Here and Now: January 2008

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In The Primary Colors of Dark Saturday, January 19, 2008

III.1.3.

I was so pleased with my black and white pictures last issue, that I decided to do it again.

This time, I'm mostly using pictures I took over the course of two days in downtown San Antonio. I had my car in for service those days, and with about four hours to kill each day, I took my camera and did some walking around downtown, which I do often during the cooler part of the year.

San Antonio is as spread out as you would expect a city of nearly 1.3 million, from the edge of the Texas hill country on the north side to the beginnings of the coastal plains on the south, but, unlike many other cities, it has managed to maintain its discrete downtown area. This is primarily due to tourist attractions like the Alamo and the Riverwalk, which attract hundreds of thousands of visitors a year from all over the world to the downtown area.

It is a great city for walking, both at street level and on the river.

Don't expect any kind of connection this week between the pictures and the poems that follow. Instead, you'll just come along with me on my walk, with stops along the way for poems.

OK, just humor me

Another trip to the used book store this week brought a couple of good books, including this one, Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems 1943-2004, with enough poems to take care of "Here and Now" for twenty years. The collection was published by Harcourt in 2004.

The poet, Richard Wilbur, has served as poet laureate of the United States. He has also received many other honors, including, a National Book Award, two Pulitzer Prizes, and the Bollingen Translation Prize. At the time the book was published, Wilbur lived in Massachusetts and Florida.

Shame

It is a cramped little state with no foreign policy,
Save to be thought inoffensive. The grammar of the language
Has never been fathomed, owing to the national habit
Of allowing each sentence to trail off in confusion.
Those who have visited Scusi, the capital city,
Report that the railway route from Schuldig passes
Through country best described as unrelieved.
Sheep are the national product. The faint inscription
Over the city gates may perhaps be rendered,
"I'm afraid you won't find much of interest here."
Census-reports which give the population
As zero are, of course, not to be trusted,
Save as reflecting the natives' flustered insistence
That they do not count, as well as their modest horror
Of letting one's sex be known in so many words.
The uniform gray of the nondescript buildings, the absence
Of churches or comfort stations have give observers
An odd impression of ostentatious meanness,
And it must be said of the citizens (muttering by
In their ratty sheepskins, shying at cracks in the sidewalk)
That they lack the peace of mind of the truly humble.
The tenor of life is careful, even in the stiff
Unsmiling carelessness of the border guards
and douaniers, who admit, whenever they can,
Not merely the usual carloads of deodorant
But gypsies, g-strings, hasheesh, and contraband pigments.
Their complete negligence is reserved, however,
For the hoped-for invasion, at which time the happy people
(Sniggering, ruddily naked, and shamelessly drunk)
Will stun the foe by their overwhelming submission,
Corrupt the generals, infiltrate the staff,
Usurp the throne, proclaim themselves to be sun-gods,
And bring collapse of the whole empire.

Here's a quiet piece from Alan Addotto. We haven't seen Alan in a while. This is a good poem to return on.

the missings

This morning it rained.
I tried to watch just........it
......................watch nothing but it.
No easy thing to do
attending to only one thing and nothing else.

Distractions come so easily,
so seductively,
........I am so weak.

So many things...
the tiny speak speak speak
........of raindrops on the concrete,
thunderpurrings,
the livewater perfume
and endless tales of its transformations.

Would that you were here
to clear my meditation
of my meditation
of my meditation and concentration.

Thanks for the gift of the rain.

Another new book this week is Heaven-and-Earth House by Mary Swander, published by Alfred A. KnopF in 1994.

Swander is a lifelong Iowan and, when this book was published, was an associate professor at Iowa State University. She is the author of two earlier books, Succession, in 1979, and Driving he Body Back in 1986. She received an MFA degree from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and has received a number of grants and awards, including one from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Literary Arts Award from the Chicago Public Library, and the Nation-Discovery Award. Gardeners might know her from her pieces in the National Gardening Magazine, or her book of interviews with midwestern gardeners, Parsnips in the Snow, published in 1990.

This is the first poem from her book.

Heaven?

No, it's lying in a field in Iowa
staring at the heavens, stars streaking
the sky, their auras pulsing out, in.
Night of the meteor shower,
night of mosquito netting and pitched tent,
the flap open to the eastern horizon.
Hot, damp, August night when the rooster's crow
folds into its perch and the cricket's song
dives into the same pool as the whippoorwill.
Night of August Caesar and St. Augustine,
Amish date night when the buggies race
home late, their wheels spinning up hill,
lanterns blinking, horses' manes flying.
Pegasus of the tall corn, Pegasus of the fat bean,
under my sleeping bag is the richest earth
on earth, and this is the night of
the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
the blessed virgin prairie, the nightcrawlers
floating up through layers of black dirt.
What awaits? A choir of angels,
a chorus of sheep bleating out how good
is the grass, how good is the flesh.
How good were the stars to lead me here,
the year of the blue goat, brown duck,
the year of the squawk and coo, the loyal
dog who barked at strange me and storms.
O little town of Kalona, Hannakolona,
Kahlua Kalona, bull town, where the gardens
are ringed in cockscombs and cannas,
and down the road little girls sing hymns
outside the window of the dying man
propped with pillows near the screen.
Their voices hover above me, and are gone,
a flock escaped from the barn.
I chase them one way across the ditch
over the hill, through the neighbor's
orchard and field. I chase them
back toward the house, corner the ram
against the fence, then Aries, Aries
is free and off through the grove
with the ewes and lambs close behind.
So bleat for the ones who never return,
the ones who last just this long,
the empty manger and stall, bleat
for the ones who come again, who ascend
in the clear air, dark night, holy night,
when sounds carry and trails of light
flit over our heads, and bleat for the moon,
the sun, the golden day when we will all lie
down in a field, nothing more to be done.

Another poem from me about writing a poem.

when the gate opens

the hardest part
is the sitting
still
and waiting -
watching
for the moment
the image
the word
the stray
thought
that opens the gate
to the poem,
lurking
like a riled bull
waiting to be rode,
to dance
to your command...

if you're poet
enough

The next poem is from another of my new books for the week. The book is Horse of Earth published in 1994 by Holy Cow! Press of Duluth, Minnesota. The poet is Thomas R. Smith.

The book was signed by the poet in 1997 and given to someone named Cynthia. I'm surprised at how many of the used books I buy have the poet's signature and dedication.

Smith was born in 1948 in Wisconsin in a paper mill town on the banks of the Chippewa River. He graduated with a major in English from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, beginning to write as a poet while there. In the '80s, he directed a rural-based arts organization serving farm communities in western Wisconsin. His work as a poet, essayist and editor has appeared in numerous journals in the U.S. and abroad.

The Breasts

I lie with my hand pressed
between your breasts' divided fall,
the flat of my thumb on your rippled breastbone,
and remembered that mild November afternoon
we climbed the bluff at Rocky Branch.
In the late, unasked-for
warmth, we stripped to our waists
and basked above the shadows slowly pooling
the autumn dusk in the coulees.
You were n you late twenties, chest
nearly shallow as my own. The nipples'
brown roses opened thirstily to my touch
as if the loneliness in my body were enough
to call your womanhood budding outward
to meet me. Thus a slender girl in you
followed love into her fullness, while I,
who had hovered above my body for years,
fell into he blood and bones of a man.
Sometimes in dreams or in a mirror,
I'll glimpse that lost boy, hear his voice
of glass, in moments of panic feel his thinness.
And you, slowly breathe so calmly beside me,
as if you were always and only this one
clasping in her doubled embrace of woman's
tenderest flesh my hand grown familiar
from thousands of nights - Is there still
in your dreaming a girl who waits uncertainly
for springtime at the edge of an unblossoming field?

It's great to have Khadija Anderson back with us for this issue.

Khadija is a poet and Butoh dancer. She lives in Seattle and will soon move back to her birthplace in Pasadena, California. She is a mother to four children, and collaborates closely with her eldest son in her dance company, Tanden Butoh.

In another life

in another life you would have loved me
for the way I bent down to gather
the eggs

you would have loved the way
my long skirt swayed side to side
as I walked towards the house
hands clasped at my breast

you would surely had loved
the way my thumb and forefinger
held the wool
as I spun the yarn
the rise and fall of my leg
at the treadle

you would love the light
on my breast
as I nursed our child
by the fire
you would love the fire
that I kept to warm you
in the chill night

you would love
the wetness of my arms
as I washed in the basin
my neck
curved downward

you would love my arm
resting across your chest
as we lay together
at night

and my long hair
across our pillow
and the sun on my face
in the morning light

under the clouds
we turn our eyes upward
and reminisce blue sky

My last used book purchase for this week was Bare Root - A Poet's Journey With Breast Cancer by Anne Silver.

Silver earned a M.A. in Poetry from San Miguel de Allende in 1972 and a M.S. in psychology from California University Los Angeles in 1982.

She was an internationally recognized author of three books, a cancer patient in treatment, a political and environmental activist, provided expert witness testimony on matters of handwriting analysis and co-host of Moonday at Village Books Poetry Series with Alice Pero.

Featured on numerous television and radio programs and often requested as a reader, workshop leader, and guest speaker, Silver engaged audiences of all kinds, from corporations to classrooms and hospitals to local Barnes and Noble readings and the annual Idyllwild Earth Day Fair.

Recent publication credits include The Atlanta Review, English Journal, Nimrod, Red Wheelbarrow, Minnesota Review and MacGuffin. Bare Root: A Poets Journey with Breast Cancer was her first book of poetry. Ark For One was last.

Where it's At

I toss the wig,
go bald to the courthouse
in my stunning scalp
and Nordstrom suit.
I bald it to the mall, beach,
movies, poetry readings
where I'm the reader,
to holiday parties.
When people ask
what happened,
I say I'm taking a break from hair.
Because if everyone
has to be somewhere
and I'm here bald,
why, then,
bald is where it's at.

I wrote this last week. I don't know what made me think of it except maybe the sight of people standing outside a nice warm coffee shop to smoke a cigarette in 30 degree weather, knowing that twelve years ago I would have been one of those fools standing out there with the rest them.

smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette

cigarettes
hooked me
when I was twelve years old

a friend and I
were hanging out
over at the football field
behind my house and
somewhere or other he
had come up with a pack of
delgados,
little oval shaped
mexican cigarettes
with wrapping paper
soaked in a sugar solution
at the factory - they were
real kid-snatchers, it was like
smoking a peppermint stick

never saw this particular brand
before that night
or after that night,
but that night was enough
to start me on forty years of smoking,
two packs a day in the end,
before I finally found the
whatever it was that let me quit

now the friend of mine
who gave me that first sweet taste
of tobacco
and I didn't hang around much
as we went on into high school
and I didn't see him at all
for twenty or twenty five years
after high school, until one day
I was visiting my old home town
and ran into him at a little soda parlor
where I had gone in for coffee

he was all chubby-faced and pink-cheeked
and healthy looking, a nonsmoker
for about half as long as I had smoked
and he was proud of it

and I looked like death dragged
over a rocky road,
shallow-skinned and hard breathing
and puking every morning
to clear the stuff that pooled
in my lungs at night while I slept
and I wanted to reach down his throat
and pull out his lungs,
one at a time

Now it's time to go back to earlier days in little Spoon River, the story told to us by Edgar Lee Masters.

Fiddler Jones

The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddler you must be, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind's in the corn; you rub your hands
For beeves hereafter ready for market;
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drought;
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
Stepping it off, to "Toor-a-Loor."
How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill - only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle -
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.

James Lineberger is back with us again after a long absence.

Jim is a retired screenwriter, sometime playwright, and full-time poet. He has eight volumes of poems and a full-length play available from lulu. To take a look, copy and past url this to your browser:

http://www.lulu.com/james_lineberger

guy i used to buy tomatoes from

guy i used to buy tomatoes from
took me out back one time
to reveal
where he had fashioned a dirt basement
from the crawl-space
beneath his house just got under there
first with a gi trenching tool
locked down to a hoe
and later on when he had room enough
to where he could stand up part way
took to using his garden shovel which finally broke on him and then
on to one equipped with
the new 'miracle space age' plastic handle
that was just
coming into use at the time
and kept on digging
the thing nigh on to a year and a half
until finally
on their fiftieth anniversary two months before his wife died
he decided it was done with
a hand-hewn hole
that went back as far as the kitchen-side
of the living room
and extended crossways from the perimeter wall
of the bathroom to the shady part
of the opposite bedroom
taking up about half the square footage beneath the joists
except after all that work only things
he had stored down there was row upon row of canned peaches
his wife put up before
she left and he took out his bandana and dusted
the jars like they
were pieces of furniture but aint it something he said what a person
can do when he sets his mind to it
and he brought out
a couple of those aluminum lawn chairs
and unfolded them for us to
sit in and he said
here i want you to take some of these peaches
no charge
because you always been one of my regulars and the truth is...
and he looked around him then
at all the wide space
he had created and the tears welled up
in his eyes
...truth is there is so much around here crowding in on me
now that she's gone
and toward the end when she was so crippled up
she couldn't hardly walk i said to her how come you're doing this
how come all this damn canning
all of a sudden
and she said well ask yourself sometime why don't you
what good is it to dig a hole
unless you got something to put in it

Next, I have a poem by Lorenzo Thomas from his book Dancing on Main Street.

Thomas was born in Panama and grew up in New York City. He is a poet, a critic and a professor of English at University of Houston-Downtown. His books of poetry, in addition to this one, include Chances are Few, The Bathers, and Sound Science.

Lifelong Learning

One day my Dad
Decided
Whatever else we were in life
We should be rich

I don't like being poor
He said, I don't like
Getting up at 4 o'clock dark
Day after day
2 subways to somebody's job
To put 3 dollars every week
Into a Christmas Club
And after scrimp and save and all

What come
The end of the month
The same rob Peter
To pay Paul

There's got to be a better way

The scheme he fell for was a scam
"Direct Mail"
Was the road we chose
To riches

We sent away for
Mailing lists, ordered a crate of doohickeys
Printed 1,000 flashy ads
Return address embossed
The name we picked
H. Hamilton Richard & Sons
Would sound to suckers like we'd been
In business for a century

"Purveyors of fine doohickeys"

We didn't do well
Of course
A small fortune in stamps was lost
By Christmas
No cash left to shop
We did the best
With what we'd got
Doohickeys went to all our friends.

What never broken never mends

I was a writer for many years, even during all those years when I wasn't writing anything. I had a kind of writer's consciousness, which, by the way doesn't offer promise of being a good or even mediocre writer.

What it does, though, is sometimes leave you confused as to whether a particular incident you recall really happened or just something you invented either consciously or unconsciously in your dreams.

That's the case for me, anyway. I have vivid memories of things I know never happened.

Which led me to write this poem.

dreams

i say
i never remember
my dreams
and mostly I don't,
even though I know
some of the things
i remember best
are dreams
from years ago,
a house, complete
in every detail,
where no house
has ever been,
a house of many rooms,
a maze of rooms
that take me, always,
to where i began,
with wood,
lots of wood,
floors of polished
hardwood
that gleams
in a kind of yellow light,
one wooden chair
in a corner,
high-backed
and arms,
old fashioned lamps
in an old fashioned house
with high ceilings
and polished wooden beams
and everything is brown,
a house, i have been inside,
walked on its polished floors
through every room that
all lead back
back to the first room,
a room always one door
away from every other room,
i know this place
even though
i know
it does not exist

My next poem is by Korean poetKu Sang, reportedly a humble man, who holds the distinction of having been oppressed in both North and South Korea for his love of truth and aversion to tyranny.

The poem is from his book Wastelands of Fire. Translations in the book are by Anthony Teague.

Rehearsal for a death-bed scene

Lying under a white sheet,
I am carried off in an ambulance.

The evening sky hangs upside-down beneath my feet,
forming a terrible quagmire of death.

I picture my corpse like this, rigid, stretched out,
my skeleton, decomposed, reduced to bones.

Behind me, a lifetime lies smothered in error,
I have not even managed to bear buds of sweat and tears,
let alone the love that can blossom in Eternity.

No point in getting flustered now...

"Father, into your hands
I commend my spirit."

Instinctively repeating the last words of Him
whom I have only aped, not truly served.
I sever the link with all concepts.

And my breath becomes rasping.

Jessica Van Driesen is an American math teacher living Poland. Jessica says she continues to write. hoping to find a poetic voice to reach behind the surface of "normal" life.

We had one of her poems some months ago. It's a pleasure to have her back.

inked

You have a tattoo
and now, so do I.

Yours can be seen -
although only
when you strip.
Mine remains hidden -

as long as I
keep my armor on.
Yours is of a gun,
mine, a bullet.

I found yours the day we met -
roaming your body
with eyes, hands
and lips.
I discovered mine later -
probing my heart
like a tongue
exploring the socket
of a missing tooth.
Yours is in ink,
mine, blood.

There are lasers
if you change your mind -
and can stand the burn.
But, no amount of fire, acid
or pain
will wash away the indelible mark
of a man
I want
and cannot have.

Arthur Sze is a recent discovery for me, a poet I had never heard of before that I like very much. He is a second generation Chinese-American, born in New York City in 1950. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkley and is the author of six books of poetry, including the anthology I took this poem from, The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998.

At the time the book was published (1998) he lived in Pojoaque, New Mexico and was a Professor of Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

The Rehearsal

Xylophone, triangle, marimba, soprano, violin -
the musicians use stopwatches, map out
in sound the convergence of three rivers at a farm,

but it sounds like the jungle at midnight.
Caught in a blizzard and surrounded by wolves
circling closer and closer, you might

remember the smell of huisache on a warm spring night.
You might remember three deer startled and stopped
at the edge of a road in a black canyon.

A child wants to act crazy, acts crazy,
is thereby sane. If you ache with longing
or are terrified: ache, be terrified, be hysterical,

walk into a redwood forest and listen:
hear a pine cone drop into a pool of water.
And what is your life then? In the time

it takes to make a fist or open your hand,
the musicians have stopped. But a life only stops
when what you want is no longer possible.

One of my favorite movies of all time and, with no doubt in my mind, the most beautiful looking movie ever made is Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. The experience of seeing that movie four or five times, as well as the similar, though lesser, movies from China that followed in Lee's wake represent the full extent of my knowledge of the Mandarin language. But I did notice a particular sound in the language that appeals to me. So that's what this poem is about. I wrote it last week.

china silk

there is a feathery sound
in the mandarin language
that holds for me
a little piece
of the mysteries
of the orient

it's a musical sound,
something like

"sssha"

that purses
the lips in a way
that to me
is most delightful

the cyrillic alphabet
has a similar sound

"ssscha"

but it's harsher
and harder
with something
of the russian winter
in it,

while the mandarin

"sssha"

seems soft and intimate
as china silk

My next poem is by Nuyorican jazz poet Americo Casiano Jr.

Casiano has been editor of a literary magazine called Sombra. His work has appeared in Nuyorican Poetry, The Next World, Aloud, and New Rain.

I took the poem from the anthology of performance poets, bum rush the page.

Puente
     for Tito Puente

Let's not talk of subway series
Or dead birds or mosquitoes or robust crops of pollen

Let's not talk of air raids and naval assaults eroding Viques
We both know the fish will not return to feed the young curb of hungry
   stomachs

The stalking barracuda is oblivious to our pain

So let's not frown or slip into moods when the empty spotlight appears on
   the bandstand
Where he stood      face brimming with that enigmatic grin
Navigating him through the business

The cosmos welcomes him
As we file past his coffin

it is my understanding      according to the flute player*
That all he sought out of life was a standing ovation

*A reference to Mr. David Valentine, flutist and musical director of the Tito Puente Latin Jazz All
Stars.

We haven't seen Tina Hoffman in a while; now she's back.

Tina lives in Perrysburg, Ohio where she enjoys music, gardening, reading, time with her friends and her pets, Willie and Cinders. She also maintains a day job, but only out of sheer necessity, she says, and a desire to eat/pay rent.

Tina has been participating in online writing workshops (primarily poetry workshops) since the late 90's and is currently most active on the Wild Poetry Forum and poets4peace. She was the first woman to win the InterBoard Poetry Contest (IBPC) (first/second place in same month) in its second year of inception (Feb., 2001.) She has also been published in hard copy in local newspapers and a few other publications.

Here's her poem

Rose and her lover on New Year Eve's Day

His lover sleeps, her sight is his heart's comfort.
Alabaster skin exposed on pale pink sheets
in morning light brings a smile, a memory
of a blue peignoir and the stroke of midnight.

A kiss on her parted ruby lips, tea with honey
and lemon on a tray is his way to wake her
gently from her dream repose. She shifts, sighs,
flutters her eyes, kisses there bring her smiles too.

Together they sip their constant companion,
laugh and talk of things like love,
peace, a future; determine the day's agenda
far too busy, decide not to leave their bed.

I used some of the "Aztec Songs" Stephen Berg presents in his book The Steel Cricket several weeks ago. Here are some more bits from the same source.

drink honey
your heart opens with each drop
it is a flower!

**********

I am here! I am here!
I come from the sea from the middle of the waters
there the water darkens itself
its colors
dawn

**********

many pictures my heart
many songs
I come to give pleasure I come
to relive what gives life
here over the strewn mat
red-throated flowers open

**********

a piece of fallen jade
a flower shoots up
it is your song

**********

Oh nothing will cut down the flower of war
there it is on the edges of the rive
here it is opening its petals
flower of the tiger flower of the shield
dust rises over the bells

**********

my soul fills to the brim with what I say
Oh friends
I am going to let my heart roam the earth
looking for peace
looking for good luck
no one is born twice

**********

now my friends
listen
the dream I am singing
is
each spring life
in the corn
put on a collar of rare stones

*********

flowers of red and blue
mix with flowers of fiery red
it is your word your heart
Oh my king
for a little while I can see earth
I cry because death kills
everything I did
everything I sang
for a little while I can see the earth

Ana Ramon is currently a freshmen at the University of Texas-San Antonio, majoring in history and minoring in Political Science. She lives in a family of six, with two younger sisters and a younger brother. She says she writes whenever she's not busy trying to pay off her student loans. Can't start that too soon, she says

She is becoming a regular member of our weekly poetry sessions at La Taza coffee shop.

This poem is her first appearance with us in "Here and Now."

La Nina es Morena

Latina
Means you're
Different

Your skin is not
Black
or
White
You are Moreno
You are a brown stick in between
Dance a cumbia
By yourself
Learn to dance on your own
Your Familia
Will dance with you
Always
A little brown stick
Came from a tree
And they will always be
There for
Me

The nicest thing about our weekly poetry gathering at La Taza is the informality of it. We sit in a circle and talk and discuss and bs and read poetry, usually with as much talking, discussing and bsing as poetry reading. People can join the circle and read, or if they want, just listen in, commenting if they want, or not if they don't. Someone will say something that leads someone else to a poem that leads someone else to say something else and so on.

Anyway, that's the process that led me to reading this poem last Monday. It's in my book, Seven Beats a Second, but I hadn't read it, or even thought about it, until I read it again and discovered I liked it more than I remembered liking it.

Here it is.

when nighthawks fly in memories dark

nighthawks glide through the dark,
shadows against the starlit sky,
soaring between trees,
picking insects from the air
like outfielders
shagging high, easy flies

nothing to it, with a shrug
as they toss the ball in

the birds flit through the air
and I think of old heroes
jumping from their planes,
uniforms glistening black,
Blackhawk, the leader,
Chop Chop, the Chinaman,
Andre, the Frenchman
with glossy black hair
and a pointy little mustache,
and Olaf, the squarehead German

that's what they called my father,
third generation in the country,
first generation to leave
his central Texas enclave
of squareheads and krauts,
always careful through two wars
not to draw attention to themselves
and their German ways, quietly
keeping to themselves,
raising their sheep and cattle
on the rocky hill country pastures,
facing good times and bad
with squarehead persistence

and before Blackhawk, Smiling Jack
with his movie star looks, and his friend,
Fatstuff, with a belly so large buttons
flew off his shirt like popcorn in a pan

dad had a belly like that,
from his emphysema
ballooning his lungs,
making them heavy with spit,
swelling, degenerating tissue
dragging his lungs down,
collapsing his chest,
displacing his stomach,
pushing his belly out
like he was pregnant with
the fruit of his own death

those popping buttons are on my mind
as I gasp for air after a flight of stairs
and I think of my own belly pushing
ahead of me and wonder
what it felt like to die in pieces

And did you really think I was going to end a walk through downtown San Antonio without a picture of the Alamo somewhere?

Well there it is and here we are all finished up for another week.

Hope you saw something you liked.

Remember, in addition to the Alamo, that all of the work presented on this blog remains the property of its creators and that the blog itself is produced by and the property of me...allen itz.

2 Comments:

at 7:33 AM t rasa said...

I hate statements that state "best" or "Fave". they usually seem so shallow. After reading this issue, my first thought was that this is the best one yet since I've been reading 7beats. If it comes accross as shallow... serves me right.

t

at 10:14 AM Alice Folkart said...

Thank you, and DOUBLE THANK YOU for publishing Julia Vinograd - I knew her on the streets of Berkeley - Telegraph Avenue to be exactin the late '60's. She was known as the bubble lady, because she always had a bottle of bubble stuff and one of those little wands with a loop at the end of it that you dip in the bubble stuff and then wave through the air to make bubbles.

I used to talk with her. Buy her lunch - well, I was almost as poor as she was, so it wasn't much, and she wouldn't go into any shops or restaurants with me, so I had to bring something out to her. She was always very delicate about it. At first I didn't know that she was a poet, but then I found out. I loved her poetry - so immediate, so truthful. I'd never read anything like her poems. I bought copies of all that she had - I still have them. Even when I moved and was winnowing my library, those came with me.

I'm so glad to see her here. Do you know if she's alive? In 1969 she was about 45 and she was living on the streets, although I knew people who had taken her in for a bath and a meal and when it was raining.

I wasn't writing poetry then. I wasn't writing anything then, just trying to keep myself and my son alive, but I knew that if I ever did write poetry, she would inspire me.

Alice

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Black and White and Read All Over Friday, January 11, 2008

III.1.2.

Welcome, again, to "Here and Now."

As suggested by the title, I'm doing something different this week - all my images are black and white.

Color pictures are pretty but they lack the punch and versatility of black and white, which can be presented in a way that is strictly reportorial or they can be suffused with a mystical aura that reduces everything to shapes and shadows only faintly reminiscent of whatever the subjects pictured are objectively.

But maybe I'm just old-fashioned, a product of black and white tv and movies. I can remember when you could tell how serious a movie was by whether it was color or black and white? If it was color, it was probably fluff; if black and white it was serious.

I know people now, who won't go to a movie if it's not in color. They make me think of movies I've seen in the past and how the ones still emotionally alive to me were rarely made in color.

Anyway, all the images this week are black and white.

I had a hard time picking my first poem for this issue. I usually give a lot of thought to that, figuring if I can get people to read through the first poem, they'll probably go on to read the rest.

I went through five different books, looking for something that would pull people along without finding anything that didn't bore the crap out of me. Finally, I remembered Travis Watkins. I had forgotten about him, despite haven given him the longest introduction on his first appearance than was given to any other poet before him.

And so, here he is, number one of the list of poets for this issue. I know he'll pull you on to the second poem and beyond.

I mentioned this the last (first) time I used his work, but it is worth mentioning again. Check out laymanlyric.com to hear Watkins and other
poets in performance. To get there, just click on the link on the right.

Here's the first poem for this week, from Watkins' book My Fear is 4 U.

Your Village
For Mom

They say, "it takes a village"
Huh!
I had my mom.
And mom was a white as burning bright big city night lights
That
Pierce the black of midnight.
And
Dad was black as midnight
And
I'd stay up till midnight
But
Dad was out past midnight
So
I must have missed him then...

And I must have missed it when,
Addiction took him in
And he sinned,
Over
     And
          Over again.

He beat down the doors of prison with ill decisions
Till
Them 'bars would let him in
And
I did not know then
But
Them 'bars were his old friends
And
He'd be back again
But
Let me say again,

I had my mom.
And mom would shield me from those hateful glares
That
Didn't care how much she loved me
They
didn't know who much she loved me
God
Knows how much she loved me
And
I know how much she loved me
But
You cannot hide from truth...

And you cannot hide from youth
I'd hear,
"Hey Travis, you got a white boy's name"
I thought I was.
"But, hey Travis, you got a black boy's mane"
I thought I was.
Guess I never really thought,
I just...
Was.

But then came that exam
I am,
Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, non-Hispanic
Pick a struggle, pick a burden , pick a race.
Funny!
All this time I though we were human.
But the white boys called me nigger
And

The black boys called me nigga.
So I figured that's what I became.
Filled in the "black" bubble by my name
And waited for daddy to come back
But,

I had my mom.
And mom was as wise as ten thousand black men
But
She could not teach me black...

I needed Du Bois,
I needed Carmichael,
I needed Malcolm, Baraka, and Hughes
But
She could not teach me that
And
Dad couldn't teach me that
And
School wouldn't teach me that
So Who's gonna 'teach me black?
Guess
The world would teach me that.
And...

In hindsight,
Mom had fine sight to see past all colors
But the world sees all colors,
To the world,
I'm just colored!
And the world's not contrite.

But all was right with the world
When we got that call...

No operator
No fees
No,
Barriers at all.

Just dad
And
He was out for good!
He
Changed his life for good!!
He
Left them bars for good!!!
But

He could not stay for good...
I wish he would...
But I had my mom.

And mom worked like a slave for her sons
So
We were often left alone.
We
Faced the world alone!
We
Grew as men alone!!
We
Found ourselves alone!!!

But alone does not suit all.

And I can remember how small I felt
Seeing big brother melt down,
And succumb to pent-up pain...

You see had dad remained,
I wouldn't have listened
I was stubborn
But
Mike needed a dad to govern
His growth into a man
But

Dad was not a man!

And mom was not a man
By no fault of her own.

It's hard being a white woman
Raising two black men alone!
Working two late shifts alone!!
Earning two incomes alone!!!
Cause 'your so called man, left you alone!!!!

But mom was strong...
And I'm so glad I had my mom,

And mom and dad would finally work things out
But
They
couldn't change our past.
They
couldn't erase our past.
They
couldn't relive our past.
They Couldn't forget our past...
          But no one ask.

You see we all have a village
And
Every village has dark alleys
And
Low valleys
That
We would soon forget
But
Don't forget...
Those same dark alleys
And
Low valleys
Are where we learned to love
Where we learned to care
Where we learned to hope
Where we learned to dream
Where we learned to fight
And where we learned to stand!

Understand...

Your village made you human.

And you don't always have to love your village
But
It will always be,
Your village.

               (Spring '04)

I have our friend Alice Folkart back this week with a new year's poem.

Hope it Fits

The old year,
full of moth holes,
stained with
forgotten meals,
mulberry juice,
goose gravy,
is unraveling.

This year
always feels
like all there is,
forever,
but then
the unraveling
begins, one strand,
all past, past, past,
but all future too.

We unravel the past
to get the
yarn for the future,
and so it goes,
kinks and
faded bits and all,
the old year
into the New year.

Hope it fits.

:

What would the new year be without some good old-fashioned German expressionism. So, how about Hugo Ball, from the anthology Music while drowning, German Expressionist Poems.

Ball studied sociology and philosophy at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg. In 1910, he moved to Berlin and became an actor and collaborated with Max Reinhardt. He was one of the leading Dada artists, creating the Dada Manifesto in 1916. The same year as the Manifesto, in 1916, Ball wrote his poem Karawane,, a German poem consisting of meaningless, nonsensical words, reflecting the chief principle behind Dadaism.

As confounder of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, he led the Dada movement there, and is one of the people credited with naming the movement "Dada," by allegedly choosing the word at random from a dictionary. He was married to Emmy Hennings, another member of Dada.

His involvement with the Dada movement lasted approximately two years. He then worked for a short period as a journalist and eventually retired to the canton of Ticino where he lived a religious and relatively poor life. He died in Sant'Abbondio, Switzerland in 1927.

His poem Gadji beri bimba was later adapted to the song entitled I Zimbra on the 1979 Talking Heads album Fear of Music.

His poem was translated for the book by Anselm Hollo.

King Solomon

with the crash of cymbals
the blare of trumpets
he broke the mute circle of demons
lit up the night
grown dim and grey with their breath

a woman we saw by his side
swaying forward receding swaying
eyes like a mummy
        ecstatic
the white peahen from Sheba

and the King himself in his tent
its entrance fringed with flames
        stretched out his arms
and the walls rose
the cedar-trunks fused

and countless beasts and devils saw
        dancing down dancing down

Writing a "poem-a-day" is a tough regimen, possible sometimes only through excuse-making.

As I did here...

set out to write a poem

i set out
to write a poem
right now,
the first
for the new year,
but
it's a bright
and beautiful day
and i'm as sleepy
as a dog
in a patch of winter sun
so literary ambitions
must be set aside

dreamtime calls
and a mistress
not to be
denied
is
she

My next poem is by Danielle Legos Georges from the anthology bum rush the page, published by Three Rivers Press in 2001.

Georges is a Boston based poet. She is book review editor for Obsidian III. Her own work has appeared in The Beacon Best of 1999, The Butterfly's Way and Step into a World.

Grasshopper

I turn my head and say, Ah, grasshopper.
I turn my head and say, Ah, grasshopper,
in imitation of the master who teaches
David Carradine that life is a series
of mountains to be destroyed
or resurrected in the imagination, or
a blade of grass atop which titters
a water drop that sticks
to the hind legs
of an insect
that flits
across grass as if across water.

Water-crawler, with legs so light,
body so weightless that it
lifts water to it, does not sit
on the oily surface,
glosses surface,
like a balloon
whose belly
is lighter than the air
around it. Translated it goes
in and through and out; in and through
and up in a cloth bubble that takes us
around the world in a fraction of eighty days;

the Himalayas, the hemispheres below us
   like a chain of glass beads; the Indies East and West
      in the seismic tremor of lifting a hand to the breeze; in the
      ease with which a world is glossed. The huge wave of
   an arm across a distant horizon; the gesture here is
where it all begins.

But the fortieth days finds our man Jesus
in the desert, darkness settling him
the light around him glowing,
refracting to show
the most

beautiful angel
the great wings beating still,
the land spread before him, a new
world panorama. Yours
if you'll love me, the light
breathes.

We know the story: He eventually returns
on a donkey to the city that will kill him.
Martyrs always get it in the end,
but do grasshoppers?

I turn my head and say,
Ah, grasshopper.
I turn my head
and say, Ah,
grasshopper.

Next I have young San Antonio poet, just months returned from military service in Afghanistan, Rob Soto.

I take his poem from the little pocketbook of his work produced by LeArt Works, Atheist in a Foxhole

near life experience

Silent signals reach me in my sleep. They take th silk road past empty desert
outposts to my inner ear and vibrate my spine which has become accustomed to
their frequency. The bombardment of megahertz of metaphors leaves radiation
burns on my dreams until I can count every single star in the unobstructed sky
again. The wind pauses only long enough to cock back like a fist and rip through
the particulate energy of life itself. And as awful as it sounds, I imagine the
footprints of conquers impressed into the blood stained ground before me only to
be swept up in another dust storm and filling my naked lungs. Suddenly North
Dakota doesn't seem so bad.

The green is starting to make sense to me now, even if it is all blue. Moonlight
falls apart in the palm of your hand and even though you hate the cold it makes so
much sense to you now. Chopper blades and low yield explosions sound like
sadness bouncing off the walls of mountains which curtain the sky. Jackals are
the only ones to find any of this funny. So they laugh somewhere out in the
darkness choosing not to fill us in on the joke.

You can taste morning there. The metallic caress of a canteen cup against your
tongue. The soft quake of sunrise meets bloodshot eyes. Tracer rounds fill you
thoughts, fire fills your dreams, longing fills your heart. Humanity doesn't seem
existent from the valley floor. The view from the air isn't much better, but at least
you can cover more ground.

Words can fall apart over and ocean and for a while or so you're actually foolish
enough to think you left it all behind. After that every three dollar pitcher of beer
at O'Corley's is a surrender. You're not really happy if the only people you hang out
with are just as miserable as you. These are the sort of things your mind will fool
you into believing are perfectly normal until you figure out where you want to go.

My next poem is by Sapphire, from her book American Dreams.

The is the last section of a poem too long to post here completely. It is about the murder of a 15-year old girl.

from Strange Juice (or the murder of Latasha Harlins)

2.

I don't remember what I did wrong.
Somebody hit you, you hit 'em back.
She didn't have to shoot me.
I was born here
and someone can shoot me and go home
and eat turkey on Thanksgiving -
what kinda shit is that?
Videotape the bitch killing me,
the hoe's own videotape
recording
the end of my days
reeling obscenely
for tv cameras -
my blood
sweet Jesus
Rolling 20s
Bounty Hunters
PJs
Imperial Courts
NWA
LAPD
South Central
Hollywood
18th Street Diamond Riders
Easy Riders
it's a brown thing
it's a black thing
Crips
Bloods, Mexicans together forever tonight.
I don't remember...
I jus' wanted some juice
and now I'm dead.
Killed by a model minority
success story.
Listen, is anybody gonna
say anything?
I was gonna get a new orange leather jacket
to match my Reeboks.
I was passing math and
doing good in English.
Fuck history, I'm tired of hearing
'bout George Washington
and Columbus.
I told the cracker, "Shit, mutherfucker
what about us?"
No, I wasn't pregnant,
but I was gonna have a baby,
definitely, one day
I like Luther Vandross, Tone-Loc
and Queen Latifa.
Listen, is anybody gonna
say anything?
Community service!
A white bitch
with a pink slit
between her legs
like mine,
drips red.
A white girl that probably got
into law school on the
affirmative action birthed
by black people's struggle,
sitting on a seat
that was opened up
for her by Rosa Parks and
Fannie Lou Hamer,
nig - no, black people, African
Americans, like me marching
under fire, hoses, broken glass
gasolined bodies
testicles sliced off,
strange fruit, tossed to dogs.
Swinging from trees.

This white Judge woman
hooded in mahogany-walled
chambers decides my life
is not worth nothing.
A fifteen-year-old black girl
equals zero in this white bitch's book.
She sentences this yellow gunslinger
to community service and probation.
What are the terms of her probation,
that she don't kill nobody white?
Does anybody hear me?
Without my tongue.
Fifteen and out of time.

Listen to the gasoline on the wind.
Listen to my blood rhyme -
drip drop on the sidewalk.
Hear me children -
and BURN.

I can be an angry poet, too.

Just watch me here.

dang!

some days are lost
from the start

I began at 8 am to work
on my printer

it whirrs
and buzzes
and beeps
and whistles
and scrapes
and scrunches
but it does not
print

it is now
9 pm
and it still
does not
print

neither does
the new one I bought
this afternoon at 3 pm
print

well,
doggone it,
I said (not really,
but this is a PG rated
poem so that'll have to do)
this can wait until tomorrow

I promised Reba
I'd be right back for our walk
(already overdue at 9 pm)
then went to Borders
for a latte and a nice quiet read
of today's funnies

I always save the comics
for later in the day
when I'm hard up
for a laugh, but not funny this,
the newspaper has disappeared
from my car and Borders is sold out
of everything but the Times and it
doesn't have comics

(and whattheheck is it with them,
anyway, dadburn New York liberals
think they're too good for Dagwood
and Pickles and Zits and Ruthie
and Mutts and the rest)

so I'm stuck here
with a nice latte and no comics,
expressing my frustration
on this little napkin that keeps
tearing into shreds as I write
and I realize
this is kind of therapeutic
in itself, tearing these little
napkins into shreds
and throwing them up over my
head and everyone's
looking at me kind of funny
so now I have to leave

dang!

As you may have noticed, I'm paying special attention this week to younger, unknown or lesser known poets. The youngest of this group is probably Brigid Milligan, who published her first book while a senior at a San Antonio high school.

This poem is from that book, Mija, Never Lend Your Mop....

Insult

the greatest insult is to be rejected
in a poetry contest
you won the year before

sunk between the sagittal sutures within her
consciousness is a ballroom
where all good poets win poetry contests
everyone writes with pencil
those who quote cliches are dragged out
into the street
and shot
plagiarism is an art form
and honesty is mass produced abstract art
hung over every piano

crawling out of her rhythmic sonnets
she awakens, notices her mirror
too short for her head
too tall for her feet
never quite seeing
the whole picture
writing for critics and reviewers
something is lost in the translation
she is found verbose and vague
again
running out of breath and words and stories
she sits with sharpened pencils
on an overstuffed sofa
forming adjectives from nouns
making up for lost time
praying no one notices her absence of thought
small handwriting that further complicates
the readability
of her meaning

the greatest insult is to be rejected
in a poetry contest
you won the year before
and everyone forgetting
you wrote
poetry

Now another San Antonio poet, our erudite eminence, Dr. Waldazo

Suppository Poem 6.3.06 1:42 AM

The pharmacist hurt my feelings today.
I merely asked a question...
Let me explain what he had to say.

I didn't care for the direction or the destination
In his reply response
When I ask for instruction
On the proper use of suppositories.

Being a neophyte
Not a medical whiz, not well-read,
I want to get all procedures just right.
I take literally every word that is said.

Surely he could understand my initial reaction.
I was taken aback.
But, now I see the obvious,
The fundamental nature of his exclamation.
After a detailed explanation
I understand what he meant
About where they went.

I just think he could have said something with more class
Than simply, "Stick it up your ass."

Bush has a suppository presidency.
Every plan that he's got
Is shoved up my ass.

There's no consultation about his approach.
Whether it's about medicine, schooling for kids,
Gay marriage, abortion, the Bill of Rights,
Or if it's okay to toke on a roach.

The War in Iraq
Is a great example of the same shit.
'I'm the President, so get over it."
"It's my way or the highway."

He is a hard pill to swallow
Not any easier to take
When it's shoved up my sphincter
By a self-righteous decider
Who is dumber than what his approach
Is trying to eliminate...
Namely, that I might give him some shit.

Here's another poem from bum rush the page, this one by Jacqueline Jones LaMon, a member of the faculty at Antelope Valley College in California.

Sammy Davis Jr.

who can make the sun rise?
sprinkle it with dew...

she awakened me with tears
   get up baby / get up & pack
   martin luther king, jr. has been shot & killed
   you & I baby / we're going to
   atlanta

mom & i flew there to pay
our respects
say goodbye to a man & hello
to his dream
   I have a dream
   that one day...

we crashed a hotel segregated
high rise tower on peachtree street
with white valets
& nervous executives
eager to appease they sorta
welcomed our presence kinda
treated us proper like
tellin us 'bout all the amenities this four star
had to offer
so many things but i only heard
   the pool / the pool
   we have such a lovely pool

so first things first
i went to swim
lap after lap
back 'n' forth
like ester mae williams come down outta da hood
oblivious
to the scavengers & piranha
angry white men pointing / disgusted
flustered white woman in high heels / appalled
   there's a NEGRO in our pool
   a COLORED girl, I tell you
mommy, will she hurt the water
      we can't go in til she comes out

I executed my backstroke
eyes climbin higher towards heaven
& fixed upon a hip black man stridin balcony tough
jumpin / projectin
non-containin himself
   you stay in that water, girl
   you swim & swim some more
   doncha pay no mind to those circlin sharks
   look up / see God / & swim girl swim

sammy took us out to lunch
said what I had done was no different
than martin or rosa or harriet even
cuz that is how we swim this meet
just livin life as we choose to live

one backstroke at a time

Here's another of my dog-walk poems. I have a lot of these during the cool part of the year; not so many in the summer.

a fair wind

a fair wind
tonight,
bare tree limbs
clapping together
like dominos
on a wooden table,
and the rustling
of leaves blown
down the street
and behind it all,
wind chimes
playing their different
tunes
from backyard
patios
all up and down
the street

a quiet night
with a fair wind
symphony
of neighborhood
sounds

I have to take back what I said about Brigid Milligan being our youngest poet. I just found Tennessee Reed, born in 1977, who began writing poetry when she was five and published her first poetry collection,Circus in the Sky when she was eleven. This was followed by several more two collections, Electric Chocolate in 1990 and Airborne in 1996. She then published another collection in 2003 and then another City Beautiful in 2006.

She has read her work across the United States and abroad and has had her poems set to music by two different composers.

This poem gives us a modern update on an old story, with a funny statement on the fine art of product placement along the way.

Disney's Cinderella

She would wake up every morning
to an evil stepmother and jealous stepsisters
She was treated like a slave, doing the cooking and cleaning
Her stepmother always complained about her food:
"Cinderella, the pasta is too sticky, and the salad has ice burn"
or "Cinderella, potatoes are too hard."
Then Cinderella had to make her dinner again
One of the stepsisters accused her of stealing
her dark blue boot-cut jeans and white cotton blouse by Guess?
The other stepsister accused her of driving her Chevy Cavalier
without asking her when she went to pick up Ivory soap at
Duane Reade
(It turns out that her stepsister's ugly boyfriend
had borrowed it)
Her punishment was to go upstairs to her stepmother's room
to hear a long list of new chores
like changing her new baby stepsister's Pampers
Baby Dry disposable diaper, cleaning the kitchen with
Clorox wipes and wiping down the bathroom
with Windex and Pine-Sol
Despite all this, Cinderella was an upbeat young woman,
she did what she was told, and she was very pleasant.

There were times when Cinderella would give up,
like when her animal friends had made
her a dress for a ball
that was superior to Versace and Miyake
and it was ripped apart by her stepsisters
There were other times when she would
lose her temper or her patience
like when her name was called every two seconds
"Cinderella, it’s Tuesday night, take out the garbage,"
or "Cinderella, the hamper is full"
She had people/animals in her corner
like her mice, her dog, horses and birds
as well as her Fairy God Mother

Because of the Fairy God Mother's storied enchantment
Cinderella was able to attend the ball
which was RSVP only
It was held at the Pierre Hoel
and Peter Duchin's band performed
The prince had his eye on her
even though there were hundreds of others in the room
including her stepsisters who had crashed the gate
One was eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts
even though she was diabetic
The other was eating a big bag of
Cool Ranch Dorito chips
She licked the remainders off of her fingers
The Blue Book Crowd was thinking,
"How grotesque"
The prince was stunned by Cinderella's beauty
and disappointed that she vanished
all except for her slippers
He arrived at her house in his shiny, gold Lexus
and slipped a shoe on her, which was more fancy
than the latest shoe by Giuseppe Zanotti
They flew off in his private jet
to honeymoon in Walt Disney World
and Disney's private island in the Bahamas
The angry stepsisters and mother showed up at the gate
but it was too late
His plane was taxiing out to the runway

Next, a little musing by my favorite poet from New Zealand, Thane Zander, on some of his travels, complete with a couple of footnotes to help us through any language difficulties.

Pacific Island Reverie

This happened, I tell you
so privileged to serve in the Navy
and every year when New Zealand wintered
a Pacific tan would beckon and away we went.

We'd spend three months surveying
ten days working, 4 days playing,
in such environs as Western and American Samoa,
Tonga, Fiji, Funafuti, Tokelau and Niue.

Can't forget the Cooks neither
each island group with it's own microcosm
of Island Life and language, music too
dancing the night away in many places

I remember Apia for instance, for a kilikiti game,
on a cricket ground hastily prepared
near the President's place, up the hill from Apia,
afterwards relaxing at either Aggie Greys

or perhaps the sunken bar called Otto's Reef
or perhaps even the Tusitala itself, talofa palangi(*1),
then when the evening drew on, up the hill
to the nightclub, Mount Vaea Club for a cooling rum,

or perhaps Tonga, Nukualofa to be precise,
Joe's Hotel or the Dateline, keep your shirts on
the locals have strict codes of conduct, obeisance,
the pool at the Dateline a fresh taste of relaxation.

Niue is different, so hard to get on there, but rugby shared,
a look around the island, no beer I seem to remember,
still an Island of utter beauty and remoteness.
We'd stay more often around Fiji, so much work there

enough to keep us coming back for four years,
yes four years straight I had an all round tan,
mainly based out of Lautoka, many fine nights
the Lautoka Hotel one of our homes, another

a long forgotten nightclub of dubious report,
the bottle store and a nearby park a hang out
with locals, share a beer, woman, guitars going
then the next morning off to Treasure Island

a trip out on the Tui Tai to the island,
rum punches the order of the day, sizzled
the rapport with other foreigners, Canadians
and many Australians, plus some Kiwis,

a day on a deserted island with just a small bure (*2)
sun baking, swimming, wind surfing, Bula vanaka,(*3)
The other main island Vanua Levu, sugar cane country
Labasa, not many bars, the one that was open

a call back to western times, grills everywhere,
across the bar, across the stereo speakers,
across the door if you're fool enough to enter,
already stoked of Frigate Rum and Kava

we all enter and have a great time, as sailors do,
the dance music calls some to dance, the local
girls a treat for sore eyes, and some leave with one,
I never tasted the ladies, their lives mapped for them.

The underlying key to being welcomed as kiwi's
was our own Polynesian history, we're all islanders
we know the taste of salt, the bright of sun,
the language of companionship, touche

I used to know a lot of the languages where I had been,
made it a point to at least converse in the local dialect,
now my addled brain barely recognizes basic commands,
I sit here and replay beaches, coral reefs, singing

The Last of the Robert Louis Stevensons, a writer now
eager to get things to paper, for me, and my girls,
they need to know that there is another world,
one that revolves around peace and harmony.

*1 Talofa Palagi - Samoan for Hello stranger
*2 Bure - Fijian for small house without walls
*3 Bula Vanaka - Fijian for Hello or welcome

Since I started "Here and Now" two year ago, I've read a lot of poets I had never read before. Some bore me, some confound me, and some have become permanent new additions to my favorites list.

Young Korean-American poet Ishle Yi Park is one of those who jumped immediately to my good list the first time I read her. Most of her poems are firmly rooted in a specific place and time, almost sociological in their examination of people and events. A few are more personal, like this one, taken from her book The Temperature of This Water.

A Simple Bridge

These days I feel out of touch with lightning,
fire, even the loneliness of wind.

My soul sings to itself
because it is alone.

And then, I think lightning,
fire, wind are all solitary forces:

they can't help but touch
things in their path. It is the reaching -

the space between the paper's edge,
the blue fingers of flame,

between the wind
and sharp, breathless leaves,

between the whiteblue jolt,
the one bare tree,
branches open to light
and burning -

it is a simultaneous distance
and longingly my body recognizes.

A simple bridge inside me
waits to be crossed by lovers

in both directions - who meet
in the middle of the arc at four hours:

the pink hour, the pitch hour,
the starless hour, the soft waking hour.

Here's a little shortie from me.

while walking in the neighborhood, late

the few leaves
still clinging to the trees
rustle in the breeze
like water over rocks

the cold north wind
bracing -
like drinking
from a mountain stream

Now, I'd like to go back to Walt Whitman, which is kind of like trying to breath up the sky - you just can't ever get finished with it.

from Song of Myself

   1

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to
   you

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of
   summer grass

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from the
   soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same,
   and their parents the same.
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance.
retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but
   never forgot,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every
   hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

   2

Houses and rooms ae full of perfumes, the shelves are
   crowded with perfumes.
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall
   not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
   distillating, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become
   undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk thread,
   crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart,
   the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the
   shore and dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the
   barn.
The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to
   the eddies of the wind.
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around
   of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple
   boughs wag.
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along
   the fields and hillsides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of
   me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reacon'd a thousand acres much? have you
   recon'd the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of
   poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess
   the origin of all poems.
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there
   are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third
   hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor
   feed on the specters in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take
   things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from our
   self

As always with Whitman, I read ahead and want to continue typing, but must stop, lest this too-long issue get even longer.

Next, we have a friend we haven't seen in a while, Arlene Ang, with a poem from her book, The Desecration of Doves.

Arlene lives in Italy and has published her poetry in a number of journals. She was for a time, and might still be, editor of the Italian edition of Poems Niederngasse, a very fine bimonthly journal you can access by clicking on the link on the right.

Confessions of a Ballpoint Thief

I cast fingers into public offices,
private libraries, even
my boss' stationery disk.
I pull close elbows
before a nonchalant face
that hides my hands
disappears pens into pockets.

Passion for the sea,
they say, can drive men
to surreptitiously wear
wide sleeves, stitch
extra pockets on clothes
in order to make room
for the daily catch.

Not even Poseidon
would deprive men
of running wet tongue along
the scales of small fish
I net so discretely
with my own hands.

Every night I position
every pen I've ever
disappeared on white floor.
Each ballpoint, like a lighthouse,
sheds its own colored beam.
I lie on my back surrounded
by a myriad of unspilled ink
like a sated crocodile
in a pond of freshly dead fish.

Here's a poem by Sonia Sanchez from the anthology Making Callaloo, 25 Years of Black Literature.

In 2002, when the anthology was published, Sanchez was Laura Cantrell Professor of English at Temple University, where she also served as Director of Women's Studies. She has published 13 books, most recently Like the Singing Coming Off the Drum, Shake Loose My Skin, and Does Your House Have Lions, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998.

Sequences

1.
today I am
tired of sabbaths.
I seek a river of sticks
scratching the spine.
O I have laughed the clown's air
and now my breath dries in paint.

2.
what is this profusion?
the sun does not burn
a cure, but hoards
while I stretch upward.
I hear, turning
in my shrug
a blaze of horns.
O I had forgotten parades
belabored with dreams.

3.
in my father's time
I fished in ponds
without fishes.
arching my throat,
I gargled amid nerves
and sang of redeemers.
          (o where have you been sweet
             redeemer, sharp redeemer,
          (o where have you been baroque

       shimmer?
          i have been in coventry
          where ghosts danced in my veins
          i have heard you in all refrains.)

4.
ah the lull of
a yellow voice
that does not whine
with roots.
I have touched breasts
and buildings unanswered.
I have breathed
moth-shaped men
without seeds.
(indiscriminate sleeves)

               (once upon an afternoon
         i became still-life
         i carried a balloon
              and a long black knife.)

5.
love comes with pink eyes
with movements that run
green the blue again.
my thighs burn in crystal.

This poem was a kind of assignment.

There is a small group (lots of room for growth) that meets on Monday every week to read poetry to each other, our own or someone else's. The meeting is at La Taza Coffee Shop in the retail center on the corner of Crown Meadow and Hwy. 281 (watch for the easy to see HEB sign). This is a very informal little gathering - no orating from behind a podium, just sitting in a friendly circle reading poems and listening to others read.

There's plenty of room at the inn and San Antonio area readers of "Here and Now" are more than welcome. We start at 8 in the evening and usually shut down by 9.

Anyway, normally we just read whatever we brought with us. But, last Monday a challenge was issued. We each picked an object and agreed to write a poem about that object at our meeting next Monday.

My object is a clock or a watch or some equivalent something having to do with time. I wrote this piece this afternoon and, unless I come up with something better in the meantime, will read it next Monday.

time's up

i'm never without
my watch,
but, if, on some dark day,
the universe
goes into a skid
on icy rails
and i
am without my watch
and ask the time
of some impertubable soul,
i dont want to hear
"about three"
or "a little past six"
or "almost noon,"
i want to know what
time it is...
exactly!

or when D calls
and wants me to meet her
downtown for dinner
and I ask when
I don't want her to say
"oh, sevenish,"
which is not a time at all
but an anti-time,
I want to know
is that seven, seven-fifteen,
six-forty eight or quarter to eight,
cause I don't want to be late
and I hate to wait when I'm early

but i am
time
compulsive
and D
is more attuned
to ancient spirits
who understood time, if at all,
only in terms of dark times
and light, moons, seasons,
events, heroic feats that mark
a particular memorable period
as in - oh, yes that was when
uncle hawk-flies-straight
killed the grizzly bear
which was before
leaping-fish
stole fourteen horses
from the kikapoos,
but after
eyes-of-gray-wolf
married
that hussy
little-green-meadow
in the snow
up to their
knees

you have to ask
yourself
how did those guys
ever
get to dinner
on time?

And, speaking of time, it is time now to end this production for week 2 of month 1 of year 3 of "Here and Now."

Over the past two years I have used poems here that left me without as clue as to what the poet was trying to say, as well as poems that damn near put me to sleep as I typed them.

But I figured well, different people like different things. No taste is universal, especially not mine.

But this week I put that aside and tried especially hard to find the kind of poetry I like.

I'm just too damn old to have much patience with artificial mysteries offering no clues for solution, poems where you would have had to have been in fifth grade with the poet to know what the hell he or she is talking about. I equally lack patience with those who confuse obscurity with depth or malice with wit. What I like is poetry that is natural and direct, with nothing in it that requires academic elaboration or obfuscation. That's what I like to read and that's what I try to write - poetry for people who don't read poetry, as well as for people who do.

I hope you also like what I found this week.

Remember as you file quietly out the door, all work presented in this blog remains the property of it creators. The blog itself is produced by and the property of me...allen itz.

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A Walk On The Mild Side Friday, January 04, 2008

III.1.1

Here we are, near the end of the fourth day of the new year and the beginning of the third year for "Here and Now."

Hmmmm....not bad.

My first poem this first week in this new year is from is 5, a collection of poems by E.E. Cummings published by Liveright and reissued in paperback in 1996. This is the third poem in the third section of the book.

III

it is winter a moon in the afternoon
and warm air turning into January darkness up
through which sprouting gently,the cathedral
leans its dreamy spine against thick sunset

i perceive in front of out lady a ring of people
a brittle swoon of centrifugally expecting
faces clumsily which devours a man,three cats,
five white mice,and a baboon.

O a monkey with a sharp face waddling carefully
the length of this padded pole a monkey attached
by a chain securely to this always talking
individual,mysterious witty hatless.

Cats which move smoothly from neck to neck of bottles,cats
smoothly wallowing out and in between bottles,who step smoothly
and rapidly along this pole over five squirming
mice;or leap through hoops of fire,creating smoothness.

People stare,the drunker applaud
while twilight takes the sting out of the vermillion
jacket of nodding hairy Jacqueline who is given a mouse
to hold lovingly,

our lady what do you think of this? Do your proud fingers and
your arms tremble remembering something squirming fragile
and which had been presented unto you by a mystery?
...the cathedral recedes into weather without answering

I wrote this poem last week, a little reminiscence from days gone by.

Readers, do not try this at home, or anywhere else.

eeeehawwww, we'd say real loud

there was this place
out on the county line
where I used
to go drinking

- this was way back
when i lived
in a dry county
which it wasn't called
on account of lack
of rainfall but
because
you couldn't buy
no liquor there
and you had to go
next door
to a wet county
if you wanted to buy
a beer or several
which i and many others
did
frequently
guaranteeing
about midnightish
you'd have squadrons
of dedicated drunks on the road
driving home from
the county line
unless
you was a deacon
at one of the many
baptist churches
that controlled issues
like wet
or dry
and you, for sure,
didn't want someone
seeing your car out in
one of the honky-tonk
parking lots
so you'd get a couple
of your other baptist
friends together
and maybe a methodist
or two
and go out to the
county line
and buy a case
or two or three
and drive around
drinking on back roads
until it was all drunk
up
which meant
even before midnightish
you'd have whole bunches
of drunks on the roads
except these was
baptist drunks
and they'd be feeling
guilty
even as they was
swigging it down
and telling dirty
sex
jokes,
and there was
an artistic side
to the whole thing
too
like when it rained
and the bar ditches
flooded
and all them beer
cans washed up
on the road
and you'd have you
an aluminum highway
that shinned real pretty
in the
moonlight -

but i was talking about
drinking out at the
beer joints
on the
county line and how much
fun
it was with the cowboy
music and Lone Star beer,
eeeehawwww,
we'd say
real
loud
when we was really
having fun,
but it wasn't near
as much fun
as driving home
with the door open,
my head
hanging out over the
pavement
watching out
for that white
line
that ran
down
the middle

My next poem is by mail carrier/poet William D. Barney from his book A Cowtown Chronicle, published in 1999 by Browder Springs Press.

In all, Barney published nine books of poetry during his fifty plus years of writing. This is his most recent. I like the elegant simplicity of his writing, how he can turn a memorable phrase even in the middle of the most common theme.

The Clydesdales

What do we need of behemoths, mastodons,
    dinosaurs,
to astonish the apertures of our reason,
seeing we have these sleek, gargantuan horses
swishing their silky feet, making musical clop
on our pavement? The great brown Clydesdales,
perfectly matched in team and in tandem,
faces ablaze and rattling their leather
    armor,
advance through our streets on enormous
    hooves;
nobler by far than a column of tanks,
they ponderously glide like a great steam
    monster
easily clanking into a station.
        They pass us by,
strutting like feathery-footed pigeons,
lifting each indefatigable bolt
and smashing it gently on asphalt horizons.
Down Houston they haughtily drag their wagons -
these who knew knighthood when Man was in
    flower,
up Main and back to the granite-skinned
    courthouse,
a foam, a fine lather ashine on their flanks.
Beautiful beasts, how did you ever find grace
    to submit
in your terrible dominance, in your cyclotron
    stride,
to the bit to the bridle, to harness and
    swingletree
and the puny five-fingered hand, the cunning
    reinmaster?

Justin Hyde is back with us this week.

Justin lives in Iowa where he works as a correctional officer. He's also a fine poet who's been here with us several times.

sixty-three years ago today

my father
was born
on a dirt floor
in hitt missouri,

son of
hired help
on a chicken farm.

joseph william hyde,
"buck" as he's known
to everyone
in the pool-hall.

joseph william hyde,
drinking crown royal
in a crumbling
home in iowa he
never wanted
with a burned out
pill freak
for a wife,

probably
on the couch
watching
black and white reruns
of cops
to mark the occasion.

i say probably
because i don't know,
part of me cares to
if you can follow that.

joseph william hyde,
fifty years
behind the world

five hundred miles away
from that dirt floor
in his hometown
which no longer
exists.

we've never
talked about it
never will,
but someday
i'll be out there,
waist deep in
prairie grass,

his ashes
in my fist.

I have a couple of poems by William Carlos Williams now. Not as well known as the plum poem or the red wheelbarrow, but of the same quirky pleasures.

Would that we could always see with the indelible precision WCW shows us. I love these things.

Poem

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

The Sun Bathers

A tramp thawing out
on a doorstep against an east wall
Nov. 1, 1933:

a young man begrimed
and in an old
army coat
wiggling and scratching

while a fat negress
in a yellow-house window
nearby
leans out and yawns

into the fine weather

D had a couple of days off for Christmas, so we took a drive up into the hill country to take in the sights, take some pictures, have a good meal and come home. We brought some good dried beef home (which I'm chewing on right now) and a couple of containers of koch kasse (which I had eaten all up by the day after).

Here's the poem that I wrote from the visit for my poem-a-day forum.

into the hills

we took a drive up
into the hills
today,
to the place
where my roots lie
deep, to the little store
my grandfather built
one hundred years ago,
looking to the second floor,
to the window in back,
imagining the room
therein
where my father
as a baby
slept through nights
90 years
past,
to the street
in front,
built wide enough
for an 8 mule
wagon
to make a u-turn,
and to the crowded
sidewalk
where tourists
every day come to see
a facsimile of the little
town that used to be
for real, and back
to grandad's store,
a chocolatier now,
where I bought
a piece of fudge
to remember
him by

I bought an interesting book this afternoon. Titled The Steel Cricket - Versions 1958-1997, it is a book of translations by Stephen Berg published by Copper Canyon Press in 1997.

You will be seeing many pieces from this book in the weeks and months ahead, beginning this week with Berg's translations of some short songs from the Aztecs.

between cactus and acacia
both
other acacias other cactuses
now this giant earth is empty
dust
in our houses
to the sound of the flowers that listen
the sound of the songs that hear

**********

drink honey
your heart opens with each drop
it is a flower!

**********

many pictures my heart
many songs
I come to give pleasure I come
to relive what gives life
here over the strewn mat
red-throated flowers open

**********

a piece of jade
a flower shoots up
it is your song

**********

Oh nothing will cut down the flower of war
there it is on the edges of the river
here it is opening its petals
flower of the tiger flower of the shield
dust rises over the bells

**********

cheerfully sing cheerfully
Oh singer
love it here
now give joy to the giver of life

**********

where is there no death
will I go there
mother in the place of mystery
father in the place of mystery
my heart stops NOT DEATH NO!
I am terrified

**********

I have tasted the wine of mushrooms and my
heart screams
anguish I am lost
I hate death nothing is true
nothing is left

**********

in vain friends
cheerfully take your bells
throw flowers walk
here we lift new songs
here new flowers fill our hands
no bitterness no sadness
no one be sad! no one remember the earth!
flowers words
we touch each other
friends
we have to leave beautiful
SONGS!
we have to leave beautiful
FLOWERS!

Here's another from our friend Alice Folkart as she settles into her new Hawaii home.

A New Friend

She walked me out to the end
of her rickety pier, over turbid green water.
Its pilings leaned at dangerous angles,
many planks had collapsed of their own weight
and lack of paint, maybe termites too,
leaving gaps suitable for ankle-breaking.

It's a private pier, leads out into the shallow bay
in front of her ramshackle, hillside house.
Two canvas chairs rot quietly at the end,
bespeaking a quiet conversation some summers ago.
A motor boat encrusted with slime
lies sullen at the end of an unraveling rope.

Look, she smiled, look at this beautiful place!
We can see the whole bay from here,
and the island right across there.

All I could do was wonder how
we could get the boat out of the water,
scrape and paint the bottom, polish the brass,
and what kind of wood is best to replace all the planks.
Of course, I'd use brass screws instead of nails,
they don't rust, but they cost the earth.
Would ten gallons of white paint be enough?

My hostess lives there, and sees only the beauty.
If I lived there, I would see only rot and work.

I picked up four books this afternoon, including this one, an anthology titled The Defiant Muse, Hebrew Feminist Poem From Antiquity to the Present, published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York in 1999. It's a bilingual book, with Hebrew and English on facing pages.

There's a lot of good, interesting work in the book and I expect I'll be going to it frequently for "Here and Now." For this week, I start with a short poem by Rachel Morpurgo, born in Trieste in 1709 and died in 1871.

She was descended from a line of great Italian poets and scholars. Her early education was in Hebrew and studied very little outside the Hebrew tradition. Although here poems were well received, they were few and written far apart, occupied as she was with the duties of wife, mother and mistress of her house. Her poems were collected for the first time in 1890, nearly twenty years after her death. The book was reissued in Israel in 1953.

There is great bitterness in this poem at her prospects as a woman, even as her first poems were praised. The poem was translated by Peter Cole.

On Hearing She Had Been Praised In The Journals

My soul sighs, fate brings only trouble,
my spirit was lifted and I grew bold;
I heard a voice: "Your poem is gold.
Who like you has learned to sing, Rachel?"

My spirit in turn replies: I've lost my savor.
Exile after exile has soured my skin;
my taste has faded, my vineyard long gone thin.
For fear of shame, now, I sing no longer.

I've looked to the north, south, east, and west;
a woman's word in each is lighter than dust.
Years hence, will anyone ever really remember

her name in city or province, any more
than a dead dog. Ask: the people are sure:
a woman's wisdom is only in spinning wool.

Wife of Jacob Morpurgo, stillborn.

I took the picture above last week. It shows the front entrance to a Catholic school. The inscription over the entrance, Science Religion Patriotism, seemed to me a relic of a much simpler time. It's very hard for me to imagine any public figure now days putting those three words together over the entrance to a school. One of the words, two of the words, that's easy, but the three words together, because of the conflict we see now between the words, that's hard.

The willingness to accept, if not endorse, those words in combination, that's a legacy lost. Perhaps that's what led me to this poem.

In the poem I ask the same question as Rachel Morpurgo in the previous poem - what's to become of us in the end? What will be our legacy.

She expects to be forgotten; I expect the same, but in a more liberating sense.

legacy

in 120 years
or less
everyone on the planet
today
will be dead

i read that
this morning

that's you and me
gone
and everyone
you know
and everyone
I know
and the last surviving
World War I vet,
as well as the baby
due to be born
at 12:01 a.m.
of the new year
and all the celebrities
you read about in People
magazine and all the
politicians running for
president, losers
just like you and me
in the mortality race,
and everyone who
wronged you as well
as everyone who
took up your cause

all gone,
all of us, succumbing
to the death to which
we are born, all of us

what will be our legacy?

for me,
it's only dust I'll leave behind

dust that blows across
some plain
then into the sky
to become the grit
around which
a rain drop grows,
part of a spring shower
to feed the roots
of grass and trees
and summer blooms
that delight lovers
who have never heard
my name

then back
to dust
again

This is the third book I bought today, published by Pig Iron Press in 1980. The title is Orphan Trees and it says (all it says) is that it's a first collection of poems by two young Ohio poets.

The two young Ohio poets are George Peffer and Terry Murcko. I'm tempted to google them to see what's happened to them since 1980 but I'm not going to, at least not now. It may be that "Here and Now" readers are familiar with them. If so, use the comments section to fill us in.

In the meantime, better the mystery.

First, this piece by Murcko.

CAT-WISH and the BI-CAMERAL MIND

My cat stares hate at me through the window. I feed her but
I won't let her in to piss on my carpet. If this were a contest
of will she would stare me down. Hate makes her more intelli-
gent than me. Catfood and cold keep her strong. Perhaps she's
wising me to death behind the wheel (or some other boorish
end) knowing well that no-one ever dies in a car wreck - that
they die somehow beforehand by forgetting. The mind splits
back in two and a fresh animal goes along like other animals,
hearing the voice of gods in its right ear occasionally saying,
"It's winter. Put the snow-tires on." or "It's Christmas. Bake
some cookies." When the crash comes it's more like sweeping
debris than tragedy. That's whey we're never surprised - why it's
always someone gone from out thoughts who wanders away
drunk with forget, cut adrift like a sheep in space - by what we
clean up and put in the ground. This is why I shudder when I
catch myself staring into instead of at the TV or using a
shopping card down an aisle like an act of God or driving forty
absent miles locked into the radio like an extra transistor. This
is why I sit here typing - to spite my cat. Spinning too fast for
the gods to take half of my mind.

Next a piece by Peffer.

We Go To The Movies

We go to the movies - Chinatown
Our friends drive cars that swallow them up
They come out the gills
People wear stupid shoes
We eat popcorn talk
Like Jack Nicholson for two days.

We go to the movies
We forget who we are
Always someone else comes out
To the raging controversy
Of who we are

On a dark corner
I buy you a rose remembering
Who I am not
They wilt before you can press them
in that large book
You've not been reading for twenty years.

Here's an elegant little image from Beau Blue. I've mentioned Beau's website several times. If you haven't checked it out, you should. Just click on the link on the right side of the page.

the pedestal bed

she sleeps
her cats curled around her,
of all of the purrs
hers, the loudest

The last of the books I bought today is Poetry For The Earth, a collection of poems from around the world that celebrate nature, published by Ballantine Books in 1991.

I'm sure I'll be pulling lots of poems from this book in future issues. This week, my first selection from the book is a few lines by Walt Whitman.

from Song of Myself

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of
   the stars,
And the prismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the
   egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of
   heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all
   machinery,

And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any
   statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of
   infidels.

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits,
   grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.

In vain the speeding or shyness,
In vain the platonic rocks send their old heat against my
   approach,
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder'd
   bones,
In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,
In vain the ocean setting in hollows and the great monsters
   lying low,
In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
In vain the razor-bill'd auk sails for north to Labrador,
I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the
   cliff.

(Four books, several hundred poems, for only a couple of pennies
over $10. It was a good day for visiting the secondhand book store.)

I have a real feeling, as I describe in this poem, of some great change coming at us from just the other side of the hill. I don't know what that means, but I think it's a sense shared by many.

change

there is a feeling
I have
that we
are on the edge
of something big -
not "end times,"
that's a silly sideshow
for hysterics and
others made mentally
defective by certain
life-denying religions -
but right on the edge
of something big
some great change
in our lives
and the things
we think we know
about our lives,
some great step
for humanity,
forward or back,
I don't know which,
to a world unrecognizable
to those of us alive
and accustomed
to our own simple times

I don't know
whether to fear
or rejoice in the
arrival of this
great new world,
or even if there will be
a place in it
for me
at all

My poem from The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry for this week is by Bobby Miller.

Called by some "The Lenny Bruce of Beat Poetry," he is included in the book among the "slammers." He is a performance poet, actor and photographer. He is the author of three books, Benestrific Blonde, Mouth of Jane, Rigmarole and, most recently, A Photographic Dairy of Studio 54. He is included on the CD Home Alive, along with Pearl Jam, Nirvana and others.

My Life As I Remember It

At two years old I whistled at the mailman
and set a pattern for years to come.

At four I danced in the sunshine of our front yard,
an interpretative dance to the gods.
The neighbors swore I was retarded.

At six I told my classmates that
I was from another galaxy light years away.
Mrs. Jackson, our first grade teacher,
thought it necessary to alert my parents.

By ten Mr. Grady the art teacher was alarmed
by the colors I chose to paint with, red, black and purple.
In junior high I was considered weird and neat
at the same time because I dressed funny
and my parents had tattoos and Harleys.

My ninth grade report card was all D's and F's
except for art and music class.
All written reports from the faculty stated,
"talks too much and daydreams..."
Some things never change.

I watched the Beatles arrive in America,
and decided I wanted to go to England.
I saw hair grow over ears and down collars
and onto shoulders and backs all over the country.
I walked with the first protest march in Washington
and every other for ten years.
And we still have crooks running the country.

I sat in streets, cafes, corner bars and coffee houses
and listened to the beat of a new generation being born.
I went through puberty with Janis and Jimmy and took LSD
when it wasn't cut with speed or poison.
I smoked pot in fifth grade and laughed all day
at a fat substitute teacher named Mrs. Potty.
I dated black boys at fifteen in an all white Klan neighborhood.
I hitch-hiked to New York from Baltimore
with three queens in hot pants, clogs and long bleached shags
at sixteen and blew truckers all up and down the turnpike.
I've been addicted to MDA, tequila, LSD, PCP, speed, dope,
coke, pot, mescaline, Quaaludes, nicotine, sex
and the mysteries of the night all my life until I hit twenty-eight.
since then it's only night life and sex.

I've walked barefoot on twenty four hundred degree hot coals
and not been burnt.
Greta Garbo grabbed me from behind in traffic
and saved my life.

I've had green hair, blue hair, black hair, red hair,
no hair, long hair and all before 1973.
I'm happy to still have hair.
I've walked Sunset Blvd., Polk Street,Forty Second,
Hollywood and Vine, Christopher, Fire Island, Provincetown,
Key West, Bombay, Miami Beach, London, Paris, Rome, Milan,
Montreal,
and every gay ghetto street listed in the book
and I'm still looking for the perfect lover.

I've lived as a woman for a solid year and had tits. Thank you.
I've dated black men, white men, brown men, red men,
yellow men, and several delicious women.
I've been engaged, married, in love, separated, divorced
separated and broken hearted.
I've had syphilis, gonorrhea, crabs, scabies,
hemorrhoids, hepatitis, appendicitis, dermatitis
and the flu at least fifty times,
and I feel better now at forty-six than I did at twenty five.

I've spent the last eleven years meditating,
concentrating, contemplating, applicating, educating,
investigating and instigating a higher ideal.
I've been a born again Christian, a crystal-holding
new age visualizationist, a Buddhist, a Hindu,
a Christian scientist, a universalist, a bullshit artist,
a seeker of truth, a charlatan,a holy roller,
a shamanistic dancer, a guru, a disciple and an enigma to my friends.

I'm a triple Gemini natural blonde who loves God
and takes time out to smell the roses.
I've been around the block at least ten times
and I'm ready to go again until these feet
won't carry me anymore.
I have always believed in the power of love
and that the groove lies somewhere
between the heart and the genitals.
I have never been deliberately cruel and I've never hit anyone with my fist.
I hope I never have to.

I've been a whore, a saint, a sinner, a healer, a heathen,
an actor, a poet, a drag queen, a straight man,
a teenage zombie, a punk rocker, a greaser, a clone,
a faggot, a streetwalker, a skywriter, a vegetarian,
a teacher, a student, a wanderer, a caretaker,
a wild thing, a father, a son, a yogi, and a fierce hairdresser.

I've been lost, found confused, absolved, punished
and rewarded.

I've stared death in the face and wondered
why not me - yet.
I've talked and listened and heard and seen
and been shown the way.
I've played follow the leader, pin the tail on the donkey,
five card stud, and Russian roulette
with a silver handled 38.
I've lost eight thousand in cash gambling
and won five hundred on a bet in less than a minute.

I've seen the eye of God
and been touched by her hand.
I've seen miracles happen
and been disappointed dozens of times.
I've been almost everywhere, met almost everyone,
seen almost everything, done almost all of it,
and I'm still waiting to be discovered.
The night has a thousand eyes
and I'm a gypsy dancer
who's still hungry for more.

Image by Sandia National Laboratory

About a week ago, Bob Anderson, a friend from New Mexico, suggested I take a look at website reporting on work at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. The laboratory has been researching the most recent significant meteor impact on earth. That meteor struck the earth near Tungusta, Siberia on June 30, 1908. Devastation from the impact was enormous, leveling, among other things, a forest for 200 square kilometers around the immediate impact point.

The most immediate finding of the laboratory's research is that the meteor that caused the destruction was almost certainly much smaller than had been previously thought. The implication of that finding is that as we search the skies, watching for meteors that might present a danger to earth, we need to scale down, significantly, the size of meteor we're watching for. The further implication is that there are many more smaller meteors than there are larger ones, meaning we are at considerably more risk of being hit by a meteor large enough to cause catastrophic damage than we had been thinking we were.

As a science fiction guy since I was a ten year old reading Jules Verne for the first time, this all fascinated me. But what really drew me were the computer illustrations the laboratory created to show various types of impact.

I doubt you can call these illustrations art, since there was no human creator seeking to make art, but they sure are pretty - and that's enough for this ol' boy.

If you want to take a look yourself, the release is titled Sandia supercomputers offer new explanation of Tungusta disaster. You can find it at this url. (You'll have to copy and paste to your browser.)

http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/asteroid.html

Here are the images, beginning with the one above.

Image by Sandia National Laboratory

For my next poem I go to Earle Thompson in Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry.

Born in 1950, Thompson grew up on the Yakima Indian Reservation in Washington. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published one chapbook, The Juniper Moon Pulls at My Bones and is said to be working on a second book of poems.

Song

Woman sits on her porch
knitting and begins singing
a Shakerhouse song;
    Hoy-hoy-ee...
    Hoy-ee-hoy...
Young Pah-temas rests
on the steps watching
a bough drifting inland
while the current tries taking
it to sea.
Cedar bough resists,
and in the boy's eyes
it becomes a dugout canoe - long,
with dark-haired men
naked to the waist paddling,
singing an old Lummi song.

Pah-temas and grandmother
watch seahawk diver from fine mist,
swoop upon a glint transformed
into fish
    Sudden splashing breaks
stillness of morning.

I was looking through one of those end-of-the-year lists of who died and saw Wally Schirra's name. He was one of my heroes and seeing his name on the list reminded me that I wrote this poem two years ago on his 81st birthday.

The poem appeared in The Green Tricycle, a now defunct quarterly publication I still miss, in June, 2004, shortly after I wrote it.

Wally Schirra is 81

I remember watching
Wally Schirra
report Neil Armstrong's
first step on the moon

Wally wept that night

maybe his tears were
for the chance he lost
to make his own mark
in the virgin lunar dust
or maybe for the earthrise
he would never see

or he may have wept
for lost mystery,
our bright goddess
of the night
worshiped
for a thousand generations,
no longer so remote

or maybe he wept for all of us,
making this first step together,
this first emergence from the womb
of precious mother earth

Guan Daosheng was the wife of painter, poet and official Zhao Mengfu who lived from 1242 to 1322. Her birth and death dates are unknown. They were married in 1289 and lived in the capital, Dadu (today's Beijing) and in Wuxing, where she was born and where her husband was later posted. Like her husband, she was a painter, calligrapher and poet. Her work was well received in her time by the emperor and by critics.

These poems by Guan Daosheng are taken from The Anchor Book Of Chinese Poetry and are translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping

Fisherman's Song

Two Poems

1
I recall several plum trees by my distant Mountain Hall.
Despite the cold, jade flowers open on southern branches
the mountain moon shines
the morning wind blows
and I'm bitterly intent on returning to that clear fragrance again.

2
The great ranks are princes and dukes,
but floating reputation and wealth take away one's freedom.
How can that compare with
a flat boat
and chanting poems about moon and wind without return?

Our British friend Christopher George shows he has a pretty good eye for American politics.

Movers and Shakers

I watch an eagle tear
the flesh from a rabbit
on the White House lawn.

Am I dreaming it? I point
it out to the cab driver.
He says, "Uh-huh."

At Union Station,
hardhats raise
a big tent for

an interest group
shindig. Lobbyists
gladhand

lawmakers, and all get
crocked into the night.
Honchos plot to blast

their rivals
below the knees with
12-gauge shotguns,

and to deny the poor
health coverage or
bury their beloved.

The world says, "Uh-huh."

My next poem is from Alcools, first published in 1913, the seminal work of the French Poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

Apollinaire was born in Rome in 1880 to a Polish mother. He never knew his father or his father's name. As a young man in Paris, he was part of a group of artists and poets that included Picasso, Jarry, Mac Jacob, Marie Laurencin, all figures of the avant garde involved in the creation of many of the core ideas of 20th century art and literature. It was during his period that he coined the word "surrealism" to describe what he saw going on around him.

He fought for France in World War I and, in 1916, was wounded in the head by a shell fragment. He married in 1918, then died of Spanish influenza on the weekend of the Armistice.

I pulled this poem from an edition of Alcools published in 1995, edited and translated by Donald Revell. It's another bilingual book, with French and English on facing pages.

1909

The lady wore a dress
In the Turkish style
Her golden tunic
Was made of panels
Snared at the shoulder

Her eyes were angels dancing
She laughed she laughed
She had a face like the flag
Blue eyes white teeth and lips extremely red
She had a face like the flag

Her neckline plunged and curved
Her curls were absolutely modern
Her long arms absolutely bare

Will I never hear the stroke of midnight

The lady dressed in the Turkish style
And in the provocative
Golden tunic
Tossed her curls
Her golden headband
And dangled her little buckled shoe

She was so beautiful
You dare not love here

Time was I loved atrocious women in awful places
Where various creatures were born each day
Iron-blooded creatures and fire brained
I loved I loved the clever working classes
Luxury and loveliness are only sweat
That woman was so beautiful
She scared me

Here are several very short poems I wrote in 2003. I was living on the coast at that time, doing a weekly commute between San Antonio and there inbetween retirements. Lots of good skies on the coast, especially near the beginning and the end of day.

The poems were published the next year in Liquid Muse.

afterglow

cloudless sky
after summer rain
air neon bright

hang ten

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

Continuing in the short poem mode, here are several shorties from Langston Hughes.

Ardella

I would liken you
To a night without stars
Were it not for your eyes.
I would liken you
To a sleep without dreams
Were it not for your songs.

Sea Calm

How still,
How strangely still
The water is today.
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way.

Dreamdust

Gather out of star-dust
     Earth-dust,
     Cloud-dust
     Storm-dust
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust
     Not for sale.

Island

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:

I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

I see the island
And its sands are fair:

Wave of sorrow
Take me there.

Suicide’s Note

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.

Vagabonds

We are the desperate
Who do not care,
The hungry
Who have nowhere
To eat,
No place to sleep,
The tearless
Who cannot
Weep.

And this week we also welcome back Shawn Nacona Stroud with a new poem.

The Corner of Elysian Fields

This hive thrives. My heels tap along
jagged flagstones towards the French Quarter
through the flower balm of Elysian Fields.
My face flushed by the swelter and crush
of a February crowd.

Spring ripe gardens wrap shotgun
and Greek revival homes like krewe floats
with stars of jasmine, lilies, and the pink
bougainvillea that snail-slinks
up the lace ironwork fences year after year.

The crowd's chatter creates one voice
as I pass that corner, peering
into the Food Circle Store's tawny-dust
layered windows, ignoring the clinks
of trinket beads around my neck.

The smell of BBQ pours out
tendrils of temptation from grills
that line sidewalks like mailboxes. Cafe au lait
skinned ladies offer me
food as we wait for drums of distant
parades to creep closer.

I take refuge beneath a Spanish oak
that marquees over that corner
before the roads were running rivers,
the face down man -
a rescue boat for rats drifting
over the quiver of yellow lines, road center
on page twenty-eight in TIME.

This is the poem Puerto Rican poet Victor Hernandez Cruz uses to introduce his book Red Beans

Red Means

Red be-ings
whose history is
Adam's apple
Guyaba at the
entrance
To the cave
Which Lucifer
Entered to
Terminante with
darkness
Taking that ride
up the throat
Finding the stove
of the kitchen
Where someone
Had been up earlier
Cooking Red Beans

I had this kind of feeling of responsibility to mark with a poem the historical passage from one year to the next.

The problem is I don't really think I have much to say about the subject, in fact, don't think there's much worth saying about the event of passing from one calendar to the next. Time is an invention, an artifact of man. The fact is, our time is now and it makes no difference whether you call now December 31, 2007 or January 1, 2008. It's still now and now is all we ever get that is real. All else is unreachable illusion.

Anyway, with all the disrespect for the event I could muster, I wrote this as my new year's poem.

numbers

at
1
2
0
1
they shift
from
1
2
3
1
0
7
to
0
1
0
1
0
8
just another
set
of numbers
to remember,
ssn
drivers license
telephone numbers
military id numbers
but
even worse than
those
numbers, these
numbers
change
every minute
and every
6
0
th
particle
of a minute
like
when I started this
it was
0
8
0
9
1
2
3
1
0
7
and now
it's
o
8
1
5
1
2
3
1
0
7
and it keeps
going and going
and going like that
and by god
you could run out
of paper trying to keep
track
in no time at all
and so i just think
we should save
all that paper
and just forget about it,
save
the trees
and just forget about it
and while we forget that
we could
also forget that
just a few numbers
past
0
1
0
1
0
8
we get to a new number
that changes my number
from
6
3
to
6
4
and I see
no purpose
i
n
i
t

The picture above is of the Nimitz Museum of the Pacific War, named after the Admiral Nimitz of that same Pacific War. The Museum is located in Fredericksburg, Texas, a little town settled by German immigrants, including ancestors of both Admiral Nimitz and me, in about 1845.

The building was originally a hotel, built by the admiral's father, a riverboat captain, built to look like a riverboat to reflect his riverboating past. Being a riverboat captain was apparently a good stepping stong to success in early Texas. There was at least one other riverboat captain who made it big in Texas after leaving his nautical career behing, Captain King, who steamed up and down the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo in those days) before buying a bunch of cattle and hiring a bunch of vaqueros to drive them from Mexico to his new King Ranch. Many descendents of those original vaqueros still live and work on the ranch, calling themself Kinenos.

Captain Nimitz plied his trade on the Nueces River (I think), for a time the southern boundry of the original Republic of Texas.

And so ends your lesson for the day.

We'll be back next week. Until then, remember the work used in this blog remains the property of its creators. The blog itself is produced by and the property of me...allen itz.

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