A Lot Like Louise Gluck (correction: a little like LG)

I take hold the dog's leash
but feel the tug at my own neck.
I look up, and I am three: knee-high
in Grandmother's Monroe parlor
mother of pearl mantle above
the fireplace, cold since Grandfather's
passing. I catch my reflection
inside a cup of Earl what's his name.
I think I don't like the shade
of lipstick stamped against its edge.

I yank the leash and, all at once,
the memory is smudged...
evidence on the collar of a shirt.
Round and round, I feel myself
chase my own tales.

and now some real Louise Gluck

Prism

I. Who can say what the world is? The world
is in flux, therefore
unreadable, the winds shifting,
the great plates invisibly shifting and changing--

2. Dirt. Fragments
of blistered rock. On which
the exposed heart constructs
a house, a memory: the gardens
manageable, small in scale, the beds
damp at the sea's edge--

3.
As one takes in
an enemy, through these windows
one takes in
the world:

here is the kitchen, here the darkened study.

Meaning: I am master here.

4.
When you fall in love, my sister said,
its' like being struck by lightning.

She was speaking hopefully,
to draw the attention of the lightning.

I reminded her that she was repeating exactly
our mother's formula, which she and I

had discussed in childhood, because we both felt
that what we were looking at in the adults

were the effects not of lightning
but of the electric chair.

LeRoy Jones

Rereading Dutchman, I am reminded that I live nowhere near a theatre that would produce this play. Been wanting to do Odets' Waiting for Lefty for so many years now. But Clay and Lula...I know that kinda testy dance:

Lula: "Be cool. Be cool. That's all you know. . . shaking that wildroot cream-oil on your knotty head, jackets buttoning up to your chin, so full of white man's words. Christ. God. Get up and scream at these people. Like scream meaningless shit in these hopeless faces.
              [She screams at people in train, still dancing]
Red trains cough Jewish underwear for keeps! Expanding smells of silence. Gravy snot whistling like sea birds. Clay. Clay, you got to break out. Don't sit there dying the way they want you to die. Get up."

But, he doesn't. He doesn't know just how serious the situation is, and Lula just kills him in the end. When you play with an instrument, eventually, you will sound a note.

Wallace Stevens and Robert Bly

"The poet, Stevens emphasizes, is the servant of reality. The earlier romantics elevated imagination to a noble and central role in poetics; but for Stevens it is the means by which the poet maintains composure in the face of the bright light, the enormous pressure, of the real. The imagination functions as a sense of humor might function to keep a servant from despair. By mediating between reality and desire, the imagination makes poetry possible, but it also prevents the light of the sun from simplifying or occluding reality. The servant, not the master, understands the dichotomy of "Lights masculine and lights feminine," and understands that the purple that envelops Hartford is the light of the sun translated (as through a prism) by his imagination to represent his desire for the feminine, while the "heroic attitudes" embody his vision of the masculine."

 Wallace Stevens in Connecticut, by William Doreski. Questiaschool.com. Oct. 2009

I may not be a perfect poet, but I am the perfect servant. 

It was my good fortune to have found a copy of Robert Bly's The Man in the Black Coat Turns at a used book store a few months ago. The merchant had commented that the book had only just come in and been shelved that morning.  I decided to purchase the book when I opened to this poem:

Snowbanks North of the House

Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six

            feet from the house...

Thoughts that go so far.

The boy gets out of high school and reads no more 

           books;

the son stops calling home.

The mother puts down her rolling pin and bakes no 

           more bread.

And the wife looks at her husband one night at a

           party, and loves him no more.

The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls

           leaving the church.

It will not come closer--

the one inside moves back, and the hands touch

           nothing, and are safe.

The father grieves for his son, and will not leave the 

           room where the coffin stands,

He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.

And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on

           through the unattached heavens alone. 

The toe of the shoe pivots

in the dust...

And the man in the black coat turns, and goes back

              down the hill.

No one knows why he came, or why he turned away,

               and did not climb the hill.        

I wonder of this is where the Little River Band found inspiration for their song "Man in Black"? Great song; great poem.

from Going On

These are the days of horrible headlines,
Bomb Blast Atrocity, Leak From Reactor,
Soccer Fans Run Amok, Middle East Blood Bath,
PC Knocks Prisoner's Eye Out In Charge Room.
Outside, the newsvendors ululate. Inside,
lovers seek refuge in succulent plump flesh,
booze themselves innocent of the whole shit-works.
Why has the gentleman fallen face-forward
into his buttered asparagus, Garcon?
He and his girlfriend have already drunk two
bottles of Bollinger and they were half-tight
when they arrived at the pace half-an-hour since.
Waiters man-handle the gentleman upright,
aim him (with smirks at the lady) towards his
quails (which he misses and slumps in the gravy-
baying, the while, for "Encore du Savigny")
He is supplied with the beaune, which he noses,
quafs deeply, relishes...sinks to the gingham
where he reposes susurrantly. There is
'63 Sandeman fetched to revive him.
Chin on the Pont L'Eveque, elbow in ash-tray,
as from the Book of the Dead, he produces
incomprehensible hieroglyphics, bidding
Access surrender the price of his coma
unto the restaurateur, kindly and patient.
These are the days of the National Health Cuts,
days of the end of innocent liver;
they have to pay for it privately, who would seek anesthetic.


Peter Reading

Possibly Maybe - Bjork

I quite like this one Van Gough "Poplar"

And another tree...well, a grouping.

Bio-Poetica

1.

The poem I wrote about him was to avenge you. She said to herself as the realization was crystallizing, like a perfect symphony, vibrating in her bones. The first line of her short story was now written. She finally felt anchored. This pleased her. It was her only pleasure.

“You’ve changed,” said Toby condescendingly-- hoping her usual anxiety and timidity would prompt her to get up and go away.

He crossed his long legs. The creases of his Oxford suggested that he had slept in it, but it was a deliberate unkemptness. A calculated unselfconsciousness. She’d forgotten that she was not alone, sitting in the little circle of Adirondack chairs the senior parents had purchased for the school only one week ago.

“I’m not a shiny, new penny anymore," she said to him without further explanation. I’m not the new, annoying -too friendly- older teacher anymore...from another era-- a more interpersonal and intimate time when people were given opportunities to develop patience and less accustomed to instant gratification...a time when people appreciated-- if they didn't fully comprehend-- the process of unfolding a mystery. Now, there were no mysteries. Only blatant intelligence, or blatant sexuality, or blatant ignorance, she thought to herself.

"I'm not a little glint of blind in the eye," she finally said, after he had spent a good two minutes trying to look like he wasn't at all thinking about what she had meant by the penny remark. Her voice was smooth as a boiled egg. She’d regained it during the last week of classes. Her first year of teaching was over. She’d made it through. The dysfunction of boarding school life had not driven her away this time. He laughed lightly. He didn’t get what she meant by the penny remark. He didn’t really want to know what she meant. He was twenty-five and very preoccupied with keeping his subscription to The New Yorker up-to-date and skulking around campus in places where there were no sidewalks or other commonly used paths.

Typical, she thought when she caught herself paying attention to his inattentions. She was forty-three and still capable of being hurt by red-faced twenty-somethings in the year two thousand and nine. She still held--a sometimes admirable resiliency- sometimes foolish naiveté about human beings and their capacity for conversing intimately with anyone they weren’t screwing or working on screwing-- or networking-- the emotional investment nearly identical. If they aren’t interested, they assume you are. She smiled at the thought and wondered if she wouldn’t like to toy with him.

“You never know how neglected you are until someone pays attention to you,” she said softly, her jaw set and her face squared to his.

She amused herself by watching him obviously wanting to bolt, not doing so, and being a little puzzled as to why.

2.

The students at the prep school where she is a teacher use the word ‘indeed’ like cologne. She thinks that they think it makes their Mensa scores magically appear on their foreheads when they say it: “Indeed, the weather is gloomy.” “Indeed.” When she asks them if they have studied for her tests.

3.

"Have I ever told you that--" She couldn't think of anything pure or distilled to say to the family's three dogs. She had a sudden fear that if she told them she envied them, she'd come back as a mistreated pet in her next life--- "that, I have nothing important to say?" She finally managed. It was just after noon. All the reports had been entered into the database. When she had left campus, it was completely still. They looked at her: the beagle, the terrier mix, the Australian-collie-? mix- all adopted from various rescue centers over various years. When she was home alone, they would follow her everywhere: the bathroom, the bedroom, to the window as she pulled out of the driveway. They stood quietly and watched her, waiting. The refrigerator's hum was the only sound in the house. She always became exhausted and anxious.

Everything cried out for attention when she was home alone. The dogs' silent, round eyes, the dusty rugs, the cobwebs tufting in the corners. Trapped bees and lightening bugs complained against the screens of the enclosed porch: all of their magic passwords tumbling like lists out of an instinct unprepared for Man. She could hear them from the upstairs bathroom. She kept a glass and a stiff postcard from the opera house near the sliding back door. She would slowly corner the flying creatures, gently cup them, slide the paper under the glass and free them into June. If only it was that easy to keep my tomato plants alive with all this rain, she thought. The rain had been falling for three weeks straight already. And then Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died on the same day.

"They go in threes," she said to the dogs as they watched the news on the little TV in the sitting room. And then she remembered Ed McMahon, who had died a few days before. "That's three," she sighed, and went out onto the front lawn. She sat down in the yard. It was very noisy with birdsong. One bird in particular called three identical notes over and over. It reminded her of what a songbird would sound like if it were trying to cough something up: tew-tew-tew, tew-tew- tew, over and over the bird called in sets of three. It haunted her like a squeaky swinging door forewarning of a gathering storm. It did not occur to her that the theme of things coming in three's was beginning to form.

She suddenly fixed on the memory of a super band from the sixties and seventies, The Fruit Bats; how their lead song writer, a kind of a guru who had had a dream about bantams.  He wrote a song about it called "Bantam Dream" that became a cult hit. So much so that people started breeding Bantams; naming their children Bantam, and conspiring about bantam chickens being channels to an alternate universe.  He later married a woman from Bangkok and left the band. His wife was vilified for the rest of her life.

Patterns In the Cosmos

Castor beans: www.arthistoryclub.com

From beans to beetles, we are all one.

Rodney Dangerfield

It’s like when you find out the movie star,
whom you thought was alive, is dead
no longer warming the dark space
inside their silhouette. That’s how it felt
the moment I realized it was not love,
but lust, that kept you waiting at my table
for the locks to consume my keys
thumbs thrumming the wood.

I think it was Rodney Dangerfield.
I was in the shower, I remember, or
I realized – quite a different story—
he wasn’t lying low, but lying down.
It gave me the creeps, like I had been seeing things...
an apparition of an “us” that never was.

Like the old man who sits on the park bench,
the one you laugh with every morning
waiting for the bus, until the day you learn
he died eleven years ago;
a heart attack on that very bench.
Very funny, you say, to the gum chewing bus driver.
But her glassy eyes don’t blink. She's kind
of looking at you funny. She asks,
Do you have exact change?
and so you press two silver dollars into the slot,
look over your shoulder, and take your seat.

It was a cruel trick, now that I realize
it was never love that kept you coming.

I come home at night to an empty house, reach for the remote,
find a comedy, and turn on all the lights.
Our ghost is still there, Haunting like an echo of laughter,
But the straight man was never in on this joke.

If I Could Only Be Dick Proenneke

I would grow my own, live off the land (as long as my low blood sugar allowed), and mostly alone. Although, sometimes I think I don't want to be alone so much as I'm protesting feeling alone for so much of my life. Ironically, it seems my desire to be alone is precipitated by a bout of loneliness. --that and that I can't stand the slings and arrows of American society, which grows more malicious, claw-tooth bared, and vain every day. Where is my tribe?

Other musings

In reviewing the music I most listened to over the last decade, I find mostly melancholy tunes by Bjork, Fiona Apple, and Joni Mitchell, among many others. I’m thinking of how silly this music is to me now, near age 43; how impractical and draining it all is. And I find myself preferring classical music once again, because it’s the most practical music out there. Of course, as a teen, through thirty-something, I always believed classical…to be the most strenuous and emotional music there exists—don’t get me wrong, I understand—in so much as the two classical music courses at college could bestow upon this lay-woman—that the work of a composer is a complicated brilliance, but all in all, classical is far more no-nonsense than your average hormone-angst-driven chanteuse. Classical reaches all the emotional depth of that other genre, and more, without the fluff.

Poem by Annie Finch

Dickinson

Of all the lives I cannot live,
I have elected one

to haunt me till the margins give
and I am left alone.

One life will vanish from my voice
and make me like a stone--

one that the falling leaves can sink
not over, but upon.