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55 days without rain
Monday, June 20, 2011 VI.6.5. Welcome back to me and to you. I will move on quickly to the poetry this week, not pausing here to duplicate the shameless plug for my new book which I have thoughtfully include at the end of this post. Here's the goods for this week: Gin A Therapist Invites Me to Visit My Inner Child Encounter Sculpture of Gulls Me what do the fleeing blackbirds know D. A. Powell [19 lines] Me android days and flypaper nights Raul Salinas To My Woman A Glimpse of Lore (ca) Me summer in the city From Japanese Death Poems 13 poems Me I felt challenged to write a wiener poem Marcos McPeek Villatoro Final Hope While Voting To Miguel Angel Asturias Me just don’t have time for meditation Carl Sandburg Masses Lost Sketch Me this is the poem I was going to write today From Poetry East Albert Goldbarth Packing for a Difficult Trip, Molly Hunter Giles Photograph Jack Heflin Domestic Me the door we will someday open Arthur Munoz Love El Sapo Mary’s Place Me how it works Stephen Dobyns The Malditos Make a Racket Me a fan of little things Gu Cheng Parting Thoughts Feeling Legal Case One of My Springs Old Man (1) Grave Bed The God Says Me the universal application of old men and old cars From Against Forgetting Ariel Dorfman I Just Missed the Bus and I’ll Be Late For Work Stanislaw Baranczak If China Duoduo from Thoughts and Recollections Me in the way of reassurance upon the onset of dread disease Thomas R. Smith The Soprano Me frankly, my dear  I begin this week with several poems by Meg Kearney from her first book of poems, An Unkindness of Ravens published in 2001 by BOA Edtions, Ltd. Recipient of an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2001, Kearney also received a New York Times Fellowship and the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Award in 1998. She is currently Director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College, as well as Director of Pine Manor's Solstice Summer Writers Conference. For 11 years prior to joining Pine Manor, she was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards, in New York City. She also taught poetry at the New School University. Gin She came to sex as she'd come to gin. Five years in the convent, what did she know about gin? Sister Emmanuiel said the Devil himself was suckled on it, and after her third drink in the Red Kilt she knew he was inside her like a crazed Wizard of Oz, pushing and pumping her leavers and gears. Each time she brought the glass to her lips, Sister's voice whispered, You couldn't lift one finger, jnot one pinky of one hand if not for the love of God. But she was twenty-five and didn't know anything about love. She knew she wasn't holy, or chaste, or even sorry. And she knew she was alone when the man called her beautiiful, when the gin said, Baby, relax, enjoy it while you can. A Therapist Invites Me to Visit My Inner Child I dread going back to see that girl after her first day of kindergarten. She is sitting on the front porch of teh green house on the hill in her braids, freckles, and new plaid dress. What should I not say? The living-room drapes are drawn; front door is closed against the afternoon sun. The girl's socks are muddy.Her pockets sag with diamonds sh discovered in the creek bed on trhe way home. When Mother wakes from her nap, the girl plans to give them to her. She will stand by the couch and pour into her mother's hands diamonds that sparkle like ice in a glass. Then her mother might be happy. The girl is singing "Three Little Angels," waiting for those curtains to open. I want to explain that once they dry, the diamonds will be dull and gray. I wnat her to stop singing that song. I want to say her pockets are full of stones. Encounter What is the sound of a raven burning? The position of the sun is your only clue. At dusk the air darkens with each breath. You cock your head to one side; essence of raven fills your body. You move closer, you hear fire taking wing. What does it sound like? A gust of sighs the color of a bruise. Closer still, this unkindness singes your eyelashes, the back of your throat. Black eyes pierce your hands. You hear your own flesh burning as you drop and roll with the bird, desperate to douse the flames - but your attempt is foolish; you are suddenly more alone than you ever expected. There is nothing under your body but the absence of light. The sun is rising now over your shoulder and you stare at your filthy hands. Your stigmata have disappeared, leaving only two small scars in the shape of a bird. A shadow flies behind you and hides itself in your shoes. Sculpture of Gulls They are riding the crest of a wave that never quite breaks. One gull flies just above the other and slightly behind, as if he could protect his mate from the past or a possibly fury overhead, disguised now as a cloud, white as sea. She worries more about what lies ahead, the beach and it dependable shifting, the huge blue swell beneath her, the depth of its insatiable thirst. What they know about the wind holds them. What they are learning about each other makes them cry out, startled.  This is my first poem for the week, written sometime during the past days off. what do the fleeing blackbirds know blackbirds frantically flee, flapping dark wings against that fraudulent grey sky that promises every early morning a cool day of shadow and wet, the promising sky that fades when the sun fully risen incinerates from a cloudless sky… but more interesting, why did the blackbirds so frantically flee, was it one of those amazing but true animals sensing natural disaster things, for example, like the fires in the near north, does it mean they are on the move, burning south towards us, do the birds smell the smoke drifting this way against the wind what do the birds know, that’s the interesting thing ~~~ I used to know a lot of things when I was a child, my dear companions a full set of “Book of Knowledge” encyclopedias to read and I did every day and knew all the emperors of Rome, all the Kings and Queens of England, all the players in the French Revolution, those who lost their head and the few who didn’t, knew the names of all of Napoleon’s major battles, knew the names of the books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd somebody else and so on, knew all that stuff, like how many years it would take you to fly a DC-7 from earth to the moon - which was a whole lot of time in child-years and which I don’t know anymore, just like I don’t know any of that stuff anymore, just like all the stuff you learn as a child gets buried in your later years by more important things like who was last year’s American Idol and who took my cheese and who put the bop in the bopsheebopsheebop and while all that old stuff is interesting and while I it all might come back to mind in my dotage when I’m seeing imaginary rabbits in imaginary cabbage patches, the more important thing right now is all these frantically fleeing birds and what they know that I don’t know… I think we humans should know those things too so we could know when we see the birds frantically fleeing whether should we be stocking up on toilet paper and batteries and bottled water before whatever's going to happen happens or what  Here's a poem by D. A. Powell who lives in the Bay Area where he teaches at the University of San Francisco. The poem is from Powell's fourth book of poems, Cocktails, published in 2004 by Graywolf Press funded in part by grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota and the National Endowment for the Arts, and others. [19 lines] Looking for Mr. G Bar (1977, Richard Brooks, dir) shapes repeat themselves. and messages rewind it's the answering machine you don't want to hear from "I could never be kept," he says. the fear of sobriety wets his tongue; slips it into my ear with his number sitting in prospect park bar: conveniently contained by the lack fo scenery. his shorts creep up his leg hand: too causal. considering his inner thigh parts of the same bodies arouse each other: kissing cousins we all sleep with men who are not our lovers: economically the barter is proposed: more drinks on the mastercard the pitch and roll of a bed crosses my mind. how to end this groping beneath the formica table: nobody walks away I used to wake beside the same body for years its contour familiar: until it no longer suited who knows where desire goes when it leaves the bed a stranger comes to sit with me: both light up he's had a lover test positive. his lips find my neck his hand,his ass: I consider the risk of each part I want there is a covert exit. a cab waiting. I sign for us both  I'm off the grid, mostly, and try hard to say that way. I have a revolutionary cell phone - it takes calls and makes calls and that's all. And that's they way I like it. I'm sure there are 27 thousand things I could be doing with my laptop that I'm not doing, stuff that I don't intend to do because of the requirement that I would have to learn to do it. Keeping it simple, the thing that I work at every day. android days and flypaper nights cars moving along the freeway, east and west, Saturday-style moving, not in the purposeful frenzy of a weekday, but a Saturday going, Saturday doing, chores to do that didn’t get done all week, so no need to hurry today, except... that's the Saturday mornings I remember and sometimes imagine in the morning fog of sleep-stuccoed eyes, setting from my mind today's Saturday mornings of constant whirly-whiz , constant doing and undoing of ever-tightening knots of needless complexity, a time when only a few of us enjoy the luxuries of Saturday morning... the rest couldn’t slow down if you wrapped them in a molasses cocoon, they’d just go on, sticky-dripping, down the fast-lane trail… I believe in pacing even when I ran things back in the real life thirteen years past on, I set a pace that allowed for a life for myself and for those who worked at my direction - easier then, the tyranny of electronics not yet grown strong enough to grab and bury our days - incommunicado whenever we wanted to be, easier then to be off the grid because there was no grid yet, easier to be human then because the android days and flypaper nights of today were still the tech-dream of efficiency experts and science fiction… none of that these days, I watch the young ones scurry, racing off for promised-riches, 15 hour days, six-seven days a week just to stay in place, never getting foot and a half past go in a life that is gone before they know it… I’m glad that I’m old and got out of the game before the game became a death march... playing my own games now, like this one and if I feel like it a new one tomorrow  Next, I have two poems by Raul Salinas. The poems are from his book Un Trip through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions, published in 1999 by Arte Publico Press of Houston. The book was originally published in 1980 and, long out of print, was brought back by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Found and The Cultural Arts Council of Houston & Harris County. It covers twenty years of poetry reflecting the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, much of which time Salinas spent in Prison. Salinas currently runs the Resistancia bookstore in Austin. His subsequent writings include East of the Freeway: Reflections de Mi Pueblo To My Woman Tonight: i know you are lonely though you are not within my view; for loneliness is that suffering which you've been subjected to. Lonely nights of burning thirst your ravaged soul must bear, and its sole consolation will come from one lone tear. But do now weep, O' lonely woman, for surely you have known that in my darkest hour, i too, am alone. Soledad 7/13/59 A Glimpse of Lore (ca) Upon gazing at these plastered walls they do not seem white-washed to me. Instead they are yellow and dirty crumbling with time. Silently i listen to the winds. Sounds of Gypsy Guitars possessed by the clouds overhead convey in the form of sunbeams natural folk-songs to cling to my ears. Yes,Federico; 'your presence is near me this day. So near that i can see your glowing eyes and radiant face; unlike that puzzled youth of old, who endlessly wandered 'til he got lost in a sickening jungle of concrete and steel. It is no different today, my friend. The scenes are the same as you felt them. Nothing has changed, Garcia Lorca. Oh, yes! they are more revolting. The skins of the tigress now come in two shades: purple and green with contrasting stripes of blue and brown. i vomit at the sight of the tigers in pink. The rivers are told when to flow the blue skies have now turned grey... they burn the eyes. You are better off dead. Flash! piston shots ring in the humid & still afternoon, dying Lorca the jungle once before us floods in pools of blood, jackal jackboots crush tender poetic countenance Federico Garcia Lorcca; and it is late in my afternoon. Soledad 7-(18-19)59  But keeping it simple sometimes has the effect of making one simple. Every once in a while everyone needs to go off on a tear, let loose one's locked down urge for chaos. A wild hare, or a wild hair, not sure which of those is correct, but not interested enough in knowing to look it up. summer in the city I need a wild hare, something to get me past this steaming pile of summer doldrums that has become life as I know it, something to take my mind off the inevitability of becoming pot roast in some cartoon god’s Stanley Steamer - 106 degrees yesterday at 5 p.m. according to the temperature gauge in my car, hard to find any jollity, joie de vivre, or any similar such whoop-de-do in that I’m saying as I, despite it all, heroically, faithfully, laboringly do my one hour a day outside working in the Hades swamp of my back yard tending plants long since given up, dead stalks of themselves, laying bricks to form little retaining walls around my bustle of brush and dead stalks, certain that it is for the common good that I not surrender, “nuts,” I say to the Devil as he commences to retake his garden “damn the sautéed blisters,” I say, “full stroke ahead,” no summer-wuss here, I am large, in charge, sweating like a barge in the Panama Canal and it all boils down, yes boils as the whites of my eyes bubble and misty red steam whistles from each ear, it all boils down to this, I need a wild hare, frosty mint variety, before I do my self in… or an icy cold Carte Blanca to drink, to rub its icy cold brown bottle on my bald head - a couple of two or 15 of them could also work as well as a wild hare, frosty mint or regular or a couple of dozen sun-maidens in bikinis, playing volleyball in a patch of sand, bouncing, bo un ----- ci ng that might take my mind off it as well  Here are several poems in the Japanese "Death Poem" tradition. The mirror out own cuture's interest in "famous last words." The poems are meant to be the poet's summing up as death approaches. I have death poems from two schools of poets, poets best known for their haiku and poem by Zen Monks. let's go - how bright the western skies! by Jakua, died in 1801 ~~~ This year I want to see the lotus on the other side. by Jakura, died in 1906 at the age of fifty-nine ~~~ Family whispers with the doctor - winter showers pass through their sleeves. by Jikko, died in 1791 at the age of sixty-nine ~~~ Leaves of words: autumn colors a still mountain by Jomei, died in 1766 at the age of sixty-one ~~~ A back-yard chrysanthemum looked at the setting sun and faded. by Kaen, died in 1772 at the age of seventy-five ~~~ If I must die then let me die before the winter comes. by Kafu, died 1784 at the age of thirty-six ~~~ Barren branches: the autumn left behind a cicada's hollow cry. by Kagai, died 1778 ~~~ The foam on the last water has dissolved my mind is clear. by Mitoku died in 1669 at the age of eighty-two Now here a few death poems by Zen Monks. You must play The tune of non-being yourself - Nine summits collapse Eight oceans go dry. by Zosan Junku, died in 1308 at the age of seventy-six ~~~ Adrift between the earth and sky I call to tre east and change it to west. I flourish my staff and return once again To my source Katsu! by Shun'oku Soen died in 1611 at the age of eighty-seven ~~~ No single bone of my body is holy - It is but and ash heap of stinking bones, Dig a deep hole and there bury the remains Thus, not a grain of dust will stain The green mountains. by Shumpo Soki, died in 1496 at the age of eighty-eight ~~~ My six and seventy years are through. I was not born. I am not dead. Clouds floating on the high wide skies The moon curves through its million-mile course. by Yakuo Tokuken, died in 1320 at the age of seventy-six.  Popular culture offers many opportunities for poetic examination, though most don't give you more than 15 minutes. This, for example, already stale and, in modern society, already in the fifty ring of forgotten history. I felt challenged to write a wiener poem I feel challenged to write a wiener poem today well I can do that, without, maybe, going either pornographic or excessively gastronomic just don’t expect one of those specialty brands advertised to “plump when you cook’em” or anything of the footlong variety cause I’m afraid this little weenie is the best I can do  Next, I have three poems by Marcos McPeek Villatoro, from his book They Say that Am Two, published by Arte Publico Press of Houston in 1997. Villatoro is the son of a Salvadoran mother and an Appalachian father. In the 80s and early 90s, he lived in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Alabama, doing grassroots community work in Central America and with migrant farm workers. After graduating from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1998, he and his family moved to California, where he holds the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair in Writing at Mount St. Mary's College. He's also a regular commentator for NPR and the local PBS affiliate KCET of Los Angeles, the latter for which he won the Emmy. Final Hope We walk between marimbas and M-16s, between ink pens and pyramids and coffee and beans and borders. Wind scatters them, flings their story apart in the spray of dying vortex. We come around, collect the debris of the disassembled body. Now together, its dark mouth filled with dust and blood cakes, opens and screams. The wail runs like a rabid gunshot, splitting open heaven gorged with forgotten rain. While Voiding The young man who grew old with whiskey went outside. He watched the stares that laughed in a silent sky. He thought, "I'm alive. At least I'm alive." He soaked the same ground from yesterday and the day before. He breathed crisp air and made himself a drunken promise: To breathe, sometimes slowly, other moments panting but to breathe with lungs that longed to fill themselves with the laughter of stars. To Miguel Angel Asturias Scratched on the back page of my copy of Hombres de Maiz Here I am, don Miguel, in an international airport far from the dark women who wqalk on leather feet and who slap tortillas so that the sun falls into the frying pan. Here, where there is not earth, only borders, stamps, passports valued more than bodies. The gringos stands around me. and I detest them, as they speak about Guatemalan colors, how cheap they are to buy, and those simple little Indians, and the development of our western civilization. ("Pass me a coffee in a styrofoam cup, please.") I hate them, while I walk with them. I was in your land for a short while, getting to know the corn man's life, touching a few people, risking friendships, leaving a few tears and the hollow vibration of echoes under my ribs.  Unfortunately, as much as I might like, I'd never make it as a Zen Monk. Inner peace as a product of a serene and quite mind is something I'll never find. My brain won't shut up long enough. I just don't have time for meditation you’ll have to excuse me if I seem distracted, but I’m doing some overdue maintenance on Arizona it is a problem of being the creator of all the universe around me things keep breaking down, needing maintenance like Arizona… haven’t paid any attention to it in a while and it’s gone to hell in a handbasket, to quote a phrase I created when I was creating everything else - needs work, this Arizona, probably going to take all day to get it back in shape - it’s the price i pay because I wasn’t satisfied with rocks and huge canyons and cactus and trees and snakes and lizards and desert varmits, stuff that doesn’t hardly need any maintenance at all… but people, big mistake, always screwing up, always getting bent out of shape, always slip-sliding away from the rational path I laid out for them - I wonder if God has these problems, probably, almost certainly does, considering the shape things are in - I created him specifically to take care of my stuff, instead, where did I find him last Thursday? riding around with Sarah Palin in her stupid bus, job dereliction is what it is and I’m thinking about maybe it’s time set him straight, un-create him for a while, maybe give him a sex-change operation - wonder how he’d like that - maybe move him to a lesser cloud, one of those clouds over on the other side of the tracks, deny him food stamps, increase his Medicare premiums… maybe that’d bring him back down to earth, back to doing the job I created him for so I could get out of the maintenance business and back to creating.. it is so hard… but wait a minute, you’re fading on me… jeez, now I have to fix you too  Here are several poems by Carl Sandburg, a poet of his day with whom I have much more sympathy than with the modern radical movementnistas. Sandburg seemed to me to speak to real people about real people from a real person perspective, unlike our current crop of radicals who seem to write as an elite to the elite and for the elite. Though not the poet Whitman was, he seemed to write with the same sense of solidarity with all his fellows. Masses Among the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and red crag and was amazed: On the beach where the long push under the endless tide manueveuvers, I stood silent; Under the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant over the horizon's grass, I was full of thoughts. Great men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and work- ers, mothers lifting their children - these all I touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them. And then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the darkness of night - and all broken,humble ruins of nations. Lost Desolate and lone All night long on the lake Where fog trails and mist creeps, The whistle of a boat Calls and cries unendingly, Like some lost child In tears and trouble Hunting the harbor's breast And the harbor's eyes. Sketch The shadow of the ships Rock on the crest In the low blue luster Of the tardy and the soft inrolling tide. Along brown bar at the dip of the sky Puts an arm of and in the span of salt. The lucid and endless wrinkles Draw in, lapse and withdraw. Wavelets crumble and white spent bubbles Wash on the floor of the beach. Rocking on the crest In the low blue luster Are the shadows of the ships.  A day is rescued in mid-poem. this is the poem I was going to write today this is the poem I was going to write today… facing the new day feeling crusty and stale like day-old bread that’s the way it’s been every morning for weeks now the heat and the getting old and the never-ending day and the stomach-churning muck of this second decade of the 21st century… lord I will relish a change in the seasons, the day when a north wind blows and the air is clear and bright and light, not heavy like a summer day, not borne down like summer, as if with the sins of all mankind, a day of daydreams and night songs of welcome to the season of our better natures summer comes and brings the bitter taste of dust devils swirling on white caliche fields, of sweat and burn and fire in the air and soot-smelling nights and grumbles of cracking earth opening like a fish with mouth agape gasping for the air of its water home... and so on and so on, a too-long poem of too-common misery, a poem of desperation, facing another long day of another long summer, a plea of desperation that only could be writ by someone who has walked barefoot across the cinder blocks of hell… that’s the poem I meant to write today… but then, I was awaken at 4 a.m. by the sound of rain against the window by my bed, and then the sun came up to a dark day, black clouds dropping a steady hum of rain, puddles, long -dry creeks running wet, the interstate a parking lot as commuters struggle to survive rain-slick streets, their lights reflected like yellow diamonds on the wet asphalt, rain, after forty days without - soon to pass it will be, not a drought-buster, the heavy summer to return soon in all its dry misery, but today, evidence that, at least for today, the forces arrayed against the devil have won, forcing, at least for a day, the demon back to his fiery basement… but we take our victory in measured doses for we know a knockdown is not a knockout and a day without summer does not mean the onset of spring a new round, we know, will start tomorrow, but today we will sing in the rain, dance in puddles before they slip away, lay on our backs in a rejuvenated creek even as its flow starts to slow - we will take the day and for the day stop thinking about tomorrow  I have three poets now from Poetry East, the spring 1997 issue published by DePaul University. The first poet is Albert Goldbarth. Born in 1948 in Chicago, Goldbarth received his BA from the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle campus, in 1969 and his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1971. He taught at the Elgin Community College in Chicago until 1972 and as a coordinator for the Traveling Writers Workshop for public schools in the Chicago area. In 1974, after completing a year of study at the University of Utah while working toward his PhD in creative writing and publishing a chapbook and two full-length poetry collections, hee left Utah early to begin a teaching career, working briefly at Cornell and Syracuse Universities before moving to the University of Texas, Austin, where he taught from 1977 to 1987. He is currently Adele Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wichita State University, where he has taught since 1987. Packing for a Difficult Trip, I take my sci-fi paperback adventure - I can lose myself agreeably inside its brawling cosmos; and, to balance that, a pedantically serious treatise on the measurement of time in preliterate cultures; and a book of verse...trying to anticipate varieties of reading need - "intended for use on occasions yet to arise," so says the treatise, of early shaped stone stored in caves. If she's in pain, I'll divert here with stories. If she dies, I'll be strong for my sister's sake. Preparing preparing preparing. Now getting onto the flight to Chicago. The next poet from the anthology is Molly Hunter Giles, who has published short fiction for children and adults. She trains "special sitters" in the care of children with development disabilities. Photograph I remember that vacation: Mother standing on the beach contorted behind a camera as we waded in, Uncle Chuck's giant arm towing my baby frame over jagged stones and broken shells into the blinding sun. I squinted, stumbled, winced with each administrative yank as all the grownup voices shouted, "Smile!" And then I smiled just to show them. My last poet from the book is Jack Heflin, co-director of the creative writing program at Northeast Louisiana University. His first collection of poetry won the Montana First Book Award. Domestic Not long after you first walked you danced, a crazy kind of penguin hop, feet stuck to the floor, arms at your side, as if holding weightless pails of ice, flightless antarctic joke, and how we laughed. Ginger Baker, bluegrass, Sonny Rollins, you even found the beat to Mahler's Ninth. We slapped our butts and sang along, capable, however compromised, of joy, as in a Brueghel print, or so we thought. It won't last long. Your style is about to change: you've started picking up your feet, and just today, you whirled a dizzy windmill. On your back, you stared for us to pick you up and we came stumbling to your need.  I don't really like this poem so much, too much writing, to little instinct, too little spontaneity. But, it's mine, can't hardly leave it out in the dark and wet. the door we will someday open an inch of rain and the everything is greened overnight demonstration that everything that lives wants the life promised to it every acorn fights to be the grand and towering tree it holds so tightly within the warm prison of its shell every seed waits to flower with its fellows on some wind-stirred meadow you and me, a little different, we believe in life even as we scorn the death seeker, the aberrant and misshapen piece of self unique to our sentient kind, buried deep by our forced expulsion from the womb of nothing, our heritage the gloom of creation, the trauma that never entirely leaves us, recognizing ever day of life another step to the nothing from where we came like the acorn and the seed and all the other living, we know life but only we know life ends so that even as we seek our life potential, we know the end that waits for us behind the door we will someday open, leaving this green world behind  Next, I have three poems from a book I was very happy to run across in my used book store. The book is From a Cop's Journal & Other Poems,by former San Antonio homicide detective Arthur Munoz. The book was published by Corona Publishing of San Antonio in 1984. Born in a Los Angeles barrio in 1924, Munoz moved to Texas with his family , completed high school down the coast in Corpus Christi, attended nearby Texas A & I University and St Mary's Law School here in San Antonio. He worked in the San Antonio Police Department for more than 20 years, working his way up in the department from patrol officer. He published one book before this one and, after retiring from his law enforcement career became Poet in Schools with the San Antonio ISD. Love In the center of the project an old lady works her garden; for years she has done the same. Now a piece of green with flowers exists in the concrete pile. Children never walk by without smiling; drunks cross the street to piss, and teens, running from the cops or fighting, wouldn't think of cutting through her garden. All this with never a word spoken to the old lady except from a distance - and then only to each other, "She's crazy." El Sapo He was a fighter and leader of his gang The Red Devils. In the county jail there were notches on the bars counting his time, and his name burned on the walls giving him honor in the street. At his mother's side he did no wrong and his father who cared never understood him. "El Sapo" was born too late. He should have been here when the Aztecs ruled to have been their chief, or with Columbus sailing his ships - perhaps with Cortez, conquering new lands. Instead, he fights in the barrio "to clear his name" gunning his low-rider through the projects on Sunday - one against the world, fighting windmills. Mary's Place The door opened and all eyes turned to see the stranger who dared to enter the neighborhood bar in the dead-end alley. In the corner the box continued to play another version of the same story about a son-of-a-bitch who never gives women a second chance, always the macho ready to fight. The brew had knitted their brains and the song primed them to stand and challenge... They were just waiting for someone else to go first.  I'll admit that the weather during the last half of June made this schedule very hard to maintain. With sequential days of triple-digit heat and high humidity, going outside to do my work is a challenge every day. Staying out for a full hour is even harder. how it works here’s how it works: I get up before six, have breakfast, write my this and my that until about noonish when I go home and do my hour in the yard before lunch, tomato soup and a ham sandwich if I’m being good, then proceed on to writing my afternoon something else… in the past years my hour working outside has become very important to me, especially during the summer when good sense and a weak inner core of discipline would see me outside no more than the time it takes to walk from one air-conditioned haven to another so, I insist I must persist, giving me a sense of time and place as it does, and a sense of history as I work under the sun, like the first settlers of this area worked, the various tribes of the Coahuiltecan, laboring dawn to dust, almost certainly alongside this very creek, to survive in a harsh land, forever in fear of the warrior Apache and Comanche - with each spade of earth turned I feel more a part of a living past… but what to do? most every thing I’ve tried to grow, runs, after a couple of inches, into the caliche and rock that lies below the thin layer of soil and dies, the only survivors of my efforts, the weeds I’ve tried summer after summer to kill, beautiful weeds, I’ve come to believe, survivors, growing through the this inhospitable environment for ten thousand years… who am I to try to interfere with this natural expression of life affirmed? so, giving up my horticultural conceits, I turn to geologic issues my back yard falls in a severe decline from my patio to the creek on the other side of the fence - loss of what little soil remaining, a continuing challenge, some parts of the yard already eroded to a bare limestone shelf… and so, my project of many summers, building retaining walls, not one big, long wall across the back yard, but a series of semi-circular borders around trees and plots of the persistent weeds I could never kill and have come to accept as God’s gift to the inattentive gardener who accepts that green is green, after all, and who cares what category of green some may call it… in previous summers I have laid curbstones around in the semi-circular pattern as described never affixing them in any way permanent… the project this summer is to attend to such affixing mixing a bit of redi-mix concrete every day and building little concreted retaining walls where I had previously laid the curbstone… yesterday I completed a particularly challenging part of this affixing, needing to build a higher wall at a place around a tree where the drop from one level was particularly severe four curbstones high, each level cemented to the level below… i completed the challenge about 1:30, pulled a beer from the fridge, squirted myself top to bottom with the water hose and set back to admire my masonry, a mighty-damn-fine piece of work is what I call it, as maybe would you, after I explain that my artistic and architectural inspiration was the world-renown Leaning Tower of Pisa… I’m considering the income possibilities of the tourism trade at this very moment, possibly a place on the standard tour right after the Alamo and before the stop at the Spanish Governor’s Mansion - us poor but committed artistic types never being in a position to ignore any possibility of cash in our pockets  Here's a poem by Stephen Dobyns, from his book Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides, published by Penguin in 1999. The book is hard to explain, except to say that the principal character in all the poems is, Heart, who, in addition to being a character with wants and desires and dreams, as well as it is with all characters, adventures and every day life, is also the blood pumping organ we all rely on to keep ourselves alive. If you can't buy into that premise, you're going to have a problem with this poem. The Malditos Make a Racket The banditos of memory gallop their sorry nags around the yard of Heart's hacienda. They smack their horses' butts with their dusty sombreros. Caramba, they shout, and Yip, yip, yip. Heart watches from the window with his head poked over the sill. Yesterday his Federales had vowed that these chingadas would torment him no longer. They had been corralled,imprisoned,driven back to the jungle. Now they show up wilder than ever. the fat one with a greasy mustache who signifies Heart's defeats - debts unpaid, projects unfinished. The cross-eyed one, his chest crossed with X-like cartucheras who brings to mind Heart's lost loves. The skinny one with a scar on his cheek depicting for Heart the betrayed friends, the help not given, the letters not written. Others can be imagined: work bungled, deadlines unmet, simple ruination. They gallop in front of Heart's windows, shooting off their pistols. Such a nuisance. This was the day Heart had set aside for meditation,when he meant to critique his defects and turn over a new leaf. No chance for that now. The malditos are making too big a racket. Instead, he will sip some whiskey and study his catalogue of beautiful women. He will limp forward making mistakes and accumulating regrets, just like yesterday and the day before. Now there is a hammering at the door. It's the fat one with a printed invitation. Come ride with us, it asks. They are eager for Heart to be their chief. They flatter the brilliance of his failings and cheer his capacity to be bad. Heart is touched. Maybe later, he mumbles. The banditos crowd through the door. In no time, the entire gang is lounging in Heart's living room, sprawling on his bed, swiping snacks from the fridge. How can he endure it? you ask. But don't you see it's like this every day. Heart is their boss already. The way they dress, the wave they wave their guns, it's all under his direction. And if they disappeared, Heart would be crestfallen. He'd lose his credibility as a vital sinner, on officer in the army of the bad, and be like you or me or anyone - just a civilian.  We're always told we need to see the "big picture." I think the little pictures are much more worthy of notice. a fan of little things just finished breakfast, thinking, best damn super-extra-crispy bacon of my whole doggone life on this planet, which I thank for creating the corn or whatever that fed the pig that became the best damn super-extra-crispy bacon of my whole existence on this planet not counting the times I might have been the corn or the pig or whatever else was involved in creation of the best damn super-extra-crispy bacon ever, thank you, God, if you exist and if you had anything to do with it and I’m thinking, damn I wish I could wake up again and come in here again and order my breakfast again and eat my best damn super-extra-crispy bacon all over again, enjoy the super-extra-crispy crunchy pleasure all over again as if it had never ever happened before and the super-etcetera pleasure was completely new to me, experienced for the very first time but that’s the way I am, a fan of little things, the little atomic thingies that come together to make up bigger and bigger things, like stars, that in turn come together to make galaxies and constellations and ultimately a whole damn universe, laid out before me as I lie in the grass at night, looking up at it all, thinking of all the teensy-tiny things that came together to make wondrous things like stars shining against a universal backdrop of dark somewhere/nowhere and pleasurable things like cool breezes in summer, cold water splashing on my droopy-morning face, little girls who giggle when I wink at them and, as you might guess by now, super-extra-crispy-crunchy bacon, the best I ever had, just this morning  Next, I have several poems by modern Chinese poet, Gu Cheng, from his book Nameless Flowers. This is a book I apparently bought on one of my used book forays and never got around to looking at. It is a beautiful book, with pictures by Hai Bo, an internationally known freelance artist living in Beijing an extended self-introduction by the poet and a remembrance by his father, also a poet. The book was published in 2005 by George Braziller, Inc. with translations by Aaron Crippen. Born in 1956, the poet began life in privilege as the son of a prominent party member. His father was the army poet Gu Gong. At the age of twelve, his family was sent down to rural Shandong during the Cultural Revolution for re-education. They bred pigs. In the late 1970s, Cheng became associated with the journal "Today" (Jintian) which began a movement in poetry known as "menglong" meaning "hazy, "obscure". He became an international celebrity and travelled around the world accompanied by his wife, Xie Ye. The two settled in Auckland, New Zealand in 1987 where Cheng taught Chinese at the University of Auckland. In October 1993, Gu Cheng attacked his wife before hanging himself. She died later in a hospital. Parting Thoughts I will die become a shifting riddle the future scholar's gaze will fill with suspicion leave hovering fingerprints leave staggered footprints shatter the language skew the music this is no child's sleep talk or geriatric game this is to bring one period of history to a permanent end 1980.7 Feeling the sky is gray the road is gray the buildings are gray the rain is gray through an expanse of dead gray two children pass one bright red one pale green 1780.7 Legal Case the nights are like crowds of blurry-faced people stealing up to me then leaving I've lost my dreams there are only some coins in my pockets "I've been robbed" I say to the sun the sun goes chasing the nights and by another crowd of lights is chased 1981.11 One of My Springs outside the wood window lie my furrows my yak my plow a squadron of suns comes shining through the fence slats sky-blue flower petals begin to curl the frightened dew wets a field of memories startled sparrows look to the heavenly pole I will to work choose seeds from in dreams let them glint in my hand and cast them on water 1982.2 Old Man (1) the old man sits by the fire forehead flaming he is watching the muddled smoke sucked by draughts into slender threads that lightly rub hands then snap quick glowing embers need no mor language just sitting not moving not recollecting letting time flutter at his back those immaculate ashes are almost untouchable thus no crying no opening the ink-green window there are no boys outside standing on health's asphalt road toes spread wide waiting for a miracle 182.5 Grave Bed I know death approaches it's not tragic my hopes are at peace in a forest of pines overlooking the ocean from a distance like a pond afternoon sunlight keeping me mottled company a man's time is and man's world goes on I must rest in the middle passersby say the branches droop passersby say the branches are growing 1988.1 The God Says ashes too have lives they float in the wind go courting in smoke caress on warm airs in quite a few places they seek me  I found this news item very interesting and had to do a poem to investigate the ramifications. the universal application of old men and old cars heard on the radio about this new research that found the disease rates and death rates of old people go down after they reach a certain age it’s like when you reach that age you’ve suffered and survived every disease there is to suffer and you’re body just goes on and on until it finally just wears out, quits producing the biological elements that sustain the juice of life and your life is done not because of disease, but because it’s just done, reached the limit of it’s capacity to live… the gerontologists continue to try to figure this out, to learn what the factors are that allow longevity to produce longevity… but there’s a hint in an associated study that suggests it’s a bigger question than one limited to biology that study learned that the same effect of longevity producing longevity also applies to automobiles, that just as people reach that certain age when their chances of continued survival begin to improve, the same effect is evident in old cars, that a car, if still running after some number of years, will continue to run and run and run, like the million-mile cars you read about that just don’t stop until some seminal moment when everything stops at once, that moment of termination when all the elements say “that’s enough” this makes me consider the possibility that it is in the nature of all things to have a cease and desist directive, the time when an old man or an old car stops, the time when a stone crumbles to dust, the time a star blazes in nova, the time the universe folds back into itself, the inevitable result of the big bang a big whimper, the death of all things coming in its time, our own cycle of birth and death, not unique, but part of the whole scheme of things, the inevitability of birth, the inevitability death, the purpose of birth it’s inevitable end… but while the cosmic questions abide, I am a single element in that cosmos, an element with self-knowledge, an element that wonders of self more than it wonders of the whole - like me, considering for myself that if I can make it to 75, my chances improve for 80, and that for every five years completed thereafter chances to see the next five are brighter - quite a personal comfort to me as the universe races toward inevitable death all around me  Here are three poets from the anthology Against Forgetting, Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, published by W.W. Norton in 1993. The first poet is Ariel Dorfman. Although born in Argentina in 1942, Dorfman is a Chilean. A strong supporter of socialist president Salvador Allende, he was forced into exile in the United States and Europe until 1983 after the coup d'etat of 1973. He went back to Chile in 1983, but was arrested and deported in 1987. He is now allowed to return and divides his time between teaching at Duke University and visits to Chile. I Just Missed the Bus and I'll Be Late for Work I'd have to piss through my eyes to cry for you salivate,sweat, sigh through my eyes, I'd have to waterfall I'd have to wine I'd have to die like crushed grapes through my eyes, cough up vultures spit green silence and shed a dried-up skin no good to animals no good for a trophy I'd have cry these wounds this war to mourn for us. (Translation by the poet and Edith Grossman The next poet is Stanislaw Baranczak. Born in 1946, Baranczak was, by 1975, a professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozan with several books to his credit. But then he was blacklisted because of his activity in the Polish human rights movement as cofounder of KOR (Committee for the Defense of Worker's Rights) and as editor of underground journals. Fired from his teaching post in 1977, he was refused an exit visa eight times and was not able to leave Poland until 1981. His passport was revoked in 1984 and he has lived in trhe United States since. If China If china, then only the kind you wouldn't miss under the movers' shoes or the treads of a tank; if a chai, then one that's not too comfortable, or you'll regret getting up and leaving; if clothes, then only what will fit in one suitcase; if books, then only those you know by heart; if plans, then the ones you can give up when it comes time for the next move, to another street, another continent or epoch or world: who told you you could settle in? who told you this or that would be forever? didn't anyone tell you ou'llnever in the world feel at home here? Translated by Magnus J. Krynski And my last poet from the book this week is Duoduo. Born Li Shizheng in Beijing in 1951, Duoduo trained as an opera singer. He began writing poetry during the Cultural Revolution in the early 1970s and became prominent in the liberalization of Chinese politics at the end of that decade. He has worked as a journalist in Beijing. from Thoughts and Recollections When the People Stand Up out of the Hard Cheese The sound of gunfire - dilutes the bloody terror of revolution. August is stretched like a cruel bow. The poisonous man-child walks out of a peasant hovel with tobacco and a parched throat. The cattle have been brutally blinkered and remains hang in the hair from their haunches, likeswollen clappers. Now even the sacrifice behind the bamboo fence is obscured: far off, the troops keep coming through the cloud. 1972 Translated by Gregory Lee and John Cayley  Here's an old poem to fill a hole in the schedule. in the way of reassurance upon the onset of dread disease feeling bad after two days in bed, signs of life, but still need assurance that the end is not nigh time to take inventory, so before the mirror i stand good-sized human, liberally patched with white fur - a apparition in the dark of a half-moon night - belly like the prow of a sailing ship pushing fearlessly into the highest seas arms, chest shoulders still bearing evidence of a blacksmith’s genes, but even there, ample signs that gravity is in the game, and winning internals not so good but all in all not so bad for a body in its 68th year the creature lives! as the doctor cried it lives! it lives!  For my last piece from my library, I have this prose poem by Thomas R. Smith, from his book Horse of Earth published in 1994 by Holy Cow! Press of Duluth, Minnesota. Smith was born in 1948 and grew up in Wisconsin. He majored in English at the University of Wisconsin - River Falls. Inspired by the work of Rimbaud and Baucelaire during a year's travel in Europe, found his preferred poetry expression through prose poems. In the early 1980s, Smith directed Artspeople, a rural-based arts organization. As a poet, essayist and editor, his work has appeared frequently in the Canada, the United States and abroad. The Soprano The conductor brings up violins behind the heavy-breasted woman. Tonight she is singing Four Last Songsby Strauss. Her knees bend, she lists to one side like a boat on the Rhine. Notes stream upward, almost inaudible, the stirring of a breeze among oak leaves or the sounds river ice makes in early spring. Suddenly what was listened for so carefully is loose in air, a passion declared after years of concealment, a storm arriving on a clear day. In a valley, sunlight flees the ripened cluster of grapes. So many not tasted, paintings never seen, cities that waited for us and we did not come... The audience feels fear beneath the intoxicating melody. In the voice's distillation is a summing up, a precise accounting of its existence, a rose fully opened in this room. The hearer glimpses not only the strength and subtlety of the soul, but its dark seams also, niches of character, dislocations and failings. How difficult it is to be a woman, the grief of the new life turning in her earthen body. And then - how difficult it is to be human. The man is inside the woman and the woman inside the man, and they have never met.  Another old poem; many holes this week, not writing a lot that I like. frankly, my dear I spent a good part of a day last week trimming the hedge in front of my front porch it was about chin high and I cut it back to about knee high with the idea that we could sit out there in front and watch life go by so far life going by amounts to cars going by too fast for a nice Andy Taylor/Aunt Bee wave and howdy, several dog walkers mostly with ugly dogs who I suspect are the producers of the dog poop I always find in the yard - the dogs not the walkers - and the very large lady in the very tight shorts who jogs by twice a day huffing and puffing and I guess there’d be a story there, a real slice of life story, but frankly my dear I don’t give a hoot - I stole that line, but cleaned it up for general audience - so that, as they say, is life on Clearview Street in San Antonio Texas, not much to spend a whole day trimming hedges for well there was the young girl who missed the turn at Callaghan & Clearview and drove her Ranger pickup through my neighbor’s fence this afternoon but that doesn’t count because I wasn’t there and didn’t see it, though I did hear about it, making it a part of someone else’s life and only secondarily my own, which is not enough to count as a full-measure part of my life on this slow Texas afternoon and certainly not justification for trimming the hedge  Dat's dat, but not without a reminder. My second EBook, Goes Around, Comes Around is scheduled for release between now and the first. The book includes 85 poems and will sell for $5.99 or less. If previous experience is a guide, it will be available first on the Amazon Kindle, to be followed in the next week or so in the Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony's EReader and in IBooks. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, that I know of, will download an application for PCs and Macs at no charge with purchase of the book for customers who don't have an EReader.  As to future publishing plans, I expect to have at least one, maybe two, additional EBooks published by the end of the year. In the meantime, back to "Here and Now" business. All material presented in this blog remains the property of its creators. I'm allen itz, owner and producer of this blog, wishing to leave you with this last word... Bless you and all you children and pets, even those who roam at night and pee on the carpet, and buy my book. |
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