Rocks & Hard Places
Friday, May 21, 2010
 V.5.3.
I have lots of good poets this week, some of my favorites, in fact, including my featured poet for week, Don Schaeffer.
Don's recent poetry has been published in The Loch Raven Review, The Cartier Street Review, The Writers Publishing, Lilly Lit, Burning Effigy Press, Understanding Magazine, Melange, Tryst, Quills and others. His first book of poetry, Almost Full was published by Owl Oak Press early in the summer of 2006. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from City University of New York (1975) and lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
The poems he is letting me use this week will be in his next book, A Wish for My Dreamer, due to be released in late Summer.
Unfortunately, don’t have much in the way of art this week, especially compared to Katie Sottak’s work last week, just some re-rendered photos from a hike my son and I took up Enchanted Rock several months ago. As I’ve said a number of times, I’m always looking for artists or photographers who can send me twenty five images to feature in an issue. That’s much simpler for me than trying to figure out something new to do, again and again, to old photos.
And, with that, here’s our grand band of poetically adept poeticos for this week.
Naomi Shihab Nye Even at War Grieving Ring For the 500th Dead Palestinian, Itisam Bozieh Shoulders
Don Schaeffer A Wish for my Dreamer
Me imagine you are almost one of a kind
Carol Connolly Without a Hat Fantasy Man’s Best Friend The Index
Me how reporters helped me write better poems
Don Schaeffer Visitations
Tony Barnstone The 167th Psalm of Elvis
Me with Basho in his garden
Don Schaeffer The Arrival
Belle Waring Back to Catfish What Hurts
Don Schaeffer The First Inkling of Need
Me Guest Speaker
Gary Soto Career Counseling Pagan Life
Me Reba for Congress
Don Schaeffer 1875
Blaise Cendrars Bijou Concert Sunsets White Suit Orion The Equator Crossing the Line Sunday Eggs Butterfly Rio de Janeiro Mictorio Sao Paulo
Me frog-state
John Bandi 6 haiku
Margaret Chula 4 haiku
Cid Corman 4 haiku
Patricia Donegan 4 haiku
Diane DiPrima Death Poems in April
Me notes from a grounded witchdoctor

I start this week with several poems by Naomi Sihab Nye, from her book, Red Suitcase, published by BOA Editions in 1994.
Born in 1952, Nye is an award-winning is a poet, songwriter, and novelist. Of mixed heritage, her father is Palestinian and her mother American. Although she regards herself as a "wandering poet", frequently traveling abroad on USIA-sponsored Arts American speaking tours through the Middle East and Asia, she refers to San Antonio as her home.
Even at War
Loose in his lap, the hands. And always a necktie, as some worlds are made complete by single things. Graveled voice, bucket raised on old ropes. You know how a man can get up, get dressed, and think the world is waiting for him? At night darkness knits a giant cap to hold the dreams in. A wardrobe of neckties with slanted stripes. Outside oranges are sleeping, eggplants, fields of wild sage. An order from the government said, You will no longer pick this sage that flavors your whole life. And all the hands smiled. Tonight the breathing air carries headlines that will cross the ocean by tomorrow. Bar the door.
The Grieving Ring
When word of his death arrived we sat in a circle for days crying or not crying
long ago in the other country girls balanced buckets on their heads
now the old sweet water rose from the spring to swallow us
brothers shrank children grew old it felt fine to say nothing about him or something small
the way he carried oranges and falafel in his pockets
the way he was always slightly mad
what he said to each the last time we saw him hurt the worst
those unwritten letters banging each head till it felt bruised
now he would stand at the mirror knotting his tie for the rest of so many lives
I think I’ve used this next poem before, but bears re-reading - maybe once a week or so until the little deaths are ended forever.
For the 500th Dead Palestinian, Itisam Bozieh
Little sister Ibtisam, our sleep flounders, our sleep tugs the cord of your name. Dead at 13, for staring through the window into a gun barrel which did not know you wanted to be a doctor.
I would smooth your life in my hands, pull you back. Had I stayed in your land, I might have been dead too, for something simple like staring or shouting what was true and getting kicked out of school. I wandered stony afternoons owning al their vastness.
Now I would give them to you, guiltily, you, not me. Throwing this ragged grief into the street, scissoring news stories free from the page but they live on my desk with letters, not cries.
How do we carry the endless surprise of all our deaths? Becoming doctors for one another. Arab, Jew, instead of guarding tumors of pain as the they hold us upright?
People in other countries speak easily of being early, late. Some will live to be eighty. Some who never saw it will not forget your face.
Shoulders
A man crosses the street in rain, stepping gently, looking two times north and south, because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him. No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo but he’s not marked. Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing. He hears the hum of a boy’s dream deep inside him.
We’re not going to be able to live in this world if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing with one another.
The road will only be wide. The rain will never stop falling.

Here’s my first poem from this week’s featured poet, Don Schaeffer.
A Wish for My Dreamer Watching yourself in the early morning adding plots to your dreams. Like time was a set of tinker-toy blocks, set your dreams in motion. Make up good dreams, I say to her as we are wishing good night. Please don't frighten yourself, my dear. Make dreams that give you joy.

Here’s my first poem of the week as well.
This came to mind as I read that proof, in the form of intermingled DNA, had been found that at some point during the ten to twenty thousand years that modern humans and Neanderthals had lived together some interbreeding had occurred. For understandable reasons, the idea that I most likely carried a trace of a Neanderthal ancestor made me see them in a whole new light, and, for the first time I considered their ending days, the extinction (perhaps the only one) of a self-conscious species.
This poem was the result of that thinking.
imagine you are almost one of a kind
imagine you are almost one of a kind
one of just a few of your kind remaining
brute, the other kind calls you, but you have dreams
and you can see your dreams and all the dreams of your kind fading until there is no more like you to dream them - no more like you to fear your gods, no more like you to hold a loved one close to hold a blood fresh child, no more like you to dance as new day breaks the sky
no more like you
but you have planted your seed so that some part like you can carry on
you have planted your seed among the other kind, the ones almost like your kind, the ones who hunt you, kill you, break your bones to suck the marrow, to suck from your bones the sustenance of your life, to leave your bones to be covered with tens of millennia of dust, until you are forgotten
imagine your are he, the last of the circle, all others gone like rocks on a hillside,
imagine lying naked in summer grass, a pale shadow under the full bright eye of the moon - listening to the sounds of a flowing creek, the water, the mating frogs, sounds of the trees and the wind
imagine a time when these are the only sounds of night - the water, the trees, the wind, the call of a predator, hungry, howling in the hills
the only sounds of life around you
and you are otherwise alone
imagine all this
the final nights of another kind of man - a kind of man with dreams and inner life much like our own, another kind of man who knows time is ending
a man who lives now only in stories of trolls and other ogres
and in some tiny part of ourselves
descendants, most of us, of the keeper beneath the bridge

I have several poems by Carol Connolly from her book, Payments Due - Onstage Offstage, published by Midwest villages & Voices in 1995.
Connolly, an ardent feminist, was born, raised and educated in he Irish Catholic section of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Mother of seven children, she began to write poetry at the age of forty. She has worked as a columnist for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul magazine and Minnesota’s Journal of Law and Politics, as well as a commentator for the local NBC affiliate. She has served as co-chair of the Minnesota Women’s Political Caucus, chair of the Saint Paul Human Rights Commission, and chair of the affirmative-action committee of the Minnesota Racing Commission.
She was appointed Saint Paul’s first Poet Laureate in 2009. Payments Due, apparently her only book of poetry, was adapted as a stage production and presented in Los Angeles in 1n 1993.
Without a Hat
If you are not a blessed virgin but an ordinary woman full of ordinary dreams on an ordinary night, full of wine and expectation when the moon is high, you might find a handsome athlete and dance slow with him, sway a little to his song, and go with him for just a little while. But should he gather others, make an all-American trio who lock you with their music in a plain room, taunt you and ridicule you as they abuse you, take their turns all night, all night, at hurting you so bad, so bad, all that will remain in you is on scream and you will cry
for help. Help.
They you will be required in extraordinary ways, again and yet again, to explain why you are just an ordinary woman and not a blessed virgin.
Fantasy
If my breasts were as sharp and pointed as the pyramids, I would use them to cut red x’s in his face.
Man’s Best Friend
In the center of the Empire men dress in fine ensembles and walk the dog. They bend beneath curbs, gather warm dog excrement in clear bags pulled from fine silk pockets. Only the finest. This is the center of the Empire, where money talks and dogs are walked on Gucci leashes and dog dirt is collected. E is for Empire. Its excellence is elegant but excrement exists. In piles.
The Index
If you shake your finger at me again, I will bit it off and hold the tip in my teeth until I die. People with police power will find it. Trace you. You will be arrested. In Duluth.

I don’t suppose this next thing is much of a poem, but i wrote it and found it kind of interesting as I did, and what the heck else am I going to do with it if I don’t put it right here.
how reporters help me write poems
for many years i was the go-to for area media wanting a local slant on business and economic news that was rarely good
TV, newspaper and radio interviews several times a month, usually covering the same story, breaking news mostly, sometimes a reporter, either on assignment or on their own initiative, looking to do a more far-reaching story
newspaper and radio were usually done from my offices, relaxed conversations, mostly, with reporters i knew and had worked with often
TV was different and more varied, taped and live
i did a few minutes on a local morning news and talk show two or three days a week, and several times, when news broke too late for reporters to get down to my office for tape, i did live interviews with the anchor, behind the anchor desk - 3 to 5 on-air minutes to respond to 4 to 5 questions from the anchor
i learned how to do those without embarrassing myself by doing taped interviews a couple of times a month - just a reporter, a cameraman, and me, getting the interview done in three basic set-ups, a wide shot of the reporter and me talking, a close-up of me, talking, and a medium shot of the reporter talking, usually taken from behind me
- all sound was dubbed later -
two lessons i learned - the first, and most basic - never piss off a reporter because, in the end, they will define you and a happy reporter is much nicer than an angry one
many reporters, especially the new ones, came into the interview already set on the story they will write and there was no sense in arguing with them about what the story ought to be
the better course was to find a way to tell the story i wanted told within the context of the story they wanted to write
and the secret to doing that is part of the second important thing i learned -
i knew that even a ten minute interview with me would end up with no more than 45 seconds of me talking, so what i had to do was toss in, throughout the 10 minutes, little bits and pieces so good i knew they weren't going to be able to them leave out of my 45 seconds
it’s the power and art of the quote
all reporters are expected by their editors to find the quotes they need for the story - a story without quotes, to many editors, is an editorial, not a news story - i learned to see that my job, as someone with a story to tell, was to give reporters the quote they needed, even if wasn't the quote they wanted -
and what’s a poem?
a memorable, logically connected, imagistic construct of words and phrases -
in reporting terms, a good quote
and that’s how doing news interviews showed me the way to become a better poet
(except in the case of this poem, which is more like an instruction booklet - in four languages - of how to build and repair a diesel engine)

Here’s my second poem from featured poetDon Schaeffer, a piece, as I read it, to a lost past and a difficult future.
Visitations When I think of Joyce tonight, I'm subject to the justice of the void. I can wish like a child but it will not come true. Winter is the best time to think of it when my coat is not enough to keep out the truth of the cold. I can plead that I had no choice but I merely watch another tightening of the vice and listen to the alarm drawing blood in my ear. My denials are like a child's eager wishes. The elders, faces darkened, shake their heads. He knows, they all say, deep inside he knows, as I pound my fists on the bed.

The next poem is by Tony Barnstone from Signals, the 2005 Winter Solstice issue of Runes, A Review of Poetry.
Barnstone is Professor of English at Whittier College. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, he lived for years in Greece, Spain, Kenya and China before taking his Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature at U.C. Berkeley. His poetry, translations, essays on poetics, and fiction have appeared in dozens of American literary journals and he has won numerous fellowships and poetry awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Pushcart Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, The Sow's Ear Poetry Contest, the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Competition (Chester H. Jones Foundation), the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, the Cecil Hemley Award, and the Poetry Society of America. In 2006 he won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry for his manuscript The Golem of Los Angeles, which was published by Red Hen Press in 2007. He won the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry in 2008 for Tongue of War and won the grand prize in the Strokestown International Poetry Festival, in Strokestown, Ireland, in 2008.
The 167th Psalm of Elvis
Blessed are the marble breasts of Venus, those ancient miracles, for they are upright and milk white and they point above the heads of the crowd in the casino. Blessed are the crowds that lay, and whose reflections sway in the polish of her eggshell eyes. from they move shimmers and flights of birds as they circle the games and they are beautiful and helpless. Bless the fast glances that handle the waitress, bless her miniskirt toga and the flame-gold scotch, and bless the gamblers who gaze at the stage. Remember also the dancer and remember her dance, her long neck arched like a wild white goose, the tassels on her nipples that shoot like sparks, and bless the legs and bless the breasts for they are fruit and honey and they are generous to the eyes. Have mercy on my wallet, for the dollars I punch into the slot, and grace the wheels swapping clubs and hearts. Mercy on me too, as I stumble as if in a hashish haze watching the reels spin away, for I am a blown fuse and I need someone to bless me before it’s too late. Honor the chance in a million, the slot machine jolting, the yellow light flashing, honor the voice that calls jackpot, and the coins that crush into the brushed steel tray, for there is a time for winning and a time for losing and if you cast your bread upon the waters you will find it again after many days. Pity the crowd around the blessed winner all patting his back as if it rubs off, this juice, this force, this whatever that might save them from their own cursed luck. And pit the poor winner whose hand claws back into his bucket of coins and who cannot walk away, because he’d do anything for the feeling he had when the great patter rose from the chaos of cherries and lemons and diamonds and stars and he knew for the moment he was blessed.

I woke up later than usual and was feeling very rushed and harassed, entirely a matter of a habit of many years not yet broken even after years of retirement. I had no place to go, but it seemed I was still impatient to get there on time.
A mental slowdown was needed.
with Basho in his garden
driving on I-10 at 7:45 a.m. is like attending a linear convention of type-A personalities, every one of them the kind that sees every little trip to the grocery as a competition with everyone else on the road between home and the supermarket
sometimes i begin to feel like that, the onset of an insanity too common in our lives, and i try to treat it with imaginings of more peaceful times and places, like the little bamboo hut students built for the haiku master Basho where he sometimes found peace between his travels -
i join him in my mind, kneeling with him in his garden of high weeds, flowers no one else wanted until he, in his peace, found their beauty - beauty not of color or spread of stems, or grand blossoms, but of their perverse indifference to the gardner, their tenacity and will to survive and spread, their willingness to struggle for place all others would deny them
useful traits, all, for poets and philosophers so like weeds we are in the Queen’s formal gardens, as Basho might well have known and treasured

And now another poem by featured poet Don Schaeffer. I particularly like this one, if you let me into your life, I will shake your world.
I like that The Arrival A human being is a heavy weight. You can't expect one to arrive lightly. Not like a feather, not on tippy toes, body behemoth making great waves in its wake A human being blasts everything. Boom! The big guns in the harbor sound. The weakest run. If you will have me I will change your life. And I will join you but only if you laugh.

I have two poems now by Belle Waring, from her book Refuge, winner of the 1989 Associated Writing Programs’ award in poetry, published in 1990 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Waring was bon in Virginia in 1951. She holds degrees in nursing and English. In 1988, she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Vermont College. She is now on the Field Faculty of the Vermont College M.F.A. Program and also works as a registered nurse.
This is my first time to read her, and I do like her a lot.
Back to Catfish
The cafe with the hotwire boys is where you are and me I’m back to cooking catfish with banana, disguised as a Guadeloupan delicacy, but it’s still its old ugly-snout self. Now when you bon temps roulez, you booze in a fancy French joint where the ladies get menus with no price list. My little sun king, who knows when you’ll blow in. A woman like me with a fine arts degree could have been a master engraver. Counterfeiter. Not the counterfeiter’s moll.
Sure. I’m back to cooking catfish, a creature with purpose in life, to sweep the creek bottom clean as the moon. I’m waiting for thee, wearing this swamp green shirt you left. I could never just throw it away, the color of a hangover. A bruise.
But I could start without you. Scarf up bananafish by myself. Clean this kitchen with your keepsake shirt, scrub every bad business I can reach. Go out for some middlebrow cappuccino. Swing by the Tastee Diner for some brawl-proof pie. I’ll smile when I’m ready and feel complete. Who knows who I might meet?
I could swim the night in my cherry Nova and sweep down the state road crossing the river on its long goddamn way home.
What Hurts
is waking up flung cold across the bed, right where I left myself, these eyes spooked, like my father’s after a binge. Just what the hell is he doing in my face? I don’t booze. I’m not like him. But that scared and blowzy stare I recognize after this stark dream of looking for Max, my hopeless ex, world without end. Some nights my father spent in a cell to sober up. I learned to sleep in my clothes. Sentry. Night watch. Mother by a sickbed. Doctor on call. No surprise. Ready for a shit storm. Praying for a cool sunrise.

Now another piece by featured poet Don Schaeffer.
Very romantic this week is Don Schaeffer. The First Inkling of Need The gesture is what amuses us as it says I am playing I am not in time out I have not yet quit. Watching the well washed little boys in the table near the door I see how they practice gestures making sure for each other they are vivid, saying, I am playing play with me. Some day we will be real members and this will count. Don't leave me.

Here I am again, with more echos from a previous life.
guest speaker
i've been a guest speaker many times, service club meetings, business development seminars, convention banquets, every such event where all the speakers and other notables sit at a long head table on top of a riser, while attendees are spread out across the room in tables of six or eight, watching as those at the head table are fed first, watching every bite bit, every chew chewed, every sip slurped, every slurp dripped, every sliver of food dropped, every flash of white teeth in mouth-open chewing
always made me self-conscious
this noon, eating my Popeye's drumsticks at the kitchen table, two hungry dogs, outside on the patio, watching though the window, every bite bit, every chew chewed
at least i won't have to give a speech

Here is another of my favorite poets, Gary Soto, with a poem from his book Junior College, published by Chronicle Books in 1997.
I’ve done Soto’s bio so often I’m just going to let you look it up yourself this time.
Career Counseling
The mortuary students, those vampires with cool fingers, Would get good jobs, for the world was filled With the dying - grandmothers needling Their last doilies and workers with their caps Feeding into industrial rollers. The criminology students gathered near the bike racks, their compound eyes Behind sunglasses. They searched for trouble, Their hands at their sides where, in three months, Cold 45s would snuggle in oily holsters. In college, I stayed away From these future cops. In World Religions, I considered the priesthood. In geology, I considered lighting up the world, The bang of two rocks. I took speed reading, The equivalent of 19 cups of coffee, And enrolled in biology - Mendel crosswiring peas in pods. The nursing students hurried with clipboards, And one day I followed them, Like a dog, like an insomniatic patient.
In junior college, I painted numbers on curbs, The houses themselves as cold as tombstones. I worked on my knees, right above the busy traffic Of straight-ahead, no-bullshit ants. I went from house to house, At the level Of each porch I could reason this - There was work for both mortuary and criminology students, And somewhere in between the nurses were involved - Their stethoscopes counting down the heartbeats. I painted curbs and kept to myself. One day, my counselor asked, What do yo want to be? He asked this on A day when student nurses eyed my crippled walk, When a mortuary student asked if I could play dead And let him count my teeth and broken bones. The newly graduated cops were meaner Than thugs. They scolded those Who walked on our reseeded lawns, Scolded those in wheelchairs and on crutches. I should leave town, I told myself, And would have given Some of my teeth to travel to Ireland to Scotland, Somewhere cool. Or like a ghost, I would have lived inside a tree And come out only when it was dark, thus safe, Untouchable as smoke. But I left his office And returned to the curbs. With both knees wet And sunlight bright as scissors, I lowered my eyes and thought of the divisions of labor - Me with house numbers, the vocational students With good job, and, in my shadow, ants With our human plunder descending into creaturely holes.
Can’t resist; here’s another one.
Pagan Life
In history of religion, I read that three-foot pagans carried five-foot spears, Worshiped trees and hundred-pound pumpkins, And after week-long hunts returned to their village To throw their women in the dirt And get some under the sun. I licked my fingers and turned the page, Looking for pictures. I found none, Only more words. The bell rang, and I left the class, 5’8”, with no spear, no woman, No tree to stand under and chant, “O, blessed Tree.” I was nineteen. I dragged my loneliness like a dead cat To the levee. The water rushed black. The wind whipped the eucalyptus, That giraffe of trees. I bent my head over the water And shook buddha-shaped ears into that ancient current. Tires floated by, The dead carcass of a suitcase, And overturned kitchen tables with spindly legs Jutting above the surface. I cried for the fish, And the fish’s cousin, a one-eyed toad in the reeds. Then I picked up a stick, me the pagan, And chased a gopher into a hole. I grew small and powerful. As I walked, I became deliriously wild From carrying my ten-foot spear. My footprints left dents in the sandy ground, Footprints that slowly shortened Until they were only inches apart. By then, Ants followed my march, beetles and termites, And one armadillo, a lock-jawed disciple. By the time I reached town, I was trouble for married and unmarried women. I was no bigger than a thumb, And my spear, Jesus Christ, tottered n my arms And stirred the populace from their houses - Wondrous girls climbing onto each other’s shoulders For a glimpse of the thing that sanctified the air.

Speaking of Reba a which I often do, here she is again.
Reba for Congress
i woke this morning to heavy rain, thunder and lightning across the horizon
and a wet dog in panic-frenzy because of the thunder
stupid dog
she stands in the rain and yowls, instead of hiding in her safe little house on the patio
it’s like watching the news from Washington, where politicians in constant panic-mode stand in shitstorms of tough times and yowl, like my stupid dog
oblivious
Reba, my smart dog, knows better
she wakes up, ready for her morning outside business, stands at patio door, takes measured note of the weather, and if it is as it is today, returns to her bed and to sleep, legs crossed, until better weather bodes
i wonder if those crazy tea party people would be open to electing a dog to Congress
(better than the dogs we’ve got now, i’d tell them)
maybe if i took her to a couple of their meetings

Here’s my last piece from featured poet Don Schaeffer. Thanks, Don. I look forward to reading your new book.
1875 When Charles Darwin is doing his thing the world is gears clothed in brass with leather seats handles of ivory and wood. Survival is the final and fierce machine of judgment. And we all stand in the light of mechanics and count our virtues with a one, two, three. If we need help in testing our regeneracy there are plenty of carnival performers with tests For a penny you know how you stack up. You enter the great competition-of-life dance and get your rank, then turn rank into index and carry the evolution quotient in your heart.

This week’s “Here and Now” is chock full of poets I like very much, none more than the next one, one of my all-time favorites, Blaise Cendrars, from a collection of his poems, Complete Poems, published in 1992 by the University of California Press.
Born Frédéric Louis Sauser in 1887, Cendrars led an active and interesting life until his death in 1961. He was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized French in 1916 and a writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.
Severely wounded (he lost an arm) in the first World War, he spent much of his life traveling in the years after. An observant, energetic and empathic traveler, you read his travel poems and regret you never had an opportunity to be his traveling companion.
Here are some of those travel poems, snippets of observation, that he recorded in his notebook as he traveled. These poems, as well as all the others in the book, were translated from French to English by Ron Padgett.
Bijou-Concert
No Never again I’ll never drag my ass into another one of these colonial dives I want to be this poor black man I want to be this poor black who stands in the doorway Because the beautiful black girls would be my sisters And not And not These stinking French Spanish Serbian German bitches who furnish the leisures of gloomy functionaries dying to be stationed in Paris and who don’t know how to kill time I want to be that poor black man and fritter my time away
Sunsets
Everyone talks about sunsets All travelers are happy to talk about the sunsets in these waters There are hundreds of books that do nothing but describe sunsets The tropical sunsets Yes it’s true they’re wonderful But I really prefer the sunrises Dawn I wouldn’t miss one for the world I’m always on deck In the buff And I’m always the only one there admiring them But I’m not going to describe them the dawns I’m going to keep them for me alone
White Suit
I stroll on deck in the white suit I bought in Dakar On my feet the espadrilles bought in Villa Garcia I hold in my hand the Basque beret I brought from Biarritz My pockets are filled with Caporal Ordinaires From time to time I sniff my wooden cigarette case from Russia I jingle he coins in my pocket and a pound sterling in gold I have my big Calabrian handkerchief and some wax matches the big kind you find only in London I’m clean washed scrubbed more than the deck Happy as a king Rich as a multimillionaire Free as a man
Orion
It’s my star It’s in the form of a hand It’s my hand gone up into the sky During the entire war I saw Orion through a lookout slit When the zeppelins came to bomb Paris they always came from Orion I have it above my head today The main mast pierces the palm of that hand which must hurt as my amputated hand hurts me pierced as it is by a continual stabbing pain
The Equator
The ocean is dark blue the blue sky is pale next to it The sea swells all around the horizon It’s as if the Atlantic were going to spill over into the sky All around the steamer it’s a vat of pure ultramarine
Crossing the Line
Of course I have been baptized It’s my eleventh baptism of the line I got dressed up like a woman and we had a great time Then we drank
Sunday
It is Sunday on the water It’s hot I’m in my cabin as if trapped in melting butter
Eggs
The coast of Brazil is strewn with round bare little islands we’ve been sailing through for two days They’re like speckled eggs laid by some gigantic bird Or like volcanic dung Or like vulture sphincteroids
Butterfly
It’s odd For two days now that we’ve been in sight o land not a single bird has met us or followed in our wake On the other hand Today At dawn As we were entering the Bay of Rio A butterfly as big as your hand came fluttering all around the steamer It was black and yellow with big streaks of faded blue
Rio de Janeiro
Everyone is on deck We’re in among the mountains A lighthouse goes dark They’re looking everywhere for the Sugarloaf and ten people find it in a hundred different directions so much do these mountains look alike in their pyroformity Mr. Lopart shows me a mountain with its profile against the sky like a a cadaver stretched out with its silhouette looking like Napoleon on his deathbed I think it looks more like Wagner a Richard Wagner puffed up with pride or overwhelmed with fat Rio is now quite near and you can make out houses on the beach The officers compare this panorama to that of the Golden Horn Others talk about the revolt of the forts Other unanimously deplore the construction of a big tall square modern hotel that disfigures the bay (the hotel is very beautiful) Still others vehemently protest the leveling of a mountain Leaning over the starboard rail I look at The tropical vegetation of a deserted little island the huge sun that cuts through the huge vegetation A little boat with three fishermen These men moving slowly and methodically Who work Who fish Who catch the fish Who do not even look at us Absorbed in their craft
Mictorio
The mictorio is the station toilet I’m always curious to see it when I arrive in a new country The john in the station in Santos is a little nook where and immense earthenware pot which reminds me of the big jars among the vines in Provence where and immense earthenware pot is buried up to the neck A big thick dark wooden sausage sits like a crown on the edge and serves as a seat It must be rather uncomfortable and too low The exact opposite of the tanks of the Bastille which are too high
Sao Paulo
Finally here are some factories a suburb a nice little trolley Electric lines A street crowded with people doing their evening shopping A natural gas tank Finally we pull into the station Sao Paulo I feel like I’m in the station in Nice Or getting off a Charing Cross in London I find all my friends Hello It’s me

Another couple of days of good rain. I love it.
frog-state
great wet night
thunder crashing lightning flashing
rain by the wash tub
and it looks like more today
and i’m in a frog-state
ready to squat down in the mud
and let the rain run off my green warty skin
happy - croaking like the frog-king
on saturday night and content in my bumpy frog-self...
just don’t bother me or i’ll pee in your hand
frog-revenge on those who disturb the rain

Last week in included some haiku from the original Japanese masters of the form. This week I have poems from several of the modern American masters of haiku.
The poems are take from the anthology The Unswept Path - Contemporary American Haiku, published in 2005 by White Pine Press.
The first of the new masters is John Brandi.
Brandi is a native of southern California, born in 1943, a poet and artist associated with the Beat Generation.
daybreak pollen rising from the unswept path
~~~
around the bell blue sky ringing
~~~
after the storm a dragonfly pinned to the cactus
~~~
morning chill every haystack leans to the sun
~~~
not knowing what to say he mails only the envelope
~~~
without clothes it’s a different conversation
Next, I have haiku from Margaret Chula. Chula lived in Japan for twelve years , where she taught creative writing and studied woodblock printing and ikbana. Author of a number of volumes of poetry, she now lives in Oregon.
cushion, incense, bowl so much preparation to do nothing
~~~
late into the night we talk of revelations moon through the pines
~~~
silk sheets gardenia on the bed stand unfolds its petals
~~~
waking this morning from troubled dreams foxprints on new snow
The next poems are by Cid Corman. He was an editor, poet, land translator. He lived abroad most of his life, first in Europe, then in Japan.
Corman died in 2004.
There is no end and never was a beginning - so here we are - amidst
~~~
Only a bunch of swallows over and over the darkening stream
~~~
Nothing ends with you - every leaf on the ground remembering root
~~~
Alive or dead I’m in it for the poetry
Patricia Donegan is an author, poet, translator, and teacher in Tokyo, Japan.
summer twilight - a woman’s song mingles with the bath water
~~~
winter afternoon not one branch moves - I listen to my bones
~~~
Pampas grass bends bodies intertwined
~~~
spring wind - I too am dust
And, finally, this series by Diane DiPrima, another import ant poet from the beat generation.
Death Poems In April
1
even the Buddha lay down to breathe his last, why am I struggling?
2
easy to disappear into this fog
3
pour this water and ash on the roots of some old tree

Continuing my long tradition (it’s my blog, if I saw two weeks is a long tradition, two weeks is a long tradition) of closing out every “Here and Now” issue with one of my old poems. This one was written in 1968 or thereabouts and published thirty years later in January 2000 in Avant Garde Times, another fun zine gone before its time.
The poem, an example of what happens when you mix excessive Whitman hero-worship with a psychedelic time, is not much to brag about on paper, but, I’ve been told by one who heard it, a dynamite read if read by a good dramatic reader.
Our work is like our children, we claim what we can for it.
notes from a grounded witchdoctor
rosy glow rosy glow breaks the light into silken clouds of floating pink drifting drifting into the expanding corners of my pulsating room rooms fields tiny universe growing growing to big too much falling back falling back regrouping afraid of reaching
give me room
control control sure no longer afraid jumping for the clouds riding riding into the ever expanding corners of my pulsating room riding
clouds of taffy sticking sucking pulling me to the floor phosphorescent walls quake and tilt
throwing off slippery shadows that pool at the floor eat at the floor and leap at me with the deliberate slow pace of the unconquered tide then turn golden then red at my feet
the angry lobster redness the infectious angry redness colors my feet and crawls up my leg chewing chewing chewing reaching crawling pulling at my body pulling me to a high place
i stand atop a hill in the shade of a tree a wide spreading tree
birds sing from the tree and i understand the song and try to sing along but the birds stop and leave me singing alone alone until a bird lunges from the tree to stand on the ground to become a shadow figure a man in black a man with no face
black space where a face should be the thing the shadow faceless thing begins to cry and the birds come from the trees and land on his shoulders as crows great black crows evil black crows that sit on phantasmal shoulders and cry
the ground collapses beneath me the hill flattens beneath me and i’m in a valley and the hill is behind me and the figure and the crows stand on the hill and cry so far above me as the hill shimmers through the heat of the valley fades disappears
i’m alone in the valley in the dust of the valley in the hot hot dust of the valley
hotter and hotter in the valley and i’m lying naked in the boiling mud of the valley
people stand around me men and women without faces black spaces where faces ought to be men and women in long black skirts that drag in the mud
they laugh at me
great ghastly specters from a tribal past they laugh at me i press my cracked lips into the mud and try to suck for water and burn my face and my lips and tongue mud mud mud not mud grass wet grass dew-wet grass cool dew-wet grass i run my tongue over the grass bite into the grass chew on its coolness i lie on my back under the cool fresh sky and stretch out my arms and pull handfuls of grass and throw them at the sun and let the grass rain back on me and i catch it with my body
i crawl beneath the grass and meadow flowers and roots and working earthworms and look up to watch the sun in its forever agony of circling circling ever circling
i watch the sun through the roots and grass and crawling insects from behind the petals of meadow flowers circling circling circling falling crashing diving swooping clawing at my eyes burning at my eyes searing my eyes and cheeks and lips and screaming tongue
i close my eyes
and i’m in a room a small room a dark room a black room a room without light but for a small dot pulsating off and on off and on off and on off and on in one corner of the room
the dot grows bigger and bigger off and on bigger and bigger it crashes toward me
washes over me
leaves me in a lonely light alone
alone now
alone
alone now lying on my floor linoleum cold against my cheek
i turn on my back alone of the floor
and sleep

Enough.
All material borrowed for this blog remains the property of those who created it. If it’s mine, you can use it, just give proper credit to me and to “Here and Now.”
I’m allen itz, owner and producer of this blog, and I’m done.
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Thank you for Andrew Bird.
Absolutely amazing.
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