Leaving Bush Country
Friday, May 16, 2008
 III.5.3.
Here we are again.
Counting the weeks now until the right side of history is ours again.
Might as well read some poetry while we're waiting

My first poem this week is from Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides, a collection of poems by Stephen Dobyns.
Dobyns born on February 19, 1941 in Orange, New Jersey. He was raised in New Jersey, as well as in Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania and graduated from Wayne State University. He also received an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1967. He worked as a reporter for the Detroit News.
Dobyns taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University.
His many books include collections of his poetry, novels and a book of essays on writing poetry.
In this book, Dobyns looks at the world through the eyes of Heart, a blood-pumping organ, lover, poet and skeptical philosopher of the everyday life.
It is from this poem that the book gets its name.
Thus He Endured
Heart's friend Greasy gets nixed by a stroke. His pals give him a wake; they drink all night. The next day they cart the coffin to the church. In life, Greasy waxed cars; now he's defunct. The priest says how Greasy's in a better place. Heart takes exception. What could beat this? Some mourners weep; others scratch their butts. In life, Greasy was a practical joker. Even salt in the sugar bowl wasn't too childish for him. When the service is over, Heart and five friends have the coffin on top of their shoulders. Outside it's raining. They wait for the hearse. Maybe it's late, maybe it showed up and left. The priest locks the church. The last cars depart. Let's carry the coffin, it's just a few blocks. As they set off, Heart hears a whistle. Show some respect, he complains to a buddy in back. In life, Greasy often asked, What's the point and What comes next? Heart thought his jokes helped keep the dark at arm's length. Rain drips down the pallbearers' necks. Because of the fog they can't see beyond their noses. Right or left? If their hands weren't full, they would flip a coin. Someone plays the harmonica, then starts to sing. The pallbearers look at each other, it's none of them. In life, Greasy reached reached three score and ten. He had a wife, four sons, and five Great Danes, but not all at once. He always drove a Chevrolet. Did we take a wrong turn? asks Heart. The rain turns to sleet; it's getting dark. Someone starts playing the trombone. A tune both melancholy and upbeat. Where could this be coming from? In life, Greasy felt a lack. He worked to hard, the holidays were short. His wife kept asking why didn't he do better? Then his sons left home. Greasy suck rubber dog messes on the hoods of his friends' cars. This is what life's all about, he'd think. Thus he endured. It begins to snow. Heart shoulders his load. The sun goes down. Will Greasy get planted today? It looks unlikely. Heart watches the road. He can't see that the coffin lid is tilted up and Greasy perches on top, just a shadow of his former self. With both hands he flings wads of confetti. He's a skeleton already. Heart would scratch his head but he'd hate to let his corner drop, his pals ditto: pall bearers envying the one who rides.

I played the tuba in my high school band. While, as a tuba player, I was never better than just barely adequate, the band was very good. The best thing about being a tuba player in that situation was, first, I never had much to do in any performance and, second, where tuba players sit way back in the back of the band is a great place to hear the music. So, while never contributing much to it, I heard a lot of very good music.
That was all running through my mind last week when it occurred to me that I hardly ever have time to sit down and really enjoy the good music that's all around us. From there to this poem was just a minor jump.
i wish i had more time for music
i wish i had more time for music -
time to dress up for the Symphony; time for an evening out in a little jazz club where people sit in close and listen; time to find the dark bars where the new music is being made; time to sit in an easy chair for an afternoon and listen to favorites, Cash, Haggard, the lovely, lost Susannah McCorkle, the wit of John Prine, all the old '50s rockers, the doowoppers, the soulmen, all those, to just sit and listen to them, to hear them, not as some soon-forgotten accompaniment to whatever it is that occupies me at the time, not as sound-haze, but as the purpose, the sole purpose of the sitting...
i wish i had more time for music...
i wish i had more time

The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart is a poetry anthology edited by poets Robert Bly, James Hillman, and Michael Meade. It's another of the books I picked up last week.
David Ignatow is one of the poets in the book. He was born in Brooklyn in 1914 and spent most of his life in the New York City area. He died in 1997 at his home in East Hampton, New York.
Ignatow began his professional career as a businessman. After committing wholly to poetry, he worked as an editor of American Poetry Review, Analytic, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Chelsea Magazine, and as poetry editor of The Nation.
Winner of many poetry prizes, he also taught at the New School for Social Research, the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas, Vassar College, York College of the City University of New York, New York University, and Columbia University.
Here are two of his hyper-realistic poems.
Sunday at the State Hospital
I am sitting across the table eating my visit sandwich. The one I brought him stays suspended near his mouth; his eyes focus on the table and seem to think, his shoulders hunched forward. I chew methodically, pretending to take him as a matter of course. The sandwich tastes mad and I keep chewing. My past is sitting in front of me filled with itself nd trying with almost no success to bring the present to its mouth.
No Theory
No theory will stand up to a chicken's guts being cleaned out, a hand rammed up to pull out the wiggling entrails, the green bile and the bloody liver; no theory that does not grow sick at the odor escaping.

Robert McManes is back with us this week with a new poem.
Mac is one of the many fine poets I share poems with on the web. He's been with us several times and I'm glad to have him back again.
a block with shaved corners
i drank shots with a priest discussed politics with a senator counted stars with an astronomer sang karaoke with the eagles wore bell-bottom blue jeans and later a three piece suit
i sipped tea in england sniffed brandy in france smelled the tulips in holland danced in a german disco tasted the air in the swiss alps felt the ground tremor in croatia and touched holy water in macedonia
every block has a corner and lord, I've rounded a few even looked cancer in the eye and have since survived but how I ended up in rural Kansas is still a mystery to me

My next poet is David Rivard with a poem from his book Wise Poison, winner of the 1996 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.
Rivard was born in Massachusetts, in 1953. His other books include Bewitched Playground and Torque, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the Pitt Poetry Series. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines.
He has received many literary awards and is now Poetry Editor at the Harvard Review. He teaches at Tufts University and the Vermont College M.F.A. in Writing Program.
Change My Evil Ways
Some days it is my one wish to live alone, nameless, unfathomable, a drifter or unemployed alien. But that day the movie was over. I found myself walking in Cambridge, & on the Common here were some conga players, as well as the guys with xylophones, with fingerpianos & tambourines. Have you ever seen minnows flopping from shallow to shallow, doing somersaults? The drummers' hands were pale fish, like guppies thrashing light in a clear plastic bag, as blurred as children careening around lawn sprinklers in the careening mercuric blue dusk of August. Dulse wavering! Hair shook out while somebody dances. Some days it isn't a life alone I need but one that supplies the luxury of forgiveness. It was a day like that, luckily. Past the tobacconist, a kid sang his song about changing my evil ways, & strummed a three-chord blues, plugged into a boom box And I put my ear close to his snout, and - a little cautious at first - I began to listen.

I wrote this last week, near the end of a very hot day.
hot
she's about 5'10" - "built" as they say and you can tell from the way she walks she knows every man within 50 yards is watching every little twitch of her hips and you know she's right, and you know she's used to it, has fun with it... grace... sex... h... o... t... ...and speaking of that it was 101 degrees here today, that is 101 as measured by the good Doctor Fahrenheit, not that wuss, Celsius, who squushed everything together to a base 100 'cause he thought it was neater or something,
101 degrees, 75 percent humidity, it'll be this way until mid-October
101 degrees, 101 reasons why i ought to be somewhere else

Alice Walker won her Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple, but she is also a fine poet.
This next poem is from Once, her first poetry collection. In this book she writes of her experiences as a black American in Africa.
Love
i
A dark stranger My heart searches Him out "Papa!"
ii
An old man in white Calls me "mama" It does not take much To know He wants me for His wife - He has no teeth but is kind.
iii
The American from Minnesota Speaks Harvardly of Revolution - Men of the Mau Mau Smile Their fists holding Bits of Kenya earth.
iv
A tall Ethiopian Grins at me The grass burns My bare feet
v
Drums outside My window Morning whirls In I have danced all Night.
vi
The bearded Briton Wears a shirt of Kenya flags I am at home He says.
vii
Down the hill A rove of trees And on this spot The magic tree
viii
The Kenya air! Miles of hills Mountains And holding both My hands A Mau Mau leader.
ix
And in the hut The only picture - Of Jesus
x
Explain to the Women In the village That you are Twenty And belong - To no one.

James Hutchings is a 58-year-old truck driver and poet, among other things. He says he started writing poetry when he was in school, where he played in garage bands and wrote songs. "A sort of natural progression to poetry," he says.
This poem outlines that progression for us.
Three Chord Progression
when I was fifteen I learned to play guitar
I joined a band two brothers a girl on keyboards a drummer and me
they replaced the girl with a concert pianist but the sound wasn't right they got a country guitarist that's when I quit
started my own band a friend played bass O.J.T. another on drums my best friend backup singer an older guy on lead guitar The Thirteenth Degree was born
walked around hair slicked back black sports coats black corduroy pants t-shirts and black velvet Beatle boots floated on a reefer cloud
we played school dances churches the Moose Club and a little place called The Etc. Club a hippie coffee house across from the fairgrounds and the battle of the bands
made some money had a little fun played Beatle songs and the stuff I wrote
it was good for a couple years and then came the blues I grew bored with them I joined a group that tampered with Willie Dixon Sam Cook and Wilson Picket did music with soul
played two gigs got drafted so the story goes I have two guitars in the closet and haven't looked at them in six months.....

Wistawa Szymborska was born in 1923 in Poland, where she lives today. She has worked as a poet, poetry editor, columnist and translator. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.
This poem is from a book of her work Poems: New and Collected 1957-1997 published by Harcourt Inc. in 1998.
The poem was translated by Stanislaqw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
Notes From A Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition
So these are the Himalayas. Mountains racing to the moon. The moment of their start recorded on the startling, ripped canvas of the sky. Holes punched in a desert of clouds. Thrust into nothing. Echo - a white mute. Quiet.
Yet, down there we've got Wednesday, bread and alphabets. Two times two is four. Roses are red there, and violets are blue.
Yeti, crime is not all we're up to down there. Yeti, not every sentence there means death.
We've inherited hope - the gift of forgetting. You'll see how we give birth among the ruins.
Yeti, we've got Shakespeare there. Yeti, we play solitaire and violin. At night fall, we turn lights on, Yeti.
Up here it's neither moon nor earth, Tears freeze. Oh Yeti, semi-moonman, turn back, think again!
I called this to the Yeti inside four walls of avalanche, stomping my feet for warmth on the everlasting snow.

Well, it's true, work is not all toil and trouble. I wrote this last week.
secrets revealed
for some days now i have been reading essays by 8th graders from a state that shall remain unnamed
on the subject of "Freedom, And Why It Is Important To Americans" many grand and noble sentiments have been writ, sometimes with great and refreshing eloquence, as well as, sadly, evidence that for some eloquence will always be a mighty reach
there is excitement like a burst of fresh air sweeping the crowded room when, from the pen of a 12-year-old beautiful powerful prose erupts
and, for the readers, excitement as well when hidden knowledge is revealed, as when a student tells us that among the reasons America's founders fought the British was the promise in the Declaration of Independence of "Life, Liberty, and the Prostitute of Happiness" or when a student reminds us to support our soldiers fighting for our freedom in "Elfganistan," letting slip the mystery that has puzzled scholars for ten thousand years - i.e. the hitherto secret location of the homeland of the Elves...

Here's another poem from the anthology The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.
This one is by Pablo Neruda in a translation by Robert Bly.
The United Fruit Co.
When the trumpet sounded, it was all prepared on the earth, and Jehovah parceled out the earth to Coca-Cola, Ind., Anaconda, Ford Motors, and other entities: The Fruit Company, Inc. reserved for itself the most succulent, the central coast of my own land, the delicate waist of America. It rechristened its territories as the "Banana Republics" and over the restless heroes who brought about the greatness, the liberty and the flags, it established a comic opera: abolished the independencies, presented crowns of Caesar, unsheathed envy, attracted the dictatorship of the flies, Turjillo flies, Tacho flies, Carias flies, Martinez flies, Ubico flies, damp flies of modest blood and marmalade, drunken flies who zoom over the ordinary graves, circus flies, wise flies well trained in tyranny. Among the bloodthirsty flies the Fruit Company lands its ships, taking off the coffee and the fruit; the treasure of our submerged territories flows as though on plates into the ships, Meanwile Indians are falling into the sugared chasms of the harbors, wrapped for burial in the mist of the dawn: a body rolls, a thing that has no name, a fallen cipher, a cluster of dead fruit thrown down on the dump.

And now a treat. Alice Folkart, friend and frequent contributor to "Here and Now," has turned back to work on her first love, the short story.
So, here's a short story by our friend Alice.
The Same River "You could not step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on to you." Heraclitus
I been a bad girl sometimes, but my momma, she worsen me. She run off to Chicago with that fancy man to become a poor, that's what my gramma say. She say I'm gonna go the same way if I'm not careful. I gotta be twice as good as other girls 'cause I gotta stickma. I don't know what a poor is, but I know she gotta stand on the street corner and make eyes at men to get money. Don't sound so bad to me, but gramma always talking 'bout an honest day's work and the laborer being worth his fire or something like that which I take to mean we all gotta take in laundry and clean white people's houses if we want Jesus to love us and don't want to burn in Hell and Damnation, and no pretty clothes neither, and no lipstick, and no fun, all of which momma really liked 'cause she was so pretty.
So, I gotta live with my gramma.
I know she love me even when she whupp'n me. She fixed for me to get baptized in the river next Sunday, for my own good. Wash my sins away, They'll just float away, like dry leaves on the river.
Momma used to take me down to the river, into the reeds, away from the road, and we'd get naked and splash play and she'd float me and I'd scrub her back with wet leaves. Then we'd lie in the sun on our clothes and dry. Momma said this was the river of life like in a poem, the waters of life we was bathing in, just like the Pharaoh's daughter and the little baby Moses.
So, on Sunday, I'm gonna shut my eyes real tight and hold my breath when Rev. Therman tips me back and dunks me. I'm gonna remember that my momma has been in the same river with me, the river of life, and that wherever she is, she'll know that I'm saved 'cause she'll probly look out her window and see my little brown sins floating by and she'll be comforted

William Carlos Williams was born in 1883 and died in 1963.
He was a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine who, according to his biographer, "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician." All with good effect. He was hero and mentor to the modernists and the beats and all the poetry outlaws that followed his insistence that American writers ought to write of American things in the idioms and cadences of the American language and was, in his own writing, the closest thing to a perfect poet American literature has produced.
Here is one of the brief poems he is most famous for.
Poem
As the cat climbed over the top of
the jamcloset first the right forefoot
carefully then the hind stepped down
into the pit of the empty flowerpot

I used the William Carlos Williams poem above because I think it's a masterpiece in stark modernity. But, as well, I used it to set up this next poem, a Williams tribute piece of my own.
the good pediatrician
WCW, that good pediatrician, drops his little bursts of reality into this fog-infected world and clarity has its short moment in the sun
and in that brief light we, his children, play

Born in 1919, William Meredith died in 2007 after 45 years at the center of the poetry world. His first collection of poetry, Love Letter from an Impossible Land, written while he was serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 1943. Many volumes of poetry followed. This poem is from his collection Effort At Speech published by Northwestern University Press in 1997.
Walter Jenks' Bath
For Rollin Williams
These are my legs. I don't have to tell them, legs, Move up and down or which leg. They are black. They are made of atoms like everything else, Miss Berman says. That's the green ceiling Which on top is the Robinson's brown floor. This is Beloit, this is my family's bathroom on the world. The ceiling is atoms, too, little parts running Too fast to see. But through them running fast, Through Audrey Robinson's floor and tub And the roof and air, if I lived on an atom Instead of on the world, I would see space. Through all the little parts, I would see into space.
Outside the air it is all black. The far-apart stars run and shine, no on has to tell them , Stars, run and shine, or the same who tells my atoms Run and knock so Wealter Jenks, me, will stay hard and real. And when I stop the atoms go on knocking, Even if I died the parts would go on spinning, Alone like the far stars, not knowing it, Now knowing they are far apart, or running, Or minding the black distances between. This is me knowing, this is what I know.

I said earlier that friend Alice Folkart had returned to her first love, short stories. I didn't say Alice had quit writing poetry. Here's one of her latest poems, a little short story in poetic form.
I Don't Think We're Going to Chinatown
Mama's boy friend said he'd take us to Chinatown. But, he fell asleep. So did mama. I played jacks on the front steps.
When it got dark, I turned the porch light on. Mama and her boyfriend were still asleep in our room, so I told the cat to sit still and dressed her up like a princess. She ran away with Mama's handkerchief.
The only Chinese Food I know is fortune cookies - folded fortunes, Mama reads them for me. I was hoping to get a good fortune for us, but Mama's boyfriend is still asleep. I don't think we're going to Chinatown.

Zbigniew Herbert was born in 1924 and died in 1998.
He was a spiritual leader of the anticommunist movement in Poland. His work has been translated into almost every European language. This poem is from the collectionElegy For The Departed. The poems in the book were translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter.
The Adventures of Mr. Cogito With Music
1 long ago actually since the dawn of his life Mr. Cogito surrendered to the tantalizing spell of music
he was carried through the forest of infancy by his mother’s melodious voice
Ukrainian nurses hummed him to sleep a lullaby spread wide as the Dnieper
he grew as if urged on by sounds in chords dissonances vertiginous crescendos
he was given a basic musical education not completed to be sure a First Piano Book (part one)
he remembers hunger as a student more intense than then hunger for food when he waited before a concert for the gift of a free ticket
it is difficult to say when he began to be tormented by doubts scruples the reproach of conscience
he listened to music rarely not voraciously as before with a growing feeling of shame
the spring of joy had dried up
it was not the fault of the masters of the motet the sonata the fugue
the revolutions of things fields of gravitation had changed and together with them the inner axis of Mr. Cogito
he could not enter the river of earlier rapture
2 Mr. Cogito began to collect arguments against music
as if he intended to write a treatise on disappointed love
to drown harmony with angry rhetoric
to cast his own burden onto the frail shoulders of the violin
the hood of anathema over a clear face
but let us think about it impartially music is not without fault
it's inglorious beginning - sounds in intervals drove workers on wrung out sweat
the Etruscans flogged slaves to the accompaniment of pipes and flutes
and therefore morally indifferent like the sides of a triangle the spiral of Archimedes the anatomy of a bee
it abandons the three dimensions flirts with infinity places ephemeral ornament over the abyss of time
its obvious and hidden power caused anxiety among philosophers
the godlike Plato warned changes in musical style provoke social upheavals the abolition of laws
gentle Leibniz consoled that nevertheless it provides order and is a hidden arithmetic training of the soul
but what is it what is it really
- a metronome of the universe - exaltation of air - celestial medicine - a steam whistle of emotion
3 Mr. Cogito suspends without answer reflections on the essence of music
but the tyrannical power of this are does not leave him in peace
the momentum with which it forces its way ito our interior
it makes us sad without reason it gives us joy with no cause
it fills harelike hearts of recruits with the blood of heroes
it absolves too easily it purifies free of charge
- and who gave it the right to wrench us by the hair to wring tears from the eyes to provoke us to attack
Mr. Cogito who is condemned to stony speech grating syllables secretly adores volatile light-mindedness
the carnival of an island and groves beyond good and evil
the true cause of the separation is incompatibility of character
different symmetry of the body different orbits of conscience
Mr. Cogito always defended himself against the smoke of time
he valued concrete objects standing quietly in space
he worshipped things that are permanent almost immortal
dreams of the speech of cherubs he left in the garden of dreams
he chose what depends on earthly measure and judgment
so when the hour comes he can consent without a murmur
to the trial of truth and falsehood to the trial of fire and water

Here's one of my stream of consciousness things. I wrote it last night.
streaming
thinking about days past and days to come, knowing there are many more of the first than there will be of the second, remembering, that when my generation was young, the age i'll be on my next birthday was seen as no more that two or three doors down from dead, i think a lot about that sort of thing, the whole age thing, not out of morbid obsession, but just plain curiosity, how we are at one time young and most of the world around us old until years pass and we seem to be old while the world grows younger and younger and if we are lucky there is that little spark of inner essence that doesn't age as our body sags and droops and withers, that keeps us forever in our mind young as the world around, until the fever or the stroke or the fall that lays out the stark reality of our condition beyond even our most frantic effort to dispute it
i wonder at how wrong we always are about ourselves, old and young, and how our ignorance protects us, keeps us every ready to fill the sky with kites in the first favorable wind

The next poem is by Charles Bukowski from what matters most is how well you walk through the fire, one of the eight thousand three hundred forty-six (a rough estimate) collections that have come out since he died. Couldn't have happened to a better poet, not the dying, but the eight thousand and whatever part. As long as they keep coming out, I'll keep reading. Though not to everyone's taste, he's one of my favorites.
38,000-to-one
it was during a reading at the University of Utah. the poets ran out of drinks and while one was reading 2 or 3 of the others got into a car to drive to a liquor store but we were blocked on the road by the cars coming to the football stadium. we were the only car that wanted to go the other way, they had us: 38,000-to-one. we sat in our lane and honked. 400 cars honked back. the cop came over. "look, officer," I said, "we're poets and we need a drink." "turn around and go to the stadium," said the officer. "look, we need a drink. we don't want to see the football game. we don't care who wind. we're poets, we're reading at the Underwater Poetry Festival at the University of Utah!" "traffic can only move one way," said the cop, "turn your car around and go to the stadium." "look, I'm reading in 15 minutes. I'm Henry Chinaski! you've heard of me haven't you?" "turn your car around and go to the stadium!" said the cop. "shit," said Betsy who was at the wheel, and she ran the car up over the curb and we drove across the campus lawn leaving tire marks an inch deep. I was a bit tipsy and I don't know how long we drove or how we got there but suddenly we were all standing in a liquor store and we bought wine, vodka, beer, scotch, got it and left. we drove back, got back there, read the ass right off that audience, picked up our checks and left to applause. UCLA won the football game something to something

Cliff Keller says that, with two bands going now that play all original music, he's been concentrating on song lyrics, rather than standard poetry. But he did send me a couple of poems written within the past year, including the one below.
I'm still hoping to have music on the blog at some point. Maybe if I get that done, we'll get to hear some of Cliff's music.
Mountain Passage
Head down, ascending, avian shadows flicker on the trail,
morning sun refracts
through new blades of grass, the cochlear hum underscores the birdsong.
I stop at the ridge top below, progress looks up and salutes.
The opposing valley face hangs like a tapestry on a wall, verdant pointillism of spring aspen,
heavy pine, and forest shadow. I reach out to brush the frayed top of the ridgeline and notice
Birds and insects surround me now,
stillness is the attraction, but stillness is not what brought me here. I drop
Into a glen,
stream's white noise courses
through a tuft of shivering leaves.
I march through the still parade and watch to the right
the shuffling alignment of
tarnished white aspens, the myriad of silver eyes that stare where waving limbs once gestured.
I do this so often:
turn to track the cadence
of my own passing
as in this poem.
One more poem, and then I'll fold the tent for the week.
In the last issue, I mentioned that I had written successful poems about my father, but nothing very good at all about my mother.
Well, on Mothers' Day I took another shot at it and came up with this next poem, the best I've done so far on the subject and pretty OK in its own right.
what i remember now
as the end approached she was often confused, obsessive over things and times no one else could remember, and suspicious, sure people were stealing from her
i was impatient
i think of that now, add it to my ever-growing list of sorrows, things i would change if the past once set could be reshaped to correct errors of inattention and selfish negligence
but when i think of her i don't think of those last months, but of all the months and years before and from all that passing time, it is another picture that comes to mind - it is her smile, standing at the backdoor arms outstretched to welcome me when i visit
that's what i remember on this day

That's it.
Come back next week.
Until you do, remember all the work presented in this blog remains the property of its creators. The blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz.
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