Here and Now: August 2009

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Gaia Says - Enough! Thursday, August 20, 2009

IV.8.3.

I have to take a drive to Austin tomorrow, so I'm posting early - earlier than my usual early becaue I don't want to miss my NCIS reruns tonigh. I allow myself one television program at a time. Right now it's six years of NCIS reruns. In a couple of weeks, it'll be bye-bye NCIS and hello Dexter.

That important piece of information out of the way, there'll be no more fanfare or prelims this week - straight to the business at hand instead.

I have for you this week a couple of old favorites of mine, as well as a couple of poets new to my library that I'm reading for the first time.

Here's the mix.

Blais Cendrars
Tampa
Bungalow
Vomito Negro
Spanish Ruin
Golden Gate
Oyster Bay

Joseph Milford
shards the light threw off

Osip Mandelstam
from Stone

Me
it's hot

Paul Kane
A Whiter Shade of Pale
Two Liners

'Ilima Stern
Adding a Little Excitement To My Day

Charles Bukowski
In Search of a Hero

Me
crackpots of the world unite

Joanna Weston
The Leap
Tuscany

Me
dimensional strife

Walter McDonald
Faraway Places

Kevin McCann
The Medicine Man Explains...
The Firekeeper's Tale

Me
apathy

I start this week with poetic notes from my favorite traveling companion, Blais Cendrars, who apparently spent several years of his life just traveling the world, seeing all, appreciating all, enjoying all.

Cendrars, born Frederic Louis Sauser in 1887, lived until 1961. He was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized French in 1916 and a writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.

His writing career was interrupted by World War I. When it began, he and Italian writer Ricciotto Canudo appealed to other foreign artists to join the French army in battle. He himself joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to the front line in the Somme where he was in the fight from mid-December 1914 until February 1915. It was during the bloody attacks in Champagne in September 1915 that he lost his right arm and was discharged from the army. He described his military experience in the books La Main Coupee ("The Severed Hand") and J'ai Tue ("I Have Killed"). After the war, he became involved in the movie industry in Italy, France, and the United States. Needing to generate sufficient income, after 1925 he stopped publishing poetry and focused on novels and short stories.

During World War II, his youngest son was killed in an accident while escorting American planes in Morocco. In occupied France, the Gestapo listed Cendrars as a Jewish writer of "French expression."

In 1950, he ended his life of travel by settling down on the rue Jean-Dolent in Paris, across from the La Sante Prison. There he collaborated frequently with Radiodiffusion Francaise. He finally published again in 1956. The novel, Emmene-moi au bout du monde!..., was his last work before suffering a stroke in 1957.

In 1960, Andre Malraux bestowed upon him the title of Commander of the Legion d'honneur for his wartime service. A year later, he also received the Paris Grand Prix for literature. He died soon after.

The next five poems were written during Cendrars' travels in the American South. They are from the book Blaise Cendrars -Complete Poems, published by the University of California Press - Berkeley in 1992. The poems were translated by Rod Padgett.

I. Tampa

The train has just stopped
Just two passengers get off on this broiling end-of-summer morning
Both are dressed in Khaki suits and pith helmets
Both are followed by a black servant who carries the baggage
Both glance absentmindedly at the distant houses that are too white at
  the sky that is too blue
You see the wind raising swirls of dust and flies pestering the two mules
  harnessed to the only coach
The driver is asleep his mouth open

II. Bungalow

It's small but quite comfortable
The flooring is held up by bamboo posts
Vanilla plants climbing all over
Angola peas
Jasmine
Above which bursts magnolia and poinciana flowers

The dining room is designed with the sense of luxury characteristic of
  Carolina Creoles
Big chunks of ice in yellow marble vases keep the room deliciously cool
The plates and crystal sparkle
And behind each guest stands a black servant

The diners take it slow and easy
Stretched out in rocking chairs they surrender to the softening climate
At a signal from his master old Jupiter brings out a little lacquered stand
A bottle of sherry
an ice bucket
Some lemons
And a box of Havana cigars

No one spoke
The sweat was steaming down their faces
It was absolutely still
In the distance the loud croaking laughter of the bullfrog which
  abounds here

III. Vomito Negro

The pretty gardens and woods are all behind us
It's a bare and dismal plain with an occasional
Stand of bamboo
A stunted willow
A windblown eucalyptus
Then marshland
You see the yellowish smoke
This gray fog along the ground continually quivering
With thousands of mosquitoes and the yellow breath of rotting muck
  There are some places where even the blacks can't live

On this side the bank is lined with big mangroves
Their tangled roots plunge into the sludge and are covered with clusters
  of poisonous oysters

The mosquitos and poisonous insect form a thick cloud over the
  stagnant water
Beside harmless bullfrogs you see incredibly fat toads
And the famous hoop snake which chases its victims as friskily as a dog
There are stagnant pools teeming with slate-colored leeches
Hideous scarlet crabs playing around sleeping caymens
In the spots where the ground is hardest you meet gigantic ants
Thousands of them all voracious

On these stinking waters in the poisonous muck
Flowers bloom with a stunning scent a heady and persistent smell
Bursts of blue and purple
Chrome leaves
Everywhere
The black water is carpeted with flowers next to which will protrude the
  flat head of a snake

I walked through a thicket of big mimosas
They parted in front of me as I went
Their branches moved aside with a small swish
Because these trees have a sensitivity almost a nervous system
Among the jalap vines full of talking blossoms
Big pink and gray birds on long thin legs feasting on crusty lizards fly off
  with a great beating of wings as we approach
Then giant butterflies the color of sulfur of gentian of heavy-duty oil
And really big caterpillars

IV. Spanish Ruin

The nave is in the 18th-century Spanish style
It is all cracked
The damp vault is white with saltpeter and still bears some traces of gold
  leaf
The lantern beams fall on a mildewed painting in the corner
It is a Black Madonna
Thick moss and poisonous stripe dotted beaded mushrooms cover the
  stone floor of the sanctuary
There is also a bell with some Latin inscriptions

V. Golden Gate

The old grillwork provided a name for the establishment
Iron bars thick as a wrist which separate the drinkers from the counter
  where bottles of every kind of alcohol are lined up
Back when gold fever was at its height
When women from Chile or Mexico were auctioned off right and left
  by slave traders
All the bars had grillwork like this
And the bartenders came with a drink in one hand and a pistol in the
  other
It was not uncommon to see a man killed because of a drink
It's true the grillwork has been left there for show
Just the same the Chinese come in for drinks
Germans and Mexicans
And also a few Kanaks of little steamboats loaded with mother-of-pearl
  copra tortoise shell
Chanteuses
Atrocious makeup bank tellers outlaws sailors with huge hands

VI. Oyster Bay

Canvas tent and bamboo chairs
Now and then on these deserted beaches you see a hut with a palm roof
  or the skiff of a Black pearl driver

Now the country is completely different
As far as the eye can see
The beaches are covered with shining sand
Two or three sharks are sporting in the wake of the yacht
Florida slips below the horizon

You take a golden Regalia from the ebony end table
You break it off with your fingernail
You light it voluptuously
Smoke smoker smoke smoke spirals away

Cendrars is another poet, like Whitman, who is very hard for me to put away once I begin.

I have a first-time friend of "Here and Now" this week, Joseph Victor Milford, who I hope we'll see much more of in the future.

Joseph says he was born in Alabama by the banks of the Chatahoochee River. After growing up in the south, he attended The University of West Georgia where he studied with poet Donald Platt while receiving his degree in English and Philosophy. He then was accepted at The Iowa Writers' Workshop where he received his Master of Fine Arts in Poetry. He currently resides in rural Georgia, teaching full-time at Georgia Military College. His collected works, Cracked Altimeter, Volumes I, II, and III: Collected and Selected Poems, 1990 - 2005 have recently been published by BlazeVox Press.

Here's his poem.

shards the light threw off

i have three classes
to teach tomorrow
and two of them
are tests

*

it's broken about us
most good things trickle away
or wash ashore
we use the remnants
of ancient vessels and vehicles
to collect the words and fossils
we make equations to quicken time
i am bored with most of my colleagues
i wait for my first real teacher
as i learn to listen
so i will be ready to be found
i hope you do too with your awesome skills
temper your missiles with grace
that in itself will turn the arrows to swans
landing on water with ripples
and not in flesh with bloodsport

*

i will learn
what i knew
one day
again
and forget
the anger that taught me
to look

*

i am more satisfied than cardboard in a landfill
i am more full than all worms
i am now a viola in the universe's hands
it tickled with trial and tribulations at first
i laughed at being a mortal fizzle
while shitting myself and rose from dung
with mortar and pestle
found the thing to grind
syncopated it
in good time

*

my wife sleeps from being overwhelmed by herself.
i see it at times.
i usually sleep from being overwhelmed by other things.
i am jealous of her.
my child sleeps because she sleeps when she does.
we need to learn as much as possible from her.
it's funny, around my daughter, i never feel jealous.
i feel joy. what i saw in my wife's face through pain
while my hand shook cutting the cord. purity i and we tend to forget.

*

i broke my finger on your bone under your
flesh and can't play my guitar but can type this

*
i never spun so hard while sitting still
until i met your strong steel eye

*

flesh
is hilarious
considering
what we do
inside
of it

*

the drums only signal
the stories of first and last
at times you forget these
you only listen to the strings and pipes
remember the taut skins
and you will know
how to come home

*

wait for sitars
for you hear them an instance
before all becomes one

*

bones...my bones
you sing with metals and crystals

please old boys sing louder to me

Next, I have several selections from the book Stone, a collection of poems by Osip Mandelstam. The first of the 81 poems in the book was written in 1908 and the last in 1915. The book was first published in 1913, then published in a greatly expanded second edition in 1916. My paperback copy was published in 1997 by Harvill Press. It is a bilingual book, the original Russian and the English translation, by Robert Tracy, on facing pages.

Mandelstam was born in Warsaw in 1891 to a wealthy Jewish family. Soon after Osip's birth, they moved to Saint Petersburg. In 1900, Mandelstam entered the prestigious Tenishevsky school, which also counts Vladimir Nabokov and other significant figures of Russian (and Soviet) culture among its alumni. His first poems were printed in the school's almanac in 1907.

In 1911 after two years at the University of Heidelberg, he went on to study at the University of Saint Peterburg. After moving to Moscow in 1922, Mandelstam's nonconformist, antiestablishment tendencies were not heavily disguised, and in the autumn of 1933, they broke through in form of the famous "Stalin Epigram." Described by many as a "sixteen line death sentence," the poem, sharply criticizing the "Kremlin highlander." Six months later, Mandelstam was arrested.

He received an unusually light sentence of internal exile and in the years following this first arrest, he would (as was expected of him) write several poems which seemed to glorify Stalin.

But in 1937, at the outset of the Great Purge, the literary establishment began a systematic assault on him in print - first locally, and soon after that from Moscow - accusing him of harboring anti-Soviet views.

Early the following year, Mandelstam and his wife received a government voucher for a vacation not far from Moscow and upon their arrival in May 1938, he was promptly arrested again and charged with "counterrevolutionary activities." Four months later, Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in correction camps. He died in a transit camp that same year of an unspecified illness.

A quote from Mandelstam might stand for many Russian poets during the years of oppression. "Only in Russia is poetry respected," he said, "it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"

Here are several short entries from Stone.

1.

A tentative hollow note
As a pod falls from a tree
In the constant melody
Of the wood's deep quiet...
1908

5.

More delicate than delicacy
Your face,
Whiter than purity
Your hand;
living as distantly
From the world as you can
And everything about you
As it must be.

It must all be like this:
Your sorrow
And your touch
Never cooling,
And the quiet catch
Of not complaining
In the things you say,
And your eyes
Looking far away.
1909

13.

The snowy hive more slow,
The window
a crystal more clear,
A turquoise veil lies on a chair
Carelessly thrown.

The gauze dazzling itself so much,
Caressed by its own soft glow
It lives in summer, as though
It never felt winter's touch;

And though ice diamonds glide
In the eternally frozen stream,
Here flickering dragonflies gleam,
Alive but an hour, blue-eyed
1910

27.

Oh sky, sky, I'm going to dream about you!
It can't be that you've gone completely blind,
That the day, like a sheet of blank paper, has burnt through
Leaving only a little smoke and ash behind!
1911

29.

I hate the light that shines
From the monotonous stars.
Welcome back, old obsession of mine -
Tower that thins to an arrow of spire!

Stone, become a web,
A lace fragility:
Let your thin needle stab
The empty breast of sky.

My turn will come yet -
I feel the wings spreading.
So be it - but where is the target
Where living thought's arrow is heading?

Perhaps I will come back here
When my path and my time both fade:
I could not love there
And here I am afraid...
1912

45.

...The courage of midnight girls
And meteors in reckless flight;
A tramp clutches my coat - do I have
The price of a bed for the night?

Tell me who will deaden
My consciousness with wine,
If reality is Peter's creation:
The granite, the Bronze Horseman?

I hear the salute from the fort
And I notice how warm it grows;
They could probably hear the report
There in the cellars below.

And beneath the incoherence
of my feverish brain
Are stars and talk that makes sense,
The wind west off the Neva again.
1913

62.

Orioles in the woods, and the only measure
In tonic verse is to know short vowels from long.
There's a brimming over once in each year, when nature
Slowly draws itself out, like the meter in Homer's song.

This is a day that yawns like a caesura:
Quiet since dawn, and wearily drawn out;
Oxen at pasture, golden indolence to draw
From a pipe of reeds the richness of one full note.
1914

73.

The fire tongues
My dry life away;
No more stone songs,
I sing wood today.

It is light and rough,
From one piece, no more;
Both the heart of the oak
And the fisherman's oar.

Drive piles more firmly in,
Hammers, pound tight,
O wooden heaven
Where all things are light
1915

Have I mentioned this before? The weather has really been lousy this summer.

it's hot

i remember
stepping off a cold C-140
Air Force transport
in Saudi Arabia in May, 1968,
to a hot blast of desert
wind like the Devil's breath
at the gates of hell

it's been
like that here this summer,
just as hot and just as dry

as we inch toward mid-August,
normally the hottest part of the year,
we are actually cooling just a little,
like,
a nice breeze last night, not
a cool breeze, but at least a stirring
of the air that has been dead
in its stillness for months

there is hope
for summer's ending

~~~~

i always have trouble with heat

born with a higher than normal
metabolism my body temperature
is always a little higher than normal

i sweat
when others are reaching
for their sweaters

i have no idea
why i live where i do,
where summers seem endless
and winters are lost in an eye-blink

except it's where i've always lived

and maybe i'm too old to live
anywhere else

~~~~

i've always envied old people
who always have a chill

it's been a bright spot for me -
something to look forward to amid
the infirmities of age

i always think
at every birthday
that their affliction will soon be mine

but,
so far,
i seem immune

~~~~

i've been thinking, lately,
that my problem may not be
with heat, per se, but with my
aversion to change

if this place makes me miserable
most of the year,
why don't i just leave?

it's not a fear of the uncertainties
that keeps me here,
but the absolute certainty
that change cannot be an isolated event,
but the beginning of a chain of events,
one leading to another, and the further down
the chain of events you go, the more
likely disaster waits

for example,
i went to my normal, my safe and normal,
breakfast place this morning, seeing when
i walked in that my normal table was available
but allowing myself to be convinced
by the hostess that i should be daring
and go for a different table
which led to the next daring decision
to try, for the first time, their Greek Fritada,
two eggs in omelet form
with sun-dried tomatoes, asparagus,
artichoke hearts and Greek goat cheese,
and, going for broke,
having strayed so far from my normal
gustatory habits, orange marmalade jam
for my sourdough toast

the outcome was a string of disasters,
like falling dominoes, beginning
with my decision to change tables -
the new table was in a hot spot in the room,
the fritada was excessively green, not a good color
for eggs, and the orange marmalade was just as
disgusting as i had always assumed it was

so, move and start a chain of events
that would, i know, inevitably move me
to a place even worse than where i am?

not a chance

i know how these things work,
and the misery
i know is better than the misery
i don't

meanwhile,
things are looking better here,
temperatures only at 101 yesterday

i'll just continue to hope
these positive trends will continue
and things will get better here
before i die
and fry
in the desert desolation
of what used to be
my back yard

Next, I have a wry piece of remembrance by Paul Kane from his book Work Life, published by Turtle Point Press in 2007.

Kane is the author of three collections of poetry The Farther Shore, Drowned Lands, and this one. His other publications include a critical study of Australian poetry, an edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's poems, a collaboration with the photographer William Clift, and several anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, he has also been awarded Fulbright and Mellon grants. He teaches at Vassar College.

A Whiter Shade of Pale

"...although my eyes were open"

In '68 I sported a Panic Button on my blazer -
pushed, it read, "Things will get worse before
they get worse." After the assassinations, I threw
it away. On edge, we were now living on the edge.
Across the hall, Drexler, the quiet kid from Belgium,
played Procol Harum full blast whenever
he left the room, the door wide open.
Conformity consisted of learning "how to think
for ourselves," but we knew one another by our
oddities, while the teachers knew us for out failings.
That year, falling love sent me stumbling backwards -
the real fall came later, when Signe took up with Ramseur,
the handsome hockey star who insisted we arm wrestle
because I could hit a ball farther than he.
My roommate, Leep, the math genius from Menlo Park,
was California cool; Arader, a Main Line Mensa
miles gloriosus; Schiffer was pure New York.
I tried making a virtue of my virtues
but when I puzzled things out, the pieces never fit.
Prep school prepares you to succeed, but no one
prepared us for success - that was a blank
we would have to fill out on our own, or not,
like Drexler's empty room blaring "A Whiter Shade of Pale."

Not long ago, I heard that song again by chance
on the radio, and these memories welled up
quick - a pool in a clearing, spring-fed
and coruscating. Those pieces of the past
coalesced suddenly into a whole -
beyond the pain of nostalgia or wistfulness
for lost youth: a presence, instead, and intensity
so tensile the insight stretches out past
the instant of its moment - as when you
are perfectly happy or in complete despair.
And in the midst of it, I thought of Drexler
and wondered about the song haunting the radio,
about why he did what he did and why it affected
me so much then and now decades after.
"Whatever happened to Drexler?" we ask, as if
we could say what it was that had happened to us
from a point of view outside ourselves.
Two days later - no, thirty-six years later - I got
an email from Drexler reading, "Remember me?"

Two-Liners

My Father's Neuropathy

I staggered out of a lot of bars, he says,
but never into one before.

Poetic License

"Live Free or Die!" cries New Hampshire;
"First in Flight," North Carolina demurs.

Sign on an Upstate Jail in Winter

Any prisoner not back by six o'clock
will be locked up.

Sign on an Upstate Farm

Anyone found here at night
will be found here in the morning.

National Pastime

Football will supplant baseball when we
start wearing helmets on the street.

Cliched

Give him enough rope
and he'll hang you.

I used a couple of short poems by our friend from Hawaii, 'Ilima Kauka Stern, last week. Now here's another one.

'Ilima, a retired educator, has taught creative writing at a women's prison on O'ahu for five years. Through a prison writing project, she has helped inmates publish five editions of their work in Hulihia. Her own work has appeared in Rain Bird. She divides the rest of her time between writing, teaching hula, and the study and practice of Hawaiian spiritual traditions. Ms. Stern lives in Kailua with her family

Adding a Little Excitement To My Day

Ascending Lanihuli, approaching the pali tunnels,
the wipers are on, keeping up with the rain,
which is not a downpour, more like a steady heartbeat,
the remnants from tropical storm, Felicia.
I'm on my way to visit a friend in Honolulu, as I've done
in days past, but today the weather is a bit of a
challenge. Just before the first tunnel, I realize
I'm driving through low-lying clouds. I'm thinking,
it's almost like fog, wow, fog in Hawai'i. Into the tunnel,
into the gray mist, and out in between tunnels, the
entrance to the second tunnel is completely obscured.
My heart skips a beat. The mist is fine, though, so
I slow down and find my way through. Outside the
second tunnel, in the grandeur of Nu'uanu, a curtain
of misty rain sweeps across my vision from left to right.
I'm entranced and enthralled. Thank you, Felicia, for
adding a little excitement to my day.

Charles Bukowski is many things, mostly things I like, but he is rarely really funny. This poem, from the collection, New Poems, Book 2, published by Virgin Books of London in 2003, is really funny, though I suspect not everyong will enjoy the humor of the self-parody and his casting a satiric look at his own image. But, I did.

In Search of a Hero

as far as literature is concerned,
for a while it was Hemingway, then I noticed that his writing was imitating itself, he was
not really writing anymore.

as far as sex is concerned,
I began quite late and being fully rested
I gave it a roaring start, learning more from each
  woman
and applying it in all its fulsome aspects to the next,
  awakening
in strange bed after strange bed (and then back in
  some old
beds) looking out the window in the morning to
  check
on my car parked outside - and remembering that
  there was
another woman for later that day and maybe even
  another one that
night.
dinners, lunches, walks in the park,
walks by the sea, sometimes unexpectedly a brother,
a son, an ex-husband and, once, a current husband.
I knew of nobody with as many girlfriends as I had
who was drinking as hard at the same time.
I was penniless and stupid
and almost without reason.
I'd return now and then to my tiny dirty room
to find wild notes under
my door in an the mailbox from
anxious females.
I had no time to respond and some then became
enraged,
trashing my automobile, breaking into my
room, destroying everything in sight, female
hurricanes from hell,
and the phone rang without pause throughout
all this carnage, curses, wails, hang-ups, callbacks,
threats of love, threats of death, and if I took
the phone off the hook for a bit, soon the sound of
a racing motor, the screeching of brakes
and then a rock thrown through the window.
3 times there was an attempted murder
despite the fact that
I was old and ugly, worse than poor,
often without even toilet paper in
the bathroom. but somehow
in my demented state
I became my own hero.

I'd go into Black bars,
I'd go into biker bars,
I'd go drunk into Mexican bars,
I'd go anywhere,
I'd spit into the eye of God and
even into the face of the devil.
then I'd wake up somewhere
with someone new
in the morning
and the sun would be
shining
as if for me alone.

I bought the cheapest junk cars
off the lots
and drove them to Caliente, to
Mexico,
the woman saying
"Jesus, you're driving this thing
like a maniac!"
I'd squander my meager dollars at the race
track
with bravado
as if all the gods were
on my side.

it all ended
some place, somewhere
in a small
room in downtown L.A.
I was there with this beautiful
girl with long hair, so
young, such a fine body, such
long long hair, it was almost all
too much. I think it began
in a bar downstairs or around
the corner and it was
arranged that i was to have
sex with this child of
unbelievable beauty
but there
was also a large heavy Mexican
woman there, even
uglier than I and I turned to her
and said, "you can leave the
room now."

"I stay," she said. "I make sure
you not hurt her."

Christ, she was ugly.
the cheap flowers on
the wallpaper bloomed and
blossomed at me.
I wanted the obvious to be
obvious.

I looked at the ugly woman.
"I don't want her," I heard myself say,
"I want you."

"huh?"

"I'm going to fuck you!"

i rushed at her,
noticing at the same
time that the beautiful girl on
the bed was not moving, was not interested,
was not saying anything.

the big woman was
stronger than I,
she fought me off,
it was a
battle, I reached for her
breast,
I tried to kiss her
wretched
mouth
but she was full of
refried beans and
good
old-fashioned strength,
we banged against the
dresser,
spun around,
she shoved me away,
I crashed against the wall,
she rushed at me
and swung a heavy arm at
the end of which was attached
a metal claw I
had not noticed,
no hand, just this gleaming,
metallic, dangerous
claw.
I ducked under the claw
and she swung again.
I leaped aside and
ran to the door to find
it shut tight.
I ducked under the swinging
claw once more.
you have no idea how it
glinted, glinted in the
cheap light that
illuminated that heartless
room.
I flung open the door and
ran own the stairway
and she chased me down
and I ran out into the street,
I ran and I ran
and when I looked around
she was gone.
and then luckily for me,
unlike so many other nights,
elsewhere and everywhere,
I remembered
exactly where I had parked
my car.

the albatross is a fake,
the universe is a shoe,
there are no heroes,
there is only a mouse
in the corner
blinking its eyes,
there is only a corner
with a blinking mouse,
two toads embrace
what's left of the sun
as the monkey
manages a tired
smile.

Everyone should have a retirement plan. Here's mine.

if you don't hear from me again

stopped
at the supermarket this morning,
cashed in my jar of pennies -
twenty dollars and ninety one cents,
i spent the ninety one cents
all at one place
and put the twenty dollar bill
in a envelope
that will rest at the bottom
of the penny jar, waiting to be joined
in six months or so
by another twenty dollar bill

dollar a day
they say
a million days - a million dollars

it's what you might call
a long term savings
plan
which i will stick to
unless
i win the lottery

~~~~

checking my email
as i drink my latte at Borders,
i discover
notice that due to my dedicated
and diligence service
as a customer
i am awarded a forty percent
off purchase price of any book
in the store
coupon

since i am on the last fifty
pages
of my current book,
this is a timely return
on investment

deciding
when i turned sixty-five
that i no longer had time
to wait for the paperback
editions
of books i wanted to read,
and reading
as i do
a couple of books a week,
my monthly literary bill
has skyrocketed
leaving me to consider
a forty percent off coupon
a major coup

another sign
that, even though
it's not even noon yet,
my fiscal and monetary condition
is on the rise

~~~~

i bought a lottery scratch-off card
when i sold my pennies

i haven't checked it yet to see
if i'm a winner

i'm putting it off
cause
this could be the one
that puts me over the top
and i don't want to become rich
before i have a chance
to prepare myself
for a life of wealth and leisure

if you don't hear from me again
you should know
it's because i've passed on
to a better
place -
a little villa
on the coast of Spain
perhaps

The next poem is by Mark Doty, from the anthology, A Day for a Lay, a Century of Gay Poetry, published by Barricade Books of New York City in 1999.

Doty was born in 1953 in Tennessee. He is a National Book Award winning poet and memoirist. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, then received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont. He has written twelve books of poetry and three memoirs.

He lives in New York City, and Fire Island New York. He was the John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program at The University of Houston Creative Writing Program. He has also participated in The Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers and was on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in August 2006. He is the inaugural judge of the White Crane/James White Poetry Prize for Excellence in Gay Men's Poetry.

He now teaches at Rutgers University.

63rd Street Y

All night steam heat pours
from radiators and up the stairwells
to the thirteenth floor,
and I can't sleep because I know
all the windows are thrown wide open,

a voyeur's advent calendar.
If i lean out the screenlesss frame
the building's twin flanks yield
banks of lit rectangles above a black courtyard
where a few papers lie completely still

this warm December. Thirteen dizzying stories
show tonight and any night some blank shades
or black glass, and dozens of interiors -
men all right, mostly not young
or strikingly Christian, though certainly associated.

The nude black man two windows over
is lying in bed, Melchior halfway
through his journey, writing a letter home.
And on the twelfth floor, in my favorite window,
only a little corner holding

a foot of the bed visible,
a pair of strong arms are smoothing
a thin red coverlet so carefully
he must be expecting someone. The scene's
too fragmentary to construct a convincing story,

but he smoothes the cloth until
I imagine there's not a single wrinkle
on the scarlet spread blushing
the lamplight so that his arms glow
with the color of intimacy. Even

after I'm tired of watching
there's something all night to wake me:
a pigeon flapping toward the still
like an awkward annunciation, someone singing
in the alley thirteen floors down

- the Ode to Joy? - curiosity
about the red room a floor below, empty now.
In the park, the lamps' circle shrink
along distant paths beneath intricate trees,
Fifth Avenue luminous in its roman,

floodlit splendor, and there the hulk
of the Metropolitan, where the Neapolitan angels
must be suspended in darkness now,
their glazed silks dim,
through their tempera skin's so polished

even an exit sign would set them blazing.
I'm sleeping a little then thinking
of the single male angel, lithe and radiant,
wrapped only a a Baroque scrap
sculpted by impossible wind. Because

he's slightly built - real, somehow -
there's something shocking
in his nakedness, the svelte hips
barely brushed by drapery;
he's no sexless bearer of God's thoughts.

Divinity includes desire
- why else create a world
like this one, dawn fogging
the park in gold, the Moorish arches
of the Y one grand Italian Bethlehem

in which the minor figures wake
in anticipation of some unforeseen beginning.
Even the pigeons seem glazed
and expectant, fired to iridescence.
And on the twelfth floor

just the perfect feet and ankles
of the boy in the red-flushed room
are visible. I think he must be disappointed,
stirring a little, alone, and then
two other legs enter the rectangle of view,

moving toward his and twining with them,
one instep bending to stroke
the other's calf. They make me happy,
these four limbs in effortless conversation
on the snowy ground, the sheet

curling into the billows sculptors used once
to make the suspension of gravity
visible. It doesn't matter
that it isn't silk. I haven't much evidence
to construct what binds them,

but the narrative windows
will offer all morning the glad tidings
of union, comfort and joy,
though I will not stay to watch them.

It's a strange world we live in - at least the part where I am.

crackpots of the world unite

it so happens
that i live in a section
of these great Discombobulated
States of America
where
common sense
is seen as a disturbing
sign
of rampant
left-wingism
and the principle
Republican
recruiting slogan
appears to be
"Crackpots of the World Unite"

some of these attitudes
may be the result of pride
in our frontier
heritage
though most of the
yahoos
so afflicted
are prosperous,
but mortgaged to their eyeballs
by the 21st century,
suburbanites
who wouldn't know a frontier
if it bit them on the ankle

some of it comes
from religious fundamentalists
who confuse speaking in tongues
with thinking in circles,
god-folk
principled concerned with enumerating
the sins of everyone who doesn't
believe
exactly as they do,
confident, as they make their lists,
that these people
are really gonna be fucked
when Jesus
finds out what they've been thinking

but mostly i think
it's the weather, the heat
and lack of rain, little jumping
neurons
frying like an automobile
engine running without oil

if it'd just rain around here,
and maybe cool off a bit, i think
most of these people
would come to their
senses

Here are two short poems by our friend Joanna Weston.

Joanna has been publishing poetry, reviews, and short stories in anthologies and journals for twenty years. She has two middle-readers, The Willow Tree Girl and Those Blue Shoes, as well as a book of poetry, A Summer Father, available through her publisher Frontenac House of Calgary.

The Leap

did any down
this steep of rock
fast and flying
arms out-flung
cry echo dying?

did any leap
their scream back-held
by moss and stone?

did a stag pause
to glimpse
the fleeting
over-tumbling

and recognize
a death in flight?

In Tuscany

The hills lean back to blue on blue,
smell of horses and of leather
rolling on the windless weather,
the near sound of a pigeon's coo,
Siena central to the view.

And in my study here today
I can recall each dappled spray
of spring-held buds on oak and beech,
the scents and sights beyond my reach,
and wish I were on holiday.

It's respect for the little differences that make long-term relationships work.

dimensional strife

her first instinct
is to go
small

mine
is to go large

our fridge
is full of styrofoam
take-home containers,
overfilled tiny ones
from her
and large ones
with a tiny lump of leftovers
from me

32 years
of dimensional strife
has not resolve the
difference

two people
who live together for many years
frequently develop
these kinds of issues,
but
they never get out of hand
with us

because her heart
is much larger
than mine

while my willingness
to put our relationship
at risk is
tiny

From the anthology, Unaccustomed Mercy - Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War, published in 1989 by Texas Tech University Press, I have this poem by Walter McDonald.

McDonald was born in 1934 in Lubbock, Texas. A pilot in the United States Air Force, 1957 -1971, he served briefly in a ground assignment in Vietnam, 1969-1970. He holds a BA and an MA from Texas Tech College and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Juniper Prize, the George Ellison Poetry Prize, and three Poetry Prizes from the Texas Institute of Letters. When this book was published in 1989, he was Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Texas Tech.

McDonald has published 13 books, including 11 volumes of poetry.

Faraway Places

This daughter watching ducks knows
nothing of Vietnam,
this pond her only Pacific, separation to her
only the gulf between herself
and ducks that others feed.
"They will come," he calms her, "soon,"
and touches her. Her hair blows
golden in the wind. Strange prospect
to leave such gold, he thinks.

There is no gold for him
in Asia.

The ducks parade unsatisfied,
now gliding to her hand, her bead,
her tenderness. Possession
turns on him like swimming ducks,
forcing his touch again.

She does not feel his claim
upon her gold
that swirls upon her face but cannot blink
her eyes
so full of ducks

Next, I have two really interesting pieces by our friend Kevin McCann.

Kevin has been a full-time writer for 16 years. He's published six limited edition pamphlets in England. He also writes for children.

The Medicine Man explains...

                   How many are there ?
                   More than the stars
                   But most only take.

                   How do they live ?
                   Like netted eels.

                   What do they kill ?
                   Anything they can,
                   Even each other.

                   How do they eat ?
                   Some : Too much, quickly.
                   Others : Too little slowly.
                   So they all die.

                   How are they happy ?
                   They're not.
                   They're civilized.

The Firekeeper's Tale

                   They got every tribe there is,
                   Skulls mainly,
                   Stacked floor to ceiling
                   And all neatly labeled,
                   That's what those scientists
                   Are measuring.

                   Want to prove
                   That smarter than dogs,
                   But dumber than them,
                   Is what we'll always be.

                   So for every head,
                   Man, woman, child,
                   Even baby

                   They'll pay handsomely.

And sometimes the envelope is just pushed to far.

apathy

cartoon
in the paper today -
guy at a bar, talking
to the bartender, i used
to get really upset with the news,
he's saying,
until i discovered the wonders of apathy

so i'm looking
to sip, myself, at the chalice
of apathy's wonders - too much
of my brain has been cornered by two
subjects - unmitigated heat
and the politics of gullibility

i'd write a poem about it,
but i just don't give a shit
anymore

Well, it's been a long day and the crew at NCIS is waiting for me.

Until next week, remember all of the material in this blog remains the property of its creators. I produced the blog and any part of it that is entirely my creation is available to whoever wants it. If you use any of my work, credit me for it or I'll haunt you in your dreams. That's me...allen itz.

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Midnight Mysteries Friday, August 14, 2009

Photo by Thomas Costales
IV.8.2.

Another week closer to the end of Summer and I am counting the days. I did get a little ahead of the heat this week and have put together a bit more of a post than last week, including library poems, friends of "Here and Now" poems, and a bit of my own stuff.

Also, I'm very happy to have our photographer-friend Thomas Costales back for a return engagement. The last time he appeared here, back in April, we used his portraits. This week we return with something else he does that I like very much, urban nightscapes. Thomas suffers with insomnia sometimes and when he cannot sleep he takes his camera and roams the night, producing beautiful, moody images that remind me a lot of Edward Hopper.

Here are the poems I have for you.

Carol Connolly
lizzie Borden
Tarnish
Turkey
Baggage
Ode to a Message

Me
death notice

Paula Rankin
To My Mother, Feeling Useless

Dan Cuddy
A Nature Poem About Poetry or a Poetry Poem About Nature

James Hoggard
from Two Gulls, One Hawk

Me
walking on the moon and forgetting how we got there

Diane Glancy
Portrait of the Sufficiency of Winter

'Ilima Stern
Hawai'i
A Pair of Tetractys
What's Left

Demetria Martinez
retro

Me
random thoughts walking down a random trail

Joshua Clover
Union Pacific

Jan Napier
Rainbow

Antler
Everything is Different Now
River anatomy
Privy to My Thoughts

Me
Fin de Cycle

Peter Reading
from Marfan

Sue Clennell
Lost Heroes

Me
care to join me for a pile of food?

Photo by Thomas Costales

I start this second week in August (a week closer than the last to the cool days and nights of Autumn) with several poems by Carol Connolly. The poems are from her book Payments Due Onstage Offstage, published by Midwest Villages and Voices in 1995.

Connolly says she was born, raised, and educated in the Irish Catholic section of Saint Paul, Minnesota. She has seven children and didn't start writing poetry until the age of 40. She has worked as a columnist for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, St. Paul magazine and Minnesota's Journal of Law and Politics. She has been a television commentator and an actor in local productions.

She served as co-chair of the Minnesota Women's Political Caucus, chair of the St. Paul Human Rights Commission, and chair of the affirmative-action committee of the Minnesota Racing Commission.

Lizzie Borden

"Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one."

I understand you, Lizzie Borden.
You end it, forty whacks
with a cleaver or an ax,
say no to the vows,
give the contract a decent burial,
plant white flowers,
move on,
check your bags
with any handy porter,
and still
a long first marriage stays with you,
a mark on your soul
like mother's words
and father's warnings,
wanting extreme unction.

You see the reflection of your own face
in a cloudy mirror that won't come clean.

Tarnish

Her flesh hot from a morning
on the desert,
she steps over the stone hedge
of sharp words and silence
piled between them
in the days just past.
He opens his arms to her.
She clings to him,
whispers of her want,
begs for the comfort of his body,
and he says,
"As soon as I have my toast."

He wonders aloud as he chews,
tiny dry crumbs trembling on his lower lip,
he wonders
why spoons tarnish
and jam furs.

Turkey

He is a man
more ordinary
than he thinks.
As a child
he ate Wheaties
at Thanksgiving.
Everyone else ate
turkey.
He thought
he might not like
turkey.

Baggage

There are some things you have to expect.
If you ride on airplanes,
sooner of later
you stand by that great roulette wheel
that spits out baggage
and your number will not come up.
You look back in fondness at past luck,
when misgivings were temporary,
and accept the empty chute.
You don't have a grip...

You are stranded
in New York without a nuance
to call your own.
There may be abuses.
Your well-kept secrets
have escaped into space,
and your permanent point of view
is loose with your toothbrush,
wrapping itself in your reputation.

Reality is something you rise above
but he longing
to drag your baggage
lingers.

Ode to a Message

She answered the telephone,
said, "Yes, yes,"
and drew a Grecian urn
on the message pad,
the rim of its perfect neck
flush with the paper's edge,
as though to say, "No
to any wildflowers on my urn.
No to any spilling of my wine."

Into the telephone
she hummed, "Of course, yes, yes."
as she drew a second urn
and then a third,
all in the same position.

Photo by Thomas Costales

A death this past week led me to this.

death notice

a friend,
inexperienced
in death, does not fare well
in the face of the death of someone
close, young, still not accepting
that death is the inevitable outcome
of life, always with us, always ahead
of us, the wearing out of us
until the time comes when there is
no more wear left in us

death for me
began with my father 30 years ago,
all previous dead just abstractions,
hardly real to me when alive,
even less real when they died

my father,
followed by my older brother, then
my mother and now, in my mid-60s,
my own contingent, people who were
children with me, people i grew up with

dead to the world, all of them,
but still surviving as electrical impulses
in my mind, jumping the gaps
from memory node to memory node,
leaving tracks just as real as the footprints
i leave behind as i walk a dusty trail

i still think of all of them,
my father, most often, making connections
in my mind that could not be made in life -
imagining
how it might have been, opportunities missed

my son, for example, born three years after
my father died, never knowing the one
the other, good things becoming sad things
because they never happened, i imagine my father,
a baseball player until injured by the game,
watching my son play,
the joy my father would have felt
watching the joy my son
showed in playing
the game they both loved

the sadness of death is not in the dying, that
would be like grieving the passage of clouds,
for we are as clouds, passing across the horizons
of life - the passage our purpose, not the beginning
or the end, but the going, the stories we write
as we pass, a story, like all stories, with an end

no, the sadness of dying is in the things
that don't get to happen, the stories
circumstances deny us, the meetings
never met, the words not said,
the love
never realized,
the love never expressed

Photo by Thomas Costales

The next poem is by Paula Rankin from her book Augers, published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in 1981.

I was not able to find information on Rankin, other than she published many poems in a variety of the best poetry journals and that her first book By the Wreckmaster's Cottage was published 1977. I did find one mention of her that referred to her as the late Paula Rankin.

This poem is one of my favorites in the book.

To My Mother, Feeling Useless

Some people grow chalky dust on their skin
like leaves on a dirt road.
My mother, who would not run to the drugstore
without clean underwear, stockings,
hair pinned, two spots of blusher,
who believed everything mattered,
now sighs, no need, no need.

Who am I? she asks
of my father's, my sister's, and my faces
on the wall, under glass.
Her face lies on them
until it cannot bear the likeness.

If she goes out for supper
no one knows if she comes back
or keeps driving
into the ocean
or down a dirt road spraying dust.

On her last plane ride
she had a vision
of being taken up
beyond the top cloud:
then she heard a voice
telling her she had to go
down, she was needed.

When I was a child,
she owned two dresses,
many aprons. There was great need
for her hands in the sink,
in the threadbox with needles.

There was great need
when my grandfather's brain
turned to mush, when my father lost
his sense of touch.

I leave my house
and go down the clay road
where the trees smother
into ghosts of themselves.
A car spins past, coating my legs
with gravely powder
and I warn, Back off, dark space.
I've got connections.
My husband and children saw me leaving.

Photo by Thomas Costales

We haven't heard from our friend Dan Cuddy in a while. Well, here he is with a poem from several months ago that I just found in my almost always screwed-up files.

A Nature Poem About Poetry Or A Poetry Poem About Nature

The natural world is like a free verse poem,
syllables growing everywhere
tangling the tongue with green leaves and roots,
rustling meaning with the friction of unplanned sounds.
Oh, is it the wind that tugs at the poem's anchors,
or is it emotion's fire that crackles through consonants?
Perhaps it is the arbitrary tumbling of sounds from the poet's mouth,
unlike the rows of ordered verdure planted clean
in sculpts of dirt resodded with a hoed-scraped care, a shovel's pat,
and all around precise cut blades of grass, a carpet soft.
No, here the growth of thought spills solidly wild, burrows
in the brown crust and the bloom is baked by the uncivilized sun,
the length of line arbitrary, crabbed, a mess for one
with too civilized a sensibility, too hierarchical values, too obsessed
with lean allusive blushes of color and meaning.
A rose can mean many things but a wild rose means only
unruly life.

Photo by Thomas Costales

My next poet is James Hoggard, a widely published poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and translator. and, beginning in 1966, a long term professor of English at Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, Texas. A former poet laureate of Texas, he is also past president of the Texas Institute of Letters and winner of numerous literary awards.

The two pieces that follow are from a very long autobiographical poem in his book Two Gulls, One Hawk, published by Prickly Pear Press in 1983,

6

Fourth grader, I played tackle
on the sixth grade football team
but was planning to be
the greatest fullback the nation had seen
and alerter than Bronco Nagurski
who knocked himself out
ramming his head into goal posts.

  I'd read about him and Niles Kinnick,
  George Washington, too,
  Alexander the Great,
  Beethoven and Canute, Paderewski
  and everybody else -
  I shook Doak Walker's hand
  and speaking my name
  he asked how my folks were
  and if Greenville was fine

  I even composed music
  though it didn't make sense
  except when Mother played it -
    the music teacher
    said it was noise -

So then to find out
what others were like
I'd stand on the corner
and try hard to push
my soul up out of my body
and into whoever passed by
not so much to see
what the world looked like
from the angle where they stood
but to find how it felt
not to be me, to be them

but I never succeeded
though I'd been trying
from the age of five

and my brother no help.
He mostly played by himself.

  He didn't seem to care
  about the mysteries
  in strangers and friends
  He had his toy soldiers and battles
  and a headful of facts
  you could sometimes get him to say
  when the winds in his dreams
  blew for a while your way

7

We moved again,
this time to Wichita Falls

I was glad,
they had just won State
and in two years Greenville
had lost every game

The parsonage was being redone
We lived half that summer downtown

  halls and stairwells to explore
  new people every day
  hot pavement, shady awnings
  and stores to wander through
  and people picking us up
  carting us off to swim and play

  all those rooms and all those floors
  but disappointment, too

  I never once saw
  any naked ladies
  behind the opened doors
  I'd peer into

But running off my tongue
was Dern y'm te kwa she,
the opening phrases of
"Bringing In The Sheaves"

  my class had learned it years before
  from a missionary who
  had a furlough from China

The lyrics kept coming back
with images of the guttered fish
and new ones I was learning:

  Dolphins leading Roman ships

Cycles are different from circles
The past, unlike the present;
and undulating arc

Photo by Thomas Costales

Forty years ago the first humans walked on the moon, an event to remember and celebrate.

walking on the moon and forgetting how we got there

twenty five years old,
three months returned
from military service,
driving a taxi, two
in the afternoon 'til
two in the morning,
lousy money, but
working that shift
seven days a week,
money is irrelevant
to your life - marking

time,
GI Bill promising
a return to college,
much like today,
waiting for the next
big event in my life

somehow,
i was home that
night, with my
parents, waiting,
with Walter Cronkite
and Wally Schirra
and most of the rest
of the world, for
two human beings,
having crossed
the cold, black well of space,
to make the short final
jump to the surface
of the moon, to make
that first step for
humankind, to step
from the pages of the
books i read from the
age of twelve to real

life,
to walk on a
piece of the void
not our own, i watched
and i waited and it was done
and Walter and Wally shed
tears of a generation who,
like my father, lived to see
our kind's first flight beyond
the heavy weight of gravity to this
walking on the moon, this
escape from the bounds of own
plaanet, this expansion of
humanity's place in the universe,
this great pushing against the
smallness of our world

and i was left with a great
fullness

and i watched the next one
and the one after that, and
by the time they ended, i
read about the last one
in the newspaper the morning
after and what had been
the next big thing in my life
became another bit of dusty
history and by the time of my
son's generation, not even

that, as those who where
there when it happened
forgot to pass on the greatness
and significance of the event,
failed to remember it ourselves,
as if the secret of fire was
discovered, then
forgotten

like
our primitive awe of the flame
was forgotten

a measure of the poverty
of our soul

Photo by Thomas Costales

The next poem is by Diane Glancy, from her book Long Dog's Winter Count published by West End Press in 1991.

Glancy ws born in Kansas City, Missouri, of German/English and Cherokee parents. She received a BA Degree from the University of Missouri, an MA from Central State University in Oklahoma and an MFA from the University of Iowa. At the time her book was published, she taught Native American literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Recipient of numerous awards and grants, Glancy published three collections of poetry prior to this one, as well as a collection of short stories.

Portrait of the Sufficiency of Winter

Fenceposts mark a trail across the land.
Harvester, baler, combine
under snow.
The witchy trees letting the stars shine through them.
Behind the manure pile
a string of hayrolls,
the blue swollen landscape.
The air itself is frozen against the window.
uni:hlana:hi
Great Spirit
I work with a coat hanger to get into the car.
I think we're not on our own here.
The spirits strain with the pulley
hooked to the bale of sun.
It will burn when the clouds move on.
Then we'll get to the locked reasons under snow.
Meanwhile there's another storm
whipping a comet's tail against the dark pines.
But under the hayrolls & manure piles
the ground remembers.
Somewhere the soft green grass unwraps the bolt,
pokes its warm air in
like the sharp point of a hanger.

Photo by Thomas Costales

Here are three short poems from our friend in Hawaii, 'Ilima Stern.

Hawai'i

Fires in the sea
Formed us
Mountains
Rising to the sun
Another fire

Eroding
Folding back, back
From whence we came
Back to the restless sea

A Pair of Tetractys

rain
soft mist
like a kiss
upon a cheek
a whisper leading up to desire

oh, the burning fire of passion's flame
its flaring light
dwindles down
embers
glow

What's Left?

Hula, accompanied by gourds and drums
History passed on through song and dance
Culture kept alive and practiced
Tales of gods and goddesses
Tales of war, deaths, and births
Tales of kings and queens
Progenitors
Dead and gone
What's left
Me

Photo by Thomas Costales

I used a couple of poems by Demetria Martinez last week and have another one this week. The poem this week is from another of her books The Devil's Workshop, published by The University of Arizona Press in 2002.

retro

I thought they were done
With this discussion in the 1960s:
Get your revolution
Out of my house.
It's pissing all
Over the floor.

Your holiness:
Living on rice and tea
For the sake
Of the hungry:
Juggling theories
To cure intellectuals
Of their apathy.

Remember me?
I could use a loving word,
A loaf of bread, a rose.
Help with the laundry.

Photo by Thomas Costales

Here's another of my poems exhibiting no discipline at all.

random thoughts walking down a random trail

the weather forecast
in the newspaper shows
a full five days ahead
with no temperatures one hundred
degrees
or higher - a first since May -
and i celebrate
by stepping out
in a cool
early morning breeze
to squirt
some water on the plants
in the front yard

the grass is gone
and won't be back without
a major transfusion
from the nursery
but i'd like to save the plants,
all hardy southwest varieties
accustomed
to heat
and miserly
in their water use

even they
seem near to failing
in this two-year drought

~~~~

i stop at my favorite
breakfast
hangout for two eggs
(over easy)
sausage
and sourdough toast

as usual
i have a book with me
and looking at the picture
of the author
on the back cover, i notice
his hands and his long, thin
fingers, almost like a spider's
legs, the fingers of an artist,
or a musician, or an artisan,
a creator of miniatures,
gems, tiny portraits
inside tiny seashells like you find
on gulf beaches, my own hands
large, fingers thick and clumsy,
a blacksmith's hands, as
we have been for six generations,
skipping only my grandfather,
a merchant, and me, a mover,
sometimes manipulator, of people

we are the sum of our biology,
though some of us break free and
become our own odd number

~~~~

i know
it is not considered proper
to use the word "fascist"
when describing your political
opponent, it is as though
the Germans in the mid-thirties
found some unique evil, unknown
to the world before their rise and
after their fall, and that none
before or after can be compared to
them

but what else can you call
these right-wing Republicans
who send out
their Brown Shirts to disrupt
public meetings, whose
propagandists
feed the gullible and frightened
with lie after lie after lie

hypocrisy
is as much a part of politics
as kissing babies on the campaign trail,
it is necessary,
practitioners will say, to sometimes
say what you do not mean -
how ever much it may sour you
it is part of the game

but what about the hypocrite
who becomes his own true believer,
who infects others
with the squalor of his soul

i am afraid there is a storm
brewing,
discounted and ignored,
just like the virulence
that infected the last century

~~~~

i think back to my hands
and the blood on the hands
of others
who did not raise alarm
in the past
and how much blood
will be on my own hands
in the future,
these blacksmith's hands
softened
by their use in ways
not biologically driven,
not ready for the hardness
of their true purpose

Photo by Thomas Costales

Now I have a poem by Joshua Clover from his book Madonna anno domini, published in 1996 by the Louisiana State University Press and winner of the 1996 Walt Whitman Award given by the Academy of American Poets.

Though this book is his first collection, Clover has published in many well know literary journals and was recipient of an NEA fellowship in 1994. At the time this book was published, he lived in Berkeley.

Union Pacific

The life about which the Buddhists teach
That the certain life belongs to the uncertain,
The life in which nothing belongs to us for even
The length of a century, which is nothing: Om.
The life in which all streets are named for thieves,
Trees and thieves, the life in which the thief-and-tree
Is the sign of the West, the life in which there are
Seven spheres extending out of to heaven from the Union
Pacific switching yard in Wyoming near midsummer,
The heaven which we are not allowed to see in this life: Om.
The life which spent a third of a century maneuvering me,
Solitary, rouged in the fine dust of the Chimney Rock Ranch,
To the end of Ivinson Street in Laramie near the
Continental Divide where the railroad companies planted
Their feet in a bracework of steel and cracked open
The West the way a bear, a bold animal (first thought
Only thought) might crack open a buddhist,
By skull and by ribcage, the white containments: Om.
From the buddhists we learn that a holy man may own
Half a wooden bowl and replace it every seven years,
About seven bowls a century, about how long the life
Of the great railroads lasted, the Life of Seven bowls
In which you couldn't see the forest for the thieves: Om.
Yesterday, I watched a pair of children taking off
The red Chimney Rock dust in a stone bowl
Rifted by a petty cataract of water, one basin
for the two of them, just the right amount, they were flying
From rock to rock, they were almost oblivious
To the story of the West, it was the Fourth of July,
It seemed possible they could be damaged,
The parents were watching too, through a camera,
From the corner of an eye, view within a view,
The second thought which cradles the first thought
Like a bowl inside a bowl, four times more
Than I am allowed even here, in the other life

Photo by Thomas Costales

Here's a poem from Jan Napier, a new friend from several weeks ago.

Jan traveled the length and breadth of Western Australia for 20 years, working in Side Show Alley (the Oz term for Midway). Her experiences are summed up in her book All The Fun Of The Fair. Now she's turned her attention to poetry.

Rainbow

Wolf sky
flaunts its frost tipped wind,
worries warmth
from scarf and beanie,
nips at six am faces
shocked free of shower steam,
and hot coffee hits,
makes Inuits of commuters
stranded at bus stop tundras.

Within,
yellow lit asylum,
shift workers with
winter splintered health,
share in a cold weather
collection of agues and aches,
are united in garnet
nosed misery.
Pensive streets wish past.

Jealous
rain spits on windows
filmed by fog and cough.
Straphangers shiver away
from the Koh I Noored glass,
turn up Ipods.
Outside the panes,
cloud eggs crack, leak daylight.
Sky bright,
a rainbow ransoms the morning.

Photo by Thomas Costales

The next three poems are from the collection Antler: The Selected Poems. Antler, the poet, was born in Wisconsin and continues to live there and, for a period of a couple of years, was Poet Laureate of Milwaukee. He was also recipient of the Walt Whitman award in 1985.

The book was published by Soft Skull Press in 2000.

Everything is Different Now

Everything is different now,
Now that I know that octopus penises detach
    and wander alone through the Ocean
        seeking a mate,
So that right now, and thought
    all human history,
        and millions of years before
    humans were even at
        the tree-shrew level,
Octopus penises wandered alone
    without eyes or ears or noses
        through vast vastnesses
            of Ocean
        searching for a lady-love

River Anatomy

The mouth of the river
    is really the anus of the river
For the river starts on the mountaintop
    so the mountaintop is the mouth of the river,
        or the cloud is the mouth of the river
Where the river empties into the sea
    is the anus of the river
        not the mouth of the river,
Unless the river is vomiting into the sea.
But the anus of the river
    is really the penis of the river,
        because of what empties into the sea
    is liquid not solid.
So the mouth of the river
    is the penis of the river,
        the vulva of the river.

Privy to My Thoughts

The shit of mice and voles
    contains fungus from truffles they ate
        which contains microorganisms
            without which
        the colossal Douglas Firs
    wouldn't be able to take in and keep
        more water in their root-hairs
            in the dry seasons
        without which they'd die.
No Avenue of Giants without mice shit!
No stupendous towering treetrunk longevities
    without turds,
        little turds of shy
    scurrying pink-toed and white-whiskered
        pink-nosed mousies.
Ah, wee and cowering timorous beastie,
  what awe-inspiring power
        in thy feces!

Photo by Thomas Costales

Been feeling kind of down lately, looking around, trying to imagine a better life for my son's generation than I had for my own. Failing.

Fin de cycle

it is another
end
to another golden
age

all around
pillars crumble

truth
honor
decency

brave
souls resist

but i no longer
have the steel to be
among them

cracked stone
and crumbling mortar
await
arrival of tomorrow's
students
of empires risen
only to fail

they will
wonder
how such a fall
could happen
to these
so high and mighty

i will not
tell them

for

i know
no more then they

Photo by Thomas Costales

For reasons never clear to me, English poet Peter Reading spent a year in Marfa, Texas, in the Big Bend area of Texas, among the most desolate environments in the United States. The little town itself, population a bit over 2,000, has, in the past ten years or so become known as an arts and artist's refuge, creating some of the most interesting conjunctions of people, events and lifestyles you're likely to ever see, most especially during it's annual arts festival (which i attended last year and was not especially impressed by, except for the many young artists who came to exhibit from all around the state). It's way the hell and gone from everywhere and, unless you happen to be taking the old road from San Antonio to El Paso, you won't ever be there unless you really want to.

Reading's time in Marfa resulted in his book Marfan, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2000. The poems are in the form of vignettes and seemingly random notes on the area geography, people, history and legends. Winner of various literary awards, this was his nineteenth collection of poetry.

There's no real starting place for this book but the beginning, so I'll just jump in somewhere near the middle.

~~~~

The lights, demystified by divers eminents:
electrostatic discharge; swamp-gas; moonlight
shining on veins of mica; ghosts of Spanish
Conquistadors who sought gold here; a mirage
produced by cold and hot layers of air
refracting light; Ya know tham Mystery Flickers?
wel, what it is, the CIA is beaming
encrypted messages from Washington
onto the water tower - ya know, that silver
cylinder thar with MARFA writ on it? well,
tham coded signals bounce right off the tower
and light up the entire Chinati Mountains
with flicker flicker flicker flicker flicker

US 90 East, Marfa to Alpine:
you drive through the volcano of Paisano -
just breccia 35 million years old,
caldera, and pale rhyolite, and you.

No-nuke groups lobby governor to resist
proposals for Sierra Blanca site.
(Headline in this week's Big Bend Sentinel.)

Sierra Blanca residents have voiced
concern over the Texas, Maine and Vermont
Compact, which would enable the three states
to dump-low-level radioactive shit
on an impoverished minority's doorstep,
in violation of the federal
and international environmental
agreements made between the USA
and Mexico.

       It doesn't matter though -
they're only Spiks out on the borderline
(a site beneath which lie tectonic faults
rendering it more seismically active
than any other in the Lone Star State):

Outside the Mexican Cemetery, a sign
to visitors is crackling and buckled
from solar blistering over generations
and winds sand-blasting off the Chihuahuan Desert:
$200 FINE FOR LOITERING
OR LITTERING HERE.

        In this place idlers throng;
discarded stones, wood crosses, painted plaster,
and plastic roses faded to pinkish grey
garbage the quiet, death-sustaining slope.

Morales, Marquez, Garcia, Marftinez,
Flores, Rivera, Hinojos-Hernandez...

spiked on a Yucca sprouting from the dirt
of Maria Bartolo Villanuevea,
a straw-stuffed rag doll, smiling, rosy-cheeked,
sporting a hat of bean-sack hessian -
the pious tribute of some hijo.

       Coveys
of Scaled Quail loiter, litter among the ash,
scutter a dusty plot where Moniga
Quinteros deSalgado is reposing,
churr a low nasal Descanse en Paz.

Photo by Thomas Costales

Before I toss in my last offering for the week, here's a piece by our other new friend from Australia, Sue Clennell.

Lost Heroes

We talk over the tomb of Atreus
and of how Atreus fed Thyestes' his own children.
The guide speaks of a sister-in-law
who hates her so much
she would not reveal that her brother
was dying.
"See," she says, "we still feud,
feed our children to each other."
Poppies still bleed for lost heroes
up through snow capped mountains,
and the Judas trees
pink and preen around Olympia.

Photo by Thomas Costales

Might as well go out this week on a rant.

care to join me for a pile of food

every once in a while
i abandon
my normal grub
of chicken fried steak
and baked potato
for some of the fancy fodder
at those restaurants
with cloth tablecloths
and no chance at all
of ketchup
unless you bring it
yourself

and i've noticed
over the years a trend
toward piling your
food,
one thing
on top of another,
meat
on top of potatoes
or rice
or pasta of some denomination
or another
and under several asparagus
stems
or string beans

i don't understand
how we got to this state
of affairs -
from,
the child's complaint
that the peas
are touching the macaroni
and he can't possibly eat anything
because it's touching,
one thing contaminated by the other,
to this current haute cuisine
practice
of presenting to their diners
a pile of food in the middle of a
very large plate, most ot the plate
wasted,
untouched by the food
which is piled in the middle

this is like chopsticks,
two sticks between which
you are supposed to clamp
pieces of food that includes rice
and meat or vegetables too large
to eat in one bite

the biggest question
is not
why would we would want eat this way
but why anyone
would ever think of inventing
this method in the first place - end
product of a drinking game
is my guess

the same is true of this food-piling
movement among top chefs
of the world

i don't get it
and i don't like it
and that's why i just stick
to my chicken fried steak and
baked potatoes

carefully separated,
one kind
from the other

Photo by Thomas Costales

That's it for this week, but before going into my usual closing routine, I've been asked to pass on a request for submissions from a new literary ezine called Lit Magazine, Their Spring issue is ready to publish, but the editors are still looking for material for the Winter 2009-2010 issue.

They request 1 to 3 previously unpublished poems per submission with a maximum length of 30 lines or less and should include no profanity or pornography. Submission should be sent via e-mail to lorisimpson123@gmail.com. The words "Lit Mag" should be included in the subject line of the e-mail and basic contact information should be included in the body.

The submission deadline for the Winter issue is October 31, 2009.

I know a number of poets are included among the readers of "Here and Now" and I'd be pleased to pass on any other submission requests anyone might have. I think for further requests I'd prefer to just receive the name of the publication requesting submissions, the deadline date for submissions and an e-mail address where interested parties can call for complete information. Just send your request for a submission request to me at allen.itz@gmail.com.

I also add, don't forget me. Posting weekly, I go through lots of material and am always looking for more. Use my e-mail address above if you want to send me something.

This also applies to photos and art. I use 15 to 20 images a week, so always looking there as well. If you're going to send me images, I'd prefer to receive 20 jpegs so that I can turn all the images in a blog issue over to you. With 2,000 to 3,000 site visits a month, you'll get lots of looks here.

I do not like to open attachments since who knows what might be hiding in them. So, with the obvious exception of images, i prefer to received any material sent to me be in the body of the e-mail. I'll open attachment if I have to, but I won't like you very much for making me do it.

That being the end of that, I invite your to come back next week. Until then, please remember that all of the material presented in this blog remains the property of its creators. I produced the blog and you are welcome to use those parts created by me any way you want, but credit would be the nice and polite thing to do. Hasta la Pasta...allen itz

1 Comments:

at 1:20 AM Arunansu said...

Special thanks to Dan Cuddy for the lovely photos, and thanks to you for publishing the lively haiku of John Brandi. Enjoyed them, all.

Post a Comment

Totems Friday, August 07, 2009

IV.8.1.

I had to transcribe several very long poems for this week's post. That, and the passage of the 31 days of July of which only 9 had temperatures of less than three digits and only one of those nine with temperatures of less than 98 degrees, just plain wore me out and made me lazy.

Summer has be beat and i'm ready to give up the fight.

So I'm taking the easy way out this week of not using any of our friends' poems. Instead, what I have this week are just the library poems I have already transcribed and my own stuff, which require only that I cut and paste.

As we struggle against the hellish heat of August (actually, for the first couple of days, anyway, less hellish than the hellish heat of May, June, and July), here's what we have.

Jose Angel Valente
Morning

Antonio Machado
And He Was the Evil Spirit of My Dreams

Claudio Rodriguez
Petty Time

Me
at day's end

Bill Shields
Son of a Bitch

Me
soup of the day

from Song of Songs
The Shulamite

Me
the way it was before it was the way it was

Robert Bly
Uneasiness in Fall
Solitude Late at Night in the Woods

Me
learning to be straight

Richard Howard
My Last Hustler

Me
a good reason for summer

Demetria Martinez
Meantimes
Discovering America

Me
losing all the good stories

I start this week with poets from the anthology Roots & Wings, Poetry From Spain 1900-1975. Originally published in 1976 by Harper & Row, my edition was published in 2005 by White Pines Press of Buffalo, New York.

It is a bilingual book, original Spanish and English translation on facing pages.

The first poem from the book is by Jose Angel Valente who was born in 1929 and died in 2000. Much of his work attacks the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and indifference of his country's government after the Spanish Civil War. He studied at Santiago de Compostela in his native Galicia and graduated from Madrid university. He taught at Oxford from 1955 to 1958.

The poem was translated by Hardie St. Martin.

Morning

For Jose Augustine Goytisolo

Naked morning, the day's transparent
diamond....
Better shake off sleep.

Caravans of merchants,
fish sliding back into the sea.
I watch the poor in spirit
going past
in such long carts, covered with desires,
the poor in bread,
the poor in words
the poor in formalities.

But the morning is blue, the mountains
soak up its clean light.

Who is calling me, who
in the cradle's wail of hunger - the sun is riding high -
has dared to cry?
Goodbyes and homecomings
with the same handkerchiefs, the taste of salt
bitter like love.
People shouldn't cry.

Naked morning: trees, birds far overhead,
winter, fall...Peace.
Peasants bite into the seed
that will have to multiply.
They pull their homes tight
around the terror they share.

Oh, no one, no one
should cry.

The tall, open light takes in everything that breathes.

And out of the past
its loveliness,
farther of, what's there?

I give my children names,
I build friendship.
But my house is made of time.
Everything is so clear this morning.

The next poem from the anthology was written by Antonio Machado who was born in Seville in 1875 and died in 1939 one month after crossing the French border with thousands of other refugees from the Spanish Civil War. During the course of many travels he was a translator, actor, poet, high school French teacher.

This poem was translated by Robert Bly.

And He Was the Evil Spirit of My Dreams

And he was the evil spirit of my dreams, the most handsome
of all angels. His victorious eyes
shot fire like pieces of steel,
and the flames that fell
from his touch like blood
lit up the deep dungeon of the soul.

"Would you like to come with me?" "No, never! Tombs
and dead bodies frighten me."
But his iron hand
gripped my right hand.

"You will come with me...." And in my dream I walked
blinded by his red torch.
And in the dungeon I heard the sound of chains
and of beasts stirring in their cages.

My last poem this week from the Spanish anthology is by Claudio Rodriguez.

Rodriguez was born in 1934 and died in 1999. His poetry was less centered around the poet themes common than much of Spanish poetry during and after the civil war. He was a lecturer in Spanish at Nottingham University from 1958 to 1969 and at Cambridge from 1960 to 1964.

The poem was translated by Robert Mezey

Petty Time

Today with the north wind
that story came back to me.
Things went badly for me in those days
and my mouth worse,
in that city with its
thinning herd, its poverty
and its good name.
What with the old traditions
of fawning and stealing you blind,
the bored interview
and the cheap rummage sale, my youth
went on one leg. And for what?

I am ashamed of my mouth
not for its words
but for the mouth that
it kissed. How long ago
was that? And who blames me?
All I have left is a taste
of bitter almond, a taste of gall,
of treachery, the body
sold out, the spoiled caress.

I wish to God that time
were merely what we love. We hate
and that's time too. And poems.
I hated you then and today I have to
remember you, I have to have you
in front of me, with no one to help us out,
and love you once more and hate you
once more. I kiss you now
and I betray you now, on top of
your body. Everyone does business
as best he can with the little he has.
If yesterday was selling, today is buying;
tomorrow, repentance.
Dawn isn't the only time of day.

Sometimes it is so damn easy; and sometimes it isn't. This poem, from a day it wasn't.

at day's end

i was going to do
a stream of conscious
poem
but discovered my conscious
has no stream
today,
just a little puddle
in a shadow,
stagnant,
reflecting only the
gray
muddle
of my mind

I am no shirker

success
in my life
came
mainly
because i was willing
to work harder
and longer
than anyone else,
willing to face the hardest tasks
head on,
those hard, uncomfortable
things many others
sought to avoid

too
bad none of that counts for much
in the poetic realms

what counts
is inspiration and that particular
cupboard
seems bare today

i can think
of no time in my life
when i've felt
less
like writing a poem
than right this
minute
in this place

it is crowded,
and it's noisy,
and it's hot,
always
hot,
and i look at all
the faces and see
not one
with the power
to make me forget
that it's crowded and noisy
and hot

i found
a cool spot yesterday,
my recliner
under a ceiling fan
with the air conditioner
turned down to 65 -
i slept
for 16 hours
and am greatly
tempted
to do it again today
and am looking very hard,
even now,
for some reason
not to do
just that

but i'm not the type
to give in to the same
temptation
twice

so it could be
this poem
will be a day-
long project,
growing
into something worthwhile
as the day
progresses

perhaps
that which has been lost
will be found
before the day's
end

i will see you then

~~~~

and then,
as is so often the case,
is now

an enchilada dinner
for fifteen
to mark my brother-in-law's
fifteenth
twenty-ninth birthday is
complete

leftovers
are put up,
the tablecloth
and dishes are in their respective
washers,
the kitchen floor
is swept and mopped,
the garbage bags are in
the dumpsters
ready for pickup tomorrow,
the blue one
for recycling and the gray one
for regular trash

and the end of the day
upon which time
i pledged to have
my daily poem is near
upon us

so
is this a poem
i see before me, no,
not even close,
an epic of procrastination
instead

it is the way of life,
encompassed in this not-a-poem,
the great and wonderful things
that lie within all of us,
lost
to the inertia of a
lazy, uninspired nature

we
all could be
so much better, so much
more,
than we are,
except for the lucky few among us
who
on a day or two in their lives, maybe
just a moment or two in their lives,
are the exceptional creature
we all
have the capacity to be

the rest of us settle
for a few highs,
high relative mostly to
our more frequent lows

today
will not be marked
as one of my highs, but, neither
was it a particular low -
muddled
is more like it,
another muddled day
in a usually muddled life

and this collection of words
and phrases, muddled
like my day, but not
as bad as it could have been
had it not been done
at all

as
day's end
wraps it all in a cloak
of dark
and dreams

The next poem is by Bill Shields from his book Lifetaker, the third book in a trilogy including Human Shrapnel and The Southeast Asian Book of the Dead. I couldn't find any kind of comprehensive bio on him, beyond a brief note on the back cover of the book which says that he was a Navy Seal for three years during the Vietnam War and currently lives in Pennsylvania. I was hoping to discover if these very, very tough poems were based on his experiences or were his experiences.

Either way, this poem will shake you. I am uncertain how to post this book, which is a kind of narrative of years past the events of his life in Vietnam. The last section of the is a long poem which sets up the rest of the book. I've decided to use this concluding section because, even though it is at the end of the book, it is the beginning of the story.

This is longer than what I normally do here, but if you can stop before you're finished you're better than me.

Son of a Bitch

1.
I only hit my mother in the face once; it was a beginning.
My right hand dripped the blood from her nose. She just
stood there, eyes too stunned to blink, then the tears and
wails began.

My father ran down the steps and I caught his ear with
my left hand. He took his mind off my mother's pain.

The family's dog barked.

It was the day after my high school graduation.

2.
I started living in my car, a Plymouth Valiant with a slant
six motor and torn upholstery that you could've found
parked two doors down the street from my parents.

No girlfriend - I was an ugly bastard, but there were
groceries in the front seat, garbage thrown in the back. I
spent the days looking for a job, any job, and there
weren't any - or they weren't having me.

3.
I walked into the recruiter's office and signed the papers
in fifteen minutes. He took four years of my life; I took
freedom.

4.
Vietnam

5.
Almost 19 years old and wrapped into a VA hospital bed,
shitting blood & worms. My face was wrapped in a
hospital towel - part of a cheekbone still oozed pus & rice
paddy slime.

An old alcoholic thrashed in the bed next to me.

The night nurse caught him drinking piss out of a
handheld urinal.

6.
My mother visited; the old man sent a card.

7.
I plopped a joint into the trach hole and hit on it hard -
nobody shared it. The badly crippled men, quads and
paras, had their own ward...and bygod they knew how to
suicide like champions; I was with the run-of-the-mill
gimps - burns, dead eyes, cancer and all those guys with
the wicked shakes and stares.

8.
Turn the channel.
Flick an ash.
Time got time.

9.
My mother was visiting when the nurse soaked my
bandages off for the first time. She puked; I was fascinated
with my grotesqueness. The other guys in the ward
barely noticed.

- there were uglier things.

10.
Shots came and shots came. Young recent graduates of
medical schools learned paychecks on our bodies. I itched
and a shot came; I touched the hole that had been my
mouth and cried. A shot slid under my skin.

I loved those shots.

11.
The alcoholic died.

I saw them wrap him up tight in plastic and move him off
the ward. A young orderly, no more than a kid, wiped
down the bed in disinfectant and put his personal stuff in
another bag for the relatives.

Hell, there were no relatives.

12.
I woke up with a bag of Seconal tied around my eyes.

13.
The nurses and orderlies fed me a bag of food through a
tube stuck through my hole, then washed it down with
milk and Maalox. Breakfast, lunch and dinner - a bag of
chow.

My beard had began to stick through the bandages and
curled around them like crabgrass cracking concrete.

14.
I couldn't feel my ears. They weren't attached anymore.

15.
Red Cross ladies came to the floor Thursdays with a
cookie and juice cart; they were more pathetic than us,
trying desperately to come to grips with their frail hu-
manity and failing.

A young one offered me juice but not her eyes.
It took her a full ten seconds to realize I couldn't drink it.
She never came back.

16.
I smelled the pus running down the side of my face...I
was in my grave, hating every ripped inch of my body as
skin fell like the very snow on my bed.

If they hadn't restrained my hands, I would've dug them
straight through my face and pulled out what was left.

Nothing.

17.
After two months in a hospital bed...

I wanted to masturbate. Badly. What was beneath the
gauze of my face wasn't going to be changed in a lifetime
but a full prostate gland and swollen balls could be
drained in a matter of eye blinks. No privacy, too much
time.

Turn the tv back on.

Forget the nuts.

18.
Mother visited me again, sick, paler than most of the patients.
She brought a year's worth of Reader's Digests and
flannel slippers.

I walked her off the ward

her hands and upper arms shaking badly.

19.
As patients, we were strangers to each other - maybe
Vietnam did that, maybe our beaten bodies did it - it
didn't matter; we slept within and arm's reach of another
man's sickness.

Men died in their beds quietly after a long sigh or a
scream, then nothing...shaming us to let ourselves live.

20.
Surgery. 49 more facial scars.

Maybe a mouth.

21.
Days passed without much pain, or thought. Chow and
doctors arrived on time; a nurse turned the lights off at 10
p.m. A window with metal grating to stare out of when
the tv ran dry.

The VA was paying me a 100% disability check each
month for a holiday in the sun. My old man was cashing
the checks and drank them down. A car was involved.

22.
An old cretin with warts for hands did the final surgery on
my face. I looked about human, with a grin that tilted
towards my right shoulder.

The left ear prosthetic was attached; the right was rebuilt
with skin from my ass.

I took me a few weeks to learn how to eat, the muscles
gone in my lower jaw - food spilled like an open sack
from my mouth. The trach was closed; I remembered
how to talk

and hate my stupid voice.

23.
Three months later, I moved back into the family's home,
right down into the basement. My bed was right next to
the gas dryer. Clothes still in cardboard boxes.

I only went out at night, when the scars became shadows.

And I masturbated every day

joyfully.

24.
I paid for my first woman - a young brunette blonde in
bright white boots and a yellow raincoat. I came once on
her belly, once in her twat.

She reached into my pants that were laying on the floor
and dug out my wallet.

I dug out her teeth.

25.
Back home, the old man left me alone and the old lady
drank; it felt like the VA except the family dog stayed in
the basement with me.

26.
Victims of the vampire.

I met her through my brother (she was his dealer). She
lived in a trailer parked behind her family's house; just her
and her half-black baby, alone in the worst sense. She had
great pot.

We didn't talk much, just a little tv and maybe some
cards. Got high. I always left before sunrise.

She killed herself before that baby's first birthday.

27.
A nasty habit, this carving small pieces of skin off my
body and licking the wound with my tongue. This is
fucking sick, I would say to myself as I pulled the blade
out from under the bed.

Maybe I couldn't believe I was human.

Maybe I liked it.

28.
Just touch them, put your finger on their back, leg, or
face, anywhere on their body but never let them feel it. I
did it to hundreds of people, strangers and friends alike,
and whispered to each and every one of them: doom on
you.

One night I touched the clerk at the convenience store
three times right on his face and neck; he looked so hard
at my scars he never saw the finger.

My dying grandfather never felt my index finger on his
arm nor did he hear my words

I'm doomed too.

29.
I worked on my voice. I worked on my car. But mainly, I
did nothing. Passed time in the basement. there were no
expectations, or much thought about the future; I waited.
People and situations would show up and stand in front of
my body.

I waited.

30.
I carved a little more.

Uh-oh, a statement of philosophy approaching. Duck and cover.

soup of the day

i believe
people believe
what is convenient
to believe,
facts,
fungible things
easily replaceable
with other facts when
needed, truth
a river that
flows
from port to port,
adapting
as it makes its way
out to sea
by the pull of tides
and current
along the way

we are each
an illusion,
a spinning eddy
of minute forces
to small to see
except as we
agree to describe
them, a common
myth of being
that substitutes
for reality

how could
truth
be otherwise

The next poem is from the anthology The Defiant Muse - Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present, published by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York in 1999.

When I've taken from this book before, I used more modern poets. This week I'm going back to the beginning, ancient Israel.

The poem is The Shulamite. I spent a considerable time trying to find out who or what a Shulamite was. It was unexpectedly hard to find the answer. The best I could do is that the word means "princess" with a hint that the sense of the usage is that it's not necessarily complimentary. The word that comes to mind, reading between the lines is "diva."

What I really found interesting on this is that I could find no Wikipedia entry on the word.

Here's the poem, taken from sections of Song of Songs. This is a bilingual book, Hebrew and translation to English on facing pages. These verses were translated by Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch.

The Shulamite

Song of Songs

1.2-6
Kiss me, make my drunk with your kisses!
You sweet loving
is better than wine

You are fragrant,
you are myrrh and aloes.
All the young women want you.

Take my by the hand, let us run together!

My lover, my king, has brought me into his chambers.
We will laugh, you and I, and count
each kiss
better than wine.

Every one of them wants you.

I am dark, daughters of Jerusalem,
and I am beautiful!
Dark as the tents of Kedar, lavish
as Solomon's tapestries.

Do not see me only as dark;
the sun has stared at me.

My brothers were angry with me,
they made me guard the vineyards.
I have not guarded my own.

2.1-7

I am the rose of Sharon,
the wild lily of the valleys.
Like a lily in a field
of thistles,
such is my love
among the young women.

And my beloved among the young men
is a branching apricot tree in the wood.
In that shade I have often lingered,
tasting the fruit.

Now he has brought me to the house of wine
and his flag over me is love.

Let me lie among vine blossoms,
in a bed of apricot!
I am in the fever of love.

His left hand beneath my head,
his right arm
holding me close.

Daughters of Jerusalem, swear to me
by the gazelles, by the deer in the field,
that you will never awaken love
until it is ripe.

3.1-5

At night in my bed I longed
for my only love.
I sought him, but did find him.

I must rise and go about the city,
the narrow streets and squares, till I find
my only love.
I sought him everywhere
but I could not find him.

Then the watchmen found me
as the went about the city.
"Have you seen him? Have you seen
the one I love"

I had just passed them when I found
my only love.
I held him. I would not let him go
until I brought him to my mother's house,
into my mother's room.

Daughters of Jerusalem, swear to me
by the gazelles, by the deer in the field,
that you will never awaken love
until it is ripe.

5.2-16

I was asleep but my heart stayed awake.
Listen!
my lover knocking:

"Open, my sister, my friend,
my dove, my perfect one!
My hair is wet, drenched
with the dew of night.”

"But I have taken off my clothes,
how can I dress again?
I have bathed my feet,
must I dirty them?"

My love reached in for the latch
and my heart
went wild.

I rose to open to my love,
my fingers wet with myrrh,
sweet flowing myrrh
on the doorbolt.

I opened to my love
but he had slipped away.
How I wanted him when he spoke!

I sought him everywhere
but could not find him.
I called his name
but he did not answer.

Then the watchmen found me
as they went about the city.
They beat me, they bruised me,
they tore the shawl from my shoulders,
those watchmen of the walls.

Swear to me, daughters of Jerusalem!
If you find him now
you must tell him
I am in a fever of love.

How is your lover different
from any other, O beautiful woman?
Who is your lover
that we must swear to you?

My beloved is milk and wine,
he towers
above ten thousand.

His head is burnished gold,
the mane of his hair
black as the raven.

His eyes like doves
by the rivers
of milk and plenty.

His cheeks a bed of spices,
a treasure
of precious scents, his lips
red lilies wet with myrrh

His arm a golden scepter with gems of topaz,
his loins the ivory of thrones
inlaid with sapphire,
his thighs like marble pillars
on pedestals of gold.

Tall as Mount Lebanon,
a man like a cedar!

His mouth is sweet wine, he is all delight.

This is my beloved
and this is my friend
O daughters of Jerusalem.

8.1-7

If only you were a brother
who nursed at my mother's beast!
I would kiss you in the streets
and no one would scorn me.

I would bring you to the house of my mother
and she would teach me.
I would give you spice wine to drink,
my pomegranate wine.

His left hand beneath my head,
his right arm
holding me close.

Daughters of Jerusalem, swear to me
that you will never awaken love
until it is ripe.

Who is that
rising from the desert,
her head on her lover's shoulder!

There, beneath the apricot tree,
you mother conceived you,
there you were born.
In that very place I awakened you.

Bind me as a seal upon your heart,
a sign upon your arm

for love is as fierce as death,
its jealousy bitter as the grave.
Even its sparks are a raging fire,
a devouring flame.

Great seas cannot extinguish love,
no river can sweep it away.

If a man tried to buy love
with all the wealth of his house,
he would be despised...

8.14

Hurry, my love! Run away,
my gazelle, my wild stag
on the hills of cinnamon.

As everyone knows, even though half those who know don't know who he was, Walter Cronkite died a couple of weeks ago. This led me to thinking, not just about him, but the other players as well, arriving at this.

the way it was before it was the way it was

i ran into
Chet Huntley
in the library at
Indiana University
in 1966 - 20 years later
i met David Brinkley at a
chamber of commerce dinner
in Corpus Christi, Texas

i had been trying to write
a short story
that kept getting longer
and longer and was walking
in a fog of too few ideas
and too many words
when i bumped right into
the man, fresh from his ranch
in Big Sky Country, retired from
the news business, making a little
extra money on the i used-to-be-famous
college speech circuit

Chet,
just as tall and twice as craggy-looking
as on TV, said pardon me
and i said whoops, the difference being
his voice saying pardon me
was the same voice i had heard for years
reporting all the crucial news
of the 1950s while my voice was more of a
squeak of surprise - that's why, i suppose,
he got to report all the crucial events of the
1950s while i was left studying Russian
for the United States Air Force, writing
a never-ending short story
on the side

the short story
is in my closet somewhere, forty pages
with purpose, not to mention
denouement, not yet in sight

Brinkley, on or about 1985, was also
out on the speech circuit, making as much money
for 15 minutes of humorous recollections as
Huntley made the last year he reported all the
crucial news of the 1950s - Brinkley looked good
and, from what i could hear from the back
of the room, was his same old sardonic self
as he had been when he and Chet
had been reporting on all the crucial news
of the 1950s, the main difference being
when Chet warned that the world was ending
on Thursday, David was telling you, well,
it's about time and here are five places where
you can get a good martini before then

they were a good team
until Chet couldn't take the city life
anymore
and left to punch cows and whatever else
he did on his ranch in Big Sky Country while
Brinkley tried to make it on his own
but the world wasn't ready yet for Jon Stewart,
a belief in intelligent, meaningful politics
and other fantasies still holding some sway
at middle-american dinner tables in middle-
american suburbs across the only recently
50 middle-american states from sea to shining
sea etc.

many of us switched to Uncle Walter then, inviting
him to join us at the dinner table while we
ate our chicken a la king casserole and luxuriated
in the certitude that, the news, by god, just wasn't
meant to be
funny

meanwhile
i can tell you this...

Chet smelled like fine saddle leather
and David laughed
all the way
to the
bank

Here are two poems by Robert Bly from the book Selected Poems, published by HarperCollins in 1986. The poems in the book were selected from a number of Bly's previously published books, to many to list here. The two poems used are in Section 3 of the book which includes poems from Silence in the Snowy Fields and This Tree Well Be Here for a Thousand Years.

Uneasiness In Fall

The fall has come, clear as the eyes of chickens.
Awkward sounds come from the sea,
Sounds of muffled oarlocks
And swampings in lonely bays,
Surf crashing on unchristened shores,
And the wash of tiny snail shells in the wandering gravel.

My body also is lost or wandering: I know it,
As I cradle a pen, or walk down a stair
Holding a cup in my hand,
Not breaking into the pastures that lie in the sunlight.
This sloth is far inside the body,
The sloth of the body lost among the wandering stones of
    kindness

Something homeless is looking on the long roads,
A dog lost since midnight, a box-elder
Bug who doesn't know
Its walls are gone, its house
Burnt. Even the young sun is lost,
Wandering over earth as the October night comes down.

Solitude Late at Night in the Woods

   I
The body like a November birch facing the full moon
And reaching into the cold heavens.
In these trees there is no ambition, no sodden body, no
   leaves,
Nothing but bare trunks climbing like cold fire!

   II
My last walk in the trees has come. At dawn
I must return to the trapped field,
to the obedient earth.
The trees shall be reaching all winter.

   III
It is joy to walk in the bare woods.
The moonlight is not broken by the heavy leaves.
The leaves are down, and toughing the soaked earth,
Giving off the odor that partridges love.

I've learned you should be careful when eavesdropping. You may hear things that take you where you might rather not go.

learning to be straight

the poet
taking the form
of a bump on a log
sits
sits
sits
& sits some more
waiting
finally listening in on
the conversation
of the two women
at the next table

talking
about men
and the foolish women
who let men
run their lives
needy women
who allow their life
to drain away
waiting for men
to say the "l" word

and yesterday
same bump another log
sitting next to several men
talking about women
and the games you had to play
just for a quick feel and a blow job -
needy women
sucking the manly right out
of their men

listening to the two sexes
talk among themselves
about the other,
wondering,
how the heck overpopulation
ever became a problem,
thinking about how
seven and eight year old
boys
&
girls are both sure
the other kind
has cooties and how
hard biology must work
to get us past that point
or at least teach most us
how to at least appear to
have grown past that point

how hard biology must
have to work to keep us
straight

Richard Howard was born in 1929 in Cleveland and studied at Columbia and the Sorbonne. After working for several years as lexicographer, he became a translator from French and has published over 150 translations. In 1983 he received the American Book Award for his translation of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal. In 1970 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his third book of poems, Untitled Subjects, and later received the Academy of Arts and Letters Literary Award for his several books of poems.

My Last Hustler

...all smiles stopped

When "Brad" is lying naked, or rather naked is lying
in wait for whatever those he refers to as clients require
by way of what they refer to as satisfaction, denying
himself the distraction of alcohol or amyl, there appears
in his eyes no flicker of shame, no flare of shameless desire,
and what tribute he is paid finds him neither tender nor fierce.

On a bed above suspicion, creases in obviously fresh
linen still mapping a surface only a little creamier than
the creaseless hills and hollows of his compliant flesh,
Brad will extend himself (as the graphic saying goes)
and the upper hand - always his - will push into places the man
who happens to be there till happening comes to blows

(another saying you now more full grasp): full-blown,
Brad will prepare himself , though not precipitately,
for the grateful-kisses stage; he offers cheek and chin
but objects to undergoing your accolade on his mouth:
he has endured such homage to early,too often, too lately,
and for all his boyish ways, Brad is not wholly a youth.

Routines on some arduous rigging, however, can restore
him to himself in mirrors, every which way surrounded
by no more than what he seems and mercifully by no more.
Booked by a merciless Service for a thousand afternoons,
Brad will become the needs of his "regulars" confounded
by his indifferent regard, by his regardless expense...

Take him - young faithful! - there and then. Marvel! praise!
Fond though your touch may be and truly feeling your tact,
yet a mocking echo returns - remote, vague, blase -
of Every Future Caress, so very like your own!
However entranced the scene you make (the two you act
as one to all appearance, but one is always alone),

derision will come to mind, or to matter over mind:
the folly, in carnal collusion, of mere presented skill.
Undone, played out, discharged, one insight you will have gained
which cannot for all these ardent lapses be gainsaid
- even his murmured subsidence an exercise of will -
is the sudden absolute knowledge Brad would rather be dead.

Not a fan of summer, actually I hate summer and wonder at the mental competence of those who don't. There is, even so, one thing I do like about the season.

a good reason for summer

some i know
are offended by
young women in in
low cut summer blouses
and tight short shorts
that flex in passing

churchly folks
of the tight-assed
contingent,
followers of
St. Paul
who preached
against any
suggestion that
sex was
anything but
a base animal function,
necessary, though it was
to propagate
the brotherhood of
Christ the Holy
Eunuch,
certainly never to be
enjoyed
and feminists
of the more flaming-
eyed variety
sharing more with
Paul than they usually
care to admit
and those who,
because of the squirming
ugliness
of their souls,
despise
all beauty, like
the Taliban who
destroyed
the statues of the
Buddha

but not
me

i like it -
searching every year
for a purpose to summer,
the pleasure of such
fresh
loveliness
around me
at the supermarket
is the best reason
i've come up
with
for the season

In 1994, Demetria Martinez won a Western States Book Award with her first novel, Mother Tongue. With this collection Breathing Between the Lines, published by the University of Arizona Press in 1997, she returned to her first love, poetry.

I have two poems from the book.

Meantimes

The questions catch us off guard,
a dust storm we drive through

Although headlights are powerless
against beating grit

You wonder if you want
me in the passenger seat

If the fights about stopping
and asking directions

Say something larger,
meaner about our journey.

2.
a fog of newspapers between us,
horizons of headlines

Not even the obligatory remarks
about Rwanda, the weather

One day, who knows when,
our star died

Is the dark light now visible
to our disbelieving eyes?

3.
I offered you rosary beads
for the rearview mirror,
tear gas on a key ring

She would give you
an aerial view of your life,
a hammock of stars

4.
Can love be reset
like a bone?

Is the will a strong
enough splint?

Can we put in
another well?

When water tables
drop, is it forever?

5.
Do we have the courage
to let the questions hang
on a wire like carbe seca

until the sun speaks
to us in the savory dryness?
Do we have the courage

to raise questions like children,
let them grow into
their own answers?

6.
Lightning breaks
the locks on our hearts

Thunder breaks into
the safe of night

Seed spills from bruised fruit,
as we wait for the sun

to reweave itself
across the loom of sky

Discovering America

for P., 1992

Santo Nino on a
bedroom desk,
holy water in a
mouthwash bottle
Grandma had the
priest bless,
this house,
a medieval city
you visited,
what you sought
was not here.

Not in wrists
oiled with sage,
chimayo earth
sprinkled on sheets,
nor San Felipe bells
that pecked away
the dark,
cordova blanket
we hatched
awake in.

To prove love
I shed still
more centuries
rung by rung
into a pueblo
kiva where
you touched
the sipapu,
canal the universe
emerged from
brown baby glazed
in birth muds.

You thought
America
was on a map,
couldn't see it
in a woman,
olive skin,
silver loops
in lobes,
one for each
millennium
endured on this
husk of red earth,
this nuevo mejico.

Last night
I dreamed
a map of the
continent,
the train
that took you
from me whipped
across tracks
like a needle
on a seam
somewhere
near Canada.

It took me
four years
to heal.
Have you?
Have you
discovered
American
or at least
admitted
a woman grew
maiz here
long before
you named it
corn?

I decided I'd end this week with a little history lesson.

losing all the good stories

San Antonio,
one of the oldest cities
in the United States,
was, for the greater part
of its existence, capital of, first
the Spanish and later the Mexican,
province of Tejas, encompassing most
of what is now known as the
American Southwest

it is now county seat
of Bexar County, Texas

that's pronounced "bear,"
as in the grizzly animal who
does a thing in the woods that
need not be discussed here, though
it is true, the bear does do it in the woods
just as it is true that the Pope is Catholic
and the earth is not flat like a pancake but
round like a tennis ball, though less fuzzy

for most of my life
i was taught and believed
the county was named after
a hero of the Texas revolution
by the name of Bear who could not write
and signed his name with a "X" so that when
he was designated the namesake of the
county the name was written with an "x" in the middle
so as to be true to him and to eliminate
any suggestion the county was named after
any other Bear but him

that's the story
and it was only recently i learned
it is not true

in fact,
the county was named after
the presidio (fort) established
in the early Spanish settlement
by the Spanish Governor Martin de Alacorn,
and named San Antonio de Bejar
in honor of the Duke of Bejar,
the viceroy's brother,
who died a hero's death defending Budapest
from the Ottoman Empire in 1686

one hero
is as good as another, i guess,
but i really liked the story of the "X"
and am sorry to lose it

it is but one of the consequences
of growing old -
all the best stories turn out to be
untrue

now
i just have to learn to find some
shared sense of identity with
the guy who saved Budapest
in 1686

That's all for this week. May cool winds soothe us before we return next week. Until then, it is still true that all material presented on this blog remains the property of its creators. The blog itself was produced by and is the property (unless someone else wants it) of me...allen itz.

1 Comments:

at 12:48 PM Anonymous said...

Sigh. You say it's the property of the creators, but you thumb your nose at them by preempting them from giving you permission to use their work. I'm sure you think you are doing these poets a favor, paying them an homage, but in reality you are showing them great disrespect.

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