory interruptus

it is a wonderful place
to be, this morning,
here in San Antonio,
the sky,
deep blue and cloudless,
the day scheduled to warm up from the high 30s
to an expected mid-70s by afternoon

a quiet morning,
Friday,
the week too far gone
for anyone to be rushing anywhere,
and I'm at my favorite perch
on the porch at Cafe Chiapas
on South Alamo just off South St. Mary's

a tv crew was here this morning,
first thing,
doing remote weather breaks
for the 7 to 9 morning show

watching the on-camera guy
and his cameraman
reminded me of times past
when I did a lot of tv,
the go-to guy for a sound bite or a quote
on anything having to do with
the area economy and labor market -
I gave "good quote" according
to one of the newspaper guys
and I was always in demand
to fill the quote-quota on their stories

though I liked most of them,
I wasn't much impressed by most
of the tv guys , but it was a small market
and many of them were fresh from college,
trying out their journalistic wings for the first time
and most already had their stories written in their heads
- journalism school economic story template number 12 -
before they came to talk to me, so all they really wanted
were quotes that didn't contradict the story
they had all but already written -
some I helped make better writers
and better reporters, and some
I just gave up on and gave them what they wanted

it's funny I should think of this now,
on this beautiful day
but the tv guys
got me to thinking, reminded
me of some good times, good days
I still miss sometimes, even here,
even now, on this most wonderful
day in San Antonio







Alberta Turner, teacher, editor, critic and poet, was born in 1919. She taught at Cleveland State University for many years, beginning in 1964. She died in 2003.


Water Eased of Its Cliffs by Falling

Time to draw the left foot back and let it
take the weight, waggle the elbows, let out breath
and wait a moment before breathing in.
I need not say, "Yes, almost a relief,
Yes, I'm making do. Yes, I'm sleeping well."
Bringing me fruit has eased them. One by one
they close the door and go home.
I take my ease in the old way, in the bathroom:
house of ease, seat of ease, "The king comes
more kindly from his ease." Your tube of toothpaste
is half full. That pleases me.

* * * * * *

I didn't want to make a spectacle of myself by crying
at the funeral, so I walked across the field
and almost missed it - bawled through it anyway.
I'll invent a formula for answering the letters.
I'll be very careful to stick the stamps on
right side up. For once a decent respect.

Mornings I brought you a mug of tea,
and you thanked me and drank a swallow before I left.
Mondays you called out, "Have you any money?"
When I said no, you always found some in your bedside
drawer. I never went without lunch.

You had enough pocket knives for all
the grandsons. Shall I keep one? You wouldn't
let me see the rabbit the cat brought home.
You said it was already half skinned. Thank you.

Did I confuse you with God and my father?
Of course no self-respecting woman
would admit that. But sometimes I goaded
you until you almost hit me - almost.
"It grieves her to think of it,
yet it eases her stomach to tell it."

* * * * *

Again, I've burned the bacon. I know you
always say cook it on low, but I'm in a rush -
"Can't you slow down and just live?"
No. Anyone can be a wife.
"Will you ever grown up?"
If only I could. It's much warmer
to be good than proud.
"Easy girl, easy girl, easy - "







And now another "Here and Now" first-timer

Thane Zander is a 48 year old retired Navy Man. He's another New Zealander, which makes this issue of "Here and Now" a bit bottom of the planet heavy. But as Thane says, they may be at the bottom of the world, but they stay on top of things.

Thane has been writing for six years now and has a good cache of poems at his website http://thanezander.tripod.com. I've put a link to that site up, also, he says.

Thane says he considers himself a hit and run poet as well as a street poet so, according to Thane, what you see is what you get. He tends to bite deep in some areas.


Blew a Left Sandal to Bits

Shoulda spent wisely,
sixty bucks instead of a miserly twenty,
would have solved my blown sandal issue
by lasting five times as long as the current pair.

Now I have to walk with a self imposed limp
to be sure the rest of the thing holds together,
leastways till I can afford to buy another pair.

Must look bloody funny walking down the street,
people leaning the same way I lean
to see what the problem is,
people seem to be curious that way.

Oh well, another four months of wear I reckon,
enough to get me to winter and shoes again.







R. S. Thomas, born in 1913 and died in 2000, was a Welsh poet and Anglican Clergyman, noted for his nationalism and spirituality. He was the best known Welsh poet of his day.


Study

The flies walk upon the roof top.
The student's eyes are too keen
To miss them. The young girls walk
In the roadway; the wind ruffles
Their skirts. The student does not look.
He sees only the flies spread their wings
And take off into the sunlight
Without sound. There is nothing to do
Now but read in his book
Of how young girls walked in the roadway
In Tyre, and how young men
Sailed off into he red west
For gold, writing dry words
To the music the girls sang.







When using my own poems here, I've been using mostly new ones because, having done so many issues without maintaining an index as we went along, I'm not always sure anymore when I consider a poem from among the older poems if I've used it before or if I haven't.

The following poem I know we haven't used. It's a bit more abstract and avant garde than most of the stuff I do and, in fact, was published in a journal named Avant Garde Times in 2001.


while a bald man burns

three gulls circle
   while
a bald man burns
in the fierce island sun
   while
I trace gargoyles
in the sand
with my toe
   while
you pretend to study
the book in your hand
   while
three gulls circle
in the fierce island sun







Robert Penn Warren, born in 1905 was a poet, novelist, and literary critic, and one of the founders of The New Criticism. While most famous from the success of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel All the King's Men, he also won two Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry.

He is the only writer ever to win the Pulitzer in both fiction and poetry.

He died in 1989 of complications from bone cancer.

In April 2005, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. Introduced at the Post Office in his native Guthrie, it depicts the author as he appeared in a 1948 photograph, with a background scene of a political rally designed to evoke the setting of All the King's Men.


From Tale of Time

I What Happened

It was October. It was the Depression. Money
Was tight. Hoover was not a bad
Man, and my mother
Died, and God
Kept on, and keeps on,
Trying to tie things together, but

It doesn't always work, and we put the body
Into the ground, dark
Fell soon, but not yet, and oh,
Have you seen the last oak leaf of autumn, high,
Not yet fallen, stung
By last sun to a gold
Painted beyond the pain one can ordinarily
Get? What

Was there in the interim
To do, the time being the time
Between the clod's chunk and
The full realization, which commonly comes only after
Midnight?That

Is when you will go to the bathroom for a drink of water
You wash your face in cold water.
You stare at your face in the mirror, wondering
Why now no tears come, for
You had been proud of your tears, and so
You think of copulation, of
Fluid ejected, of
Water deeper than daylight, of
The sun-dappled dark of deep woods and
Blood on green fern frond, of
The shedding of blood, and you will doubt
The significance of your own experience. Oh,
Desolation - oh, if
You were rich!
You try to think of a new position. Is this
Grief? You pray
To God that this be grief, for
You want to grieve.

This, you reflect, is no doubt the typical syndrome.

But all this will come later.
There will also be the dream of the eating of human flesh.







This is another old poem that I know we haven't used. It was my first publication in a print journal when I returned to writing in 1999. It appeared in a 2000 issue of Maelstrom.

It was written in the early '70s and is also more abstract than anything I'm doing now.


cowboy movie

comecomecome
she said to me
in her low voice
and sighed as I moved closer

comecomecome
she said to me

jjjjjjesus

stuttersam
      crawled
into his corner
      and sighed
      and cried
in the shallow shadows
of his silver sombrero

comecomecome
she cried to me







From the 17th century, John Milton, with one of the poems we all read in High School and whose lines we sometimes quote without remembering where they came from.


Sonnet On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent
   Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
   And that one talent, which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my shoulder more bent
To serve there with my Maker, and present
   My true account, lest He, returning, chide;
   "Doth God exact day labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask; but Patience, to prevent
   that murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
     Either man's work, or His own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
   is kingly. Thousands at His bidding speed,
     And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."







And now, Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz with two poems from A Tree Within.

The House of Glances
for Roberto Matta

    You walk inside yourself, and the tenuous,meandering reflection that
guides you
    is not the last glance of your eyes before closing, nor the timid sun
that beats at your lids:
    it is a secret stream, not of water but of pulse-beats: calls and answers
and calls,
    a thread of clarities among the tall grasses and the beasts of the mind
that crouch in the darkness.

    You follow the murmur of our blood through the unknown territory
your eyes invent,
    and you climb a stairway of glass and water, up to a terrace.
    Made of the same intangible material as echoes and clanging,
    the terrace, suspended in air, is a rectangle of light, a magnetic ring
    that wraps around itself, rises, walks, and plants itself in the circus of
the eye,
    a lunar geyser, a stalk of stream, a foliage of sparks, a great tree that
lights up, goes out, lights up:
    your are in the interior of the reflections, you are in the house of
glances,
    you have closed your eyes, and you enter and leave from yourself to
yourself on a bridge of pulse-beats:

The Heart Is An Eye

    You are in the house of glances, the mirrors have hidden all their
ghosts,
    there's nobody there and there's nothing to see, things have aban-
doned their bodies,
    they are not things, they're not ideas: they're shots of green and red
and yellow and blue,
    swarms turning and turning, spirals of fleshless legions,
    a whirlwind of forms that still have yet to find their form,
    your glance is the propeller that spins and drives the ghostly mobs,
    your glance is the fixed idea that drills through time, the motionless
statue in the plaza of insomnia,
    your glance weaves and unweaves the threads of the fabric of space,
    your glance rubs one idea against another an lights a lamp in the
church of your skull.
    a passage from enunciation to the annunciation, from conception to
the assumption,
    your eye is a hand, your hand has five eyes, your glance has two
hands,
    we are in the house of glances and there's nothing to see, we must
repopulate the house of the eye,
    we must populate the world with eyes, we must be loyal to sight, we
must

Create In Order To see


(Translated by Eliot Weinberger)







I warned in the first issue of "Here and Now" that there might be occasional rants.

Here comes one now.

Though I truly am not and do not want to be dismissive or disrespectful of a people or a culture or anyone's religioius beliefs, Thomas L. Friedman said some things today (Friday, March 2nd) in his New York Times column, with the help of Saudi poet Wajeha al-Huwaider, that bear repeating.

I will admit to a possible bias.

In the late 1960s I spent a year in a middle-eastern country. I did not like it. It's true, I was an American soldier and American are seldom welcome and usually resented wherever they are in the world, and that includes parts of the United States, but never in my life, in this country and in others, have I felt so foreign and so hated. Far from any of the larger cities, I felt like I had stepped back in time a thousand years, and, all romantic notions aside, that was not a good thing.

So, though possibly not entirely unbiased, I think this issue is so important and so unexamined that notice of it is well overdue.

The issue is the lack of visible, public moral outrage over the suicide bombings going on in Iraq and other parts of the middle-east.

Where is the outrage, asks Friedman, at these bombings that target normal people doing normal things, going to market to buy food, going to school, going to a clinic for medical service, getting a haircut for crying out loud, all on the apparent theory that if Arabs kill enough Arabs the Americans will go home.

Bush, given his own moral shortcomings, lacks the moral standing to creditably express moral outrage. Europeans and many Americans blame the whole mess on Bush and reserve any moral outrage for him and don't seem to have any outrage left for the animals who do this entirely discriminent killing, creatures who kill children because they want to kill children.

(Bush has much to be accountable for in terms of stupid decisions and moral blindness, but nowhere in his long catalogue of sins is the purposeful killing of children.)

Worse than the silence of the rest of the world, says Friedman, is the lack of outrage from Arab governments and the Arab "street." In those places where outrage could made a real difference, all is quiet.

Friedman concludes his dismal discussion with a ray of hope, a poem by Saudi author Wajeha al-Humaider that was posted on various Arab reform websites.

Though not specifically a response to the bombings, the poet is brave and the poem is honest and, maybe, the beginning of long overdue public condemnation of the anti-humanity of radical Islamists and the culture of fear and repression they foster.

Here's the poem, by, once again, Wajeha al-Humaider.


When you cannot find a single garden in our city, but there is a mosque on every corner - you know that you are in an Arab country.

When you see people living in the past with all the trappings of modernity - do not be surprised, your are in an Arab country.

When religion has control over science - you can be sure you are in an Arab country.

When clerics are referred to as "scholars" - don't be astonished, you are in an Arab country.

When you see the ruler transformed into a demigod who never dies or relinquishes his power, and nobody is permitted to criticize - do not be too upset, you are in an Arab country.

When you find that the large majority of people oppose freedom and find joy in slavery - do not be too distressed, you are in an Arab country.

When you hear the clerics saying that democracy is heresy, but seizing every opportunity provided by democracy to gab high positions - do not be surprised, you are in an Arab country....

When you discover that a woman is worth half of what a man is worth, or less - do not be surprised, you're in an Arab country....

When land is more important than human beings - you are in an Arab country....

When fear constantly lives in the eyes of the people - you can be certain your are in an Arab country.


So why is this any of my business, our business? A good question, a question that continues to challenge me.

In the end, I think it comes down to this.

We have our own radical fundamentalists in our country and our own radical Christian madrases that teach and preach a kind of holy war hatred against anyone not of their specific and minutely defined faith, people who would be pleased to make this an "Arab" country also, with all the characteristics of oppression and repression the poet describes.

That's why it's our business, because we have our own Christian Mulla Omars, waiting in the wings for a chance to reshape the world to their oppressive design.

I have no doubt these people would be sending their own suicide bombers to WalMarts and anywhere else where people gather in large numbers were it not for the legal consequences and, more important, the moral outrage and lose of potential support that would greet such action.

Now, of course I'm not talking about all Christians when I talk of those with murderous designs, just as I was not talking about all Muslims before, or even all fundamentalist Christians or Muslims. It is not their actions, but their silence in the face of murder that is the issue and for that silence I do indict them.

The kind of fear and hate that produces willingness to murder the innocent and defenseless for a "cause" is an infectious disease. It's appearance anywhere in the world, if not addressed, is a threat to everyone. And the way to address it is not, in most cases, through military force, which most often increases the infectiousness of the disease, but through moral force of millions of voices, Christian, Muslim and none-of-the-above like me, saying, no, you can not do this. Those who set purposefully out to kill innocents must be treated as a deviant species, not fully human and not fit to join the brotherhood of humankind.







Almost forgot, next Friday is Poetry Table night at Casa Chiapas. I hope San Antonio area readers can come by. It's a relaxed, no pressure evening. You'll have fun, whether reading or just listening.


Until next week.

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