Collected Poems by David Jenness
NOTE: A selection of David Jenness' poems has been published under the title Trueing the Universe: Selected Poems 1990 - 2016. The book, handsomely designed by the chief designer of Radius Books (Santa Fe), may be purchased for $19.95 from:
Collected Works Bookstore
202 Galisteo Street
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Poems below are not in strictly chronological order, but in general, the most recent poems come last. To go to these most recent poems, please scroll down to the very bottom of the page.
1984
A Balanchine Pas de Deux
First, conjunction.
Two figures size on one another,
Who discerning whom.
Like envelops like,
One surrounds one,
Linked in off-placed ambits.
Then, vying.
Souls command completion.
Messages pass, jangling the spheres.
Two anxious beings superpose:
Between us a spill of consciousness.
At last, feeling.
Movement concentrates the sense
Of colors carried in light.
I am your reflection, but I contain you;
You hold the filament of which I am the source.
Together we traverse the spaces of the universe
Wrapped in light, in music.
2007
A Calendar
February brings false dawn,
A distant glint that leads you on
To plan the garden, prod the ground.
Sleet freezes you in place, sans sound.
April’s dawn is pearly cast,
It bathes, cajoles the seeds to last.
Some good ones fail of full fruition:
Dew eases their decomposition.
June is triumphantly full day.
Get you to the woods to play!
Soak warmth on your backs beneath the larch -
The child will need it come next March.
September brings a stealthy dusk
That bites the grapes and shreds the husk.
It sets off blotchy crimson spots,
From hoarfrost of the field that rots.
December is a time for killing.
The carcass for the feast is chilling
In the larder, bled, its innards torn.
They say some other child is born.
January 2009
At the Concert
The visual scene is laid down, tense,
A stretched out featureless canvas,
Waiting.
Blood murmurs, guts grizzle.
Out there is silence, a curtain,
Hanging.
There is no tuning, no cough, no in-taken breath;
An oboe breaks the silence, a scalpel parting the skin.
A snare insinuates events.
Against the stretched tympanum, a kettle drum
Resounds.
The edges of the sonic wound begin to fray and quiver,
A thread from the viola stitching after, while still the rip
Extends.
No sound bleeds out. The horns and lower brass bestir
Themselves, and surly raptures in the gut begin.
The mind displays a baffled topologic sense;
When sound excites the inner ear, the distal nerves
Respond.
Along the arm, the hairs alert and stand erect, but
Flute, harp, strings lay on a beaded balm, like a zephyr
Soothing.
The pressure in the cochlear space
Is damped into a slurring pulse that beats within.
The sonic import is aggresive, terse:
Lacerating.
The mind tamps down the message in reverse:
Abating.
Music occurs in virtual space.
If one were split from head to toe,
In what direction would the music flow?
August 2003
At the Piano with Liszt
Con fuoco
Two blind behemoths barreling down
on twin relentless tracks.
I turn the page and glance ahead.
On they come, dodging through parallax,
throwing off a tangled cloud of missiles
zooming randomly past angled verticals,
descending in a swarm of slant-seen spots
like floaters in the eye. Mangled beams tumble
in an end-over jumble of matter, all trying to come
to rest on serried white/black slots.
There is a head but no tail to this rumble
of cascades and rivulets of riven sound.
There are slurs of darting dragonflies
trying to stitch up lines, like thread
and needle plying a cyclone.
And what are those dot-size
peppered numerals for?
Why enumerate a crash?
One of the tracks is riveted in place with bars
that slow nothing, struts that hold nothing tight.
The other arpeggiates and flaps
like sail in a howling wind,
with sudden hollows of collapse -
gaps in the tumult where there is eerily no noise,
before suiciding runs destroy my sight.
The music slips away as I claw at it,
receding leftward from my focal view,
fanning out onto a plain
of bundled broken shapes and half-submerged runnels
of debris, and broken forms askew.
The numbers are all disordered now
like midges on a field of scree.
The sound degrades, derails.
Some unbending element has fallen through the bars.
The girders and ties are smashed,
The beams are broken, the tracks
are filled with disconnected heads and tails.
I am playing in an unknown key. -
Poco adagio
Suddenly becalmed, the sound
forms into a lapping eddy of notes.
A fingerstroke plays kick-the-can
with Brownian motes
like a cat pursuing dust that floats
in the afternoon air.
The melody circles round,
an in-turning arabesque
creating its shadow harmony.
Faint chords steal in as if aware
that directly they will dissipate
and back away somewhere.
The room begins to hum like a guitar.
Più mosso, it says, but I decline.
The music sets a pace; it is not mine.
October/December 2004
Bali poems
I. In island Southeast Asia, look!
A page from nature’s coloring book.
Almost a delirium of green.
Millions of minute hypertrophies
In a webbed aimless shifting,
An acqueous inertia,
A vast virescence.
An assiduity of shoots, emergent
Through a yielding loam.
A single lotus erect from slime, urgent, indecent.
If this were dreaming, I would be drifting
In a bath of deliquescence,
Part of a tidal tonguing of hidden places.
.
Where I come from, seedlings cower in furrows
Drawn in earth like anxious finger-traces
On a loved one’s livid skin,
Searching for vital signs, a recent
Pulse, some evidence of ciliar life.
Here the ricelings bristle in series, vivid
On a vegetal parade-ground, obeisant,
Braced beneath the commanding sun.
Not cajoled or stroked, but complacent.
And newly, crescively green.
II. Regarding van Eyck’s Altarpiece at Ghent
How does one fare in the face of beauty?
Essay humility.
But philosophers
Have done their dingy duty.
It appears humility
Is nothing more than pride,
A stance of vanity
That leaves sincerity aside.
Admit futility.
Stare. Only note
The slipping in the gut,
The syncope of breath,
The closing of the throat,
The eyes blind with tears.
* syncope has three syllables
III. Daily Life
Day is heavy
Dark is light
Clarity precipitates
Only at night.
Daylight is wooly
With an old flannel taste.
In someone else’s bathrobe
You promenade, encased
In second-hand feelings stiff in the cloth,
Crib-notes on life sewn to the hem,
Emblems of success appliquéd on the collar,
A stranger’s diplomas, two for a dollar,
To satisfy those, to mystify them.
Night-time is like pomegranate juice,
Astringent, inky, slightly granular
For scouring out the moral sluice.
Always a child is crying – lonely.
Calling on our earliest being we declare a truce,
In this root cellar of emotions stored for later use.
IV. More Daily Life
The foul, the fine,
Poison in the sacramental wine,
The fortunate, the scary bad,
The imagined, the hoped for, the had.
The striven for, the frivolously gotten,
The feintly formal, the integrally rotten,
The self-regarding in the love affair:
We live in life as we live in air.
The fond, the false,
The tarantella in the waltz,
Contrived repose, benevolent rapine,
The sweetmeats of decay on which we dine.
Words doing dirty things with thoughts,
Converting is-ness into oughts,
Ministering to souls beyond repair:
We live in life as we live in air.
V. A Dream of Home
It wasn’t like Zeus and the thunderbolts.
A cyclone picked up toads from the adjoining state
And rained them down on us.
Hard to say, which more terrified –
We or the toads. All the roads
Were slippery with raptor molts.
The dogs were coachmen, done up
In bombazine with crimson edges,
The cats kept screaming, but refused to mate.
Wood doves coughed in the unkempt hedges,
An empty local bus crept home to die.
The locusts all began to cry.
VI. Why Not?
I expect I will do it, finally, for the usual reasons.
Weary, stale, flat – that says it: the sere sullen seasons
Follow each other, leaving undisturbed satiety
Like a crusted-over honeycomb, through which anxiety
Infuses like bile into a sodden gut.
I will do it to hurl disgust at politicians on the podium
And at philosophers whose analytic arabesques only tedium
Will undercut.
Despair has hung around too long, a stupefying fug:
I need to find the bung and pull the plug.
But if some sympathetic soul should comprehend,
Then what’s the point? The end of life is to reach an end.
If one friend fellow-feels the pain,
It means I am inflicting harm again.
It’s all existence I need to kill –
Erasing one’s own containing mind,
Leaves reality behind: The world lives still.
Naïve realism’s valid after all.
Into each percipient life experience must fall,
And will not vanish when I go.
It comes down then to the trite and true:
You cannot placate me, I cannot cancel you.
So I must play at life for one more season
While working out a sounder reason.
September 2006 / March 2007
COMPLEX
It feels good, seeing my father at his worst
shit-faced drunk, half-unzipped, stinking of shame.
Averting his head from the one he’s most wanted to know.
- Take my bandana, Dad, clean yourself up, I don’t care how –
- Dad, it’s disgusting. At least get the sick off.
Turning my back, not politesse but the paradigm for blame.
Because I’m really thinking
I’d like to cut his dick off.
No, that’s absurd. But it brings a rush, then sickens
like paging through a pornographic book.
So turn and face him down:
- What would Mom say if she saw you now?
We both recall of course how versed
She was in rancor refined throughout her life,
rehearsed but never spoken
until his spirit could be broken.
- Oh what you’ve made of our son, just look!
Through the door I heard precisely how,
the how that scatter-bombed my head.
She said it would kill her - what he’d done,
but it took time, it took forever.
Her I shunned till, bored with sullenness, I sidled to her bed.
She smiled her practised smile, she said
- You’re more like him than you think.
She was a bitch. I need a drink.
1992
Lives of the Composers
I.
Peter Shaffer recently said
the idée fixe in Salieri’s head
was wishing Wolfgang Amadeus dead.
Wolfgang, it seems, could write a tune
that scraped the skies, but was jejune
in liking lies and japes and farts,
and wasting wit where art’s
authority lacks writ.
God loved Mozart, at least while young.
But Amadeus, despite the name,
preferred a clumsy joke or game
to praise of Him – except when sung:
Then out of Infantile there sprang Sublime –
which must have indwelt all the time.
How could Wolfie, a silly twit,
generate a Mass so deep
to make a Salieri weep?
II.
Which is more doctrinally outré:
for a composer to be sexless, or gay?
This once was the word on Schubert: he
embodied personal probity.
And was childlike and dear.
Now the news is blunt and graphic:
Franz, acquainted with worldly joys,
indulged in compulsive traffic
with very young boys.
In a word, he was queer.
So is Schubert greater now for being sinful,
for his noncherubic, knowing heart?
Then how, pre-pubic, did he make painful,
radical, shocking art?
III.
Igor Stravinsky, gnarled, tiny like a gnome,
fled Russia, fled Europe, found a home
in the luxe and lavishness of Hollywood.
When Igor entered, producers stood.
One might think he would have yearned
for colleagues too, but he spurned
relationships with peer and critic:
They were Jews,
he anti-Semitic.
It wasn’t, you know, a personal passion
but Russian fashion;
all Stravinskys gave the lash
to Jews without cash.
So he chivvied Fame, polished his Craft,
breasted movie stars fore and aft.
Living in the Hollywood Hills
brought the parties, paid the bills –
praise abundant, friends redundant.
Schoenberg and Krenek never spoke,
but they were obscure,
and they were broke.
IV. Giuseppe Verdi, 1813-1901 1999
Your century could not contain you neatly.
It stretched and sagged as if it bagged
a Titan as you were.
The fit is better if we start when
Lombardy began to stir,
and say Il novecento starts with Waterloo
and the Giovane Italia.
From then your crescive gift appears,
its empery voiced so all of Europe hears.
At the century’s pivot, Giuseppe,
in ‘forty-eight, you were in Paris,
the Austrians in flight, the Piemontési
briefly free –
Va pensiero sull’ali dorate -
depending on the French before
their Lombard treachery
(one Risorgimento done,
others to come): you, Joe,
a premature Italian even then,
putting paid to Meyerbeer, draining
the last sustenance from Scribe, disdaining
Liszt and Berlioz, laying
the shade of opera seria, diverting
the dramma-musica from Bellini’s placid flow.
You rode the roll and roil of history,
counting that freedom would emerge
from unity, so sought the germ
of liberation in early-modern days:
Ernani, Vespri, Boccanegra, Ballo,
Forza, the chill chiaroscuro of Macbeth.
Courts, wars, murder for statal cause -
Gloria ed onor! the loneliness of kings; the fear
of God – Consentimi, Signore; the cancer
worm of power held by feeling men – O don
fatale, o don crudel; the clash of fealty and faith.
Your means? simply the familiar: the music
of the taverna, the street, the brawling
choruses, the big guitar, the rum-te-tum
of the big bass drum, the banda brandished
like a flag, the racket of Realpolitik.
Then, not Risorgimento but diminuzione,
pòco a pòco a turning inward from eroismo
to domestic plots, still in primary hues
but blended like footlight gels
- Philip and Posa to the elder Germont, Abigaille to Violett’ –
to the haunted bond of parent and child,
to love foresworn, to piangi e prega and
Ah! di me non ti se scordar!
The century stumbled on from triumph to tedium(and to Brahms’s
massive rigor and Wagner’s magmic
flow). You moved from the heart’s concerns
to the large humane, from Schiller to Shakespeare,
drawn now in chromatic modulating steps.
Your palette alters from the brazen – Ritorna vincitor!
to the bronzen – Esultate! – to the quicksilver
of a moonlit park, and Sir John’s mad gallantry
against the gathering dark.
The dotted march of public doings,
the umbrageous mutterings of lower
strings give way to the ‘cello’s dolent line
– un bacio ancora – to the bowed
sinistral creep of the double bass
to the clear horns and winds of Windsor
and the buzzing of the bees: un ronzio
di vèspe e d’avidi. Toward the end
it all fined down for you – like Prospero –
into a wisp of a vestige of a dream.
Ero un miraggio, you said: vago, leggèro, gentile.
The century stretched and billowed.
You staked the continent down, weightier than
the nations you once hymned. You held your public
because you never changed.
A peasant from Roncole, finally padrone
of a vast estate. A Senator who would not sit:
scorning honors, un vero rustico,
Reverenza! for real. Never un borghese
though music was your trade: while you
drilled the chorus, chivvied the tenor, counted
the fees, you gave in music all you took from life;
your peasant’s grasp of the world, your sense of art
aligned; like all Italians,
sense and sensibility combined.
Un peccatore, to be sure. The Bear of Busseto
when young. Two children dead, one mislaid.
Hateful to your parents, mean with money,
a mistress honored then betrayed.
With age, they stood for you as you came in
Va vecchio Joe! you must have thought, but
they spread straw in the streets of Genova
so you could die in peace. - La luce langue.
Two hundred thousand followed your cortege.
So what were you all about, Giuseppi?
(Viva V.E.R.D.I., ever green.)
To think, maestro Joe, we once contemned you.
as perfervid, crude, as loud. Not absolute,
your music, so the critics snarled. Well,
you bit off more than they could chew. Tutto
nel mondo è burla, as you well knew. E vero,
not absolutist in any way: in an instant
your harmony shifting from fatidic to sublime,
your melody gestural, turning on a dime
as human motives mix, clash, chime.
In thought, your grasp coincident with your reach.
In music’s rhetoric, your grave and reverend speech.
1992
Death and the Maiden
In childhood there was time for each footstep
to be recorded on the sand. At day’s end
they were interlaced but clear with the stamp
of the feet that impressed them: the kicked-up
track of the child, running; the dapple of a big dog’s paws,
the even cleft of a bony fisherman’s bare foot.
The beach was the live thing here: the footprints
falling lightly over one curve, one shadow, one shaping
of an endless time.
As a child she was brought here, and fought
and struggled and screamed against the touch of the sea.
Soon the feel of it rose against the small of her back
and the smell of it prickled her nose with froth.
Soon she felt the comfort of the sea.
Next year, and the next, she was back,
hunched down with her knees up to her chin again,
gathering the satin-pink shimmer of shells,
gathering delight, wet from the sea.
Later she traveled, and the sight that spoke to her
were the small boys in Mediterranean ports
diving for coins. She felt the thin coin rim
cutting down hard through the enormous green weight
of the sea. She felt the bubbles flying from the ears
of the boys as they sank, beating the coin to the floor.
The sea was immense, able to hide whole ships, whole islands,
yet it returned to the boys the mere glinting fleck of a penny.
She smiled a sunburst of a smile, and the boys took it
and put it away with their recollections of women.
She met a young man and found herself and her life
soaked up by him like a sponge. She wanted to live
within him like anemone in coral.
Waiting for him, she went to the seaside
and thought of his pearl that she wore.
Luster on luster, warmth on warmth, the pearl
on her finger was the sand-grain of life. The future
gathered itself round the fact of love.
The most precious sea treasure hung on her finger,
and waiting was the balance of a waterdrop
ready to fall. Sometimes, silent, she felt herself singing
One day she woke from a quick light sleep
and saw as she lay there something pinkish
move on a rock past the corner of her eye.
It was a crab, and she kneeled on the sand
by the edge of the rock where she lay. It moved again.
She leaned out over the pool. The water glittered,
the brightness turned black, she clutched at a triangular
patch of darkness that she took to be rock.
Startled, she sucked in her breath.
Like a child tumbling, she fell into the pool.
The pool was shallow, a child could have paddled.
She lay for a moment, one arm over the rock.
Sand clouded the bottom, and the tiny pink crab
scuttled away from the new waterline.
The tide rose and turned her over and over,
handling her curiously, gentle and cold.
All night long the sea lifted and laid her,
lifted and laid her body until the morning
when the sun rose and the tide ran out.
She lay in the pool, quiet, sheltered,
a soft current rippling beneath her floating hand.
It played with her fingers like wayward reeds,
with the softest touch possible it threaded in and out
around the cold finger on which the pearl shone,
rosy and shimmering, resting on sand.
2005
DJ in December
Two-thousand-four was a pretty bad year,
personally (health and wealth a bit impeded), a near disaster in the public realm.
I ask myself as I face up to age
if this was just a blotted page in the annual account,
or if it’s going to be like this from here, in some amount.
But a book was coming to fruition, and nothing is so restorative as self-tuition.
And there was love and friendship: May we all thrive
throughout two-thousand-five.
1983
Episodes
We each pass through our
episodes of love and puzzlement
and fracture.
Hard to know what’s natural, what
mental,
what pre-ordained, what
accidental,
what factual, what fictive,
benign, vindictive:
what is fate, what facture.
Enough! Analysis is formal.
Life’s episodes are normal.
1983
Gardening in a Small Garden Plot
Bodily
rapidly
capably
I turn over dirt
and separate roots.
Geckos greet me equably.
Earthmovers menace underlings –
They undercut, invert, and suffocate –
their very weight annihilates.
But I tread carefully
who merely guides the spade.
When blade breaks through
I slightly levitate:
digging displaces me.
The blade defers to hardnesses,
slips affably into holes and pockets.
It severs living things.
but worms reconstitute
and beetles relocate.
I simply alter things a bit
and shake them out in novel congeries,
and go about it happily.
May 1999
Illness
Cancer
Oncology
trumps
ontology.
One mutation:
devastation.
Cancer cancels
There was time and world enough
that finally he overrode
his struggle with: ontology.
Joy! Then devastation.
By one discrete mutation of personal genetic stuff –
alas! The cytoplasmic code
concerned instead: oncology.
.
Alzheimer’s
Poco a poco,
mente loco.
People places things are dropping from my mind.
The doctor says my brain is full of holes
Isn’t that Al Zeimer up ahead? maybe he knows me.
Tonight the part of me is played by ….
Does anybody know my name?
2010
In Your Dreams
I plan to make love to Emily and
then, along with Clara, to that hunky jock
posing like an athlete on the winners’ stand
whose adamantine jaw will drop in shock
when he sees what we have planned for him.
We’ll fix on Agnes then, so blonde she’s dim,
her pale veined skin when pressed will bruise..
But with my cool anaesthetizing hand
I’ll stroke the underside of her prim small breast
where no marks show, pressing inward
before she comprehends what’s happening below.
I can’t work out factorial five.
The aim is, we all arrive
at a cat’s cradle of rapture,
not knowing who is where or what is whose -
a smoothness of call and capture,
a humming in the throat, no care
for giving or receiving bliss -
we’ll register our looping kiss.
2010
Indeed I lose myself in sleep
Indeed I lose myself in sleep, and
every morning shuck the husk
of compromised identity,
then try without revealing obvious need –
no one should see this tidying-up -
to isolate what may contain
the seed of self.
I warm it for an hour or two until
it roots itself in the detritus
of dreams from overnight,
and only then permit the seepage
of each new dangerous day.
July 2003
Lives of the Painters
(The Wayward Evolution of Italian Art, 1300 – 1600)
By afternoon Giotto
was ordinarily blotto,
Which is why every second saint
on the wall looks blurry and faint.
Taddeo Gaddi
was a talented laddie,
I suppose.
But everyone knows,
my heart belongs to Daddi.
Wasn’t there a Martini?
His style is thought to be dry.
That would be fine with a Caviar Blini.
We’d have to check if there was one.
Could some art historian try?
Paolo Uccello
was modest and mellow.
But his family were for the birds.
Piero Della Francesca
Hated the concept of Fresca -
(He had good taste in words).
He was positive though toward fresco,
or so says UNESCO.
Fra Filippo Lippi
was squint-eyed and hippy,
he kept his hair in a trunk.
Which is why he became a monk.
Bellini was a peach!
Which Bellini?
Each.
Allessandro Botticelli
was personally slim: no belly.
His females are slender,
his boys a bit nelly
Da Vinci means victorious.
Indeed, the guy was glorious.
True, he was secretive,
As well as censorious.
Michelangelo and Rafaello:
Each was a helluva fellow.
One was gay, one was straight;
both made money.
Each passed through art-history’s gate
to decorate art-heaven’s halls.
With these two, I haven’t the balls
to be funny.
Bernini
was a meany
He pushed himself forward for work,
preferably Papal.
He held no brief for Mannerism,
but advocated bannerism
abroad and at home.
That is why his style’s a staple,
at least in Rome.
He was a jerk
“Big George” Giorgione
really liked bologna,
or so he admitted warily.
He wasn’t even Bolognese -
he was geoculinarily hazy.
But he wasn’t a phony.
Now Titian
was Venetian.
He was beyond compare.
His son Orazio could paint,
but his fame remained faint.
Which perhaps wasn’t fair:
But had a son won recognition,
‘twould have been a repeTitian.
Tintoretto
detested staying a letto.
At times he’d submit to dormition -
but only on the firm condition
that he receive a big commission.
G. Romano made folks queasy.
His taste in boys was cheesy,
his finances downright sleazy.
He was Rafaello’s anointed,
but he disappointed,
He was a conceited gent
who liked to be called His Nibs,
He ended without a cent
and with a dagger in his ribs.
Music mystified Coreggio
He never got the hang of solfeggio.
But could he do gesso?
Dio! I guess so!
Del Sarto, Pontormo, Bronzino –
Each was Fiorentino.
Without any urging,
they knew all about merging
Florentine bravura
with bella figura
Caravaggio, corragio!
You scored like DiMaggio.
The young may confuse you with Carpaccio
but then they seldom eat dried meat
(save for ham from Parma,
which they take with a bit of vino),
which is why they know Parmigianino.
But they can’t tell Verrocchio
from Pinocchio.
Basta!
June 2009
Morning Devotions
Each morning after you
have gotten up I
scoot over and rest
on your pillow, taking
in the warmth and
the bits of your body
left from the night;
and capture the seepage
from your dreams,
the exhalation of your soul.
It is God’s quickening -
the breath of life,
the seed of personhood –
and I protect it
until it flourishes in
each new dangerous day.
November 2008
My Left Brain
It is insistent, it will not let me sleep
For telling me that I have promises to keep
And much to do, or I will weep
Before it’s tea-time. I scan my mind.
Whose thoughts are these I guess I know.
Like Christmas lights all in a row,
When one is bad, the others go.
I try to cogitate; I’m flying blind.
1977
North Africa
The hot spit sky is stretched out tighter
than the tight canvas on the drying rack.
Heat beats against that outer shell,
the final limit of the visible world.
The drying rack is placed beyond the group of trees
and to the west of them, in sunlight and at the point
where shadows bleed into the blank sand of middle landscape.
The waves that make the surface of the desert floor
are only felt, not seen. They cast no shadow,
they hold no light. It takes this bit of Africa
ten thousand years to move into the sea.
Beneath the palms the air is honey-sweating
with the smell of dates and camel dung
littered on the ground as dried-out mulch.
The man who skinned the camel pants in the heat
and sees it shimmer oyster-colored above him,
sees it lightly blister on the nude pearl sky.
He sits cross-legged, all in white.
His bronzed face shines. On it are two
bleached-out eyebrows and a rigid mouth.
Below the eyebrows, inset like opal, are two
black eyes. Against the cooling darkness of the grove
he looks like an albino bunny sitting before his hole.
A storm is forming in the east.
It is gently filling out the sky and growing
larger, like a bruise beneath the skin.
There is no sound. But now the sand begins to fall.
At first it seems that sand is being blown
against him from the desert, but there is
no wind along the ground.
The sand is gently sifting down on him.
It sifts through the trees,
parting the leaves with a little whisper.
It flows softly down his neck,
it runs softly down his nose,
it stiffens his eyebrows, filling in the hairs.
From high above the storm circles, centers, and descends.
Everything moves slowly clockwise as the wind begins to stir
the desert round and round. The camel skin creaks,
flapping back and forth until it blows away.
The poles stand and dart upward.
The storm moves on.
At once the gentle sifting down begins again.
Now the canvas and the poles are sinking
toward the sand..
The canvas lights upon the faint outline
of the Arab body lying covered there.
It peaks above his chest.
The poles pick into him between his bones.
Against the high domed sky, silence rings.
poem from sleep, February 2002
Peonies by Manet
Pure white floral fact,
stem line coded in nature
generations ago,
color committed by light.
The vase the only
artifact –
Poured water hardly counts.
Unless you are a painter
looking looking
or a poet configuring.
Poems May-June 2008
Self-Reflection
Who can that old puzzled face in the mirror be?
He does look familiar; can it really be me?
War Songs
To France, 1917
This is the war to end all wars
So President Wilson has sworn
So find us some rent-boys and bring us some whores
And it’s off to France in the morning.
The lights are fading all over the world
And we’d better get home before dawning.
Goodbye, dear friend, we may never meet again
Goodbye, dear friend, till then.
To England, 1918
This is the time that will end all time
There is nothing left to live for
No more parades, no fresh martial rhyme
Our minds are blitzed and our souls are sore.
The lights have gone out all over the world
Our wives and our widows have soured on men.
Goodbye, dear friend, we will not meet again
Goodbye, dear friend, till then.
History, Natural and Non-.
The geologic earth is pitted, riven, torn
by canyons, scarred by talus fall.
Then furrowed, harrowed, terraced, worn
by slash and burn, the second growth a pall
of colonizing weeds and beaten ground.
The neolithic hunters killed, and left their carcasses to rot
where later humans made a common burial plot.
New firms extrude new parking in and round
new highways twisted in a fuming wreath.
Technologic buildings pose, disclaiming underneath
the faecal rivers that spew into the sound.
Gardeners sell off their farms, and fishermen lament,
and swimming pools break up a carpet of cement.
Our hills are tumuli
Our ponds are sumps.
Our proudest tallest trees are stumps.
The baby’s nails leave furrows on the face
and deeply groove the mother’s breast.
He bites the nipples, his fingers turn to talons,
flesh under the nails; now bloody streaks
appear upon the mother’s livid cheeks.
The mother’s endocrinal calm is savaged
by the son who fears a later-born,
so comes back home to kick the womb
and turn the marriage bed into an echoing tomb
The act of love creates a vicious race
to replicate the fixed genetic trace.
The children turn to scavengers and felons.
The orphaned daughter now is ravaged;
Her brother’s fame is calumny and scorn.
Clytemnestra incites her appalling fate
by murdering a murderous mate.
Our men are prisoners
Our women sluts
Our people walk in mirrored ruts.
2006
REPOSE
Holding him, listening to him snore
Reminds me of the unconvincing roar
Of the ocean as it struggles to the shore.
But a confident pulse under the skin
Beats in and out, out and in.
2007
MORNING IN NEW ENGLAND
Slanting gold over the sill,
Warm skin on her back,
Pale light on her book.
Cat washing on the Chinese rug.
Register clicking, furnace alert.
A powdery aroma: the bread machine
Has done its work.
Mechanical sounds from town.
Oh! she remembers how
Her country town’s a suburb now.
Bali, October 2004
Revised after Ray D. Oliver's comments
Travelers (after an idea, if you can call it that, of Raymond Oliver’s)
Reverend McNally took his brolly to Bali,
He wore all his clothes to stay dry;
Mrs McNally, her first name was Sally,
Tore off her brassiere: Bali, hi!
Tautologies
Emmenthaler? very strong.
Gustav Mahler? very long.
Sol’s Misgivings
The moon circles dutifully around the sun --
is ever-constant, or so they claim.
But when clouds disturb her calm
she pushes and pulls the waters,
contriving storms. She kills offenceless fishermen,
sucks swimmers to exhausted deaths,
incites distracted souls to homicidal rage.
Now here’s my wife Serena, who orbits round me placidly -
murmurs softly, modulates her light to low.
She smiles on me in sleep and watches over me when I’m sick.
But there’s a bleach of dread upon our worn out marriage bed.
Serene Serena damps the sweet sursurrus of the sea
we swim in. Sly Selena sets for me a deadly undertow,
and drives the children lunatic.
2009
Soothing in the vein
The nervous odor of contentious days
The curdled custard glare of a dirty sun
The clatter mutter of rant and run
The bloom on skin of blight.
Evening cools.
This music and this joy are concentrate:
Tinctured pearls that sting as they slip
Into the tangled plexus of the heart,
And liquefy to a morphine drip
In divagating vessels of delight.
The moons emits a silver haze,
It is now new night.
Toward dawn the endocrines begin to lurk
Insinuate through the Lethe calm
Of silvered ichor in the veins
To interrupt nocturnal balm
And recollect diurnal pains.
The mouth dries. The intestines slicken.
A roiling in the gut. The irritant of lust.
Daylight brings the gods abroad to push
Their hugger mugger. Into our minds
Lies creep, corrupt ambitions rush
To calculate new mischief.
Midday: The examined life is a disaster.
Consciousness suborns
Deceit, resentment, jealousy, and finds
Completion in a betrayal bed.
By afternoon a moral nausea
Backflows with toxic juices. Shame
Mounts faster than the cocktail hour sluices.
By dinnertime we reek decay.
But now we sense the purifying magnet of the moon
A field of force within the bone
That draws disgust away.
Evening cools.
I want the Elysian fields.
2009
Centuries of sensuality flood into today
That statue catches a naughty boy
with Priapic thoughts and a satiric grin:
his skin has turned quite green with glee.
That Botticelli girl has an almond-shaped face;
her skin is lustrous with desire,
her blonde hair writhes in shame.
The market girl moves while standing still,
curves pushed against curves, Borromini
working in flesh.
The fishmonger with his try-me stare,
the muscles slipping under his skin;
he doesn’t know Caravaggio, but learned from him.
Springtime in Rome.
2007
THE YEAR DARKENS
Pale light in autumn -
Solvent of sorrow, lubricant of pain
This very day escaping, some Presentness
already gone, never to come again.
The Present glides like a river
and wastes itself as it runs.
The moment hums like a tuning fork,
vibrating into a void.
There was Pride all summer,
Pride that swelled my throat,
Pride I had to swallow.
But a swallow never made a summer,
And Pride went before the Fall.
December 2009
My Part of the Midworld *
The ground where I have lived is littered
with dead ideas, lying about where
like suiciding angels they fell down,
discredited, with no self-dramatizing sighs.
These thoughts were mine, but my attention strayed.
They lie inert now, glinting pale pebbles
hoping to be turned once more.
I recognize the hue, the texture that once was.
Someone else might pick them up, I suppose.
But taking up exhausted thought
is like lighting a match to see the dark.
These now are shards of human intent. But
the world’s vernacular loveliness is still at hand.
The midworld of experience is serial, time-stamped,
And there’s an expiration date.
More is fallen away than jettisoned.
I know less now than when I started.
Good rubbish; good riddance; good-bye.
* The midworld is the cultural historical realm of human agency and action, lying between the world of
appearances and the world of reality. The concept is due to J.W. Miller.
January 2010
In the Old Folks’ Home
I.
I wonder how it will happen
Will I look out through aqueous nothingness
Or will the air be bloody and torn
It would be nice to be mentally inert
As Down’s children are said to be nice
But I remember
My cruelty to women, insincerity toward men
When the owl flies at dusk
Will I then have time to comprehend
I am on an empty road trailing after myself.
II.
Will that dirty old Al Zeimer be my new best friend
Or will the pretty pert nurse measure out my end?
November 2010
Time Is Life’s Fool
Memory, sly personal assistant --
most often absent when needed,
otherwise capering behind
kicking up dust and distraction,
weaving, bobbing when I turn face-on.
Memory, fey dodgy trickster --
casting into the air the paraphernalia
of an unreliable life: Medals, trinkets, ten-
dollar watches, corroded shards of shame,
echoes of goodbyes that did not last.
Documents, diaries, photographs –
evidence of nothing firm, but aide-mémoires
revising what they’re in aid of, variants of scores
unannotated, clues that clarify some
insolent fabulist’s guess at my experience.
Memory should give a well-thumbed record of reality
together with a map of unused life –
not a midden of some stranger’s life.
December 2010
Shock
30 minutes into Spring
and there is one less mother in the world
and one paler son.
30 minutes into Spring
and there is one less other in the world
and one paler sun.
January 2011
Waking in the tropics
The howler monkeys do not really howl, they roar
Like something thousands of times their size.
I’ve heard this sound, but only once,
And that was Africa and it was elephants
Affronted by some rhino’s cheeky grunts.
The parrots start by gargling out their last cold
ratcheting from the day before,
and then start in on this day’s clicks and cries.
The kingfisher, so lovely to behold
by noon; at dawn is just a carking scold.
The stupid cows believe their guts extrude
mephitic elements, but it’s the rumination of rude
methane from composted loam and the evening’s crude
meal of dried out vines. The superposed white egrets preen
their elegant necks, but manage to emit the merest squeak.
My own guts grizzle as I recall the snake half-seen
the other day, taken as the patchy lozenged trunk of a tree,
which flexed its neck and head and with its green
patient eyes began to contemplate constricting me.
The pang of fear remains, but insinuate and sleek.
The butterfly bats are quivering along the log,
sensing the pneuma of approaching day.
The river takes a coppery sheen, the baleful caiman slips away.
From under the mosquito net a tiny splash is heard
as the heron finds the pre-dawn-addled frog.
In the slanted light the boys pad down to the river, carrying poles
to set their boats adrift; but first they murmur an invocating word
to each other and to a genealogy of their ancestral souls.
I know the boats are white, the gunwales trimmed with blue:
but that’s a fact that yesterday was new,
recalled today but not yet truly seen. Each day’s sound
starts as a vague vibration but ends up noisy, grand.
The dawn of awe is once again at hand.
April 2011
Time, Gentlemen!
In the womb, in the world
it is always too late to be
what you ought to have been.
The path is broken,
there are obstacles to go around,
you never quite regain the way.
Time is a menace,
it brings surprises, time bites.
As if you are born on the third of January
and your true self lags the times.
You stumble on events that to the others
are old news. Disaster, joy
off-balance you, time bites.
Marry someone younger, but she’ll
not be moved to fill you in. .
Soon enough she’ll come to feel
how much of you is blank: Why didn’t
time see you stray and nip you at the heel?
When you grow old, you’ll know
the rules, but by then you’ll have stepped
behind the scrim of senility –
still taken aback and trying
to evade the nick of time.
The sense of self comes late.
Mostly you fake the game, though the outcome
is not at stake. Your obit
will precede your death, but
death will come as a surprise.
When you grow old, you’ll know
the rules, but by then you’ll have steppe
behind the scrim of senility –
still taken aback and brought
to terror by the nick of time.
October 2011
Two poems from sleep
At the amusement park
See that Public People Puller.
It’s purple. Weird.
The maiden waking
Hair languishing on her pillow.
Hand caressing her own breast.
Semen up inside her.
So little to do now about Death.
October 2011
Echo Chamber
A crow will caw without another crow around
and go on cawing until the sound
responding amounts to more than carking.
That crow will quickly lose its attitude
if another crow provides a corvine platitude.
A discontented dog will go on barking
until it gets some minimal rebound,
a communiqué worth harking --
A growl, a yip, a known command,
a warming countenance, a warning hand.
Dogspeak is limited, crowspeak worse.
My friends all talk and talk until they hear
political talk that sounds sincere:
verbiage they recognize as familiarly terse,
and tried and true; and which they need not fear.
December 2011
Why wisdom?
Do not strive, but having striven
Keep it hidden fast.
Denial brings at first concealment
eventually despair.
Ceasing to strive brings peace of mind
at last. And at the very last.
December 2011
Trueing the universe
The natural world I know directly,
By sight and smell and sound.
But I am not it seems a thinking reed
And I need words to put meat on bones,
to make thoughts flesh,
to incorporate truth.
Politicians wage campaigns with words,
Marshalling them, forcing them to march
until they drop in action leaving no bodies
for a decent burial. Let us terminate
the politicians.
Philosophers use words to eat words,
thoughts to phage thoughts,
To tidy up the universe
and fix what is properly in mind.
In paring down the accumulated world,
philosophers may eat their kind.
Poets true up their words with words
bringing their thoughts into exact alignment
a fining into sense.
Poets nudge and nibble at words.
A good poem digests the thought that words exude.
The work of a young poet seems ejaculated from the body,
the worn-out poet has gummed dried words to a rind.
I read and think. The here and now bears traces of the there and then,
And words mean what they have come to mean.
January 2012
Glad you left the city?
New York, New York, it’s a hell of a town
Assault is up, but battery’s down
At Vesey Street there’s a hole in the ground
New York, New York, it’s a terrible town
New York, New York, it’s a hell of a ville
You can hang from a strap while copping a feel
On Wall Street every dolt makes a deal
New York, New York, it’s a vandalized ville.
New York, New York, it’s a hell of a spot
The burglars will take whatever you’ve got
A nanny takes care of each toddlin’ tot
New York, New York, it’s a sinister spot.
New York, New York, it’s a hell of a vale
The restaurants serve you slops in a pail
The fighters are fairies, the models are male
New York, New York, it’s a virulent vale.
New York, New York, it’s a hell of a burgh
No school kid knows an egg from an erg
The West Side’s a war zone, the East Side’s a purg-
atory – It’s a blisterin’ burgh.
February 2012
The Man Over There
That man at the table who’s eating
with his family is relentlessly beating
his leg into the floor.
No one in the group seems to listen.
He talks and eats, and his knee’s like a piston
drilling into the floor.
He is waiting for his wife to say: Can’t you stop?
or his Dad: You’re no good at sales, take over the shop.
or his kid: What’s eating you, Pop? That’s not cool,
Or he’s keeping despair from the door,
drilling into the floor
while he waits for life to begin, stoking
his motor so it’s oiled and alert
in case his mind signals: Hit the dirt.
Or he’s round-about stroking
himself, playing pocket pool.
Maybe he’s given up smoking.
In any case, his knee is jiggling like a flying bobbin
stomping out a mazurka, or like a mechanical robin
drilling for a notional worm wriggling below.
Maybe he just needs to go.
Is there fellow feeling in this scene? I’d be lying.
I am riddling into his soul, not caring to be kind,
what I see there lies within my mind.
I am invading, spying:
I drill compulsively
into his soul as he
pounds into the floor.
My scrutiny is undeserved,
but I cannot let a scene go unobserved.
February 2012
Tell Me Truly
Tell me plainly, tell me truly
if when we’re making love you duly
bestow yourself as duty, or whether
our souls merge when we come together.
An obligation is not nothing -
Its discharge can feel fulfilling,
a gift when you have lots to spend.
But the sexual act is not more thrilling
than when, instead of giving, one is taking
and every thought of duty’s at an end.
Meanwhile, there is no shame in faking.
February 2012
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis
Art is long, to be sure,
But life is long enough.
The point of art is to endure
Beyond the situation of its making.
The point of living is to register the rough,
The ordinary, the sublime –
And leave the scene in time
For others to engage the same stuff,
A new manifold for taking,
Reflecting their aesthetic druthers.
Great art considers the tangle
Of life and art from a new angle
But always in relation to what has come before.
The very greatest art adds still more,
But distills it all into a resolution of paths
Marked out by others.
Life must be short, provisional, abounding,
Or the greatest art would only have itself,
Perfection endlessly resounding.
April 2012
1. A Challenge to Authority
I know what I know,
I know when I knew.
The particulars alter,
but not the view.
At times convictions falter,
undercut by sudden swells
of emotion; but these come
from that birth-hollow
of a universal past --
Not actually a part of me
but of my genetic physiology.
2. Ahead of the Curve
At the end there will be something left:
a glimmer, a whisper, some thought
that overhangs.
No way to get ahead of it
to correct or tuck it in place.
There is no actual end; a diminuendo
never achieves an end.
What will be, I hope, is some wisp
of beauty at the end, some splash of sound,
some flash of thought
that I cannot bear witness to
or comment on. But there, yes, there.
May 2012
I watch you fall awake
I watch you fall awake,
some phantom of a dream still vivid
on the inner screen.
But soon the seen is tenuous,
your eyes intent but blank -
short-sightedness brings desperation
to make it out.
Falling awake,
the scene is inchoate then fine,
for with the focus you reflexly make -
the countenance you see is mine.
September 2012
No
In some odd way I must believe in God,
since I find I have a quarrel with him.
The merest fellow-feeling brings revulsion:
How is it I can love at times, when God does not?
Hardy said it. By anyone’s experience,
God is ineffectual, inattentive, or malign.
I have nothing to complain of -
but will not use the formula ‘Thank God’
when God persists in hectoring those I love
and torturing the ones I only know about.
This is old stuff philosophically, and not even
honestly framed. My quarrel’s with people who do things
to other people, and cite God to cover up their tracks,
using a manufactured consensus for a lazy deceit.
I understand. But somewhere in the dark a child is crying.
December 2012
He, My Self, and I
Others have free will. If they had acted
in a different way, I would be better off.
What I did, I had to do.
On whose authority
could I have acted otherwise
without cancelling my self,
a midstream run at suicide?
I argue with my stand-in self,
looking sideways at my personal past.
-He might have acted better.
-His feelings came from books, not life.
-He might have loved her more.
These are after-thoughts, a touch-up of
a messy corner of the canvas.
Self’s memory may always be
revised on grounds of taste, consistency.
Regret bites back to remorse,
back to rebuke -- I to him -- but never to
judgment: impossible to repudiate the self.
New memories, unpredictable, seep up,
stain and blur the text.
I dig back; digging displaces me,
clarifies him. I alter
a word, then a thought, then the context,
then the subtext, then
the texture of the whole.
I am old. I am establishing
the critical edition.
February 2013
My library book has vanished
My library book has disappeared:
what was electronically here a day ago,
familiar marks of code on a green
field, has vanished
it was there on the screen
lined up, lined out,
scintillating to see
sensible to mean
normally the ciphers disintegrate to jumble
after being read -
this time it happened before I took them in,
before I could propose them into sense
now they subsist as bytes and pieces
scattered in the ether, to recompose -
a tissue of possible thought for the instructed -
now deconstructed, in abeyance
for reconstitution by a formative mind
May evolution guide humans to such an end:
a record of sense, of thought about thought,
simply ceasing upon a midnight
leaving behind no matter
collapsing in a clattered heap,
the code that once shaped meaning
now mere litterature
some may wish a second life, for turning all the pages
over and over again until the monkeys finish typing.
For me no further making sense:
release, repair, repose -
a blank screen at the close.
April 23, 2013
For Ken, on his 71st birthday
Behind us is a comet trail of memories and events
we shared, dissipating, too scrambled now to recognize.
And the years stream ahead, faster now,
toward an ending we know nothing of.
We wonder. One thing I take surety in:
we were together in the universe.
June 2013
Treading carefully
Travelling in France, speaking in French -
like a cat picking its way round the table at lunch.
Calculating next moves, avoiding faux pas, impasses -
hoping not to be scolded, or put down.
July 2013
Silly poem
Time’s winged chariot
Took off my Aunt Harriet
The man with the scythe
Caught up with Aunt Blythe.
Time and tide
Run pretty wide
Better get safe and hole up at Marriott.
July 2013
On an Unexpected Death
This latest death is a disaster.
But why? It clears a space for someone
else, and she was barren, worn.
Even so, she, she should have been led gently
into darkness, not knocked flat - and only
then a new soul born.
At times the night seems to freeze
in place, like a dark pond -
If one breathes out, the sky may fracture.
She never felt it crack, she never heard it split.
Today the sky looks like gray smeared spit.
July 2013
Aging
An old conductor makes the music last
longer than in the past.
But the time we hear it in, moves twice as fast.
He and we would like to reach the end
at the same moment, with no edge to mend.
The sky should bend and shelter us
As we plod on
Do you remember sitting, on one of those timeless days,
and looking at the Smokies in their streaked haze?
It was a Summer that moved into Fall,
attacca – at once, everything was all.
Today our garden is replete, there is no need to tend.
The last chord will come on time, well voiced,
No unaccounted sound to be deplored, rejoiced.
September 2013
I. The Shutter Clicks
It’s a wonder there was anything I knew
I knew, given the straitjacket in which I grew.
My mother had a magpie wit:
opinions were like buttons
in a drawer of jumble.
She read where duty took,
her certainty the month club book.
My father startled by a new idea
would try to scotch it:
It lacked citation to what was potted
hardy perennial thought:
a ball of tangled roots,
anoxic, strangled, clotted.
In his academic role he professed
and after a seemly time, pronounced
but did not question.
He let the theorists engender;
his purpose was ingestion
then exegesis, each critical dimension
pinned down he thought by mention.
My mother told me not to point,
but pointing was my recognition of some
element to be not referenced but revealed.
What I looked for was a figural field
for saying, This that together, so
Look here then there.
Pointing is not a path to truth;
The shutter clicks, is how I know.
II. Parental Guidance
When I was twenty my father said,
Still, he’s brighter than I am.
Immediately my adolescent scorn
evaporated and I felt proud, but it pained me -
some. It meant in years to come I never could
discuss a major matter, for fear he would defend
himself too humbly, and I might seem to condescend.
I keep their photos on the wall.
My father commands respect for facts,
my mother smiles, though tightly:
No need to be reminded nightly
that they deplored my bent toward
looseness or lust with learning.
They felt, with all my intellectual faults
I should be doing something else.
Littoral
“O that my tongue were in the thunder’s mouth!”
April 2014
It came over my mind one night
as over the sea the following morning:
a creeping darkness, a sullen unease
at my rationalizing regulated self.
If I usually lived near the shore there would be
in my veins the hiss of the ocean threading
the sound of my own blood.
I would not be so afraid.
I blinked myself awake, shook off disquiet,
picked my way down to the salivating sea-edge.
All is normal here:
tongues of froth, pinpools of water
sucked down by the sand, muttering
as they vanish, wavelets shuffling in and
pooling in cross-currents behind the boulder,
the low looked-upon sky a milky grey-blue
like the inside of a mussel shell.
Tendrils of light on the beach.
Far view, normal too:
a ribbed dull pewter sea, an ever recoiling
ever swelling forward sea scouring the floor
below, pleating above with quicksilver glint.
But just outside the reef, waves
start banging on the rock;
water leaps up in shock.
The broken waves furl, curl,
spill, fold, make for shore.
They slant, slide back, hurl
themselves again. Can
rock disintegrate in foam?
Out in the offing, boats begin
to tack, prepare to run
for land. The sky darkens
like a bruise spreading
beneath the skin.
The undersides of clouds
turn purple, marbled
with a livid green.
A sudden onshore breeze,
a stinging galactic cool,
alerts me. No to looking:
I must stand guard.
At the very verge, the waves still patter
and lap, scumble-scutter; fine-stitch
ripped. They lose their nerve but
still advance, marshaled into crimped
overlays, clattering in larky forward
forays, cautious coordinated retreat,
nattering in leaky runnels round my feet.
But there is a new howling
back of the beach. Gulls shriek
warning. A blanket of nothing-
ness is coming in, sucking
the air away. Power is leak-
ing from the cold glum sky.
Motes of moisture swim
like minnows in the debilitated
air. I scrape away the spume,
hold nothing in my hand but grey.
The air thinned, clarified. The magnet moon appeared.
Banked clouds defined a clearing in the torn gunmetal sky.
I went and stood in that trembling light and then padded
off down the beach: tired of sound, grateful for ground.
April-July 2014
Home
Williamstown, Mass.
When I lived there, the house faced East
Through the windows near the piano
a transcendental message flickered
from far beyond the purple mountains,
from glens in which, in solemn brothered covenants
Melville, Hawthorne, Bryant developed
and aligned their writerly intentions.
I was at those windows by seven,
to launch a crashing chord to greet those revenants
and stabilize their orbits with some Bach Inventions.
And to jolt awake my sleeping parents.
My job was to practice, practice I would -
also to punish them if I could.
My parents, dead these thirty years.
My house still stands, rotated front to back
Someone must have wanted to face it out
and see it paying homage toward some other
regional marker - so messed it all about.
I’m glad I did not see it jacked up rough.
I think it would have brought to mind my mother
at her upstairs mirror, with rollers in her hair,
altering herself from plain to pretty enough -
concerned at all occasions to be up-to-snuff.
Back then it was my professor father’s house,
noted in all the town histories, stolid, grand.
Now it proudly houses students of color,
gays and lesbians, this decade’s bland
rebels; my father turning in his grave,
his local fame becoming dull to duller.
That house was rigged in Edwardian taste:
high ceilings, plushed chairs, carpeted floors.
A painted eminence looked askance
at the mantel keepsakes (seldom dusted)
conveying less of family puissance
than of dutiful domestic nuisance
and a grandfather clock improperly adjusted.
Dividing the front parlor from the family rooms
were full-length double parlor doors
with twinned curtains swagged at the waist:
straight below, but bulging above like stout
Lily Langtry caryatids bosoming out.
Behind the doors, eavesdropping, I heard old ladies
over tea complain about their married lives -
and thought it odd that they, no longer wives,
were still so roiled by a duty not now imposed.
My own Grandmother, bless her - candid, composed -
demurred forthrightly; she had wanted more,
found nothing in the state of wedlock to deplore.
Grannie, dead almost sixty years.
I lived in that house when all seemed right
when I was still hopeful, formative.
Home to me was a book-based palace -
with only parental maledictions
of snobbish dislike, unwarranted malice.
Curiosity in childhood is given, before self-doubt.
You make observations, like bright
tiles inserted in an emerging puzzle.
In youth you long to be a spirit
or an animal, anything so that the self
will not be a problem to be worked out.
Finally, the sense that whatever interests you,
some other soul will be concerned with too.
Dorothy, sweet dolt, you had it right -
There is in fact no place like home:
Home is a corrupted mental file,
a memory of an unstable memory.
The house, turned thus, is reprobate.
No more pearly easterly mornings,
no transcendental messages at dawn
meander across the elm-proud lawn.
Pragmatism is abroad in the land.
The sense of looking steadily outward,
waiting for what may come, is gone.
The problem of self long since solved:
events have carried far more weight.
Long since done, all that was best;
All that humiliated, still with one.
Each necessary stage in life completed.
Forget the rest. The house and I face West.
June 2014
Dealing with Pain
Pain the rapist -
I’ve wheedled, propitiated,
cajoled it to paths where it should go.
Now it’s time for saying No.
July 2014
Getting Old
This: Quietude
closer to plenitude
than to lassitude.
It’s boring to be old,
but still, solitude
is comfort, without alarm.
Peace is not beatitude
but comfort in not doing harm.
Not finitude,
nor neither urgency:
the mind retains its certitude,
the body cedes insurgency.
The ego is strategically complicit
in finding that exactitude -
or just good taste - which turns the illicit
into painless paths of rectitude.
All this: less existential attitude
than probably mere platitude.
December 2014
On reading SG’s poetry
Not great, this poet,
not brilliant like Cavafy.
But the thought
glimpsed through his words
and the unvoiced sound
insinuate along the skin.
TWO AUSTRALIA POEMS
December 2014
Sun going down at Blackheath
The leaves of the trees are wet
with sunlight streaming in flat
but trembling in transit from the horizon -
Light like warmed honey gently stirred,
translucent for a few dissolving moments,
the time of a few caught breaths.
The breeze comes up and shakes the drops
from the branches, the way one shakes the beads
of water off salad greens.
Swimming. Australia
All morning long the sea lifted and laid him,
guiding him gently between two swells
of the corrugated repeating sea;
nudging him never away from shore.
He had only to lie back and flex
his fingers to stay in line, though minute
motions of the sea angled his toes
toward all points on the dial.
Breathing was the merest exhalation
bearing away petty politics,
the kids’ problems,
the coarsening of the heart,
and venial sins.
It was hot then cold.
He heard the tenderness
of rain upon the water,
felt the drops on his eyelids
like the fingers of a child.
At midday he staggered onto the shore
with wrinkled hands and feet, a scarlet chest,
a vestigial dick, and an emptied soul.
March 2015
Seeking the woods
Lately I go to the woods more often
to pick up sticks to soften the cold.
The dry sticks lie there patiently old,
on scuffy soil tea-stained from rot,
on duff evolving into mould:
small stuff that will blaze but not.
warm, give heat but no real solace.
Within this woods there’s no real menace,
though the paths twist and disconnect
so the sticks lie listless, fearful of neglect.
The deeper I wend, the more I hurry;
A storm might break, the light may fail -
in fact, I only pretend to worry -
like the stick figure in a fairy tale.
Such tales seemed blank in my youth: no fears,
rewards or life-lessons to be learned.
My mythic role in the memic scene
is to bring back kindling for my mother
in her cottage. The truth is, there’s never been
a cottage, and no mother for many years.
This play won’t play. Is there another
Scenario by which the plot is turned?
An old war movie comes to mind:
Nearby is a clearing with cowbells where
rabbits run in sun-stirred air;
But watch for a tripwire, a leaf-covered pit:
The Germans will get me if I omit
my shudder, my propitiating scare.
There’s dirt between my toes: pine
twigs slough toward dust, needles align
like filings toward a magnetic pole.
There’s a silting of my soul as well.
I rattle as I move, a kernel in a shell.
I want to be alone in the wood.
I would prefer to be lost so I could
debride my life, sift myself down,
leave bits of myself on littered ground.
May 2015
Coming to America, aged nearly six
The dark stairs stretched forever,
a challenge to a primitive child.
At the top, steps disappeared into the recessing
tops of columned vaults. Patches of light, a bird flying
crazed, dust dancing, noise like pistol fire from all directions,
muttered warnings. Nowhere to go to ground.
His father’s clothes smelled clean. His father held his hand.
That made it hard to put his feet sideways on the worn edges
and the cracked flats - so as not to fall back into a deeper darkness,
the vacancy of origin, the mucky trough of no memory at all.
Below in the hall the new mother waited -
He recognized her wariness like his of her:
Not a womb mother; her heart had never beaten with his.
Her spilt milk powdery smell was the same as
the woman who wrote his papers
and hugged him once before they led him off.
He had no memory but still the sense of before, a fear
carried over from his course till then: misery, carnage,
muck, a carriage, a ship, a shelter, inspection, two
faces-voices arguing, a train, wet underpants.
He had his first haircut there in Union Station
in the upper hall. He knew nothing of haircuts,
adult intrusion on his boy’s identity.
The child has a flattened head, the barber said.
The father felt ashamed, feared trauma in infancy,
a defect missing from the papers they possessed.
Everyone faced ahead, having no real reason to run.
May 2015
Finland in Summer
Endless under a distempered sky
Seen as through cataract in a dog’s blind eye:
A day that will neither dawn nor die.
May 2015
It’s About Time
Eighty years: a good plain sum
of ordinary life ordinarily allot-
ed. Following on will briskly come
some eventful day when I am not;
but I may act before inaction.
With that in view, there’s much to be done.
Superfluity must yield to retraction,
a late-in-life less-ness is hard-won,
and what is left is not to be missed
or pissed away in mere distraction.
I shall need to jettison those friends
who hold that one thing leads to another,
and ride the thrilling course alone:
nothing to atone for, nothing to discover
save where a falling body tends.
In restless night I wake at four,
take comfort in the sneaky thought
that I’ve gained in life three hours more
and stolen a march on what I ought
to do before this time-out ends.
May 2015
Lovers Legacy
A’s response was just spectacular
To touching between her scapular
wings. F preferred me to stroke her lower back
very lightly, she was sacrophiliac.
The other A liked me to run my thumb
not on but under her breasts, nail up: she’d come.
The thumbnail, an erotic device. M went insane
when it was drawn slowly along his scrotum vein.
While K shivered when it touched his anus –
a liberty that C found heinous.
The tongue should merely circle the nubbin head
within the nether lips, not massage it – or so M said;
for her to be maximally pleased,
the nipples should be lightly flicked, not squeezed.
The rule for making love is to do to others
what you yourself would like to have done.
But there’s lots of room for all your lovers’
own particularities. Ain’t we got fun!
September 2015
September Song
James thought summer afternoon the perfect
Phrase. But here is one of those late Autumn
Days that sound the faux-bourdon of heaped-up
Warmth and husked-in calm
An amphora of honey, gold, and balm.
There ought to be a muted bugle call –
The pie is baked.
The leaves, just now a peacock’s fan
Of color and flash, curl up their edges,
Awaiting the first finger-prod of cold.
Embers of life beneath my skin
Still warm the surface; but within
The ash of memory is seeping down,
A wintry dusk through sedges.
This afternoon I am in perfect
Equilibrium. There will be music at the close.
September 2015
Herbstlied
Henry James thought summer afternoon the perfect phrase
But now is one of those September days
That sound the faux-bourdon of heaped-up
Warmth and husked-in calm
An amphora of honey, gold, and balm.
There ought to be a muted bugle call –
The pie is baked.
The leaves, just now a peacock’s fan
Of color and flash, retract their edges
Awaiting the first finger-prod of cold.
Embers of life beneath my skin
Still warm the surface; but within
The ash of memory is seeping down
Like a wintry dusk through sedges:
As I recall the anxiety of Spring
The pomp of Summer
The pathos of the dying Fall
The burn of Winter.
This autumn afternoon I am in perfect equilibrium.
Will there by music at the close?
November 2015
Cynthia: New York, the ‘60s
She wandered lonely as a cloud --
and found that she was hit upon
and spat upon,
and set upon and sat upon,
and figuratively shat upon.
Subjected to men’s lewd inventions
but being compliantly well-bred,
she accepted their attentions
and so was often sped to bed.
When it came to cock
that girl could rock.
There was indeed a slight unease
in contemplating disease;
and she was less than amused
when waking up a bit contused.
It may have been a pity, in this great city,
that she failed to seek protection
by ‘dating’;
but mid-century New York
went for smash and grab and twist and torque
in mating.
And when, so often, push came to shove,
she took it to be as good as love.
November 2015
Adoration
I am caught in this odd awed space between art
and people-watching .
That beautiful boy in the restaurant last night
who so enjoyed my watching that he
couldn’t stop glancing to make sure
that I was still regarding him.
Did he find my gaze kindly or corrupting?
Did he see that I was bringing him to life?
At the museum, the princes from the East are watching
the baby watched over bemusedly by the mother.
The sheep are gazing at each other.
In the retinue is one who looks out fixedly at me,
making sure I know that it is he who made all this.
Near me is a loud American and his frowsy wife,
but they have fallen silent now, examining the scene.
They admire the kneeling figures off to the side,
enraptured by the Virgin and the Child:
donors adoring also their own gift.
I, looking at the fat man and the wife,
adore them for their looking.
December 2015
Tasteful Exequies
Why don’t we put the fun
back in funeral?
Let’s ensure a hearty party
after the rites are done --
when the loved one has turned
to ash and to mineral,
all sins have been burned,
all passions have ended,
and the wrong that was done is now mended.
Who needs to feel sad
when the sense of all bad
in one life has been wafted away?
Let’s rout from dark corners
self- satisfied mourners
and have them get wasted and let them get blitzed
while the body is basted? while the body is fritzed?
Death’s not to be feared,
group grieving is weird.
Whatever peace that mourners seek
will dissipate within a week.
Let’s get on with our lives without the big show:
the dead won’t mind, they won’t even know.
Trying to “deal with” death
is unnatural -- like holding your breath,
or a nudist becoming Buddhist.
December 2015
Politics 2016
I must stop listening to the news.
I know already that things are rotten -
What does it do me to get the views
Of the various vicious, misbegotten
Sons of bitches that stick it to me,
Send despair rampaging through me,
Bringing me to my knees?
What’s to be gained from the daily news?
What’s to be learned that we can use
To immunize the unreality
Of rapine, greed, mental banality,
The sleaze and lies of the pious haters
And all the passionate second-raters:
The bedrock commitment to partisan ardor
That makes respect for our rulers harder
Than any mortal man achieves?
Soon they’ll stage an Inaugural,
With an insulting moralizing call
To launch us into another round
Of beggar-thy-neighbor and hit the ground,
Take a bullet, tighten our belts,
Toe the line, or else.
If I just stop listening to the news
Can I thus prevent the daily blues?
I myself have nothing to say,
Nor energy to save the day.
But still, how dumb do they think we are?
I’ll send a check to NPR.
January 2016
Her Parting Gift
Dig down, dig deep -- but let my feelings stay asleep.
She’ll die soon, it appears..
But just last week she said
She’d always loved me.
A little late to say so.
There’s nothing comforting
That I may safely say.
Isn’t it grotesque
That all I have to offer
Back is my own shame:
I cannot say I love you too – and have it true.
So I’ll be correct – cautious and circumspect,
And tell her, You have meant
So much to me, and find
The voice that rings just right
And brings her peace at last.
We’re like medieval lovers
Entombed entwined as effigies
Inhaling only the dust -- of desiccated lust.
What I hold is bones and skin, empty within.
If I embrace her she’ll
Rattle and clank, for ‘she’
Is loose in a hollow shell.
If I did penetrate
Her, I would surely be lost
In vague collapsing space.
With no quick womb she’s old:
No more corporeal need -- for fructifying seed.
At the last, disgust not lust.
I’ll face her at the end
to tell her half the truth:
I will never forget her -- and I shall never ever forgive.
May 2016
The Recovery Room
Each time I return I wonder
Where is it I go when I go under?
Am I trapped under ice, my body
knowing to shut down for now?
Is it a sleep cure in Elysium,
nursed by my personal god?
Do the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death
lift me to a distant shore and leave me there
until it’s clear what will become of me?
Am I tagged in the cold-storage locker of identity,
dipped but not set afloat down Lethe?
Is there a pause button, the pulse suspended,
while a guard in the ventricular sentry box
counts time and intones my name,
as one recites a number under his breath before he dials?
Does my working memory get shunted to the cloud
and then speed back in time-stamped
serial order, all files intact, when I awake?
Each time, as the anaesthetist begins,
it’s like finally coming upon the secret of life,
only to feel it fade as a cottony mist comes over
and a soft soaking coma comes down.
When I come to it’s with a rush of calm, a flash
of clarity, an opening of eyes with cataracts removed.
The heart beats as programmed, no beats foregone.
The brain-stuff is mine, all right,
All mine, and all too familiar, I fear.
Truly, the examined life leaves a lot to be desired.
But where does it go when it’s not at home?
I find it oddly assuaging to be put out.
Would it be comforting to be put down?
June 2016
Italian poems
I
The mosquito’s meticulous whine
is circumspect, tuned fine,
cueing the inborn premonitory itch
to quickly smash the nasty bitch.
II
In the bright piazza the blithe ragazza has
every child’s impulse to chase the
nearest pigeons into a whirling whir.
The birds react without excessive stir,
and soon enough return
with a waddling self-possessed pizzazz
and confidence to burn.
For little girls it’s an instinct, just like that
of an inexperienced cat.
Cats get bored and eventually desist -
sans pigeons they can readily exist.
But little girls keep chasing, all untaught,
to learn how they may stay uncaught.
June 2016
Wellfleet in the Woods
On the unruffled pond the water stirs
Gently from beneath, blurring the mirrored firs.
On some sudden signal, the gulls all wheel away
But grebes stay put so long as godwits stay.
The edging sand -- bleached duff and pond debris --
Cushions our speculations on infinity.
July 2016
Sinatra
He stands candescent in the trembling pink
spot in controposto, his hip slightly canted.
His aura shimmers in the light, exuding a longing
mixed with motes of dust emulsified
in heat and pheromones.
He sings, I’m a fool to want you.
His voice rasps convincingly on fool,
His chin wavers, his blue eyes plead.
He stands like a toreador, macho
but slight, a featherweight, signaling
the crowd that he is going to bring them
to the moment of a little death.
He is fully into his role: he means what he sings.
But only another sort of fool would think
that he is addressing her or him --
though once the teenies thought so,
and swooned or wet their pants.
If we were alone together, would he make love
to me? Of course not, Frank’s not queer. But
he is right by my side, singing into my ear
alone, singing not to but for me
to a lover who came close but veered away.
He is my proxy, my stand-in.
He knows my story, my broken love affair:
I feel what he feels, we are feeling fellows.
We’ve been there, we’re in it together.
Please, might he sing Stormy Weather?
July 2016
for R.M.
on his 80th birthday
An intellectual friendship yields
Coordinate return;
Exploring correspondent fields,
Thoughts concentrate, and burn.
July 2016
On Theism
You failed to provide sufficient evidence
For us to believe in You.
By consequence,
We do not know what’s what, or where is up.
That You believe in us -- it might be true,
Still we stand in the street with a dented cup.
September 2016
To learn you’re going to die within six months
is not like coming to the edge of a cliff and falling over.
It’s like starting to stroll back down a wooded pitted slope
that’s marked with cairns for choices understood now
after the unmitigated facts.
Here a picnic, here love-making, here where I stumbled
and lost my way, here where the fog came in that day.
Here the hillock where, mid-life, I told myself: No great man I
-- and yet decided to go on.
Friends rise up and greet me, smaller, paler than they were in life.
Old enemies confront my gaze then turn aside:
no vital issue now.
The slope is gentler toward the end, which is the beginning:
The last stretch is flat-land, flat-line ending in sky.
October 19,2016
Fade-Out
It’s precisely the way I feel
about late autumn or late afternoon:
a cover of contentment, sadness, calm.
Soon it will cease to seem warm
and then it is time to go home.
November 2016
(Tell Descartes)
My Body does not seem to know
That Mind will also have to go.
Epistemology ignores histology;
Oncology mis-spells Ontology.
December 2016
I have spent my life peering at the world.
If to others this means I did not feel, so be it,
But it is not true.
Feelings emerge from noticing, like photos:
The Duchess of Balbi’s gown – Splendor from paint;
And Proust -- semantic copulation,
so as to reach conception, but Passion then;
The little boy who laughed so hard
He peed himself, and I Rejoiced with him.
No doubt you did not notice what I felt.
Perhaps I waited, perhaps I served,
But I could not leave the world unobserved.
March 2017
Warmth
All the day long the sun has been playing,
hiding behind shrubs in the morning,
veiled at noon by cirrus clouds,
ducking behind tree trunks in the afternoon.
All the day long I’ve played the game,
going about as if not noticing,
conceding it may not shine forth..
but now at dusk,
the plastered walls have soaked it up,
and I can bask
in sumptuous radiant heat.
April 2017
Childhood in the Old House
We had a central landing on the stair
Dividing the lower here from the upper there.
Here was time-stamped: school and chores,
my father’s job and mother’s meals,
and a door to others’ live-a-day worlds.
There was the realm of dreams and imaginings,
Of memory fugues, the delirium of lust,
illness and its fever blanket, oneiric wanderings
with panic at becoming hopelessly lost.
Fantasies of glory -- my Nobel speech devised
and got by heart. And there was reading in bed
until sleep crept over the page and shut me down.
I often lingered on the landing, headed down,
to get a reading of what went on below:
of what my parents would expect to see
and what the day would demand of me.
It was an enfiladed safety zone
(or so I hoped) from which to overhear
an angry or a hortatory tone
that meant, Right now it’s best to not appear.
that told me I should temporarily defect.
Now I am old. These days I seldom go downstairs.
The here is a void where I have nothing to do.
Now days and nights I live in the there. Where?