Here and Now: October 2008

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Flying Friday, October 24, 2008

III.10.4.

One of my goals every week is to present a variety of poets for you to read. I think I've done that well this week.

In addition to my own efforts, I have:

From my Library

Andre Lord
Langston Hughes
William Stafford
Robert Frost
Doc Dachtler
Norman Nawrocki
Norman Stock
John Ashbery
Luci Tapahonso
Jimmy Carter
Edgar Lee Masters
Rita Dove
Lowell Jaeger

From Friends of "Here and Now"

James Fowler
Arunansu Banerjee
Don Schaeffer
Francina
Laurel Lamperd

Here they are. Have fun.

But wait, before you run off, here's something else.

I've just added a new link to my list of links on the right. This one is for Poetry and Poets in Rags a very good poetry blog published by Rus Bowden. It's a less loosy-goosy effort than mine and very interesting and informative.

If you're at all interested in poetry, especially as it appears on-line, you'll enjoy checking in on the blog.

I begin this week with two poems from Audre Lorde, one long an one short, from her book The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, Poems 1987-1992, published by W.W. Norton in 1993.

Lorde, born in 1934 in New York City to Caribbean immigrants, referred to herself as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet." Nearsighted to the point of being legally blind, and the youngest of three daughters, she grew up hearing her mother's stories about the West Indies. She learned to talk while she learned to read at the age of four, learning from her mother how to write at around the same time. She wrote her first poem when she was in eighth grade.

After graduating from Hunter College High School, Lorde attended Hunter College from 1954 to 1959 and graduated with a bachelors degree. While studying library science, Lorde supported herself by working various odd jobs such as factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor.

In 1954, she spent what she described as a pivotal year as a student at the National University of Mexico. Upon her return to New York, Lorde went went back at Columbia, to college, worked as a librarian, continued writing and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village.

She completed her Master's Degree in library science at Columbia University in 1961. She also worked during this time as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library. In 1966, Lorde became head librarian at Town School Library in New York City, where she remained until 1968.

Lorde died in 1992, in St. Croix, after a 14-year struggle with breast cancer.

The Politics of Addiction

17 luxury condominiums
electronically protected
from criminal hunger     the homeless
seeking a night's warmth
across from the soup kitchen
St. Vincent's Hospital
razor wire covering the hot air gates.
Disrobed need
shrieks through the nearby streets.

Some no longer beg.
a brown sloe-eyed boy
picks blotches from his face
eyes my purse shivering
white dust a holy fire
in his blood
at the corner     fantasy
parodies desire     replaces longing
Green light.    The boy turns back
to the steaming grates.

Down the street in a show-window
camera     Havana
the well-shaped woman smiles
waves her plump arm along
half-filled market shelves
excess expectation
dusts across her words

"Si hubieran capitalismo
hubgiesen tomates aqui!"
"If we had capitalism
tomatoes would be here now."

Kitchen Linoleum

The cockroach
who is dying
and the woman
who is blind
agree
not to notice
each other's shame.

Made another nice little trip to the coast last weekend. This is a great time of year for a visit there, and was glad to have a reason to go down and enjoy it with some old friends.

business trip

from
here on the 18th floor
the mist over the bay
is like a thin veil
over
the face
of a beautiful woman

hints
of gulf green
slip through the morning cover
stirred
like thin soup
by the masts in the marina

it
is a clear, bright
gulf coast morning

business
this afternoon from
1 to 4,
signing
if anyone buys,
with a reading at 2 -
some people here
in this place
that used to be home
who might come
if they get the word
but the notice in the newspaper
tiny
and not positioned
where likely to be read

so
whatever else
comes or doesn't
this afternoon -
at 4:05 it's back
to the hills

the new
home
for these past
15 years

I picked up a book some months ago that includes a series of poems that somehow relate to each of the fifty states, one poem per state. The title of the book is Across State Lines, published in 2002 by Dover Publications for the American Poetry and Literacy Project. (I just noticed for the first time that the book was originally distributed for free, which casts a new light on the $3.98 "deal" I got on at the used book store.)

The fifty poems in the book were not written for the book, but were selected, instead, by editors and are from a wide range of poets from all schools, all styles, all eras of American poetry, many famous, some not so.

I'll begin with this poem for Alabama written by Langston Hughes.

Daybreak in Alabama

When I get to be a composer
I'm gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in alabama
And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I'm gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everyone with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama

Next, by William Stafford, this poem for Montana.

Once in the 40s

We were alone one night on a long
road in Montana. This was in winter, a big
night, far to the stars. We had hitched,
my wife and I, and left our ride at
a crossing to go on. Tired and cold - but
brave - we trudged along. This, we said
was our life, watched over, allowed to go
where we wanted. We said we'd come back some time
when we got rich. We'd leave the others and find
a night like this, whatever we had to give,
and no matter how far, to be so happy again.

And, finally, here's the classic by Robert Frost for New Hampshire.

Stopping by Woods on a Snow Evening
from New Hampshire Poems

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of they year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep.

Next, a poem by our friend James Fowler of Massachusetts.

Jim said my pumpkin issue last week reminded him of a pumpkin grower who entered this year's giant pumpkin contest in New Hampshire with a pumpkin nearly 2000 pounds! He was disqualified at the weigh-in for having a hole in his entry. The winner this year was a measly 1500 pounds. Jim said all this prompted the following poem.

Atlantic Giant

You sit stolid on the skid,
Atlantic Giant, the Buddha
of pumpkins. Your lifeline twists
wrist-thick through the grate

to the mountain of compost
and brown earth. The patch
of Sugars nearby, peanut sized,
look up at you in awe.

Your shadow blankets all
as the sunset and your final
day draws near. We'll cut
the cord and carry you

to your final match,
a weigh-in of sumo gourds,
soon a half ton of pies.

Next, here's a little story by Doc Dachtler from his book ...Waiting for Chains at Pearl's, published in 1990 by Plain View Press of Austin.

It's a story about a crafts project of a sort you're not likely to see on one of those TV crafts shows.

There's a lot of references on the web on Dachtler, poet, humorist, actor, carpenter and local official, but it's at a whole bunch of different places. Seems an interesting guy, but I'll let you do your own googling on him.

Ark Theater

      for Robbie Thompson, the director

   Robbie Thompson called me on the phone. He asked me if I wanted to get into Theater. I said I couldn't act. Robbie said he had all the actors and actresses, that was easy. He needed a carpenter to build sets and props.
   I want to do a play called, The Strongbox, by Carl Sternheim, 1913, German Expressionist. Set in Bavaria, your ancestral home. I need a camera with a dickie-bird that pops out. The photographer in the play is a Casanova.
   What's a dickie-bird? I ask.
   You know, a penis, a cock! like, Oh Brother!
   Oh.....Yeah....I know, I said
   We talked about timing, commitments, performances and then he said,
   You probably won't be paid much.
   Big deal, what else is new?, I replied
   I went to the warehouse in Nevada City (new and used) and asked the little man with the mustache and a remote phone on his belt how much for the J-66 Polaroid Land Camera with the accordion black focusing housing on the front. It was the only camera I could find like that without costing me a fortune for something about 1913.
   That one still works, it'll be ten bucks. I don't think you can get film for it though.
   It's not going to work when I'm done with it; I need it for a prop for a play, how about five bucks.
   How about seven, he said. It's a collector's item!
   OK, I said.

   I took the camera into the shop at North Columbia across from the North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center where we were to open in a month. I took a six pack of Becks. I cracked them both and started working. I mounted a Campbell's Soup can on the front of the camera. I got it from my landlady, who saved the labels for the Mary Knoll Sisters who do good Catholic works. Inside the tin can I screwed down a coil spring that wasn't too rusted and weak from an old bed I found in the barn. On the end of the spring I stapled a turned block of wood shaped into the head of a penis with a hole drilled in the end at an angle down so the Ivory Liquid Dish Soap wouldn't run out of it when it was stuffed back into the tin can. Over the spring and penis block of wood I stitched a pink baby's sleeper arm of fuzzy polyester I found in the Cancer Aid Thrift Store Baby Bin and created a cock about eight inches long and two and a half inches in diameter. I put a strap over the end of the can with a hammered hasp lock and a pin so the cock would stay inside until called for. I made a wood tripod and spoke shaved the white pine legs of a 1 x 1. I made a wire hoop to hold a black shroud for the photographer, Silkenband, to duck his head under. The shroud was a long sleeveless mass vestment which the landlady found for me in one of her huge closets.

   I was ready with the whole camera setup. I set Robbie down in a chair I kept in the shop for an old man who likes to come and nip and watch work. Robbie is suffering from Parkinson's but it doesn't slow him down that much. I gave him a Becks and said,
   Camera!, complete with cock and dripping semen!
   I ducked under the shroud and aimed the camera, pulled the handle to the 12 lb. nylon fishing line attached to the pin on the hasp latch that let the big bed spring sproing out with the heavy wood block cock on the end. The cock sproinged out and a splat of Ivory dish soap shot over and hit the director Robbie Thompson on the forehead as he sat there getting his picture taken!
   He is laughing like hell, a glob of dish soap running down to his eyebrows while the limp cock is emptying itself out on the plank floor and wiggling on it's spring, up and down.

Can't leave without another little Dachtler moment from Nevada County. I've set on this kind of committee, been in these kinds of meetings, and on the losing end of these kinds of argument, making this little piece especially funny to me.

Public Meeting

      I represented the Fifth district on the Nevada County Planning Commission (1977-1980)

   We were considering the application for MacDonald's fast food in Glengbrook. I made a long speech about traffic impacts, sewer impacts, about future development in the basin. The six other commissioners listened politely and then voted 6-1 against me. The one seated next to me leaned over and whispered in my ear,
   I agreed with everything you said, but I voted for it because I like their french fries.

Here's a little breakfast table revelation I wrote last week.

the word

i was sitting
at my kitchen table
this morning
eating
my Wheaties
and listening to the radio
and a song came on,
a thirty-year-old song
by Anne Murray
that i've heard probably
a thousand times
and for the first time
a word that's always puzzled me
was clear as a bell
and with that word the song
made sense to me
like it never had before

holy cow!
i was thinking,
what a great song

isn't
it strange
one word
and a song, background static
for thirty years,
became a great song

one
word

something to remember
when talking to friends and lovers

or
writing a poem

My next poem is by Norman Nawrocki from his book Rebel Moon.

Nawrocki is a Vancouver-born, Montreal-based cabaret poet, artist, actor and activist. His also the vocalist/violinist for the "rebel news orchestra: Rhythm Activism."

I'll admit to not much in the way of appreciation for middle-class-white-boy-radical-activists as agents of any kind of meaningful social change, but the do make some fine art. Nawrocki is no exception to this, with some fine poetry in this book (and some not so fine). My favorite is this next one, a true look at a real life.

John Clarke

By 6 am
the first Monday
of every month
John Clarke,
an 82 year old diabetic
walks 6 blocks
to the bus stop,
catches 3 buses,
waits in line
for 3 hours
for the Food Bank handout of
a loaf of bread,
a tray of biscuits,
peanut butter,
canned corn,
peas and beans,
instant pudding,
and a few apples and oranges.
"Luckily I know how to get by"
he says
"But it's awful rough
for a lot of old people."

Next I have three short poems from three different classic forms by our friend from Calcutta, Arunansu Banerjee.

The forms are, first a Haiku, then a Tanka, and, finally, a Tetractys.

Insomnia

Empty blisters
in a Lorazepam pack.
Chirping crickets.

Grief

She arrives
draped in a morning's mist.
Dreams, burrow further
among pillows,
taste the last verse.

Breeze

Come
near me
don't whisper
yet make me feel
you came unknowingly to gift a sigh

Photo by Dora Ramirez-Itz

Except for limericks and a very few poets, you don't think much about poetry and humor at the same time. Well, here's a couple of poems that break that rule.

The poems are by Norman Stock from his book Buying Breakfast for My Kamikaze Pilot, published by Gibbs Smith in 1994.

Stock was born in Brooklyn. He received a B.A. from Brooklyn College, and M.L.S. from Rutgers University and an M.A. from Hunter College. He's won numerous awards for his poetry and has been published frequently including in The New Republic, College English, The New York Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, New England Review, and numerous other publications. His poems have also appeared in Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, The Art of Poetry Writing, and The Poet's Companion
.
Stock lives in New York City and works as a librarian at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Most poets, or anyone else who lays themselves and their work bare before unsympathic critics, will get a special chuckle out of the first poem.

Thank You for the Helpful Comments

I sit quietly listening
as they tear my poem to shreds in the poetry workshop
as each of them says they have a "problem" with this line
    and they have a "problem" with that line
and I am not allowed to speak because that is the
    etiquette of the workshop
so I sit listening and writhing while they tear the guts out
    of my poem and leave it lying bleeding and dead
and when they've finally finished having kicked the
    stuffing out of it
having trimmed it down from twenty lines to about four
    words that nobody objects to
then they turn to me politely and they say well Norman
    do you have any response
response I say picking myself up off the floor and brushing
    away the dirt while holding on for dear life to what I
    thought was my immortal poem now dwindled to nothing
and though what I really want to say is can I get my money
    back for this stupid workshop what I say is...
    uh...thank you for your helpful comments...
    while I mumble under my breath motherfuckers
    wait till I get to your poems

the Innocent

I must look safe
the nun sits next to me
she doesn't know what I am thinking
chinese girls fucking roosters
could she think of that
great vaginas blossoming mammoth mushrooms
the availability of women
how could she know
I look so safe
go ahead, sister
sit next to me

I have a really, mostly, great life, sitting in coffee shops, drinking coffee, watching people and writing down what I see.

What's not to like.

Except for those day when the world intrudes.

poetry interruptus

no
laying back
in a dark and friendly
coffee-shop
today

no
leisurely
contemplation
of my versifying cohorts'
carefully limed lines
over lattes
and
blueberry muffins

no,
today
the discouraging truth
that weeds grow
even in drought orders
my day
and i'm off to the trailer
to gas up the tractor and
level out the grassy tufts that
bring disorder to the still-not-sold
country estate

no
way
around it

Born in 1927, John Ashbery has won nearly every major American award for poetry and is recognized as one of America's most important poets.

This next poem is from Ashbery's book And the Stars Were Shining, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1994.

If you have a little problem following along with him in his poem, remember, he once characterizes himself as having been described as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism." Given that, his poem is still fun to read, something that cannot always be said for the many poets who have sought to adopt his sometimes mysterious style.

Till the Bus Starts

"This heart is useless. I must have another."
- The Bride of Frankenstein

I like napping in transit.
What I ought to do
just sits there. I like
summer - does it like me?
So much cursory wind
with things on its mind -
"No time to worry about it
now." it - she - says.

In short, I like many
dividers of the days
that come near to eavesdrop on our thoughts.
What about gliders?
These, yes, I like these too.

And greened copper things
like things out of the thirties.
I must have one - no,
make that a dozen, all wrapped
fresh, at my address.

And were it but a foozle
schlepping around my ankles
by golly I'd give it the same
treatment all those guys,
years, gave me. You can't fasten
a suspender stud and not know about it,
how awful they looked,
and when they returned home under trees
nobody said
anything, nobody wanted it.

Still, I'll go
out of my way, waiting
for yet another vehicle.
It seems strange I read this page before, no,
this whole short story. And what
sirens sing to me now,
cover me with buttons.

Here's a couple of pieces from frequent contributor Don Schaeffer.

Don's first book, Almost Full, was published in 2006. He holds a Ph.D in Psychology from City University of New York and lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, with his wife, Joyce.

Sixty-Eight

I am a creature of retirement.
Nobody dreams of me.
Soon I will stop dreaming.

The future has slipped
back onto all those bright-eyed others
bearing away any wishes and hopes.

It's just now,
a pleasant word
perhaps a laugh.

Nothing binds and holds.
There are no enclosings
when the life of love has passed.

Live Jazz

In this club
at a table
in front of a bottle of Millers,
it's all real.
The woman with
the tattoo on her leg
is singing about
feeling beating hearts.
The men I know, she sings,

the breath in her voice
and delicate conversation,
all grown-ups. I
barely know the rules.

She sings about love.
I mention politely
I think she's lying.
The jazz lyrics
are pure country.

Luci Tapahonso was born on the Navajo reservation in 1953 and was raised in a traditional way along with 11 siblings. English was not spoken on the family farm, and Tapahonso learned it as a second language after her native Dine bizaad. Following schooling at Navajo Methodist School in Farmington, New Mexico, and Shiprock High School, she began studies at the University of New Mexico. In 1982, she gained her MA and went on to teach, first at New Mexico and later at the University of Kansas and now at the University of Arizona.

I have two poems from her 1993 collection Saanii Dahataal (the women are singing).

Tapahonso's writing, unlike that of most Native American writers, is a translation from original work she has created in her tribe's native tongue, creating sometimes unusual structures.

Shaa Ako Dahhiniteh
Remember the Things They Told Us

   1
Before this world existed, the holy people made themselves visible
by becoming the clouds, sun, moon, trees, bodies of water, thunder,
rain, snow, and other aspects of this world we live in. That way,
they said, we would never be alone. So it is possible to talk to them
and pray, no matter where we are and how we feel. Biyazhi daniidli,
we are the little ones.

   2
Since the beginning, the people have gone outdoors at dawn to pray.
The morning light, adinidiin, represents knowledge and mental awareness.
With the dawn come to the holy ones who bring blessings and daily gifts,
because they are grateful when we remember them.

   3
When you were born and took your first breath, different colors
and different kinds of wind entered through your fingertips
and the whorl on top of your head. Within us, as we breathe,
are the light breezes that cool a summer afternoon,
within us the tumbling winds that precede rain,
within us sheets of hard-thundering rain,
within us dust-filled layers of wind that sweep in from the mountains
within us gentle night flutters that lull us to sleep.
To see this, blow on your hand now.
Each sound we make evokes the power of these winds
and we are, at once, gentle and powerful.

   4
Think about good things when preparing meals. It is much more than
physical nourishment. The way the cook (or cooks) think and feel become
a part of the meal. Food that is prepared with careful thought,
contentment, and good memories tastes so good and nurtures the mind
and spirit, as well as the body. Once my mother chased me out of the kitchen
because it was disheartening to think of eating something cooked
by an angry person.

   5
Be careful not to let your children sit or play on tables or countertops.
Not only is it bad manners, but they might have to get married
far sooner than you would ever want.

   6
Don't cut your own hair or anyone else's after dark. There are things
that come with darkness that we have no control over. It's not
clear why this rule exists, but so far on one is willing to become
the example of what happens to someone who doesn't abide by it.

Hills Brothers Coffee

My uncle is a small man.
In Navajo, we call him "shidai,"
      my mother's brother

He doesn't know English.
      but his name in the white way is Tom Jim.
      He lives about a mile or so
      down the road from our house.

One morning he sat in the kitchen,
drinking coffee.
      I just came over, he said.
      The store is where I'm going to.

He tells me about how my mother seems to be gone
every time he comes over.
      Maybe she sees me coming
      Then runs and jumps in her car
      and speeds away!
      he says smiling.

We both laugh - just to think of my mother
jumping in her car and speeding.

I pour him more coffee
and he spoons in sugar and cream
until it looks almost like a chocolate shake.
Then he sees the coffee can.
      Oh, that's the coffee with the man in a dress,
      like a church man.
      Ah-h, that's the one that does it for me.
      Very good coffee.

I sit down again and he tells me
      Some coffee has no kick.
      But this one is the one.
      It does it good for me.

I pour us both a cup
and while we wait for my mother,
his eyes crinkle with the smile and he says,
      Yes, ah yes. This is the very one
      (putting in more sugar and cream).

So I usually buy Hills Brothers Coffee.
Once or sometimes twice a day,
I drink a hot coffee and

      it sure does it for me.

Raisin Eyes

I saw my friend Ella
with a tall cowboy at the store
the other day in Shiprock.

Later, I asked her,
Who's that guy anyway?

Oh, Luci, she said (I knew what was coming),
it's terrible. He lives with me
and my money and my car.
But just for a while.
He's in AIRCA and rodeos a lot.
      And I still work.

This rodeo business is getting to me, you know,
and I'm going to leave him.
Because I think all this I'm doing now
will pay off better somewhere else,
but I'll stay with him and it's hard
because

      he just smiles that way, you know,
      and I end up paying entry fees
      and putting shiny Tony Lamas on lay-away again.
      It's not hard.

But he doesn't know when
I'll leave him and I'll drive across the flat desert
from Red Valley in blue morning light
straight to Shiprock so easily.

And anyway, my car is already used
to humming a mourning song with Gary Stewart,
complaining again of aching and breaking,
down-and-out love affairs.

Damn.
These Navajo cowboys with raisin eyes
and pointed boots are just bad news.
but it's so hard to remember that all the time,
she said with a little laugh.

I wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago on a particular great October morning that turned out to be the beginning of a particularly great day.

October morning

a mid-October
morning
still dark at 8 a.m.
and in the dark
the scratch of rain
on drying leaves

on the corner
of Soledad and Martin
the homeless woman
as back after a week gone elsewhere
still elsewhere
this morning conversing
with the overcast sky
pacing pacing pacing in circles
shaping flowing forms in the air
with her hands

a beautiful black woman
beneath the grime
young sharp-featured
like fox in the hunt
dressed in autumn colored
scraps she's sewed together

colors
that meld together like leaves
swirling slowly
in a gentle October wind

The number of books Jimmy Carter has written since leaving the presidency is up to ten now, I think, including one or two collections of poetry. (And when we say Jimmy Carter wrote the book, we mean Jimmy Carter did the writing.)

My next poems are from one of those, Always a Reckoning, And Other Poems published by Random House in 1995.

With Words We Learn to Hate

We take lives in times of peace
for crimes we won't forgive,
claiming some have forfeited
the right to live,
We justify our nation's wars
each time with words to prove we kill
in a moral cause.
We've cursed the names of those we fought -
the "Japs" instead of Japanese,
German Nazis or the "Huns,"
and "Wops" - when they were our enemies.

Later they became our friends,
but habits live in memories.
So now, when others disagree
we hate again, and with our might,
war by war, name by dirty name,
prove we're right.

Considering the Void

When I behold the charm
of evening skies, their lulling endurance;
the patterns of stars with names
of bears and dogs, a swan, a virgin;
other planets that the Voyager showed
were like and so unlike our own,
with all their diverse moons,
bright discs, weird rings, and cratered faces;
comets with their steaming tails
bent by pressure from our own sun;
the skyscape of the Milky Way
holding in its shimmering disc
an infinity of suns
(or say a thousand billion);
knowing there are holes of darkness
gulping mass and even light,
knowing that this galaxy of ours
is one of multitudes
in what we call the heavens,
it troubles me. It troubles me.

Now, here's a short piece from our friend from all around the world, now holding court in The Netherlands, Francina

Quiet Meadow

It is quiet in the meadow,
where the wind holds its breath,
to leave the trees stand motionless,
and clouds colour purple in the afterglow.

No song of birds to be heard,
even the reed not to be stirred,
and the creek streams trouble free
into the river on its way to the sea.

Despite this quietness,
my thoughts circle, restless.

Now from Edgar Lee Masters, a master at using character-sketch poetry to create a jigsaw puzzle picture of a particular place and time I have two poems. The poems are from Master's classic Spoon River Anthology, a literary phenomenon due to its originality when first published in 1915.

Adam Weirauch

I was crushed between Altgeld and Armour.
I lost many friends, much time and money
Fighting for Altgeld whom Editor Whedon
Denounced as the candidate of gamblers and
    anarchist.
Then Armour started to ship dressed meat to Spoon
    River,
Forcing me to shut down my slaughter house,
And my butcher shop went all to pieces.
The new forces of Altgeld and Armour caught me
At the same time.
I thought it due me, to recoup the money I lost
And to make good the friends that left me,
For the Governor to appoint me Canal Commis-
    sioner
Instead he appointed Whedon of the Spoon River
    Argus,
So I ran for the legislature and was elected.
I said to hell with principle and sold my vote
Or Charles T. Yerkes' streetcar franchise.
Of course I was one of the fellows they caught.
Who was it, armour, Altgeld or myself
that ruined me.

Editor Whedon

To be able to see every side of every ques-
    tion;
To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing
    long;
To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,
To use great feelings and passions of the human
    family
For base designs, for cunning ends,
To wear a mask like the Greeks actors -
Your eight-page paper - behind which you huddle,
Bawling through the megaphone of big type:
"This is I, the giant."
Thereby all living the life of a sneak-thief,
Poisoned with the anonymous words
Of your clandestine soul.
To scratch dirt over scandal for money,
And exhume it to the winds for revenge,
Or to sell papers,
Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be,
To win at any cost, save your own life.
To glory in demoniac power, ditching civilia-
    tion,
As a paranoiac boy puts a log on the track
And derails the express train.
To be an editor, as I was,
Then to lie here close by the river over the place
Where the sewage flows from the village,
and the empty cans and garbage are dumped,
And abortions are hidden.

D and I went to the movies last week. I'm a fan of westerns, so we went to see Appaloosa. I recommend the movie. Though a simple movie, as in my thumbnail sketch of a poem, it isn't simplistic or emotionally shallow. I enjoyed it, more, in fact, than I've enjoyed most of what I've seen this year.

Appaloosa

went to the movies
today
11 am
early bird special
only $8 for the 2 of us

not counting
the $15
at the concession stand

a good old western - "Appaloosa"

the clip-clop of horse hooves
as the title
rolls

a horse
whinny

gunfire
and the bad guy
makes his base nature known

and good guys -
good friends,
lawmen,
partners
cleaning up the New Mexico
Territory
one dried-up little town
after another
making the territory safe
for the cheats
and cowards and double
dealing civilizer
of the west

and a prissy little woman
who's something of a whore
and a real whore
with a heart of gold
and loyal to her man

and treachery
and stand-fast fortitude
and moral choices
and the good in the bad
and the bad in the good
and a gun fight
when evil is defeated,
left lying bloody dead
on the dusty
street

and the friends must part,
the one staying with the
prissy whore
while the other rides off
into the sunset,
leaving the heart-o-gold
whore
with a little gold locket
and a kiss on the cheek

yes siree
i surely do
like
a good
cowboy movie

Rita Dove born in 1952 in Ohio, was the second African American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize. From 1993 to 1995, she served as the first Black and the youngest Poet Laureate of the United States.

The next poem is from her book On the Bus With Rosa Parks, published by W.W. Norton in 1999.

Black on a Saturday Night

This is no place for lilac
or somebody on a trip
to themselves. Hips
are an asset here, and color
calculated to flash
lemon bronze cerise
in the course of a dip and turn.
Beauty's been caught lying
and the truth's rubbed raw:
Here, you get your remorse
as a constitutional right.

It's always what we don't
fear that happens, always
not now and why are
you people acting this way
(meaning we put in petunias
instead of hydrangeas and reject
ecru as a fashion statement).

But we can't do it - naw because
the wages of living are sin
and the wages of sin are love
and the wages of love are pain
and the wages of pain are philosophy
and that leads definitely to an attitude
and an attitude will get you
nowhere fast so you might as well
keep dancing dancing till
tomorrow gives up with a shout,
'cause there is only
Saturday night, and we are in it -
black as black can,
black as black does,
not a concept
nor a percentage
but a natural law.

I have this next piece from out friend Laurel Lamperd.

Laurel lives with in sight of the Southern Ocean on the south coast of Western Australia. She writes novels and short stories as well as poetry and, with a friend, published The Ink Drinkers an anthology of their poetry and short stories.

In addition to that, Laurel has a new book coming out this month. The book is Wind from Danyari from Wings Press.

Ballad of the Sad Losers

When Margaret Roadnight came to town
Old Jimmy Cowman remembered
how he was going to be
the greatest jazz player in the world.
Play that sax, Jimmy
play them Blues.
He was Satchmo

When Margaret Roadnight came to town
she sang a song of the fifties.
Little Nancy Dee remembered
dancing with Johnnie Jones
to the old seventy-eights
Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.

When Margaret Roadnight left town
she took her songs with her.
Old Jimmy Cowman sat upon his porch.
He didn't see the crop that was failing.
Little Nancy Dee wept
remembering the night
Johnnie Jones waltzed out of her life
in the arms of her best friend.

When Margaret Roadnight left town
she left her dreams behind.

My next poem is by Lowell Jaeger. It's from his book War on War published in 1988 by Utah State University Press.

The book doesn't include any kind of bio on Jaeger and I can't find anything in the way of a bio on the web, so, at least to me, he is a mystery.

Good poet, though, which, I suppose, is all we really need to know.

At the Vietnam Memorial
(Washington D.C. 1983)

Some wounds need be
re-opened before they heal.
Here, where the earth was cut
the architect, that woman, condemned
our unforgiving memories of war.
She has re-opened the grave and made us
look inside.

            I walk the walk and read
the stone-cold Henrys and Johns and
Davids and Paul. I uncover
that afternoon a dead relative
's name. But these are his brothers, buried
so near they are my brothers
too. I shudder to remember how
we are all of one mother
and to our mother, all return.
How easily
I forget and now look: these few stones
divide the living and the dead. Look:
these men, these boys, inside the walls
and when I press my palms
to touch them I feel only the black
marble hallways of the underworld
we build with our tombs.

Nearby banners still fly
half-mast. The Viet-Vets
are unshaven and beneath berets
I see their hair, like mine,
grown long. From their small display
these men remember, day by day,
The POW, the MIA, the maybe-dead
who maybe wish they were,
whose footsteps may never mark our thresholds
again and nowhere is their name
cut in stone.

            Thank you, Mr. Jones
I say, accepting his handbill,
reading the name chiseled on his fatigues
and the fatigue etched inside his face
above the name. I want
to shake this man's gentle hand.
I want his eyes to lock with mine
and I want him to say slow and nodding,
Some wounds need to be re-opened before they heal.
But no. No. Our bodies stand intact
while our eyes peer across the battlefield
from opposite sides. He fought the war
I fought against. No, we have nothing
to say. I walk away. I read the handbill.
I walk away.

I retreat into the womb, the tomb,
the blackness, the trench. Some wounds
need be
re-opened
before they heal and where the living
will not speak, the dead cannot
keep still.

      I am long standing, listening
how generations upon generations struggle
to bust through these walls, till I feel the sun
set, and in that proper light
on the one slate my shadow walks
through the shadow world,
walks with the shadow; on the other side
reflecting hard my face and beyond that
his face
and beyond that,
ours.

I wrote this piece just a couple of days ago, another look at the woman I wrote about a couple of poems back.

without papers

the autumn
lady
street person
was
dancing
in the parking lot
this morning

dressed
in her normal
browns
& reds
& golds

slow-moving
arms
and hips
and shoulders
and head to a kind of
calypso beat

not in a world
of her own
as you might think
but
in the music

she
stops when i drive up
walks to the rail
and pretends to look down
at the river

i've said hello
to her several times
early in the morning,
like now,
but she never responds,
because she is black
and i am white
because she is woman
and i am man
because she is homeless
and i am homed
because she is the queen
of this street
of this parking lot above the river
of the water
as it flows in her river
and of this and every morning

and
i
am just a trespasser
a passer-through
a migrant
with no
papers

meaning
no
good morning
hellos
are required
or to be acknowledged

And, with a faint hint of moon in a bright morning sky, we call it quits for this week. Now, and as always, all of the material presented in this blog is the property of its creators; the blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz

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Pumpkin Power Friday, October 17, 2008

III.10.3.

Getting right to it, the lineup for this week is

From my library

Su Tung P'o
Kirby Wright
Anne Sexton
Aaron Silverberg
Thomas R. Smith
Henri Coulette
Daniel Donaghy
Jose Emilio Pacheco
Charles Bukowski
Marilyn Hacker
From friends of "Here and Now"

Dan Cuddy
Jane Roken
Alice Folkart
James Hutchings
Joanna M. Weston

And my own two cents.

I'm starting this week with several poems by Su Tung P'o from the book One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, selected and translated by Kenneth Rexroth.

Born in 1036, Su was among the best known poets of his time. Born in present-day Sichuan province, he was from a prominent literary family. He occupied many official posts, rising to president of the board of rites (which regulated imperial ceremonies and worship). He designed the parks surrounding Lake Si in Hangzhou. Five emperors came to the throne during his lifetime.

Born 1905, Kenneth Rexroth died in 1982. He was an American poet, translator and critical essayist and was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic forms such as haiku."
One of the coolest things about doing "Here and Now" is how, now and again, I run across a poet I never heard of before who is so in tune with me that when reading them it is like they're inside my head, talking directly to me. Su Tung P'o, at least as translated by Kenneth Rexroth, is one of those. A thousand year gap between his time and mine disappear in the reading of the words.

The Red Cliff

The River flows to the East.
Its waves have washed away all
The heroes of history.
To the West of the ancient
Wall you enter the Red Gorge
Of Chu Ko Liang of the
Days of the Three Kingdoms. The
Jagged peaks pierce the heavens.
The furious rapids beat
At the boat, and dash up in
A thousand clouds of spray like
Snow. Mountain and river have
Often been painted, in the
Memory of heroes
Of those days. I remember
Long ago, Kung Ch'in newly
Married to the beautiful
Chiao-siao, shining in splendor,
A young warrior, and the other
Chu Ko Liang, in his blue cap,
Waving his horsetail duster,
Smiling and chatting as he
Burned the navy of Ts'sao Ts'ao.
Their ashes were scattered to
The four winds. They vanished away
In smoke. I like to dream of
Those dead kingdoms. Let people
Laugh at my prematurely
Grey hair. My answer is
A wind cup, full of the
Moon drowned in the River.

On the Death of His Baby Son

I will never be able to stop my tears.
And the day is far off when i will
Forget this cruel day.
Why could we not have died with him?
His little clothes still hang on his rack.
His milk is still by his bed.
Overcome, it is as though life had left us.
We lie prostrate and insensible all day.
I am no longer young enough
To try to understand what has happened.
I was warned of it in a dream.
No medicine would have helped,
Even if it had been heaped mountain high.
The disease took its course inexorably.
It would have been better for me if I took
A sword and cut open my bowls.
They are already cut to pieces with sorrow.
I realize what I am doing
And try to come to myself again,
But I am exhausted and helpless.
Carried away by an excess of sorrow.

The Terrace in the Snow

In the golden twilight the rain
Was like silk threads. During the night
It cleared. The wind fell. It grew
Colder. My covers felt damp
And cold. Without my knowing it,
The snow had drifted into
The room like heaps of salt. At
The fifth watch, in the first flush
of dawn, I close the curtain
Of the study. During the
Rest of the night I listen
To the ice, warping the colored
Tiles on the roof. In the morning
I sweep the Northern terrace
And look out at Saddle Peak.
It is clear of clouds and I
Can see both summits. Above
The village in the morning
Sunlight, crows begin to circle.
The mud of the streets is covered
With white. No cart track has marked it.
Ice has turned the shop roofs to
White jade. Snow has filled the doorways
With rice. The last cicadas
Have long since gone to earth. Now
They will have to dig a thousand
Feet deeper. Some clouds pile up,
The color of dried moss. My
Chest bothers me again.
I feel I have lost the
Ability to write.
The icicles on the eaves
Drone in the wind like the swords
of murders.

A Walk in the Country

The spring wind rises fine dust from the road.
Everybody is out, enjoying the new leaves.
Strollers are drinking in the inns along the way.
Cart wheels roll over the young grass.
The whole town has gone to the suburbs.
Children scamper everywhere and shout to the skies
Songs and drum beats scare the hills
And make the leaves tremble on the trees.
Picnic baskets and jugs litter the fields
And put the crows and kites to flight.
Who is that fellow who has gathered a crowd?
He says he is a Taoist monk
He is selling charms to the passersby.
He shouts, waves his hands, rolls his eyes.
"If you raise silk, these will
Grow cocoons as big as pitchers.
If you raise stock, these will
Make the sheep as big as elks."
Nobody really believes him.
It is the spirit of spring in him they are buying.
As soon as he has enough money
He will go fill himself with wine
And fall down drunk,
Overcome by the magic of his own charms.

Looking From the Pavilion Over the Lake
27th, 6th Month, Written While Drunk

Black clouds spread over the sky
Like ink. I can no longer
See the mountains. Hailstones rebound
From the roofs of the boats.
A whirlwind sweeps out from the
Shore and is suddenly gone.
From the pavilion over
The lake the water has become
Indistinguishable from the sky.

I wrote this after the second presidential debate a couple of weeks ago.

that one

"that one,"
he said, pointing
to his opponent

now
many are outraged,
crying
racism
disrespect
unseemly behavior

a bit over the top
in my opinion

you know,
at a certain age these
senior
moments come
and incidentals like names
just fly right out the window
of a slowly calcifying
mind

i'm
sure
he would'a called him
by name
if only
he could'a remembered
it

The next piece is by Kirby Wright and it's taken from Taj Mahal Review, June 2004. (I also have a piece in that issue.).

Wright was born and raised in Hawaii. He's a graduate of Punahou School in Honolulu and the University of California at San Diego. He also received an MFA in creative writing form San Francisco State University. He has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a past recipient of the Ann Fields Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Award, and the Browning Society Award for Dramatic Monologue. His novel, Before the City was published by Lemon Shark Press.

Gretchen on the Beach

A divorcee from Humbolt
Talks traveling and books

While Gretchen, her daughter
Pirouettes for me

Wearing Angels' baseball cap
And tapa-cloth bikini.

The divorcee informs me
Gretchen is married,

That her husband is marching back
Over seaweed and lava.

Those who are beautiful
Are always attached,

Even when they are single.
The sand disturbs

Where the divorcee stands -
She's burrowing with her toes.

Gretchen knows I am watching.
She plucks a plumeria,

Carries it to her face,
Breathes in its fragrance.

Pieces of reef, now exposed,
Beg for her attention.

In this piece, our friend Dan Cuddy considers recent news on the economy.

who screwed up?

doesn't matter now
i'm along for the ride
the tire is flat
but gotta keep movin

the mortgage is due
we're hungry
gotta get to work
hopefully the office will be open
the boss will still be his miserable self
the day will go slow
the clock hands wringing frustration at noon

oh maybe i'll be clever
maybe i'll do something different
make unexpected money
cut it outside the box

naw, i'm just along for the ride
a set salary
a block of time that builds
a concrete block life

oh, i will look for beauty
eat a chocolate bar
look up at a cloud
tap my foot at a song
just anything that catches the ear

my thoughts are loose
screws loose
rattling their pathetic rhythm on the floor
watch them roll away from each other
watch them roll away
hide in nooks and crannies
as the world melts down
as the world gets nasty
like a suicide bomb

Anne Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1928.

She suffered from complex mental illness. Her first manic episode took place in 1954. After a second breakdown in 1955, she met Dr. Martin Orne, who, as her longtime therapist, encouraged her to take up poetry. Though she was very nervous about it at first, writing poetry became part of her therapy and then her livelihood as she received quick success, with her poems accepted by The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the Saturday Review.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the manic elements of Sexton's illness began to affect her career. She still wrote and published work and gave readings of her poetry. She also collaborated with some musicians, forming the group Anne Sexton and Her Kind, who were working to put some of her writing to music.

On October 4, 1974 Sexton had a business lunch to discuss her most recent book, The Awful Rowing Toward God. After the meeting, she returned home, locked herself in her garage, and committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

The next several poems are from Sexton's book To Bedlam and Part Way Back Houghton Mifflin in 1960. It was her first book of poems.

Said The Poet To The Analyst

My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;
as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,
unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.
I must always forget how one word is able to pick
out another, to manner another, until I have got
something I might have said...
but did not.

Your business is watching my words. But I
admit nothing. I work with my best, for instance,
when I can write my praise for a nickel machine,
that one night in nevada: telling how the magic jackpot
came clacking three bells out, over the lucky screen.
But if you should say this is something it is not,
then I grow weak, remembering how my hands felt funny
and ridiculous and crowded with all
the believing money.

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light;
lonely thing, twelve fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them, with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Noon Walk On The Asylum Lawn

The summer sun ray
shifts through a suspicious tree.
though I walk through the valley of the shadow
it sucks the air
and looks around for me.

The grass speaks.
I hear green chanting all day.
I will fear no evil, fear no evil
The blades extend
and reach my way.

The sky breaks.
It sags and breathes upon my face.
in the presence of mine enemies, mine enemies
The world is full of enemies.
There is no safe place.

Photos by Jane Roken

Photo by Jane Roken

Our Norwegian friend from Denmark, Jane Roken ran across these "fence fairies" during the course of her travels, saved them for us with her photos and with a poem inspired by them.

The Commander

Whenever you meet her, it's a surprise,
always, as if you've forgotten her presence
in the meantime. She doesn't mind.

She wears a knitted cap and snow goggles,
a man's windbreaker and a purple skirt.

Her face is empress-dusky: tan and grime.
Her chess-player's mouth knows chronicles
of copper groves rife with giant dragonflies,
sacred fields, bonfires, rams' skulls on poles.

She holds a double axe in her arrogant left hand;
her right arm, under the jacket, is lashed to her waist,
wary of what it might do if left to its own devices.

Right next to her the tiger sits, heraldic goldeneye
of beatitude. All along the dirt road her light
brigade of fairies play their angelic games.

Looking at her, you find it easy to believe
she has traveled here from Babylon, from the bogs
of the boundless Siberian taiga, from Ultima Thule.

No down-and-outer, she. Here's crystal power,
blessing on the hillside. Champion of the land.
Zogari spirit, suzerain, sorceress.

All night, under the naked stars, she keeps vigil
while the fairies rehearse the names she gave them,
and the tiger growls gently in his sleep.

The next poem is by Aaron Silverberg from his book Thoreau's Chair published in 2001 by Off The Map Enterprises of Seattle.

Silverberg graduated from the University of California in 1978 with a degree in philosophy. He describes himself as a personal life coach, an improvisational flutist, ecstatic dancer and organic gardner.

The Refugee's Trail

Do you have a matador's cape
An offering for the raging bull
of your thoughts' charge?

Are you glistening in the matador's finery?
Are the dramatic horns of conquest
echoing in your chest?
Without the bull, are you lonely, perhaps terrified
as your radiant sword stabs through nothing but
imagined sinew?

What if you were to walk
past the coliseum
this morning?
Out into the blazing Toledo sunshine
the Quixotian plain
where a man is but a few indentations in sandy dirt
a few puffs of water vapor.

Is there any glory without seething rage?

Peaceful feet answer, one courageous footfall after another.

Here's something else from a couple of weeks ago.

have a nice day

nice
is such a cotton-candy word
and who in the world
would
want a
cotton-candy day

especially
like in the summer

just thinking about it
makes me want to
take a shower

and now i have someone
who when parting
says
"have a blessed day"

that's
just too much pressure for me

why not
just

have a good day

i like that best of all
because there are so many
ways to have a good day

a day of north winds
blowing leaves
in a forest

a day of lying
in a soft meadow
under a baby-blanket-blue
sky

a day
when a new friend is found

a day
when a lost love
returns

a day
when your child takes
his first steps
toward your arms

a day when a good fight
is won

all these are good days

and who wouldn't
want
one

Wisconsin poet Thomas R. Smith is the author of five books of poems: Keeping the Star (1988), Horses of Earth (1994), The Dark Indigo Current (2000), Winter Hours (2005), and Waking Before Dawn (2007). He was included in The Best American Poetry 1999. His poems have also been featured on Garrison Keillor's Public Radio program Writer's Almanac and Ted Kooser's syndicated newspaper column American Life in Poetry.

The next two poems are from his second bookHorses of Earth, published by Holy Cow Press of Duluth, Minnesota.

Antonio Machado's Marriage

The young soldier and his girlfriend
leave the cheap pension at dawn.
They stop to admire shoes in a shop
window, then vanish into the subway
entrance at Puerta del Sol. and no one
knows yet what the clay of Extremadura
keeps to give back on the last day.

In a depleted mountain town along the Duero,
a man and a woman stand arm in arm
before the photographer's backdrop, a turn-
of-the-century garden. In their untrustworthy
paradise, the schoolteacher poet, unsmiling,
seems protective of the dark-haired bride
who will not live past seventeen. He will
later write, "She is with me always."

How many dusty plazas in early afternoon
are encased in the word "always":
Nights to drink from the philosophers
a guarded optimism, and write
by the ticking of a clock of vowels
sad and hopeful lines addressed
to the memory of an almond-like flowering
whose moment he called Leonor:
Narrow highway between tedium and dreams.

Once in November on the road to Madrid,
an old woman outside a tavern plucked
yellow windfall apples from deep grass
and bundled them in her shawl.
Later, on the bus, her husband
sliced carefully in quarters with a pocketknife
that fruit which the night frosts of Castile
had struck through with a watery sweetness.

In Soria golden leaves of poplars
quiver on foothills of the Guadarrama.
Something entering earth has promised to return,
as on the day the photographer
threw the black cloth over his head:
Leonor's hand rests lightly as a canary
on the dark sleeve destined to slant
a mournful ray over pages of her absence,
difficult faith that the poem can be that earth
which remembers the moist glow inside
each apple she will not have him cut for her.

High Pasture

In January,fearful that the fabric
is becoming ugly and cheap, and that the generosity
of the teacher's, unwanted, may turn and walk
away, I climb the snowed-in tractor road
from the barn to the high pasture.

Among iced furrows I look for a dull
shine in the year's beginning.
Stubble of autumn's harvest stitches
the white cap of the hill, and ochre, long-lined
poem the crow's tongue stutters toward.

Cornshucks flag barbed wire in the wind.
Binders and spreaders - occult apparatus
of a greener season - hunker in brooding.
Their forks and disks attend downward
a slowly pooling spring beneath the snow.

Old fields wait patiently for the new growth
that is their hope. The young are beautiful,
but the master weaver, wizening over his skeins,
sends cranes soaring on the sky of his loom.
For human beings, it is more important to create

beauty than embody it. The river parted
by immense boulders, the house folded among black trees,
songs sung by a man and a woman in the house on New Year's Day -
what are these but a fabric to clothe
out swiftly traveling senses in this world?

New Year's Day, 1990

Our very good friend Alice Folkart is back with us this week with a couple of temporarily lost, now found again, poems. (I've got to get more organized.)

Alice says that a poem, unlike a novel or the instructions for putting together a bicycle, can be written in very small chunks of time, in odd places. Alice Folkart lives in Hawaii and says she often "works" on her poems when paddling her yellow kayak in Kailua bay or walking through a coconut grove in a tropical downpour. She says she likes her words with a salty tang and a fresh breeze.

Plans For the Dog Next Door

Dog's life an iffy, barky, sparky way
all day, next door the poor wittle thing
the bell on his collar ring a ding
no matter how much I holler
can't hear a think 'cause he's barking.
He needs a vacation to get off the brink.

I know it's existential in a doggy way
all day, next door, Do I exist if I am alone?
Alone at home, all day? And they're away,
the two-legs that feed me. Don't they need me?
Bark, bark, bark. Even after dark, bark.
There is an ark that needs one more dog. He?

He barks, therefore he is, but I am not,
oh rot, another day, no way, I can't
bear another bark, another yipping, yapping
symphony of agonized self-examination.
They don't really love him he matches the couch,
looks good in group pictures and he has papers,

but, Oh, those capers convince me that they wouldn't
miss him, they could kiss him goodbye
if he should fly away, and if he simply
disappeared, and I said that a man with a beard
had been seen, behind the screen in their house,
they would shrug their shoulders, put in
for the insurance, and buy a big T. Ah me!.

Henri Coulette, born in 1927 , was an American poet whose first book, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems, was greeted with acclaim, his second, The Family Goldschmitt, received little attention after much of the first edition was accidentally pulped and never reissued. Dying in 1988, he did not publish another book during his life.

The next three poems are from The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette, a collection including both previously published poems and other poems never before published. The collection was prepared by Donald Justice and Robert Mezey and published in 1990 by the University of Arkansas Press.

In the 9th Year of the Literary War

to Charles

Well, poetry lovers of America,
this is about Heinz
and my stepping on his tail.

He was dreaming
57 variations
on that theme eternal,
the theme of Heinz,

and I was drunk,
having trouble with my feet,
having had trouble
with my head...

Lowell and Ginsberg and Bly were dead
Justice was missing,
so I turned to Wright,

whose face loomed
in the light
the dead gave off...

and it happened!
I mean, it really happened.
(Poetry lovers,
would I lie to you, would I)

The Pekingese next door took up the cry,
and the Afghan down the block,
and the Bull beyond,
and the cry went forth.

Dog to coyote to wolf,
the cry went forth,
Able to Baker to you.

Acid

Dostoevsky would have loved
his two o'clock kitchen scene,
the shadows, the sixty watts!

Bobbie's had his sugar cube:
his two eyes are the sprung gates
of Paradise. I can read

nothing there, and the silence
is not the silence of stones
and feathers but the burnished

hum of the electric house.
Timeless in the midst of time -
that's what Bobbie wants to be.

Is it timeless where you are,
Bobbie? but he doesn't say,
or he says, No, don't leave me,

and I hear the dripping clock,
drop by burning drop, and sense,
ah! my own trip coming on,

though it be to a gaming
table, or a bitten tongue,
or another night like this.

The Raincoat

21 times the Doctors
stitched and seamed you
every which way
like a crazy baseball

a walking slider

they tubed & wired
yr kidneys, yr cock
a light bulb in the mouth
and you'd give off light

pain is a kind of light

untold pain and you tell it
you tell me how
weary of knives they follow
night long laughing

I look over my shoulder

and you are gone
and my new white raincoat
the price tag still in it
is gone

I follow my old raincoat

after you down the street
named after you

through the Negro park
where the black winos saw you

a surgeon in his gown

I follow you
& yr pain doesn't matter
material things matter
& you

Economic conditions confound us all, and none more than this poet. This piece of befuddlement is from last week.

economic news from the porch at Casa Chiapas

i'm
on the porch
at Casa Chiapas
and there's a guy
with a power sander
next door
turning a beautiful morning
into a headache

apparently
he's getting ready to paint
the place,
an old two story victorian style
home like there's a lot of here
in the King Williams-Southtown
district, though here on South Alamo
we're out of the area where people
still live in these old houses
and a little closer to downtown
where the old houses are converted
to offices and old retail stores
into lawyer digs below
and very expensive lofts above

until recently
the two-story next door housed
an advertising agency

actually
there are two two-stories next door
and the ad agency had both -
now it seems they've consolidated
into one and i'm not sure
if that's good news or bad economy-wise

it could be this gathering of resources
signals new vigor,
a trimming of the fat
destined to lead our sour economy
into the upside again

or maybe they're just failing,
one house at a time

My next two poems are by Daniel Donaghy, from his book Street Fighting Poems, published in 2005 by BkMk Press at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

Donaghy has a B.A. degree from Kutztown University, an M.A. from Hollins College, and an M.F.A. from Cornell. At the time this book was published, he was completing a Ph.D in English at the University of Rochester. His poems have appeared in New Letters, Commonweal, Image, The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Cimarron Review, Texas Review, West Branch, and other journals. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the Cornell Council for the Arts.

He lives in Spencerport, New York.

Christmas

Two years after his death my father
still comes to snap me awake,
bringing back his burning hours,
high fever, delusions, and then release,
when we stood in the wake of what
we'd prayed for saying good-bye,
mother stroking his hair,
some small death happening in all of us,
his last words, I love you, the same
as our last each night before bed,
standing me ahead however
many years to when it's our turn,
you over me, or me over you,
nights like this precious,
your body firm and warm in my arms
with the window open and the scatter noises.
Some nights are easy and I sleep like this.
Some bring morphine, soiled sheets,
her whispering his name, my name,
over and over. You were there.
We need to talk about it:
how one of us will live without the other.

Fresh Start: Staining the Pool Deck

Again I set aside half a day
to put another coat on the pool deck,
again the gloves, again the stain can
and the beer can, fingers only half
an ache because I passed the brush
between hands each twenty strokes,
one useful thing my father taught me
while I whitewashed the hall steps
in the rowhouse I left half my life ago,
house of nicotine and dog hair,
house he left us alone in
on a street of houses rotting
against each other like teeth,
houses so far from this half acre
I have to squeeze my eyes to see it -
ripped linoleum, cracked walls,
dirt cellar of rats and mold,
nights of yelling behind doors...

Half a life later I'm trying to get
to the next day, after the deck dried,
when we swam in finally blue water.
I'm trying to work the float into this,
and the inner tubes, the handstands,
the red and yellow beach ball.
Enough about my long-dead father,
food stamps, government cheese.
What about my wife asleep
cross-legged in the Adirondack chair,
my daughter's brilliant pink suit,
the gray fox panting at the wood's edge?
And what about how cold the beer was,
how bright the sun over the crab apple tree
when I sank to the soundless bottom
and watched my daughter's kicking

Lucky are those who make it through
doors just before the locks click shut,
who turn corners and lose the way back.
Lucky those who get new starts:
Richard Wright after Memphis,
Dylan at Royal Albert Hall,
Raskolnikov crying at Sonia's knees,
so ashamed he cannot look up.

James Hutchings is a 58-year-old poet, truck driver, friend of "Here and Now." He says he started writing poetry when he was in school, playing in garage bands and writing songs. A sort of natural progression to poetry, he says.

Telltale

The rain won't come in
it tries and tries
little splatters
across the windshield
use the wiper once
I saw a rainbow
six A.M. it was
don't know if it's
an omen of happy times
or just water and dust
refracting from
the lazy rising sun
it's warmer now
tendons, muscles, bones
easier to unkink
less bulky clothing
not such a bite
the morning air pure
squirrels and birds
rabbits and butterflies
return to their playground
green hills loom
clouds breaking
maybe that rainbow
is a good omen
after all.....

My next poems are by Jose Emilio Pacheco from the book An Ark for the Next Millennium. It is a bilingual book with the original Spanish and the English translation by Margaret Sayers Peden. The book also includes outstanding drawings by one of Mexico's best known artists, Francisco Toledo.

Pacheco, born in 1939 in Mexico City, is a Mexican poet, essayist, translator, novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the major Mexican poets of the second half of the 20th century.

He has taught literature at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City, as well as the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Essex, and many others in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

He has been awarded numerous poetry prizes, Federico Garcia Lorca International Poetry Prize in 2005, the Octavio Paz in 2003, Pablo Neruda in 2004, Ramón López Velarde in 2003, Alfonso Reyes in 2002, José Asunción Silva in 1996), and Xavier Villaurrutia. He was elected by unanimous acclaim to the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua in 2006 and has been a member of El Colegio Nacional since 1986.

As with these poems, Pacheco is known for writing poems in which animals act as his alter ego.

Equation to the First Degree with Unknown Quantity

In the city's last river, through error
or spectral incongruity, suddenly
I saw a dying fish. It was gasping,
poisoned by filthy water as lethal as
the air we breathe. What frenzy i
   the ring of its lips
   the gaping zero of its mouth.
   Nothingness perhaps,
   word beyond expression,
   the last voice
   of nature in the valley.
the fish's only recourse was
a choice between asphyxias.
that double agony haunts me,
the dying water and its habitant:
   its doleful eyes on me,
   its will to be hard,
   its irrevocable sentence,
I will never know what it tried to tell me,
that voiceless fish that spoke only the
omnipotent language of our mother, death.

The Birds

My earliest memory of Veracruz
is that heavy groundswell:
black birds that seemed to carry night on their wings
"They're called pichos," someone told me
they must have been starlings or grackles, or of that feather
The name, though, doesn't matter: what I remember
is the dark garrulousness, the fear,
the mysterious randomness of the way in which the birds,
like giant worms or locusts, obscured the trees.
They fell like meteorites from cornices and power lines
an unarmed throng attempting vainly to stem the tide of
   catastrophe

The twilight, suffocated, faded and died
ashes of lifeless fire
                  high in the branches
The sky itself was a dark bird
as unexpectedly silence settled in the air
We checked into
                  the hotel after the long journey
My grandfather
               bought the Mexico City newspaper
He read the news of that bomb
of that place with that strange, faraway name
of the death that descended like the night and the birds
of those living bodies snuffed out in the flames

This next poem, written in 1967, acquired a political content four years later when in 1971 a dreaded police division called "falcons" appeared in Mexico City.

Biology of the Falcon

Falcons are eagles that can be tamed
they are dogs
to those wolves of the air
they are creatures of a bloody servitude

      They live for death
      Their vocation is to mete out death
      they are the custodians of death
      and torpor

Falcons      police hitmen
Sadism and servility earns them
only miserable scraps: some amends for
our impotent envy of wings

Indecision is a mark of these cool autumn days. This is from one of those days last week.

but then...

finding myself
turning into something
of a cave creature
i decide
today
is the day i will go out
explore
look for some photo
opportunities
stretch my legs
with a little walk in the brush
visit a farm
moo to a cow
cluck to a chicken
grab a pitchfork
and pitch some hey
why not
pretend it's midnight
and howl at the moon
or
maybe just
open my mind to the
sunshine
smile at the wind
and smell some grass

but
then
it's awful nice
here
air conditioner blowing
cool
cool music
lots of room
friendly young ladies
to refill
my coffee mug
and a good poem's bound to show up
if i just sit here long enough

but
then
we passed
some really nice
picture spots last weekend
when it was way too dark to stop
and we were both too hungry to stop
and a clean bathroom was still 15 miles away
i should go back there and take take those pictures today

but
then...

Here's a little Hollywood story from Charles Bukowski, a Hollywood story with a happy ending.

The poem is from Open All Night, one of many collections to come out since Bukowski's death in 1994. This one is part of a series published by HarperCollins.

the guitar player

he came from South Carolina
with his young wife and
two kids
had a new red truck
and a guitar.
he came to Hollywood
to sing.
you know
how it is
when the hometown folks
tell you
how good you are.

he got a job
landscaping
lived in the
front apartment with his
wife and kids.
I got to know him
went down and
drank with him
listened to him
sing -
not bad
not great
but not
bad
but you know that
the neighborhood
was full of guitars
and singers
not bad or great
but
good.

his name was
Rex
and then Rex
met another guy
who lived in a back
unit
named Del.
Del sold grass
ad speed and
sometimes
H.

Rex started to
hang with Del.
I didn't care much
for Del.
he had a mongrel dog
he kept tied
with a rope
and
he beat the dog
too much.

soon Rex
stopped singing
and he
stopped working.
his wife
got a job
cleaning house
for some rich guy
in the hills
and maybe as part
of her job
he gave her one
of his cars to use
and the kids ran
up and down
the sidewalk
in front
and I didn't see
Rex much
anymore.
he just stayed
in his room
with the shades
pulled down.

I asked his
wife, "is Rex
all right?"

"he's got
sleeping sickness,"
she told me.

well
Rex lucked out.
one day
he
looked around and
put his family
his guitar
and
a few things
into that
red truck
and drove
all the way back
to South Carolina.

soon after that
Del o.d.'d
and they
carried him out
in a
zipped-up
black body bag
an old one
and his
naked feet
stuck out of
the end
as they took him
down the walkway.
somebody took in
the mongrel
and Rex's wife
wrote us
from S.C.
that Rex was
singing again
he was thinking of
going to Nashville
and he had
a good job
and it
was nice
that
they had known us.
we
were the only
people
in the court
who had
a little flower
and
vegetable garden
in front
of our place.
it made think
of home
and Rex
says
"hello."

And now, two poems from another friend of "Here and Now," Joanna M. Weston.

Joanna has had poetry, reviews, and short stories published in anthologies and journals for twenty years. She has two middle-readers, The Willow Tree Girl and Those Blue Shoes. She also has a book of poetry, A Summer Father, poetry, published by Frontenac House of Calgary.

Summer Shoes

dance out the door
straps waving as they waltz
down the street
one - two - three
one - two - three
they turn, buckles glinting
to fly above the corner
spin over a roof-top
glide up a sunbeam

a dazzling thread of summer
they rise
dancing into cloud-land
like wild green balloons

Overnight Visitors

open sleeping-bags
dirty socks
the smell
of peanut butter on toast
before 9 a.m.

these teens toss on strange beds
are polite before breakfast
prop open their eyes
under weighted dreams
before cycling long hills
to the next campsite

they leave signatures
in the guest book
a winning Canasta score
wet towels
and the scent of youth

The next poem is from Winter Numbers, a book of poems by Marilyn Hacker, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.

Marilyn Hacker was born 1942 in Bronx, New York. She is a poet, critic, and reviewer. Her other books of poetry include Going Back to the River (1990), Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Presentation Piece (1974), the book for which she won the National Book Award.

Elysian Fields

"Champs Elysees of Broadway" says the awning
of the cafe where, every Sunday morning,
young lawyers in old jeans ripped at the knees
do crosswords. Polyglot Lebanese
own it: they've taken on two more shopfronts
and run their banner down all three at once.
Four years ago, their sign, "Au Petit Beurre,"
was so discreet, that, meeting someone there,
I'd tell her the street corner, not the name.
They were in the right place at the right time.
Meanwhile, the poor are trying hard enough.
Outside, on Broadway, people sell their stuff
laid out on blankets, cardboard cartons, towels.
A stout matron with lacquered auburn curls
circles the viridian throw rug
and painted plaster San Martin to hug
a thinner, darker woman, who hugs her
back volubly in Spanish - a neighbor,
I guess, and guess they still have houses.
The man with uncut, browned French paperbacks,
the man with two embroidered gypsy blouses
and three pilled pitiful pairs of plaid slacks
folded beside him on the pavement where
there was a Puerto Rican hardware store
that's been a vacant storefront for two years
may not. There's a young couple down the block
from our corner: she's tall, gaunt, gangly, Black;
he's short, quick, volatile, unshaven, white.
They set up shop dry mornings around eight.
I've seen him slap her face, jerking her thin
arm like a rag doll's - a dollar kept from him,
she moves too slow, whore, stupid bitch...."She's
my wife," he tells a passing man who stops
and watches. If anyone did call the cops
it would be to prevent them and their stacks
of old Vogues and outdated science texts
from blocking access to the "upscale bar"
where college boys get bellicose on beer.
"Leave him," would I say? Does she have keys
to an apartment, to a room, a door
to close behind her? What we meant by "poor"
when I was twenty, was a tenement
with clanking pipes and roaches; what we meant
was up six flights of grimed, piss-pungent stairs,
four babies and a baby-faced welfare
worker forbidden to say "birth control."
I was almost her, on the payroll
of New York State Employment Services
- the East 14th Street Branch, whose task it was
to send day workers, mostly lack, to clean
other people's houses. Five-fifteen
and I walked east, walked south, walked up my four
flights. Poor was a neighbor, was next door,
is still a door away. The door is mine.
Outside the poor work Broadway in the rain.
The cappuccino drinkers watch them pass
under the awning from behind the lass.

Now, one more from me before we close down for the week. This is a little report on an overnight trip D and I took a couple of weekends ago.

serendipity

up
since 5
and now
and hour and a half later
fed and coffeed
i watch
from our high hill roost
as the sun washes
over the Medina valley
below

low clouds
on the horizon
turn pink
as the lights
in the little Alsatian town
of Castroville
at the bottom of this hill
begin to fade
in competition
with the day

it was a serendipitous
ending
to yesterday that
brought us here
today

i entered the wrong date
when i made the online reservations
for our stay
at the place where we
intended to go yesterday
when we left home
so
with no room
we decided to just
take a long drive in the country
and a hundred miles later
ended up here
at the Alsace Inn
on top of this hill
where dinner and a drink
turned into an overnight stay

we laughed
as we got up this morning
remembering
that it was almost exactly
15 years ago
that we had stopped here
for dinner
and agreed we'd have to come back
sometime
and stay a night or two

it just took us a while
to get
around to it

Couldn't be Columbus Day without the Christopher Columbus Italian Society Pumpkin Patch. (Not to mention the spaghetti and the best meatballs I've ever tasted.)

As I dream some more about those meatballs, i have to tell you that that's it for this week, the third, already, in October. Hope to see a couple of you in Corpus Christi tomorrow. If not, maybe next week with our next issue of "Here and Now."

In the meantime, remember that all of the material presented in "Here and Now" remains the property of its creators. The blog itself is produced by and is the property of me...allen itz.

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Mariposa Friday, October 10, 2008

III.10.2.

The past week as been a busy one for me, making, as mentioned in a couple of this week's poems, a trip to the coast where I took some pictures (including some in this issue) and arranged to do a signing and reading next week in Corpus Christi. I invite all my friends from that area to join me. I'll be at Half-Price Books on South Padre Island Drive, Saturday the 18th. More information is available at the store.

Anyway, for this week, this is what I have.

From my library

Langston Hughes
Hanna Howard
Seitu J. Hart
Sandra M. Gilbert
Federico Garcia Lorca
Brian Branchfield
James Laughlin
Andrey Voznesensky
Cornelius Eady
Tao Lin

From friends of "Here and Now"

Joe Miller
Katie Sottak
Mary Jo Caffrey
Christopher George
Gary Blankenship

And the usual several from me.

I begin this week with several poems by Langston Hughes from the book Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Vintage Classics in 1990.

Hughes, born in in Joplin, Missouri in 1902, was a poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, and columnist best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance.

Due to the separation of his parents, Hughes was raised by his grandmother, whose storytelling skills he claimed to have influenced the rest of his life. After her death, he lived for two years with family friends and later returned to his mother after she had remarried.

While in grammar school, he was designated class poet, because, according to Hughes, he was one of only two black students in the class and the teacher, who always emphasized the importance of rhythm in poetry, assumed he, as a black person, must surely have it. During high school in Cleveland, Ohio, he wrote for the school newspaper, edited the yearbook, and began to write his first short stories, poetry, and dramatic plays. His first piece of jazz poetry, When Sue Wears Red, was written while he was still in high school.

Despite a difficult relationship with his father who had left the United States because of it's racism and refused to return, Hughes went to him for help paying for college. Initially, his father had hoped for Hughes to attend a university abroad, and to study for a career in engineering. He did not support his son's desire to be a writer. Eventually, the son and the father came to a compromise agreement. To get the support of his father, Hughes agreed to study engineering, so long as he could attend Columbia. While at Columbia in 1921, Hughes managed to maintain a B+ grade average but left in 1922 because of racial prejudice within the institution. At the same time, his interests had come to revolve more around the neighborhood of Harlem than his studies, though he continued writing poetry.

After leaving Columbia, Hughes worked various odd jobs, serving a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone in 1923 and spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe. In Europe, Hughes left the S.S. Malone for a temporary stay in Paris.

After becoming part of the black expatriate community in Paris in the early 1920s, he returned to the United States in 1924 to live with his mother in Washington D.C., eventually gaining white-collar employment in 1925 as a personal assistant to the scholar Carter G. Woodson within the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Not satisfied with the demands of the work and time constraints this position placed on the hours he spent writing, Hughes quit this job for one as a busboy in a hotel. It was while working as a busboy that Hughes would encounter the poet Vachel Lindsay. Impressed with the poems Hughes showed him, Lindsay publicized his discovery of a new black poet, though by this time, Hughes' earlier work had already been published in magazines and was about to be collected into his first book of poetry.

The following year, Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University, eventually receiving a B.A. degree in 1929 and a Litt.D. in 1943. Except for travels that included parts of the Caribbean, Harlem was Hughes' primary home for the remainder of his life.

Langston Hughes died in 1967 at age 65 from complications after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer.

Song for Billie Holiday

What can purge my heart
     Of the song
     And the sadness?
What can purge my heart
     But the song
     Of the sadness
What can purge my heart
     Of the sadness
     Of the song?

Do not speak of sorrow
With dust in her hair,
Or bits of dust in eyes
A chance wind blows here.
The sorrow that I speak of
Is dusted with despair.

Voice of muted trumpet,
Cold brass in warm air.
Bitter television blurred
By the sound that shimmers -
     Where?

Old Walt

Old Walt Whitman
Went finding and seeking.
Finding less than sought
Seeking more than found,
Every detail minding
Of the seeking and the finding

Pleasured equally
In seeking as in finding,
Each detail minding,
Old Walt went seeking
And finding.

Desert

Anybody
Better than
Nobody.

In the barren dusk
Even the snake
That spirals
Terror on the sand -

Better than nobody
In this lonely
Land

One

Lonely
As the wind
On the Lincoln
Prairies.

Lonely
As a bottle of licker
On a table
All by itself

End

There are
No clocks on the wall,
and no time,
No shadows that move
From dawn to dusk
Across the floor.

There is neither light
Nor dark
Outside the door.

There is no door!

This is something I wrote a week or two ago. I suppose it could be a companion piece to "come, Lord Jesus, be our guest" piece I used here a couple of issues ago.

if i believed

if i
believed
in Jesus Christ
as my lord
and savior
i'd try not to be
an asshole about it
as so many are
and i wouldn't be
one of those
staid and dour
churchgoing
stiff-upper-lip-
pew-potatoes
that populate
all those grand
chuches
with robed priests
and high-rise
steeples

none
of that corporate
salvation
for me

i'd be
a holy-rolling
hell
on wheels
singing
dancing
look-at-me-lord
fool
every minute
of every hour
of every day
of the year
and not
give a shit
what
people thought
of me

i mean
for christ's sake
pious
is ok
but
resurrection
and eternal life
that'd be
something to jump
and shout about

bum rush the page is a book of poem by performance poets published by Three Rivers Press in 2001.

Here are two poets from the book.

The first poet is Hannah Howard from Brooklyn.

soulgroovin ditty #7

little green men play a samba in my mind
maddening little rhythm
it gets me every time
i dance the bossanova to appease them
the funky disco elves in my head
i find myself singing
just to please them
snatches of songs long forgotten
still they play incessantly
forever and ever
pestering me
forcing me to move my feet keeping time
i whip
i whirl
throw in the bump
do a little grind
they keep me dancing
twirling
prancing
body movin
funky groovin
the loco little disco elves
the people/party/happening elves
the soultrain/getdownboogie elves
that gyrate in my mind

And a second poet from the book, Seitu J. Hart from Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Sundays

I went to the church and walked by niggas dealin
got in the church and watched single mothers give 10% of their income to the
upkeep of the church and pastoral homes in the suburbs while they reside
   in chic urban projects
where pastors rarely drive their
lexuses, benzes or town cars
I watched folks like me lose their inhibitions and praise the Lord,
   reminding me in the small
ways of my ancestors and their spiritual discourses.
I sat open-mouthed and watched homos sing and direct revenue generating
   mass choirs while
being castigated.
Chided.
CONDEMNED.
I laughed loudly catching the eyes of stern ushers.
Their looks forced me to concentrate on the "WORD" and the sounds of the
   Pastor's AMEN
CORNER as he made the connotation that all PHARAOHS were evil, satanic,
   based on the tales
of MOSES and the PHARAOH down in EGYPT LAND making
me to go home to ponder, chant, meditate, stand before the tree PRAY.
   Light candles Speak with
the CREATOR consult my astrology books touch my stones reread my
   favorite bibical passage
to figure out this madness
Then the answer came: WRITE A POEM.

Next, I have Joe Miller a new friend of "Here and Now" making his first appearance here.

Joe is an 18 year old country-folk singer/songwriter and poet from Dallas, Texas. He says you can listen to some of his music on his My Space page.

myspace.com/joemiller155292

from my hotel window

I watched the night sink its
coyote teeth into gutted cat meat.
Shadows under street lights stood prouder
than the objects they reflected.

The odor of human smells and
the melody of human songs climbed
to my window like bacteria from a rotten peach.

The asphalt-black hours rolled on.

As the sun started her morning coffee
a man hid behind the proud shadows.
His heavy, green eyes rested in wooden
hands.

As the sun finished her morning coffee,
he had embraced his mortality with aching
solitude.

From my hotel window,
I watched him cheer for every
mundane detail dawn had to offer.

Black Crow Blues

For the last few nights
I've watched a black bird
land on my porch to drink
out of flower pots and
eat worms and june bugs.

But tonight when I opened
my window the poor bird
was lying under a bush.
I had a dead bird on my porch.

After a moment of silence
I scooped him up in a trash
bag and threw him over my
fence so a mindless black dog
could eat a mindless black crow.

I'm giving back to the natural
order of things,

but I've been feeling a little
lonely lately and thinking
that I want to be like that bird.
Eat, sleep, pro-create and
never question anything.

I changed my mind today.

At least when I die
I may or may or not find
what I'm looking for.

Born in 1936 Sandra M. Gilbert, Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis, is a literary critic and poet who has published widely in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. She is perhaps best known for her collaborative critical work with Susan Gubar, with whom she co-authored, among other works, The Madwoman in the Attic in 1979, considered a landmark in 1970s American feminism.

Gilbert received her B. A. from Cornell University, her M. A. from New York University, and her Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University in 1968. She has taught at California State University, Hayward, Williams College, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, and Indiana University. She held the C. Barnwell Straut Chair of English at Princeton University from 1985 until 1989. She was named the M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cornell University for the spring 2007 semester. Gilbert will be the Lurie Distinguished Visiting Professor for the Creative Writing MFA program at San Jose State University in the Spring 2009 semester.

The mother of three and grandmother of four, Gilbert lives in Berkeley, California, and in Paris, France.

The next several poems are from her book, Kissing the Bread, published by WW Norton in 2000. I selected the pieces from a sub-section in the book titled Some Definitions.

Some Definitions

1.Aperitif

Take a cup of breath,
stir in a silence, stones on a shore,

twirl, whip -
add glinting, minnows,

groan of oars
and beat in.

and beat in
the darkness that creeps from the inland mountains,

the darkness that clots the eye of the tiger,
the rat, the pig.

Beat in one clump,
the another.

5. Fog on the Coast

Lid on thin
milk across the light,
skin of mist

above the waters,
weight
of vacancy pressing

against the eyes, great
shapeless
throat of silence

swallowing everything:
here's where
trawlers disappear, black

bluffs melt, ambitious
summer houses
step into nowhere

and only
the closeup has a chance,
the mouse and her grain,

the jagged
pebble, the nettle
standing its groudn

among a few spare
outlines of sound -
the faint
hint of a gull, the sea
still hungrily
thumping its table.

7. Enormous Wind

buffets the sea, creasing the blue-
green shine, rock-polishing
the dazzle cast by billows
of light, by bursts of sudden
uncoloring, un patterning

the waves that just an hour ago
were staid and shapely
in their mild arc and spray,
their falling hopes.
their rising expectations

8. Mexican Sage

Purple but minimal,
as if the curled-up
hardly daring petals

were so embarrassed
by the thread of reddish
pink desire pumping

through the long coarse
stems they ride
that they'd grow smaller

rather than grow at all.
yet nonetheless they
have to keep on

beading the gray-green
quiet with this
humiliating

flush, have to
love the touch of
touch, the quiver

in tiny silence,
have to be
plush in the cold.

Here are two poems I wrote on successive days last week. They kind of go together, so I'm posting them together.

to the coast

heading
for the coast

short trip

overnight

take some
pictures
maybe
sell a book
or two

thinking
again how good
were the years
i lived there

a smaller
but fuller life
there
than the one
i moved to

but life
is like that
full
of choices
that
once chosen
can never be
undone

each new
day
a new page
blank
waiting
to be filled

no way
of knowing
how different
the new page
might become
had a different
story
been told
four pages
back

best
to remember
with a smile and
a small heart tug
rather
than the false
nostalgia of
regret

back home

the dogs
acted
like they were glad
to see
me
and the cat
was like she didn't
give a damn
but then rubbed
against my leg
when the dogs
weren't looking

good trip

sold a couple
of books

made arrangements
for a signing
and reading
in a couple of weeks
where i might
sell some more

enough outcome
to justify
the hotel bill
to IRS
anyway

took
some pictures -
just a few -
not much can be done
with a large flat
body of water
unless a fish jumps
or something
and you happen
to catch it

had to walk
way the hell
out on a jetty
to get it but
did get a nice
shot
of the marina
and downtown
from out in the bay

damn near fell
off
at one particularly
slippery point
proving once again
that i'm just too damn old
to be climbing around
on rocks stuck out
in Corpus Christi Bay

saw some old buildings
that didn't used to be old

talked to some old people
who haven't held up
any better than the buildings

buildings
or
people -
funny how we see the wrinkles
first
then after a while
you're back
to seeing
what you saw
thirty years ago

the only thing
that saves us from ultimate
final
depression
i think

the capacity
to look past the present
and see the past
as if things were still
the way the were

back
home in time
for lunch

checked the fridge

found some fried
talapia
left over
from night before
last

smells
a little fishy
but
that's why God
invented
ketchup

it'll
fix
most anything

Next, I have several poems by Federico Garcia Lorca from the book In Search of Duende.

Garcia Lorca, born in 1898, was a Spanish poet and dramatist, as well as a painter, pianist, and composer. He was a member of the Generation of '27, a group, including Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, who would become influential artists in Spain.

He was killed by Nationalist partisans in August, 1936, at the age of 38 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Night

Candle, lamp,
lantern, and firefly.

The constellation
of the dart.

Little windows of gold
trembling,
and cross upon cross
rocking in the dawn.

Candle,lamp,
lantern, and firefly

(English translation by Jaime DeAngulo)

Seville

Seville is a tower
full of fine archers.

Seville to wound.
Cordoba to die in.

A city that lurks
for long rhythms,
and twists them
like labyrinths.
Like tendrils of a vine
burning.

Seville to wound!

Under the arch of the sky,
across the clear plain,
she shoots the constant
arrow of her river.

Cardoba to die in!

And mad with horizons,
she mixes in her wine
the bitterness of Don Juan
and the perfection of Dionysys.

Seville to wound.
Always Seville to wound!

(English translation by Lysander Kemp)

Early Morning

But like love,
the archers
are blind.

Over the green night
the arrows
leave tracks of warm
lilies.

The keep of the moon
breaks purple clouds
and the quivers
fill with dew.

Ah, but like love,
the archers
are blind!

(English Translation by W.S. Merwin)

Painting by Katie Sottak

We extend the "Here and Now" family this week with these three pieces (one above and two below) by artist Katie Sottak,

Katie is currently working on her bachelor of fine arts degree in visual art at Florida Atlantic University. Her work has been featured in a gallery in Stuart, Florida and adorns the walls of cafes in that area. She is very active in the numerous art festivals presented in south Florida.

I meant literally what I said about extending the "Here and Now" family. Katie is the daughter of poet, friend, and frequent "Here and Now" contributor, Michael Sottak.

Painting by Katie Sottak

Brian Blanchfield was born in Winston-Salem in 1973. He grew up in Charlotte and Paris, Tennessee. Now in New York he teaches creative writing and literature at Pratt Institute of Art. His poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines big and small, and he writes reviews and essays for Talisman and American Book Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and sometimes Tucson.

The next poem is from Blanchfield's book Not Even Then, published by the University of California Press in 2004.

Two Moons

The moon will all but disappear, which is to say the world is in the way
again. It will take two hours to return to full, which is what we, in our
way, call a whole half lit.

The last eclipse I didn't understand what I do now.

I was stunned by lawn sculptures of waves outside the long lobbied
Delano on South Beach, its oceanside wide open, its twenty-five-foot
billowing white drapes sucked to my back and then not and then sucked
again, its cavity fighting mine.

The galaxy is all wrong with a nine-dollar cosmopolitan. I couldn't get
daylight's alibi.someone said gimme and O. I said gimme another. We
couldn't get the bartender's attention. Obtundity nearly knocked me
over.

Dennis said he didn't know about lunar ones but the wind that rushes
in when the sun goes out brings the scent of your secret desire.

At Grand Army Plaza, by nine lanes spinning into fewer, I make it to
the middle. The moon is already phased to the size of an eyelash, or
someone's distant hand cupped at his sunned brow, making you out.
Poor white parenthesis, is everything inessential? Should everything
come between? Someone cheer the sidereal.

But no on has outsprinted our coverlet to star in a warmth on rock. I
imagine it new, another tournament beginning, an open, an invitational.

This next piece comes from my people-watchinig, an observational piece, source of much of what I do.

friends

chipmunk-cheeked
from the
chemo

she
lunches
with friends
on a hamburger
and rings

laughter
and loud talk
interrupting
each other
to finish sentences
as friends often do

there
is a relish
to every moment
every laugh
every interruption

friends
for now

friends
forever

no matter
what happens...

friends

James Laughlin 30 October 1914 – 12 November 1997) was a poet and literary book publisher who founded New Directions Publishers after being told by Ezra Pound, "You're never going to be any good as a poet. Why don't you take up something useful?" Following Pound's suggestion, he founded New Directions with money from his wealthy family. Despite Pound's suggestion, he continued to write poetry.

Laughlin died in 1997 of complications related to a stroke in Norfolk, Connecticut, at age 83.

The Longest Journey

As a young man, full of eagerness,
I set out to conquer my little
sphere. If it were only a finger's
width, it would be mine, all mine.
And I walked, as the old poet said,
"multas per gentes et multa per aequora"
in pursuit of the voices that called me.
And some were where I expected
to find them and some were not.
And as I drew near to them many
faded away and were no longer audible.
Now, in old age I think back to those
I loved rather than to anything
I took from anyone for my enrichment,
for I know now that "the beauty is in
the walking; we are destroyed
by destinations."

Mary Jo Caffrey is a retired Air Force member living in Gretna, Nebraska. She enjoys writing poetry for children and adults. she is a member of the Nebraska Writers Guild and Nebraska Writers Workshop.

After one of my general solicitations for poems, Mary sent this really beautiful piece to me and it got stuck in a crack or something and I just found it again.

A Good One

God knows I miss him,
for all our jawing about money and food
and children scattered like apples from a barrel.
Can't see much any more,
this old house dim inside
with echoes of him.

If I sit quietly in my chair
and the wind isn't rattling the window,
just beyond the beat in my ears, I hear that laugh
buzzing round my head,
can feel his breath on my cheek
and that tickle.

Too flighty, ma said, look at those legs,
long, and feet like beaver paddles,
meant for walking.
Oh, but that smile!
How it beguiled, sweet scent of something good
on his skin, a man bubbling greatness and me great, too,
by association.
Glory! He danced on that old dirt barn floor
like it was air and he gravity-free under
the spell of strings on Pa's violin.

On our wedding day, Mamma cried and hugged me tight,
her advice, "keep a good coop,"
my dowry sure enough.
Our farm prospered through three boys and one girl,
his joy like light rain through all the good that passes through -
in marriage, in life, on our farm.

Why he left I suppose is just nature,
sirens on every rock, behind every hill
too much for me, just a plain farmer's wife
with only the dream to live and grow old
with my man and sown seeds.

In time, when I'm ready to go -
that lasting part of me
will follow a wandering bee
lilting on a soft westerly breeze
to blossom-full branches
promising summer's great bounty
and shading the grass where he rests.

Andrey Voznesensky was born in 1933 in Moscow, where he still lives and works.

Early in his life, he was fascinated with painting and architecture and, in 1957, graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute. His enthusiasm for poetry, though, proved to be stronger than architecture. While still a teenager, he sent his poems to Boris Pasternak who became a friend and strong influence.

His first poems were published in 1958 and, in the mid-1960s, when the Cold War began to show signs of thaw, he was one of several Russian poets, including Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina, who attained a kind of pop star status in Russia and drew large crowds in Europe and the United States. (I think I remember Yevtushenko even appearing on television's Ed Sullivan Show, which had to have been a first.)

In 1978 Voznesensky was awarded the USSR State Prize. He is an honorable member of ten academies, including Russian academy of learning (1993), the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Parisian Académie Goncourt and others.

A minor planet 3723 Voznesenskij, discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1976 is named after him.

These next two poems are from the book, Voznesensky - selected poems, published by Hill and Wang in 1966. The poems were translated into English by Herbert Marshall.

Bikes

    To Victor Bokov

The bikes are lying
in the wood in the dew
the road is shining
through birch trees new

they reached there, they fell,
handlebar to handlebar
pedal to pedal
mudguard to mudguard

you'll never stir them -
not on your life -
those torpid monsters
with chains intertwined

so big and surprised
stare from the earth
at hazy-green skies
resin oozes
        bees purr
amid clamorous plenty
mint and camomile deep
they lie
forgotten and sleep
        and sleep and sleep

The next poem was first dedicated to Leo Tolstoy, but to everyone in the know at the time, it was clearly meant to honor Boris Pasternak, the great Russian author and poet in such ill flavor with the authorities that he turned down his Nobel Prize out of fear that if he left Russia to collect it he would be stripped of his citizenship and not allowed to return.

Crowns and Roots

They carried him not to entombment.
They carried him out to enthronement.

Browner than bronze,
Greyer than granite,
smoking like a locomotive,
the artist lived,
        dishevelled,
To him more divine were shovels
Than sacred like lamps!

Languished his lilac tree...
Like starfall
    in sweat,
His back so steamed
As in the oven - bread!...

His house gapes wide open.
Floors yawning holes.
In the kitchen no one.
In the district - not a soul.

The artists are departing,
As in a cathedral,
        bareheaded,
To birch trees and oak trees
Through humming green meadows.

Their flight - a victory
Their departure - a sunrise
To plains and planets
From tinselled lies.

Crowns fall from the woods.
But powerfully beneath the land
Twist and turn the roots
Of gnarled and wrinkled hands.

This is another piece from my brief visit to the coast last week.

that's all there is to it

Fred's
Fresh
Fried Fish

on a little spit
of sand
sticking out
into
Oso Bay

fish
anyway
you like it
as long as you like it
fried

and the beer
of your choice
as long as you choose
Lone Star or
Tecate

big
windows
on either side
suck gulf breezes
across scarred wood tables

in the kitchen
the sound of grease bubbling
at the tables
fried fish on paper plates
rings

of beer bottle dew
hot sauce
ketchup
plastic forks
and jalapenos

lots
of talk
mostly loud
mostly
profane

a place
to eat fried fish
Fred says
and that's all
there is to it

Cornelius Eady was born in 1954 in Rochester, New York and is an author of seven volumes of poetry. His first book of poetry, Kartunes was published in 1980, with several books of poetry following it. Recently awarded honors include the Strousse Award from Prairie Schooner, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, and individual Fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Eady has also recently collaborated with jazz composer Deidre Murray in the production of several works of musical theater, including You Don't Miss Your Water, Running Man, Fangs, and Brutal Imagination. In 1996, Eady and fellow poet Toi Derricote founded Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization for black poets. Cornelius Eady has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, The Writer's Voice, The College of William and Mary, and Sweet Briar College. Formerly an associate professor of English and Director of the Poetry Center at State University of New York at Stony Brook and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the City College of New York, Eady currently lives in South Bend, Indiana and is on the faculty of the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Notre Dame.

The next poem is from his book Brutal Imagination, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 2001. The book includes two cycles of poems. The second, Running Man, was drawn from his libretto for the music-drama by the same name. The poems in the second cycle are written as if narrated by the black kidnapper Susan Smith invented to cover up her killing or her two sons.

In this poem, Eady notes that the sections in itallics are taken directly from Smith's handwritten confession.

Birthing

When I left home on Tuesday, October 25, I
was very emotionally distraught

I have yet
to breathe.

I am in the back of her mind,
Not even a notion.

A scrap of cloth, the way
A man lopes down a street.

Later, a black woman will say:
"We knew exactly who she was describing."

At this point, I have no language
No tongue, no mouth.

I am not me, yet
I am just an understanding.

__________

As I rode and rode and rode, I felt
Even more anxiety.

Susan parks on a bridge,
And stares over the rail.
Below her feet, a dark blanket of river
She wants to pull over herself,
children and all.

I am not the call of the current.

She is heartbroken
She gazes down,
And imagines heaven.

__________

I felt I couldn't be a good mom anymore, but I didn't want
my children to grow up without a mom.

I am not me, yet.
At the bridge,
One of Susan's kids cries,
So she drives to the lake,
To the boat dock.

I am not yet opportunity.

__________

I had never felt so lonely
and so sad.

Who shall be a witness?
Bullfrogs, water fowl.

__________

When I was at John D. Long Lake
I had never felt so scared
and unsure.

I've yet to be called.
Who will notice?
Moths, dragonflies,
Field mice.

__________

I wanted to end my life so bad
And was in my car ready to
Go down the ramp into
the water

My hand isn't her hand
Panicked on the
Emergency Break.

__________

And I did go part way,
But I stopped.

I am not Gravity,
The water lapping against
The gravel.

__________

I went again and stopped.
I then got out of the car.

Susan stares at the sinking.
My muscles aren't her muscles,
Burned from pushing.
The lake has no appetite,
But it takes the car slowly,
Swallow by swallow like a snake.

__________

Why was I feeling this way?
Why was everything so bad
In my life?

Susan stares at the taillights
As the slide from here
to hidden.

__________

I have no answers
To these questions.

She only has me,
After she removes our hands
From out ears.

Our Liverpool born, Baltimore residing friend, Christopher George is back with us this week with two short reports from the center of the financial storms about to chew out or rear ends all the way to our neckbones.

Black Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

The stock market crashes,
politicians vie and fuss,
neglect to reach a solution;

still, this autumn morning,
a mockingbird springs onto
a "No Entry" sign, tail up,

and fall crocus thrust
pinkly through the loam.

Red, White, and Blewy

While Congress debates
the Stock Market bailout, a
kite bobs above the Mall.

As I foraged through the poetry shelves at Half-Price Books, I ran across this strange pink little book of poems by 23-year-old poet Tao Lin titled Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. His other work includes a novel, Eeeeee Eee Eeee, a short story collection, Bed, and an earlier poetry collection, You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am. He also maintains a blog, Reader of Depressing Books.

It's a fascinating book. And funny, too.

I know at all times that in four hours i will feel completely different

when you kill yourself
the universe learns how to console you
nothing i type is true; for example
i am going to go outside
and meet interesting people
actually i will never meet an interesting person
if you ask me what happens to me i will tell you
that after coffee my brain is harder and shinier
my face is less worried and my eyes move faster
if you ask me what happened to sad people
i will tell you that pieces of water move
from the inside of their heads to the outside
and then i think the water evaporates
when my brain thinks it makes squishy noises
not all brains are like this
i like to point my worried face at different areas
of the physical world, and this is a mischievous thing
my face is at the front of my head
do you believe i am a good person?
i am going to go away for two hours
when i return i will accurately predict the actions of everyone i know
for the next three weeks,because that's how i am: industrious
severely disillusioned
pass me the organic sesame seed salt substitute
industrious people who are severely disillusioned
enjoy squishy noises more than the average person
i laugh at the average person
i don't know why i do that
i will never squish a human brain
with both my hands
looking down at the brain inside the skull
i have bought and sold over three hundred things on ebay
ebay is incredible
three word sentences console me
and this is a dangerous thing
the most dangerous weapon in the universe is the sphere-shaped knife
let me explain about the sphere-shaped knife
the insanity of the sphere-shaped knife
i am going to sleep now
i am going to turn off the light now

I'm going to finish up this week with more religion. Many would say, anti-religion, but i don't mean them that way. I don't have the right to fault anyone on faith terms, but thinking our own thoughts out loud is what this whole writing thing is about.

I don't think you can think about the big questions without considering God, eternal entity who created it all and may or may not watch over its ongoing operation, even if, in the end, you dismiss him/her/it as farfetched.

God-belief as come up with some pretty wild ideas and has been used to justify both good and evil. A light in the sky indicates God's favor or disfavor (take your pick) with King Whatsakaneezer so he must be exalted or beheaded (take you pick). We've read that story before.

But science/reason, in trying to answer the big questions, comes up with some pretty far out stories of its own. (So what does this gravity stuff look like, what shape, what color, how much does it weigh?)

The difference, the one approach burns heretics at the stake, while the other accepts, in fact requires, questioning and critique.

I'm basically a anti-burning-at-the-stake-guy. (Also an anti-burning-the-steak-guy, but that's a different issue.)

It all comes down in the end to a question of faith and how much faith you have in faith as a way to explain the universe and it's meaning, including whether it even has a meaning.

Here are two poetic responses to "faith," first by me and second by our friend and frequent contributor, Gary Blankenship.

Here's mine.

believe it or not

so
they found this way
ancient
bowl over in Israel
where they find all this
way ancient
stuff
and an inscription
that circles the bowl
makes reference
to a
Jesus the Magician

and
i'm reading this
and all of a sudden
think
zounds!
there's the nub of it

there's lots of magicians
around
past and present
and if you're gonna
believe
in the magic of one
how can you not believe
in the magic
of all the rest i mean

what's our criteria here

if Jesus the Magician
has the right mojo
what about
the Great Oz
or The Great Waldo
or Moola the Magnificent

myself
i like Waldo
especially his black tux
and yellow spats
but that's like showmanship
do i have to believe in his
magic
as well

seems to me
you have to believe them all
and that includes
Tinkerbell
Snow White
and Little Red
from the hood
or you gotta believe
none of them

i choose
none

it just gets too damn
complicated
otherwise

And now here's Gary's take on the question of faith. more subtle, as usual, than mine.

Believes

(thanks to Neal Stephenson)

I believe in tangerine dragons,
plaid,
who belch undiluted bleach -
but not those spotted,
striped,
red, white or blue
who fart acid...

I believe in dragons of any shape
or color found in nature,
who excrete every toxin
in a mad scientist's lab -
but not in flying turtles,
unicorns,
angels
or horned devils...

I believe in dragons,
airborne turtles,
and all matter of creature,
humanish or not,
but not in gods who thunder,
dabble in the affairs of men,
or care about more
than where's the next party
and when does it start...

If I believe in a profusion of gods,
creeds, cults
and superstitions,
then I can believe anything
including that you will someday return
the hedge clippers
you borrowed...

(inspired by his Anathem)

And that's the story for now. Come again next week, when all the material presented in the blog will continue to be the property of its creators and the blog itself will still be produced by and the property of me...allen itz.

1 Comments:

at 8:34 PM Alice Folkart said...

good, good, good, Allen - you're not only providing a platform for both old and new poets, showing us with your photographs a world we might not see, introducing us to poets and, this time, painters we might never know, but you're also educating us. I didn't know all that stuff about Langston Hughes - about giving up that 'plum' of a job with the study of Africans guy to be a bell hop and regain his freedom. My kind of guy. And, my new favorite poem of the world is his Desert - yes, when life is so lonely, when you're so isolated, and the world seems so barren, even the company of a venomous snake is better than nothing - great poem. And, then Lorca - I knew, but I'd forgotten, and to die for really no reason (but there's been a lot of that in this world) at 38. I hope it was a bullet through the brain and not gangrene. And I love Seitu Hart's answer to everything - 'write a poem' - it just takes a while to figure out that it's that simple, doesn't it? Love Sottak's paintings, especially the girl on the beach - love the way the cleavage of her bottom and her breasts echo each other. Wonderful composition and color, and great spaces.

And, of course, the photography - an especially the Mariposa - I long to hear Spanish spoken. Must get myself to Mexico, some little town with no tourist pretensions and a cheap casa de huespedes with a courtyard and maybe an orange tree and a cat.

Nice issue, Allen, and all of your poetry nice to see again.

Alice

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Autumn Shadows Friday, October 03, 2008

Despite ten years of retirement, I have retained some of my old management obsessions, particularly things like "performance monitoring" and "benchmarking." So, that bit of manager left in me did a little bit of a jig at the end of September when "Here and Now" surpassed the 18,000 hits in a single month benchmark for the first time.

Now, the truth is, I don't have any clue what a "hit" is, but I'm sure 18,000 is better than 18 and the more zeros you add at the end, the better it is.

So, for whatever the hell it means, yea! "Here and Now" for getting, making, finding, whatever,18,254 hits in September.

Moving on to October, here's what I have for you this week.

From my library --
Chiang Shi-Chuan
Sun Wan
Fan Tseng-Hsiang
W. Joe Hoppe
Wendy Barker
Bob Kaufman
Octavio Paz
Linda Hogan
Mary Swander
Jim Carroll
Diane Wakoski

From friends of 'Here and Now"

Gary Blankenship
Alex Stolis
t rasa
Bruce Swanson

and me.

My first poems this week are from the anthology Waiting for the Unicorn - Poems and Lyrics of China's Last Dynasty, 1644-1911 edited by Irving Yucheng Lo and William Schultz, published by Indiana University Press in 1990.

First, I have two poems by Chiang Shih-Chuan. Born in 1725 he died in 1785. Chiang was born in Nanchang and considered at the time one of the his era's foremost literary men. Though also known as a poet, he was best known as a dramatist.

In spite of his literary successes, Chiang did not do well in capital examinations. After a number of attempts, he eventually did well enough to secure several minor positions in the capital. After retiring in 1763 to care for him mother, he returned to government service in 1781. Shortly after that, he came down with a partial paralysis that forced him into a permanent retirement.

Both of these poems were translated by Irving Yucheng Lo.

An Evening Prospect: City Lights

Market torches, boat lanterns: a jumble of fireflies.
Grasses and clouds - a trail of black ink - the night long and dark.
I imagine myself among the layered clouds,
Looking down upon the human world with its galaxy of stars.

Expelling Witches

Shamans scurrying everywhere propagate ghostly teachings.
Alas, they've not yet met a Hsi-men Pao!
Cursing at spirits, howling at ghosts, they weep and sigh.
The sick are fearful and suspicious when medicine effects no cure.
At my eastern neighbor's house, at midnight they strike the
   shaman's drum,
Stirring me from deep sleep, disturbing my dreams.
Dressing and going into the moonlight, I ascend my neighbor's hall;
Wife and children hold back their tears as the old man lies abed.

An old shamaness shakes her head and mumbles incantations;
Holding a dragon's horn, she invokes the White Tiger.
Hideous and repulsive, ugly and strange, images are set in rows,
Intermixed with pictures of lascivious women, truly detestable.
Wooden phoenixes, golden placards are hidden by flags
   and pennants

On high a lamp burns in front of a life-giving tally.
I rip up the demon images, put them to the torch,
Then trample on the ashes, smash their bows.
I blow out the lamps, curse the shamans, and all take flight.
Guests and friends, their tongues hanging out, all depart;
Spirits and ghosts scatter and flee the place.

At break of day the sick man rises to eat rice gruel.
Master Hu wrote a poem on expelling witches,
And in three days it was chanted in villages and towns.
Formerly I heard of a magistrate summoning a shamaness to
   summon his own spirit.
With drums and and music, she was escorted to the temple gate.
Alas, who has not heard that demons come from among men?

The mention of Hsi-men Po at the beginning of the poem is a reference to a fifth century B.C. magistrate who rid his area of sorcerers and prominent citizens who extorted money from the populace by providing young girls as sacrificial wives to the River God.

Born in 1614 in the Shantung province, Sung Wan passed the imperial tests and served in public office in the capital and in a succession of provincial posts until about 1640 when he was implicated in a rebellion in his native province. He was imprisoned for several years before being cleared and returned to office.

Although known as a leading poet of his time, Sung Wan was also a dramatist and a calligrapher of high reputation. He died in 1673.

His poem was translated by William Schultz.

Songs Composed in Prison

I
A Piece of Rush Matting

A grieving heart can't be rolled up like a mat;
This mat is good enough for a brief nap.
Don't be disgusted because it is cheap,
For it could still produce a Fan Sui.

*Fan Sui, in the third century B.C., rose to high office after being beaten and thrown into a toilet when taken for dead.

II
An Earthen K'ang

An ivory, bamboo, and kingfisher bed
Compared to this is coarse and ugly!
The butterfly and Master Chuang-chou,
Sir, can you tell them apart?

*A k'ang is a raised and heated platform made of bricks

*Chuang-Chou was an ancient philosopher.

III
A Stool with a Broken Leg

When the morning warmth enters the window,
I bare my back and go to sleep.
No telling when the spirit of Poverty will leave me,
I invite him to take this seat of honored guests.

IV
An Earthen Stove

A solitary lamp glows in the dark room;
My old servant, his head drooping, sleeps.
I get up to heart some water in the pot
And put my underpants on upside down.

Fan Tseng-Hsiang was born in 1846 and died in 1931. He was a prolific poet with a reputation as an excellent magistrate in Shensi province, even though he was not known as an important player in the politics and cultural affairs of his time.

This poem was translated by J.P. Seaton

(from)Random Verses from a Boat

II

My good wife was born in the Capital:
She's never seen the finest of boats or oars.
Come South, to see the misty waters,
Her eyes , a sparkle like the eddying waves.
Water creatures, fishing gear -
One by one, she asks about their names.
A little afraid as the wind in the sails heels the boat,
But joyous to hear the soft music of the sculling oar.
Reed shoots supply a pretty dish;
Mallow leaves make a fragrant soup.
In the groves hard by, nets set in the sun to dry;
Along the dikes, occasional weirs,
At last begin to understand the ancients' paintings
That depict the true joys of fishermen.
How I wish to sail off to the Five Lakes:
In a boat light as a white gull.
Writing table, mirror stand,
All year long will be put away.
The brewing of tea is what I've long been accustomed to;
I would have no need to buy my own Fuelwood Green.

*Fuelwood Green - a pun. You had to be there.

Here's a piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago.

i dreamed last night

i dreamed last night
i was a kid
again
fifteen
tolerating school
sacking groceries
on saturdays
mowing yards
during the week
making a little money
where i could
working hardest
at containing
my inner dork
sure
the rest of my life
stretched
before me each
day just like
the one i was trying
so hard to get through
with some sense
of self
struggling
to break through
mostly losing
to the here's-your-life
rules
of the time and place
i lived in
bravado
substituting for the
real person
i wasn't and
wouldn't be
for some years
yet
bittersweet years
in retrospect only
in real time
mostly
years of scared
shitless
day
to day
hunkering behind
self
delusion

Born in 1961, W. Joe Hoppe has published about a dozen chapbooks and his poems have appeared in a number of periodicals. He also has a poetry video $5200 MSTA that has been shown several underground film festivals in Texas as well as at VideoEx in Zurich.

From photos included in the book, it seems he probably has more tattoos than any other cowboy, poet or cowboy-poet in Texas.

The next poem is from his book, Galvanized,published by Dalton Publishing of Austin in 2007.

Red Rustoleum

August Texas heat resonates
with the blood behind my eyeballs
in the notes of the cicadas
the tip of each blade of grass
the very leaves of the trees
I'm partially sheltered beneath
inside this red '68 GMC with its seat torn out
rust steel wooled down to orange dust
the stamped metal gutters wiped clean
no longer hidden beneath black rubber mats
waiting for my thick red river

The truck's secret places lie exposed
earth and oil and metal odor
brings me back to Michigan
in my dad's mother's cars
my sister and i the only ones ever
to ride in the back seat of Gram's Satellite
our backsides wiped the blue vinyl toward clean
but the black and blue and brown
rubbed rubber floor
held galaxies of detritus

My Gram rides with me
in old cars without carpets
the sweet smelling ink of blue-capped Bic pens
brown plastic medicine vials full of pennies

The red paint soaks into pitted steel
over rivets and around threaded holes
Metal my mother's father knew about
as a lathe-man, royalty in the tool & die shop
where metal gouged and drilled and sawed and ground
everything spinning in full on precision
and no thing stood un-joined.

As the red glides over the farm truck's insides
Grand-dad's after Sunday dinner tales of Texas
flow like the book of fishes
big one he saw strung up
along the banks of the Rio Grande
tied by the tail being drained of oil
rotting on ropes and oh the smell
all to be made into paint
just like I'm using
in the heat of a Texas
my Grand-dad never returned to
where red Rustoleum runs from my brush

Next I have poems by "Here and Now's" good friend, Gary Blankenship. The poems are from a series Gary wrote about the various states of the United States, ending up with fifty poems, or a poem for each state.

Gary is a master at doing that sort of thing. If I tried it, I'd get to maybe the fifth or sixth state and dry up like a bone in the desert.

Here are three of the fifty.

Poetic States VII - Texas

Larger than a Breadbox

You are too huge to be captured
in verse written by a minor poet
who knows that it takes two days
to cross you no matter where the start.

and you raised two modern presidents -
one mostly good, the other a bit less,
though they both seemed all too fond
of guerilla wars that couldn't be won.

Nothing more needs to be mentioned
in a short poem but Dick's Riverwalk,
the perfect place for tequila shots
and buckets of boiled crawdads

as we forget which war explodes now
and the humidity blowing from the Gulf.

Poetic States XLIII - Oklahoma

American Idol Auditions, Houston

I never met a man I didn't like.
- Will Rogers

With nothing more than a rope,
grin and prickly pear wit, he starts
his act with a joke about a county judge
and jackass, "though that may be the same thing."

The producer, sharp as a horned toad,
turned his back and mumbled,
"Where does this clown think he is,
at an audition for a new Hee-Haw?"

The bass player compared him
to Jimmy Dean, another sausage maker
who made a fortune talking his way
through one song that can't be sung.

The singer looked at his costume
and tried to think of something nice
to say settling for "Are we back
in Seattle or did we land in Dogpatch."

He never set foot on a stage again,
though in Rogers County, he wowed
the boys at the VFW with rope, smile,
and "Well, there was this one time..."

Poetic States IV - Arkansas

Over the River, through the Woods

When we arrived at Ben's at the edge
of the Ozarks, his family left their meal
to prepare ours - ham, chicken, potatoes,
fresh strawberries - all grown on their farm -
as Ben told us about raising hogs
in the hills and dealing with government men.

In Jerusalem, we sat on the porch of Aunt Rose's
unpainted house as gravel trucks rumbled by.
She told us stories of how the town changed
in the 75 years since she'd married
after the first war, and fed us strawberry
shortcake from the supermarket.

We tried to avoid turtles
on the road back from Ben's,
but we could not.

Wendy Barker has published four full-length collections of poetry, including Poems from Paradise in 2005, Way of Whiteness in 2000, Let the Ice Speak in 1991, and Winter Chickens and other poems by by Corona Publishing of San Antonio in 1990. She has also published autobiographical essays as well as works of translation. Her poems and translations have also appeared in numerous magazines, including Poetry, The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Stand, Partisan Review, and Antioch. Barker has read her poetry at dozens of universities, bookstores, festivals, and conferences in the United States, Europe, and in India, and her work is frequently anthologized. As a scholar, she is the author of Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor as well as coeditor of The House is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone.

A Fulbright senior lecturer in Bulgaria during the fall of 2000, she is Poet in Residence and professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

This poem is from her first book Winter Chickens and other poems.

Scanno

Goat fleece dries on iron
railings, white against black.
Cheeses swell like udders,

hang in pairs
from braided rope,
a mortadella is as big

as a man's head.
Old women hide their hair
under scarves, knit
in doorways,
look straight through you,
don't drop a stitch.

Their needles move
faster than children's
feet running after balls

on the church steps.
Houses are stone, streets
are stone, the mountain

against which they pitch
their lives is hard
white rock, and it goes

straight up, lines
unblurred by any leaves ,
even in summer.

I seem to be having more than my share of encounters with squirrels who might illustrate a point, like this, a couple of weeks ago.

watching a squirrel hide his nut

it's 9:30
still cool and breezy
on the porch at Casa Chiapas

i was thinking about my morning poem
something about Dave Brubeck
who i saw last week at Travis Park

when a squirrel
walked by with a very large
pecan in his mouth

he stopped very quickly
as squirrels do
looked at me then went on

again
very quickly
as squirrels do

to a little patch of grass
by the sidewalk
did some sniffing

a little tentative
digging
then on to more sniffing

and more tentative digging
looking
obviously

for a suitable place
to hide his
nut

on his fifth try
he stood up straight
watching out for spies

who might raid his cache
if they see
where he digs it

then bends back down
and places his nut
gently

into the little hole
he had scratched in the dirt
stood up straight again

checked once more
for spies
then scampered across the street

as squirrels scamper
looking very disjointed
legs going every which a way

but moving very fast
never the less
jumping

on the picket fence
in front of the bright red roses
in the garden

of the little limestone house
across the
street

perhaps
there is something of Brubeck
in this poem after all

the unique scamper
of the squirrel
like the unique way Brubeck

played
with time signatures
5/4 6/4 7/4

even 9/8
in "Blue Rondo a la Turk"
stuff

that like the scampering squirrel
seems like it ought not work
but does

and the whole experimentation
of jazz
like the squirrel

sniffing and digging
sniffing and digging
until just the right elements

come together
for new sounds in
unexplored territory

and that is why...
oh,wait,
the squirrel is back

with another nut
two nuts one squirrel
a very successful squirrel

indeed

It's been a while since I've used anything from The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, so, here is Bob Kaufman from that anthology.

Kaufman was born in New Orleans in 1925 and died in 1986. When he was thirteen years old, Kaufman joined the United States Merchant Marine, which he left in the early 1940s to briefly study literature at New York's The New School. He moved to San Francisco's North Beach in 1958 and remained there for most of the rest of his life.

Kaufman usually didn't write down his poems and much of his published work survives by way of his wife, Eileen, who wrote his poems down as he conceived them. Like many beat writers, Kaufman became a Buddhist. Along with poets Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly, A. D. Winans, and William Margolis, he was one of the founders of Beatitude magazine.
He appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" four times in 1970-1971.

An improvisational performance poet, Kaufman was greatly influenced by jazz, making use in the creation and performance of jazz syncopation and meter. In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the "American Rimbaud."

Bagel Shop Jazz

Shadow people, projected on coffee-shop walls.
Memory formed echoes of a generation past
Beating into now.

Nightfall creatures, eating each other
Over a noisy cup of coffee.

Mulberry-eyed girls in black stockings,
Smelling vaguely of mint jelly and last night's bongo
drummer.
Making profound remarks on the shapes of navels,
Wondering how the short Sunset week
Became the long Grant Avenue night,
Love tinted, beat angels,
Doomed to see their coffee dreams
Crushed on the floors of time,
As they fling their arrow legs
To the heavens,
Losing their doubts in the beat.

Turtle-necked angel guys, black-haired dungaree guys,
Caesar-jawed, with synagogue eyes,
World travelers on the forty-one bus,
Mixing jazz with the pait talk,
High rent, Bartok, classical murders,
The pot shortage and last night's bust.
Lost in a dream world,
Where time is told with the beat.

Coffee-faced Ivy Leaguers, in California
Whose personal Harvard was a Filmore district
Weighted down with conga drums,
The ancestral cross, the Othello-laid curse,
Talking of Bird and Diz and Miles,
The secret terrible hurts,
wrapped in cool hipster smiles,
Telling themselves, under the talk,
This shot must be the end,
Hoping the beat is the truth.

The guilty police arrive.

Brief, beautiful shadows, burned on walls of night.

My next poem is by "Here and Now" friend Alex Stolis.

I had emailed Alex and ask him to send some of his new work. He sent me a handful of poems including these.

In his email sending these poems, and others, to me, he explained the project he is working on.

He said, "It is a chapbook length manuscript that i am currently working on. I am using "The Replacement's" catalogue as a template (cult band from the eighties, not real well known but highly influential). Sorry ma, forgot to take out the trash, is the name of the album i am starting with. The poem titles are taken from the song names. As the group progressed and matured their sound went from punk to more sophisticated, controlled and focused arrangements. The arc of the chapbook will be the same. The initial poems will be ( i hope anyway) more noir/punk like and then progress from there. I have in mind about thirty poems total and maybe the whole idea will flop. I think that because "The Replacements'" are not commercially well known I may run into trouble in publishing the whole but I figure it is cooler than doing the same thing with The Rolling Stones or someone as famous as that."

I wish it was in me to start something this structured and ambitious.

Kick your door down

if anybody said it was going to be easy
they don't know a thing
about the past, the way it creeps inside
your drink and forces you to wash down
the words stuck in your throat

one, two,
onetwothree

it's two a.m., we're laid out
flat and the last way home has left us
with our backs screwed to the wall

thatsitenoughisenoughalready
cantyoutellwerebored

so let's blow it all away
and watch the last friend standing
crawl out the door then lock it behind them.

Shiftless when idle

someone pumps lost change in the jukebox
there's a roll and click
the sound of quarters tumbling
always alone, a whir

then wait:
the next song

0A
will hit the floor
will seem familiar
like a sheet being pulled over skin
it will become the moment you realize

you've been living at the movies
and when it’s time to put out the lights it's still too early
to call it a day but way too late to go home

Bozo the clown is dead

Dick remembered it as a black and blue summer - Kennedy
wasn't dead yet and a six pack could help you get to third base

and brave enough to steal home. There was poor, not working
-class poor but the kind of poor that leaves the taste of soot

in your mouth. Some days it tasted like orange - when the palm
of his hand was sticky from pulp, when the spinning, triangular

tiles on the floor became stained dark brown from grounds.
There weren't many rewards going out but thousands coming

back20 so Jane said it was best to slice up his dreams into pieces
that could be easily reassembled to fit into a break-apart world.

Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz was born in 1914.

His family was opposed to the Diaz regime and were public supporters during the revolution of Emiliano Zapata and were forced into exile after Zapata's assassination. They served their exile in the United States.

As a teenager in 1931 Paz published his first poems. Two years later, at the age of 19, he published his first collection of poems, Wild Moon. In 1932, with some friends, he founded his first literary review, Barandal.

In 1937, Paz abandoned his law studies and began his life as a full-time poet and activist.

In 1962 he was named Mexico's ambassador to India and, in 1968, resigned from the diplomatic corps after the governments oppression during the student uprising that same year. He sought refuge in Paris for a while and returned to Mexico in 1969. From 1970 to 1974, he taught at Harvard University in Cambridge. He continued writing and as editor of his journal Vuelta until his death in 1998 from cancer.

His awards include the 1977 Jerusalem Prize for literature on the theme of individual freedom. In 1980 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard University and in 1982 he won the Neustadt Prize. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

I have several short poems this week from the bookThe Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987 published in 1998 by New Directions.

The book names a whole list of translators, but doesn't specify which poem was translated by which translator.

On The Wing

Orange

Little sun
silent on the table,
permanent noon.
It lacks something:
night.

Dawn

On the sand,
bird-writing:
the memoirs of the wind

Stars And Cricket

The sky's big.
Up there, worlds scatter.
Persistent,
unfazed by so much night
a cricket: brace and bit.

Non-Vision

Barren hour, reservoir
where my thoughts
drink themselves.

For one enormous moment
I forgot my name.
Little by little I was unborn,
diaphanous arrival.

Calm

Sand-clock moon:
the night empties out,
the hour is lit.

Here's another of my coffee shop observational pieces. You can find mystery as well as revelation all around. All you have to do is look.

morning mystery theater

huddled together
they talk
in near whispers

black woman
in a black
dress

white woman
blond
dressed for the sun
in white

bright eyes flash
from black face
like a beacon
on storm-darkened
seas

white hands
clench tight
together

morning mystery
to flavor
my coffee

From Totems to Hip-Hop, A multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002 edited by novelist and poet Ishmael Reed. The book was published by Thunder's Mouth Press in 2003.

It's an interesting book, including a wide range of poets from Nobel laureates to students in Reed's writing classes.

The poem I selected for this week is by Linda Hogan.

Hogan, born in 1947, is a Chickasaw poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. She grew up in a military family and therefore moved often, with most of her childhood spent in Oklahoma and Colorado.

She has a Masters degree in English and Creative Writing from the University of Colorado and, for a time, supported herself with odd jobs and freelance writing. By 1980, her success as a writer led to her appointment as writer-in-residence for the states of Colorado and Oklahoma. In 1982 she became an assistant professor in the TRIBES program at Colorado College, Colorado Springs. She then became associate professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota moving later to the University of Colorado as a professor in the English Department. She left that position to write full time a few years ago.

Hogan served on the National Endowment for the Arts poetry panel for two years and has been involved in wildlife rehabilitation as a volunteer.

Tiva's Tapestry: La Llorona

For Tiva Trujillo, 1979

White-haired woman of winter,
la Llorona
with the river's black
unraveling
drowned children from her hands.

At night frozen leaves
rustle the sound of her skirt. Listen and wind comes spinning
her song from the burning eyes of animals
from the owl
whose eyes look straight ahead.
She comes dragging
the dark river
a ghost on fire
for children she held
under water.

Stars are embroidered on the dark.
Long shadows, long like rivers
I am sewing
shut the doors
filling the windows in with light.
This needle pierces a thousand kisses
and rage
the shape of a woman
I light this house,
sprinkle salt on my sleeping child
so dreams won't fly her into the night.

These fingers have sewn darkness
and flying away
on the white hair growing
on the awful tapestry of sky
just one of the mothers
among the downward circling stars.

*A note about this photo:
The piece of road art shown was located on the Interstate 35 access road passing through San Marcos, Texas. The San Marcos City Council recemtly ruled that it came under the city's derelict car ordinance and must be removed. I haven't been by there since, but I assume it is gone.
Boo San Marcos City Council.

Next, I have a poem from friend of "Here and Now," t rasa, who describes himself as -

"...a 60ish semi-hermit who grew up in a mythical place called the Wild West, leaving home in the Sixties to see the world.

After forty years of seeing, he says he decided the "world" was pretty much the same everywhere and returned to the mythical place to read poetry and listen to blues and jazz (and Stevie Nicks) for the rest of his life.

He says he tries, occasionally, to write the kind of poetry he likes to read, but his main goal in life is still to brew the perfect cup of dark-roast coffee."

Drag Racing in Antarctica
Why whiskey should be classified a vegetable.

Felix Catt flew through aether
as television's first image.
We all knew it was conspiracy.
We are so hard to foolhardy to fool,
so geologically fresh.
As Americans,
we can stare anyone down.

I think I've lived here forever,
dancing on Charon's raft
where everyone deserves an Oscar
despite papal edicts
for the baptized and blessed.

I shall opt for Excursion du Lethe,
watch the sharks
as they wiggle the water fat-finned
earning frequent swimmer miles
while Vienna's bakers
listen for larksong
and tunneling Turks,
shape croissants as scimitars.

What relief to know
we are all aristocrats
spurning Procrustus' spare palette.
We are, with biblical pedigree,
symbols of power.
Captains quite capable
of disdaining lesser mammals
and starvation's Mozarts
no matter that from here on the raft,
reflected in this quantum pool,
we see through
our edifice of anthems.

Mary Swander has published individual poems, essays, short stories and articles in such places as The Nation, National Gardening Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Poetry magazine. She has won numerous awards including an Iowa Author's Award, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for the Literary Arts, two Ingram Merrill Awards (1980, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and the Nation-Discovery Award.

Swander received her M.F.A from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She is a professor of English and a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University.

The Art of Acupuncture

Heart, lung, liver, kidney, spleen,
the needle slips in to the wince of pain, then midnight
to midday, the wheel spins round, and underneath, we are all
flesh, all grass, the weed, the blade, the word.

The word is: it hurts at first, then you might feel
a tingling, an opening - door of the wind, windows to the sky.
And the constellations are scattered across your skin -
water of the milky way, dragon breathing fire.
Up and down your spine, a planisphere of the northern horizon.

Mother and son, fire burns wood and the needle drives into
your hand.
Mother and son, wood leaves ash, a cross on your forehead,
And in order to get better,son leaves mother,
a rock rolled up, rolled back.

Rock, air, fire, water, wood.
Each stab is a dare, a bet, a shake of the dice,
so I sing of Pilate and the Roman soldiers,
a spear in the side, a thorn in the crown.
My God, my God, I sing of moxa and mugwort, of lifting cups,

of the Tao and Yellow Emperor, the T'ang and the Ming.
I sing of a heaven of eased muscles, greased joints,
an earth of full moons, the light, the light
to see the way. some say the world will end in fire,
the cosmos in chaos, but I sing of the curious points,
nameless, of nerve ganglia and meridians,
tiny circles of tissue and skin, holding on,
holding everything in. I shout of these oddballs,
odd ducks, unnoticed halos of hope that neither
crow nor coo, but go on in their wobbly way

grazing in the yard for a bug and, at night,
wings spread, shine in the dark with their faint flicker,
their dim flame.

Here's something I wrote last weekend.

My son, a newly converted bicyclist, was visiting from Austin and we were talking about the difference between walking and bicycling and he said, jokingly, "walking is so pedestrian," from which, I thought, that's funny, I ought to find a poem in it somewhere.

So I went home and wrote this piece about a hitchhiker I picked up many years ago.

walking is so pedestrian

it was about
40 years ago,
the night
i picked up
the King of Denmark
at a gas station
in San Marcos
Texas

i was coming from
Austin,
heading
for Corpus Christi
by way of
San Antonio

I stopped in San Marcos
for gas and while pumping
noticed this guy
looking at me, like
he was trying to decide
whether he wanted
to talk to me
or not

i topped
off my tank
went inside to pay
the bill
and it was only
when i came out again
to go to my car
that he stopped
me and ask
where i was going

he said
he was going to
El Paso
and was looking
for a ride

i never was one
to pick up a hitchhiker,
having had some
experiences
as a hitcher myself
that made me wary,
but he was a decent
looking guy
clean clothes
seemed sober
didn't smell
and was polite
so i thought what
the hell
and told him
to get in

we were only
about a mile
and a half down
the road
when he started
telling me
his story

he was the
legitimate
King
of Denmark,
snatched at birth
from his castle
in Copenhagen
and brought
to the United States
where he was sold
to a dairy farmer
in Kansas
who worked him
from sun up
to sun down,
dark to dark,
he said, almost
from the time
he could walk

he ran away
when he was twelve,
he said,
and had been looking
for a way to get back
to Denmark
ever since

he was getting
tired,
he said,
and was losing
hope
that he'd
ever get home
again,
but that wasn't
the worse part

the worse part
was he was in constant
danger
since the pretender
to the throne
had his assassins
looking for him
since the day
he snuck off
from the farm
and if they found
him
he was a dead man
for sure

it really puts me
under a lot of pressure,
he said,
sometimes
i don't know how much
longer
i can take it

by the time
he reached this point
in his story
we were on the outskirts
of San Antonio
(a much smaller city
than it is today)
so i told him
i was heading
south
while he wanted
to go north
and i needed to drop
him off

he said he wanted
to go downtown
to the bus station
and i said
well,
i'm not going that
way
but i can drop you
here
(the corner of
Austin Highway
and Broadway)

it's a ways
i told him,
but from here
you can walk
straight on downtown
to the bus station
where you can catch
a bus to El Paso

walk,
he said,
i can't do that,
walking is so
pedestrian -
no way
for a king to make
a royal entrance
into a city like this

i'll just catch a
city bus

do you have a
quarter
for the fare?

Jim Carroll, born in 1950 in New York City, is an author, poet, autobiographer, and punk musician. He is best known for his 1978 autobiographical work The Basketball Diaries, which was made into the 1995 film of the same name with Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll.

Here are three poems from his book Void of Course, published by Penguin Books in 1998.

Carroll apparently doesn't spend a lot of thinking time on titles for his poems, labeling most of them simple, Poem. Well, he's the poet, so he gets to make the rules about what's his.

Poem

Crossing 14th St. The sunlight
Gentle today as if its fingers
Were broken. Yet still
The high pitch of Rastas
Selling incense and umbrellas

Which wake the neurotic orphans
Residing in my spine

What you told me this morning
As you were leaving, I'm afraid
To repeat it on paper
Speak it out loud
Wondering if the words

Could ignite the plane on which
You're flying home

I could concentrate a beast
And warm the coil of all hearts and loss
I've memorized your feast

As if it were a sheet on which I slept
Which holds your scent
Like a gun to my liver

Poem

Alright,
Buddah gets
A backstage pass

But his friends have to pay

For Virginia

You don't know what it's like at the strangest times your face
Pouncing into my mind like a wounded cheetah
Gripping your memory so tightly over years
It leaves blood on my hands as on your lips

It comes and goes might be days or months and with
Only the vaguest idea of places you are

Have been the way your name
Attacks attaches itself to me like lipstick
On airplanes, steep hills in San Francisco
First St. in the rain, the ache that comes
In parabolas of longing

I wanted to tell you
Because you should know
That my greatest nights in California
Were nights I spent inside Virginia

Clonony Castle - Cluain Damhna
Photo by Bruce Swanson

I had an email message from my friend Bruce Swanson last week, outlining his latest travel plans.

He and his brother are off to Quito. From there he plans to spend about ten days on a sailing vessel touring the Galápagos. Then he'll head back through Quito and another week in Cuenca, a delightful colonial city, he says, in the southern highlands of Ecuador.

The picture above and the four following are photos he sent some weeks ago from earlier travel.

South Fork - Eel River, Miranda, California, USA
Photo by Bruce Swanson

Iglesia de La Virgen de Concepcion de Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala
Photo by Bruce Swanson

Arco de Santa Catalina - 4a Av. Norte, La Antigua, Guatemala
Cuy - Guinea Pig, Arequipa, Peru
Photo by Bruce Swanson

Una vista oscura a Machu Picchu - Opaque view at Machu Picchu, El Peru
Photo by Bruce Swanson

Speaking of exotic climes and locales, here's a piece about a place I saw on some travels in Texas several months ago.

Ding Dong

Ding Dong
Texas
located
50 miles north
of Austin
in Bell County
is not named after
Peter Hansborough Bell
third governor of Texas
for whom Bell County is named
but for Zulis Bell
and his nephew Bert Bell
who opened a trading post
there on the Lamapasas River
in the early 1930s

there are many little towns
in Texas
easily missed in the blink of a traveler's
eye
and more than a few
like Ding Dong
where even the briefiest blink
is not required
for passage
unseen

still
there are
20 people
none named
Bell
so far as i can tell
who
at the end of every day
stop there
just as you might
stop
somewhere
and call it
home

Diane Wakoski was born in 1937 in Whittier, California. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published over forty books of poetry and is best known for a series of poems collectively known as "The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems."

Wakoski teaches creative writing at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan and won the prestigious William Carlos Williams award for her book Emerald Ice.

The poem I'm using this week is from her book The Rings of Saturn published by Black Sparrow Press in 1986.

Cannon Beach

One week of early morning sunshine, like a perfect rose
frozen in an ice cube,
made us so grateful, we then loved the mist
which rolled in and blanketed us for days.
When the sun shone, we walked
the beach at dawn
while most people slept, but on the foggy mornings,
we slept too, not even hearing the horns
sounding from the rocks. Two thousand miles away,
I can only pretend to see the Pacific Ocean
no matter how early I rise.
The mist that steams up from this autumn ground
over pumpkins, the dried dinner-plate sun flowers
with bowed heads, the final red tomatoes on the browning
vines, a different beauty. It is as if everyone
in Cannon Beach is sleeping
while I'm awake, everyone, everywhere,
different from this landscape sleeping,
only I awake, not knowing the images in each head;
as we all sleep through others' lives.

Only a few even try to imagine
what others simultaneously perceive,
and then know its futility. An act of faith
lets me believe the Pacific Ocean's still there, since I now
can't see it. That the sun exists,
through the fog entirely covers it today, or in death
pass beyond what I know I am.

Now, one last piece from me to close out the week.

girl

dancing
across the stage
as she delivers
my order of decaf
and a scone
then back again
still dancing
still in the music

the abandon
of dance
and rhythm
and music

and youth

elixir

a moment of light
to an old soul
heavy
with the weight of the day

End of the line for this week.

We'll be back next week; hope you'll be back with us. In the meantime, try to remember this very important passphrase:

"All work presented in this blog remains the property of its creators. The blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz."

There may be a test next week.

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