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Serendipity
Thursday, April 07, 2011 VI.4.3. No featured poet this week, just me and my library. As to the pictures, I could say that, by uploading from my picture file at random, I was testing the effect of serendipity on humanity's traditions of artistic and literary exploration; or, I could just admit I didn't feel like messing with pictures this week so I just grabbed whatever came up next. So that's what you got and this is what you get. My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge Me dire straits Thom Gunn Lines for My 55th Birthday Outside the Diner The Man with Night Sweats Me the great wall Bernice Zamora When We Are Able Pueblo, 1950 Bearded Lady On Living in Aztlan Me the stick that was a snake Donald Hall The Young Watch Us Gold Water Stones Adultery at Forty Me Sheila Naomi Shihab Nye Famous The Shopper West Side The Trashpickers, Madison Street Me things to watch out for as you monitor your quality of life Ricardo Pau-Llosa Orchids Charles V, Honeymoon in Seville Me stuff about stuff Richard Howard disclaimers Me Adam, before Eve Ruth Stone The Eye within the Eye Always on the Train Me weather today Lorna Dee Cervantes My Dinner with Your Memory Raisins Me the very proper lady in the black Sunday dress Stanley Kunitz Three Small Parables For My Poet Friends Me six months without rain Bill Shield Back to the Wall Me in a writerly mooooooooment William Meredith For Guillaume Apollinaire Me the thin lady  I begin this week with a poem by Paul Quest. The poem is from his book My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, published by Ecco in 2008. Quest, winner of the Whiting Award in 2007 whose first book, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, won the 2002 New Issues Prize in Poetry and whose second book, Notes for My Body Double, won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize, is a visiting professor of English at the University of West Georgia. I had intended to use a couple of poems from the book, but then read the title poem and couldn't pass it up, even though it's kind of long. My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge Masturbation interrupted at Normandy by strangers who fled sobbing to the surf. Or by your mother, arrived early from Little Rock, her muumuu throwing floral light at the wall. Or by janitors at the Chinese Consulate. By members of the Team Arthritis Tumbling Squat, flush with the swagger of artificial hips. By Richard Nixon, That Time He Came to Town for Reasons Nobody Can Remember but It's Commonly Agreed He slept Over There. By the Priest and that other priest wearing a clever disguise. By Charles Nelson Reilly, who seemed only vaguely offended or disinclined to join in or just bored, as one feels in the airport of a connecting flight in a town everyone is leaving, everyone knows it, and no one wants to be the last one turning off all the lights, one by one by one a part of the world turning to dust, and anyway, he died the other day after long illness, which is another horror. As is realizing encyclopedic fervor isn't a virtue. Moving on. Metaphysical constructs like Texas and mayonnaise and cole slaw and vegan water parks and The Bob Dylan Naked Network and the strain of pernicious insanity suffered by the curious. The id detonating like an improvised explosive device. The toxic spill of puberty. That time. That time after that. The one before. The encrypted slush of hotel pornography. Snow covering the state. Facts about clouds. Their immensity,the exact tonnage of the crushing vapor sailing past like a camel. Or a castle. That the hair and nails of the dead only seem to grow as the body recedes from itself like a flood. The time she said no. The time she said yes. The time she did not choose. Her tired face in the morning. The mirror's interrogation The crafted answer. How you hate it. Remedial rage. Nature all up in your grill. The dolphin's prehensile penis, fifteen inches in length and adroit in the act of mating but not at dealing cards. Or passing salt or reaching for the remote or that out of the way itch. The monstrous seven feet the blue whale lugs beneath the rolling waves with disturbing extravagance and the bifurcated penis of the marsupial and the swan's feathered member Zeus once took for his own before falling like a cloud into Leda's lap. The animals presumed by science to be extinct only to be dragged dead into boats. The brute coelacanth like a frayed epoch. the Laotian rock rat coaxed from the caves of our guilt. the ivory-billed woodpecker flitting about the ancient ruins of Arkansas. Bigfoot. Depending on who is asked and whether his tenure status is certain. Plesiosaurs. Because Polaroids of rotting flesh weighing several hundred pounds snagged by the crew of the Zuiyo-maru off the coast of New Zealand in 1977 are really all you need to welcome them back to the party. Weapons of mass destruction or aluminum tubes of yellow cake or the half-life of sweet, sweet Crisco coursing the byways of my broken heart. Decency and its granite headstone for which Science designed something based upon good taste and accurate data and no funding. American women who are able to belch on command: 42 percent. The Anti-Christ commanding them. The rest of us trying to choose between continue sentience and celibacy so serious it borders on asexual fascism. The stupor of powerlessness, often confused with summer. That guy with the shitbox van with Valhalla crudely airbrushed on each side, blissfully unaware Ragnarok when down in the seventies. Vain attempts at negotiating with Kim Jong Il who won't stop calling. Kung fu masters who fill me with existential dread instead of broken bones. But not the master of the ice-cream truck who fills me with sugared variations on the theme of winter. Memories of the woman I loved through three pulverizing years through the miseries of her marriage. When she left me, time's heatless crawl. The librarian in the deathless stacks of orthodontic history. My teeth aching like a beacon in the darkness of my voice. The butterfly threading its strange proboscis through the flower's throat for whatever it finds that to it is food. A word like dacrylphilia, which is to aroused by the sight of tears. The hook-handed man who lifts my garbage with weird grace and never a word to me. The postman I nominate for prosthetic conscience, The man next door shooting cats from the shade of his porch safari. Who paints his house in Crimson Tide. The town in which I once worked and tried my best to live. That town an August blister. That town beside the black river. That town with roads tarred to much. Strangers who left the sweat of their hands on me after asking or not asking to petition the Lord and his angels for my healing. Amen. Strangers who stopped me in the street or paid for my lunch or wept over their dead son or asked how many miles in my wheelchair could I go. the twenty-five miles in five miles that would take me nowhere except the car plant or pet food factory the wind at night would bring to everyone. Crickets singing exact heat to the night. Possums wild-eyed and newborn pink all their mean lives. Confederate flags limp in the windless past. Abysmal roads leading everywhere. The temptation of 1-800-CALL-JESUS signs. The temptation of eighteen thousand Cracker Barrels. The Ten Commandments like lunch menus everywhere. The six and counting I'd ploughed through with a kind of drunken force though I never drank, leaving me memory like a septic sidekick. Vestigial Klu Klux Klanism. Vestigial seasons. Defining vestigial. Fried Corn. Governor Fob. The child I babysat against my will who would climb me like monkey bars or claim he could use his penis as a bookmark. That nightmare. Pet store fish we bought thinking it possible to release them in a spring pond rife with thick reeds and naive exhilaration for a few seconds only until a wave, bluegill or pumpkinseed or what I don't know, swallowed them. That nightmare. All of us meandering away from suicide. Whistling past the graveyard. Stepping on the duck's humble grave. Women who consider me in their minds like an exotic equation. The answer arrived at. One kiss I could not follow down the steps she took. And the virgin who loved me. Whose love II reciprocated like politeness. Whose meals I brought to her where she was lost in work. In accuracy. In data. In numbing repetition. The microscopic souls she ferried from dish to slide to blinding oblivion and back again. The hours I watched in drained solidarity. The elevator's escape. The sky I wanted her to want and not Sunday's corpse and not Monday morning beside me, ever untouched. Not Lazarus with the first light. Not hurried into her clothes. On in them intransigent. Not absent. Not in my arms like a fraction. So it went. But there were nights when she would strip to nothing in the bathroom's cheap fluorescence and meekly meet me in the fall of shower water to soap the day from my skin and in her hand make me come, laughing as though this were magic new to a dying world.  Here's an old political poem that, like all old political poems and despite some good lines, just doesn' mean anything anymore. It might good, though, as a reminder for those with short memories. dire straits i have coffee in the morning with several old men well, not really with, but next to, at an adjacent table, we joke around and everything but when it comes right down to sitting i prefer to read my New York Times without conversation especially their conversation, which, when not talking about the market and how their stocks are doing, which bores me, they’re talking politics that, listening to them from my table, is enough to make me squirm under the pressure of shouts not shouted because, you know, these are old men, older then me by ten to twenty years, all suffering from the whispery paranoia of old age, men who think the recent New Yorker Obama cover is an overdue expose, not liberal, in the bubble, New York mocking of people like them so it’s best i sit where i sit and they sit where they sit because if i was at the table with them i’d be throwing things, like the other morning i heard one of them say you just wait until when Obama is elected and you see how bad things can get and i’m thinking jesuschristonabicycle the economy’s in the crapper, people are losing their homes, driving cars they can’t afford to put gas in and can’t sell because they owe to much, businesses are closing, workers are losing jobs, the dollar’s not worth the tick on a milk cow’s butt, we’re running out of water and running over with carbon in the atmosphere all across the world, the glaciers are melting and polar bears are drowning, and the only people in the world who don’t hate us are either laughing at us or feeding us the financial rope we’ll eventually use to hang ourselves, and 90 percent of families are one paycheck or one medical emergency away from streetlife and the soup kitchen and we’re killing people left and right in Iraq and not killing the people we ought to be killing in Afghanistan and our president for eight years is a moron and his vice is a war criminal, and short of an alien invasion from the planet Venus how the fuck I ask you can it ever get worse than all that - so we joke around me and these old guys but i never never ever ever sit at their table  Now I have three poems by Thom Gunn from his book, The Man with Night Sweats, published by The Noonday Press in 1992. Born in Gravesend, Kent, England in 1929, Gunn earned great success with his early poems, then slipped in the estimation of critics and readers through his middle years, becoming more and more specific about his homosexuality and drug use. It was this book,a collection memorializing his friends and loved ones who had fallen victim of the AIDS pandemic, that brought him back to high favor. Lines for My 55th Birthday The love of an old man is not worth a lot, Desperate and dry even when it is hot. You cannot tell what is enthusiasm And what involuntary clawing spasm. Outside the Diner Off garbage outside the diner he licks the different flavours of greasy paper like a dog and then unlike a dog eats the paper too. Times are there's a lethargic conviviality, as they sit around a waste lot passing the muscatel which warms each in his sour sheath worn so long that the smell is complex, reminiscent of food cooking and feces. Times are there's the Detox Clinic, times are he sleeps it off across the back seat of an auto with four flat tires, blackened sole and heel jammed against the side windows, bearded face blinded by sleep turned toward the light. Another lies on the front seat. The Man with Night Sweats I wake up cold, I who Prospered through dreams of heat Wake to their residue,. Sweat, and a clinging sheet. My flesh was its own shield: When it was gashed, it healed. I grew as I explored the body I could trust Even while I adored The risk that made roust, A world of wonders in Each challenge to the skin. I cannot but be sorry The given shield was cracked, My mind reduced to hurry, My flesh reduced and wrecked. I have to change the bed, But catch myself instead Stopped upright where I am Hugging my body to me As if to shield it from The pains that will go through me, As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.  Why do we do these things, write a poem or a song, build a piece of quality furniture, paint a picture, plant a tree. Because we all want to cheat death by leaving something of our selves behind. the great wall i’ve kept almost everything i’ve ever written, not out of some over-indulgent estimation of it’s value, but from faint hope that i may, through it, some day touch the future someday, i hope, i’ll have grandchildren who will have grandchildren and so on through all the ever-shifting high and low tides of time and i’m hoping that through some surviving scrap of paper a glimpse of my humanity may be seen by those who might trace their own time and life back to me; and if they should chance to know me i will be to them not some musty, antique long-forgotten photo in a forgotten box in a dark corner of some dusty attic, but a person, blood and bone and flesh like their own, exposed as only a poem can expose, a teller of stories that can only be told in a poem, loved in my ancient past and lover, intellect and heart, striving to make some small mark on the great wall of human kind  For the first time in "Here and Now," I have several short poems by Bernice Zamora.The poems are from her book, Releasing Serpents,published by Bilingual Press/ Editorial Bilingue of Tempe, Arizona, in 1994. The poems are from a section of the book titled "On Living in Aztlan." Zamora was born and raised in Colorado. She holds a Ph.D in English and American literature from Stanford University and, at the time of publication, taught at Santa Clara University. When We Are Able When we move from this colony of charred huts that surround our grey,wooden, one-room house, we will marry, querido, we will marry. When the stranger ceases to come in the night to sleep in our bed and ravish what is yours, we will marry, querido. When you are able to walk without trembling, smile without crying,and eat without fear, we will marry, querido, we will marry. Pueblo, 1950 I remember you, Fred Montoya. You were the first vato to ever kiss me. I was twelve years old. My mother said shame on you. My teacher said shame on you, and I said shame on me, and nobody said a word to you. Bearded Lady I wanted to know about love and was told to see the bearded lady. As she stroked her treasure,she told me of the melding wells of Julia, Of the kissing stones shaped like camels, Of the hair like linen found among the cloistered. And she stroked, and stroked, and stroked On Living in Aztlan - para la familia Arias We come and we go But within limits, Fixed by law Which is not ours; We have in common the experience of love after Guillevec  Here's another story from aout three years ago. the stick that was a snake i’m thinking of the old joke about the stick that was a snake as i stick my hand into the brush and dead branches pilled up around the willow tree when we bought this place eight years ago we cleaned up a whole section of mesquite brush and turned it into a pleasant little grove of mesquite trees we tried to do the same with the willow in the back corner but it was just too wild and nothing we could do could tame it in the years since our tenants kept up with the mesquite but let the willow grow even wilder looking to sell the place sooner the better, i’m determined to bring that willow to heel before that happens and have been working on it all afternoon with hand clippers and an extension tree trimmer what i really need is a chain saw but she who presides over all creatures that walk or slither or swim or fly or ooze in an amebic state, my helpmate for 31 years, has ruled that i will not use a chain saw unless someone else is present who is licensed and otherwise qualified to drive me to a hospital so that whatever arm or leg i might have sawed off can be re-attached so all i can do is look up at the offending branches hanging there prime for chain saw resolution, yet inviolate on this day as i labor without required backup in the meantime, “i saw a snake!” “that’s bad!” “not so bad, it turned out to be a stick.” “that’s good!” “not so good, the stick i picked up to hit it with turned out to be a snake!” damn, i wish i had a chain saw  Next, I have several poems by Donald Hall from his book White Apples and the Taste of Stone - selected poems, 1946-2006. The book was published in 2006 by Houghton Mifflin. It is a very nice, expensively bound book, complete with a CD with the poet reading selection from the book. Hall, born in 1928, was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (commonly known as the Poet Laureate of the United States) in 2006. The Young Watch Us the young girls look up as we walk past the line at the movie, and go back to examining their fingernails. Their boyfriends are combing their hair, and chew gum as if they meant to insult us. Today we made love all day. I look at you. You are smiling at the sidewalk, dear wrinkled face. Gold Pale gold of the walls, gold of the centers of daisies, yellow roses pressing from a clear bowl. All day we lay on the bed, my hand stroking the deep gold of your thighs and your back. We slept and woke entering the golden room together, lay down in it breathing quickly, then slowly again, caressing and dozing, your hand sleepily touching my hair now. We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole. Waters A rock drops in a bucket, quick fierce waves exhaust themselves against the tin circle. A rock in a pool; a fast splash and ripples move out interrupted by weeds. the lake enormous and calm; a stone falls; for an hour the surface moves holding to itself the frail shudders of its skin. Stones on the dark bottom make the lake calm, the life worth living Now it is gone, all of it. No, it is there, a rock island twelve miles offshore in the Atlantic. Straight cliffs, salt grass on top, rabbits, snipe. A lowered tide, a scrap of sand, maybe once a year the sea is so calm that an island man beaches his coracle, wedges the anchor in a stone, and rock-climbs to the top. He traps small game, listening to the wind, fearful of skull island. Monks in the Middle Ages lived in a stone house her whole lives. Adultery at Forty At the shower's head, high over the porcelain moonscape, a water drop gathers itself darkly, hangs, shakes, trembles, and hesitates, uncertain in which direction to hurl itself.  What a story, love lost but never forgotten. I wrote this one a couple of years ago. Sheila her name is Sheila, but she’s black, not white, and at least 40 years too young to be my Sheila who lived down the road past the irrigation canal, my first girlfriend- would-have-been if i had stopped kicking clods in front of her house and knocked on her door, but i don’t care, black or white old or young, her name is Sheila, the magic magic Sheila Sheeeeee la the exact same name as my lost-to-kicking- clods-first- love Sheeeee... Sheeeee.... Sheeeee... la and that’s enough for me i would tell her i love her but she’d probably have me arrested  Next, I have two poems by San Antonio poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, from her book, Words Under the Words. The book was published by The Eighth Mountain Press of Portland, Oregon, in 1995. With a foot in both the Western and the Arab world, Nye has a closely observing eye, with the ability to see both sides of her heritage at the same time, both as each side sees itself and as it sees the other. I enjoy her work, both as a poet and as a editor of anthologies of poets from the Arab world very much. In these two poems, she speaks for hersef. Famous The river is famous for the fish. The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so. The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse. The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek. The idear you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosum. The boot is to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors. The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it and not at aff famous to the one who is pictured. I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile when crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiled back. I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a bottonhole, not because it did anyting spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do. The first time I read the poem above was as I transcribed it. What a wonderful poem this is, I thought, as I finished. The Shopper I visit the grocery store like an Indian woman of Cuzco attends teh cathedral. Repeating words: butter, bread, apples, butte bread apples. I nod the grandmothers muttering among roots. Their carts tell stories: they eat little, the live alone, Last week two women compared their cancrs matter-of-factly as I compare soups. How do you reach that point of acceptance? Yes and no lshoved in the same basket and you with a calm face waiting at the check-out stand. We must bless ourselves with peaches. Pray to the eggplant, silent among her sisters, that the seeds will not be bitter on the tongue. Confess our fears to the flesh of tomato: we too go forward only halfway ripened dreaming of the deeper red. Here are two bonus poems, just cause I like them, both poems abour San Antonio, the city I live in and have come to believe wonderful. West Side In certain neighborhoods the air is paved with names Domingo, Monico, Francisco. shining rivulets of sound. Names opening wet circles inside the mouth, sprinkling bigh vowels across the desert of Bill, Bob, John. The names are worn on silver linked chains. Maria lives in Pablo Alley, Esperanza rides the Santa Rosa bus! They click together like charms. O save us from the boarded-up windows, the pistol crack in the backyard, save us from the leaky roof, the rattled textbook withich never smiles. Let the names be verses in a city that sings. The Trashpickers, Madison Street On the edge of dawn's pale eye, the trashpickers are lifting the lid of every can, poking inside with bent hammr and stick. They murmur in a language as soft as rags. What have we here? Their colorless overcoats drift and grow wings. The pull a creaking wagon, tinfoil wads, knotted string, to the cave where sacraments of usefulness are performed. Kneel to the triple weddngs of an old nail. Rejoice in the rebirh of envelopes. The crooked skillet finds its first kingdom on a shelf where nothing is new. They dream small dreams, furry ones, A swatch of velvet passed hand-to-hand. Their hearts are compasses fixed to the ground and their love, more like moss than a fire.  Consider this blog a form of self-help therapy, a place for good life advice. Like this... this is what i’ve learned today: when your dog starts yawning in the middle of your morn ing walk you ‘re pro bab ly in a r u t  Here are two poems by Ricardo Pau-Llosa. The poems are from his book, published in 1992 by Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, Bread of the Imagined. Pau-Llosa was born in 1954 in Havana and immigrated with his family to the United States since 1960, presumably refugees from the revolution. He is a poet, pioneer art critic of Latin American art in the US and Europe, and author of short fiction. Orchids For Luisa Richter I overlook Caracas through gates of vine braided with orchids. Like first snow, in lumps their petals tilt in the hill-cleansed air. They are dropped from heaven and fallen anywhere, at our very feet if we could float up the lianas or dance upon the stream's moonlit glass. Back home in winter I will see orchids at shows wearing ribbons. Others will be drafted to fight vulgarity's cause on a sequined breast. Or in some residence I will happen on an orchid posing in front of art like a museum guide pointing at a painted cheek. They will not signify their keeper's wish. I will dream that the hummingbird has brought the monkey to nibble on the mangos left on the terrace. He jolts when I step from the curtain and races up the vines tearing a hundred orchids in his panic to heaven. Their petals glide to the forest floor like manna. But here his terror is no catastrophe for everywhere the orchid lives in naive abundance, and what are a hundred losses to innocence? They live as love should among us, their canopy filtering the sun into a speckled light that rhymes our flesh with the orchids'. I stand in the terrace and the roots of clouds dangle into my open hand from which the monkey takes a ripe mango. I cannot see myself in his eyes, only the world. Charles V, Honeymoon in Seville It would be years before the emperor would remember, astride the corpses of Turks in Vienna, to think it strange how on the first twilight of his marriage he would gaze upon a street of nippled oranges and feel like a bird on a branch in vast paradise. Naked on his balcony, he watched a hundred gypsies, getting ready for the night. Not one orange had been plundered, a miracle, he thought, until his bride propped herself on a pillow and spat into the silver tray, "Acid!" These oranges are only good for marmalade." She gaped at her fingers as if they were dripping blood. His sudden turn toward her startled the birds in what had been the ablution fountain in the mosque courtyard, el Patio de los Naranjos. It was a perfect square grided with orange trees, infinite pillars. Allah's echo. In its center the fountain bloomed, the lotus genesis of a sphere. The emperor would recall it when his architect raised the round courtyard of his palace next to the Alhambra like a host. He had planned to live with Isabel above Granada. When she died he planned to just endure there, from the bloods and maps of faith, beside a hushed labyrinth of African pleasures. How unlike he was now to the king Titian painted on his steed advancing like the sun onto victory and horizons. From the monk's table he takes a bitter orange, and it is no longer the planet resting on his fingertips. Nor is it the circle entwined in a square that reconciles heaven and earth. It is the fruit which love must leave unconquered. On bundled rags the gypsies dream the oranges split like wine skins and wash them in gold.  It being the cusp of tax time, I had an old income tax poem here, thought it might be funny, but, nothing about the I.R.S. is funny so I took the poem out and added this next one instead. It's about something that irritates me even more than tax time. It's about all the commentators, pundits, self-appointed experts, etc. who don't know shit from Shinola about anything trying to explain the world and how it works to me. I wrote it last week. stuff about stuff I got people trying to tell me stuff about stuff they don’t know no stuff about regular stuff, like revealed religion and secret rites of Masons domestic and international politics Siberian cookware the birth and death of stars tax laws regarding home office deductions the circulatory system of the human being and other mammalians the secret socialist agenda of Barack Obama the sex life of the Cantonese termite and weight loss made cheap and easy amidst a bevy of buxom blonds in bikinis stuff like that and I don’t believe people ought to be telling me stuff about stuff they don’t know stuff about having an opinion, it seems to me, ought to be predicated on knowing stuff about the stuff one is opinionating about so though I don’t like to be rude from now on instead of politely listening to people pontificating about stuff they don’t know stuff about I’m just going to tell them that if they don’t have the right stuff they should just stuff it!  Here's a poem by Richard Howard, from his book Trappings. The book was pulished by Turtle Point Press in 1999. Howard was born in 1929 in Cleveland. A poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator, he is a graduate of Columbia University, where he now teaches. I think I used this piece before, but it's funny and worth a second look just for the humor of it. Disclaimers The text of Bach's St. John Passion, performed tonight unabridged, is largely derived from the Gopels, portions of which are alleged (by some)to e anti-Semitic. Such passages may well disclose historical attitudes fastened (by Bach himself) to the Jews, but must not be taken as having (for that very reason) expressed convicions or even opinions of the Management or of the cast. **** The Rape of the Sabine Women, which the atist painted in Rome, articulates Ruben's treatment of a favorite classical theme. Proud as we are to display this example of Flemish finesse, the policy of the Museum is not to be taken amiss: we oppoee all forms of harassment, and just because we have shown this canvas in no way endorses the acctions committed therein. **** Ensconced in the Upper rotunda alongside a fossil musk-ox, the giant Tyrannosaurus (which the public has nicknamed "Rex"), thougy shown in the act of devouring its still-living prey implies no favor by public officials to zoopagous public displays; carniorous Lie-Styes are clearly inappropriagte to a State which has aleady outlawed tobacco and may soon prohibit meat.  Now for something completely different - a new poem. I wrote it last week. Adam, before Eve up late last night, enjoying the night air blowing tender and cool - goosebump breeze of a mild sort, not like the ice-shard winds of a couple of weeks ago, winter wind clawing mean from the north… spring has brought foliage again to the trees between me and the condominiums on the other side of the creek; our locations on opposing hillsides baring the trees and me to the scrutiny of people who, during leafless winter, learn more about me then I ever want to know about them… but not tonight, as I luxuriate in the full-leafed cocoon of my backyard, the night overcast, low clouds reflecting back to the ground all the city lights, making it bright as day in my midnight nest - trees dark shadows against the bright sky, limbs shifting slow against the sky as the night winds blow, until now and then the sky breaks open to show a star, a sliver moon, a nighthawk flying from tree to tree… I pee on the back fence, a moment of nature in the night, Adam, before Eve, alone still after a busy day, enjoying now, a peaceful prelude to a well-slept night  I have two poems by Ruth Stone,from her book In the Next Galaxy, published in 2002 by Copper Canyon Press. Stone, born in Virginia in 1915, taught creative writing for many years in universities around the United States, including the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, University of California Davis, Brandeis, and finally settling at State University of New York Binghamton. Today, Stone lives in Vermont. She has published in many literary journals and anthologies and has written and published many books of poetry. This poet illustrates what's great about the poetry biz - in her late nineties and all the references to her speak in terms of "is" - is teaching, is writing, not a "was" anywhere. The Eye within the Eye I am intimate with the black square eye sockets of two computers. I know,but they do not, that I am not the Abyssinian crouched on the windowsill. But time by battery rules here. It flashes in the history of violence, this wiring of the world. As yet, it does not compute the fabulous gnat, or squid, all brain, brilliant and tactile. And out there under the cement, the nematodes are rising from the dead. Always on the Train Writing poems about writing poems is like rolling bales of hay in Texas. Nothing but the horizon to stop you. But consider the railroad's edge of metal trash; bird perches, miles of telephone wires. What is so innocent as grazing cattle? If you think about it, it turns into words. Trash is so cheerful, flying up like grasshoppers in front of the reaper. The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers, squares of plastic - windows on a house of air. Below the weedy edge in last year's mat, red and silver beer cans. In bits blown equally everywhere, the gaiety of flying paper and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.  Another new poem from last week. weather today weather today: hot and dry… tomorrow: hot and dry… the day after: hot and dry… the weekend: hotter and dryer… next week: hotter and dryer, with an illusion of rain… the week after: hotter and dryer with disillusions of rain, clouds of angst converging from every direction… summer: gates of hell open with a thunderous howl of demons blowing fire through through brimstone muzzles - people writhe in the flames and swear to move to Alaska before they presume to endure another summer in South Texas... but the roads melt and there is no escape, only to endure, imagine you are the Titanic welcoming the next ice berg to come along... October: wet night & cool day and lemony fresh skies, springs bubble up with clear water streams babble and run as melted asphalt hardens, people think, what a GREAT place to live… people have very short memories when it comes to their summer passages through hell - selective memory - a trick of the Chamber of Commerce who all spend their summers on a mountaintop in Colorado  The next two poems are by Lorna Dee Cervantes, from her book From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger. The book was published by Arte Publico Press of the University of Houston in 1991. Cervantes is a favorite poet of mine and I've used her work often, along with extended biographical information. I'm going to skip that this time and let you look it up for yourselves. My Dinner with Your Memory A woman's scent is nothing like bread, although sometimes I steam when the moon slivers my heart into poverty's portions. This one's for you, though you lie, though you deserve none of this butter. On the table between us: a slab of meat that once tasted cud the size of my breast, a cunning wire to slip off some cheese, a plum brandy that dissolves into nothing, silver on the tongue as that talk we devour. Who would hunger at the brink of this feast? Who would go, uninvited, but you and your ghost of a dog. Raisins Raisins are my currency to date - slightly seedy, prickled as my nipples, black as pubic, colored as my opened eyelids. I tongue you fricatives into vowels. I suck you to the scabs you were, forbidden fruit. Reminders. Never mind the way I found you deserted in the depot stall. No matter how this small red box was once a child's. Lost wonder, you're the gift of grace swept up off the bathroom floor. You're my only food today, the day I left you, paper husband, widowed name. Our final meal was sweet, you hovered over me, and empty package, beating blades to froth, teething me the way I like it, both lips bit and shriveled as our last fuck you. You are black with rust and will restore my blood. You're my prize of faith, stave against starve. I eat it. Grateful for the brief exchange. Twenty eight tips of fate. Three good sweats they soaked in sun as you now soak my spit, sweet as acid, damp as rot. This hunger, as your memory, feeds by chance.  Have you ever had one of those "Twilight Zone" moments when you look up from concentrating of something and it's like the veil has been lifted and the world is exposed to you as it really is? I wrote this one lastd week. the very proper lady in black Sunday dress the very proper lady in the black Sunday dress and jeweled necklace and dangly earrings blows her nose into a tiny lace handkerchief and her eyes bulge like a bug’s or maybe like a big spotted frog caught wide awake on her lily pad at midnight thinking silverfish thoughts and her ears I swear they’re flapping and I’m thinking holy shit her head’s gonna explode like the bad guy’s at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie and I don’t know if I should watch or shield my eyes from the sight so I compromise and peek through my fingers and watch as the pressure slowly eases and her head shrinks back to regular size and her ears lie again supine at rest against her head and her eyes slink back into mean little slits like when she came in but I didn’t notice then like I do now that this is one evil woman in her proper black dress and jewelry and hanging earrings and by gosh I’m glad she didn’t blow up or I’d probably have evil debris gunk dripping all over me a pretty scary experience for this early in the morning but it is one of the reasons I like to have breakfast here - you meet the most interesting people and other creatures one can’t always be entirely sure about  Next, I have a poem from National Book Award winner Passing Through - The Laer Poems, New and Selected by Stanley Kunitz. The book was published by W.W. Norton in 1995 Kunitz was born in Massachusetts, in 1906. He attended Harvard College, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1926 and a master's degree in 1927. He served in the Army in World War II, after a request for conscientious objector status was denied. Following the war, he began teaching, first at Bennington College in Vermont, and later at universities including Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, and the University of Washington. The poet died in 2006 at the age of 100. Three Small Parables For My Poet friends 1 Certain saurian species, notably the skink, are capable of shedding their tals in self-defense when thratened. The detached appendage diverts attention to itself by taking on a life of its own and thrashing furiously about. As soon as the stalking wildcat pounces on the wiggler, snatching it up from the sand to bite and maul it, the free lizard scampers off. A new tail begins to grow in place of the one that has been sacrificed. 2 The larva of the tortoise beetle has the neat habit of collecting its droppings and exfoliated skin into a little packet that it carries over its back when it is out in the open. If it were not for this fecal shield, it would lie naked before its enemies. 3 Among the Bedouins, the beggar poets of the desert are held in contempt because of their greed, their thievery and ve- nality. Everyone in the scattered encampments knows that poems of praise can be bought, even by the worst of scoun- drels, for food or money. urthermore, these wandering mins- strels are notorious for stealing the ideas, lines, and even whole songs of others. Often the recitation is interrpted by the shouts of teh squatters around the campfire: "Thou liest. Thou stolest it from So-and-so!" When the poet tries to de- fend himself, calling for witnesses to vouch for his probity ore, in extremity, appealing to Allah, his hearers hoot him down, cring, "Kassad, kaddab! A poet is a liar."  Another thunder storm passed us last night, hooking north and east of us, leaving us dry again at what feels like the beginning of another drought. This series of short bits is from the last drought, only broken in 2009 after two years of extreme dry. -1- hard blue sky devoid of the softness of even a single cloud threatens another day the only wet a farmer’s tears -2- grass so dry it crackles as i walk on it, as if walking on the dry husks of dead crickets -3- grass long gone now dry gritty powder rising in the slightest wind -4- mesquites born for the dry heat of south Texas wilt branches hanging to the ground like weeping willow  The next poem by by Bill Shields, from his book, Life Taker. The book was published in 1995 by 2.13.61 Publications. Shields served in NAVY seal in Viet Nam for three years. This book is the third in a series of three inspired by his experiences, and the experience of other Viet Nam combat vets, both in and after the war. The first two books in the series were Human Shrapnel and The Southeast Asian Book of the Dead. His poems are not pretty. Back to the Wall American Hero The man stepped right up, feet on top of a case of bottled beer. He placed his neck into a rope noose that was strung from the light fixture. He pulled it tight and leaped to the floor. He hung for less than a minute, thinking nothing but the pain as he spun slowly in a circle; the spots in his eyes were bright red when he took a palmed razor blade and cut the rope, falling chest-first into the kitchen sink. The he packed his lunch for work. Vietnam Veteran #9 No more, he screamed to himself under the shower. Not one more minute of this shit. He turned the water off, toweled his hair, dressed, checked the mirror for a person, then walked into the kitchen and ate a raisin bagel. Searched his pocket for change to make a phone call. Forget 'em, he said to the tv and the walls and the roaches. They're dead. sights along hell's highway He stood 6'4" and weighed around 240. He hadn't meant to hit her above her left eye. There were so many reasons not to...but there it was and no one can take back a bruise. "I never meant to hit you," he said from the other side of the living room. She said nothing when he walked back to the bedroom and packed his clothes. And left her life. His wife never heard this story. an impressionistic mystery story of the Vietnam war a small rooster ate the white worms as they fell; the child finished, ,pulled up her black pants and grabbed her mother by the leg. And old woman spat betel nut juice between her squatted knees. Two fires. Twelve grass huts. Old crippled people,young mothers, younger kids - a full cemetery. I know who killed them all. as spiders stare back in the mirror He's left pieces of himself hanging from the sky and dangling from the floors of Hell. A finger severed in a rice paddy marked only by an artillery coordinate; a chunk of his chin dropped into a swamp seven weeks and two miles from his finger; teeth fell in bars from Florida to Colorado; a motorcycle tore an ounce of his skin and fed it to a car; one toe is buried behind his ex-wife's trailer; a hospital in Maine burned a chunk of his guts in their incinerator. His eye will never blink as he shakes your hand. Stranger. D.O.A. She had a career. He had a job. Evenings were quiet together. They finished each other's sentences. No kids, but a phone. Housework was ripped up the middle of the apartment. She was stable, working for the same job for years. Paying bills on time and actually had an IRA; her parents visited regularly. His history was too quiet and his family was dead before his eyes. Three days before every stinking payday she would help him out with gas and a few folding dollars. It wasn't perfect, but it worked for a lot of years. The bedroom wall is still dented from the bouncing of tennis balls against the plaster. Her hair is in the cracks. the truest story Nobody found him. He was lost where a man leaves no footprints. The room had sandbags pilled on the windowsill, a wire screen in front of the glass fo deflect a grenade. He rolled the sleeping bag up in the morning and placed it on the foot of the bed. There was a loaded gun within an arm's reach from anywhere in that pit. A broken eight track tape the spiders found... His mother cashed the VA checks each month and brought him cigarettes, chow, and the tv guide; his picture was framed in the living room. Before Vietnam. in love with the grotesque and the self-mutilated 1. an old man's fingers pull a government check out of the box. 2. The coroner had to rip the skin off his wrists to pull off the montagnard bracelets a village chief welded on him in '70. 3.. The day Eddie Skomer was born, Aug. 12 1951, his father left for Korea. 4. He had been a boy scout, a football player, pulled a little guitar, had the usual acne and high-water pants through highschool. 5. His old man never worked a day after the war. 6. There were faceless brothers and sisters. A mohter beaten by life. 7. Eddie left town the day after graduation and joined the Army. 8. Three years later he came home. Halfway whole. 9. His car stayed drunk for a year. 10. A marriage lasted long enough for the skin to turn white under the ring. 11. The kids were adopted by her new husband. 12. The first spot was found in his right lung, the second on the liver. He had five chins from the anti-inflamma- tory drugs that caused his body to swell. 13. A hearse brought him from the VA hospital. 14. His kids got the money. 15. I got the bracelets. my prayer as a Vietnamese gesture of food We were all just stupid jokes. the jackals that ran amuck steaming violent nightmares to four bare walls that only our demons could spot with blood. We died stuck full of self-agony. Men are cartoons - the slow drip of vomit running down a filter-tipped Lucky Strike. But what few of us that are left can eat your bloody tomb flowers. Amen.  Ahh, the struggle. This another moment of desperation from 2008. i have read everything i have to read the entire Sunday Times, including the magazine and book review and four days of funnies i didn’t have time to read during the week and though i know the new Rolling Stone and a new collection of “Zits” comics are in the racks i’m pretending they’re not trying to convince myself that there’s nothing to read and if i really want to read anything i’m going to have to write it myself but there’s this problem el problemo you might say the rub the obstacle to such writing is that i’m stuck for something to say excuse me while i try to slip into something more creative while i study this white page while i modulate my brain waves into non-concentration so that the floodgates of creativity will open and engulf me in wonderful ideas or even just a trickle of an idea . . . . . ooooooooommmmmmmmmmm oooooooooommmmmmmmmm oooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmm ooooooshitnothingthereeither … look lets us make a deal i’ll just come up with something terrific later tonight and we’ll pretend this never happened o o o o o ooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmm  For my last library poem this week I have a poem by a poet I like, William Meredith, about a poet I like even more, Guillaume Apollinair. He was translating Apollinair for a book at the time. The poem is from Effort at Speech, New and Selected Poems, published in 1997 by Triquarterly Books. Meredith was born in 1919 in New York City. He began writing while a college student at Princeton University where with his first volume of poetry was selected by Archibald MacLeish for publication as part of Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1940 , writing a senior thesis on Robert Frost. He worked briefly for the New York Times before joining the United States Navy as a flier. Meredith re-enlisted in the Korean War, receiving two Air Medals. In 1988 Meredith was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a Los Angeles Times Book Award. From 1964 to 1987 Meredith served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. From 1978 to 1980, Meredith was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the position which in 1985 became the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He has the distinction of being the first gay poet to receive this honor. Meredith taught at Princeton University, the University of Hawaii and at Connecticut College from 1955 to 1983. In 1983, he suffered a stroke and was immobilized for two years. As a result of the stroke he suffered with expressive aphasia, which affected his ability to produce language. Meredith ended his teaching career and could not write poetry during this period. He regained many of his language skills after intensive therapy and traveling to Britain for treatment. For Guillaume Apollinaire The day is colorless like Swiss characters in a novel And I sit at a desk in the old house left to the arts Teaching your poems English. I have read the French words inthe dictionary starting with "W." There are borrowings, too: wesleyen, wigwam, wisigoth and wattman, an archaic electrical-tram driver. If you were alive this summer you'd be 82. The fourth floor of the mansion, just less than an acre, Is servants country. For years it was settled - Chambermaids, kitchenmaids, footmen, a butler, a cook. Somewhere there must be almost an acre of them now Laid out in the Romanesque floor plan under the sod, And the lady who rang for them. The house is a good place to work. But these poems - How quickly the strangeness would pass from things if it were not for them.  I'll finish off my contribution to this week's post with this portrait of a very peculiar person. the thin lady - the incredibly thin thin la d y sits a c r o s s the room eating straw b e r r y pie with whipped cream and a d o l l o p of choc o lot sy r up my good ness how does the everso thin lady stay so t h i n just plain s k i n n y she’d blow >a >>>>>>w >>>>>>>>>>>a >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>y if it wasn’t for her big fat feet and oversized tennies lord a’mighty that's one l e a n wo m an  Photo by Dora Ramirez Since I forgot to do the disclaimers last week, I have to be sure and get them right this time. First: All of the material presented in this blog remains the property of its creators. I only borrowed it. Second: My stuff is my stuff, but you can use it if you properly credit "Here and Now" and me. Third: And in case there is any confusion, I am allen itz, owner and producer of this blog. I also sweep up and do the dishes in the evening. |
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