By the Time I Put my Pen Away

Two appealing faces lent their graces to me several days ago –

or was it several weeks, three months, a year? That’s part

of what they may have come to prod me to remember

by appearing here – that to appear had not had any purpose:

anyway, beyond what might occur to me to fabricate because

I needed meaning: they hadn’t come to tell me who they were

in time or space beyond what they aroused in me by being seen:

seeing is the thing, I glean, that they had beckoned me to lean

into: to press my awkward essence into untoward flow,

become with them a medium, an estuary, liquid, salt and fresh,

aligning in the ways that chicken soup, they say, address

the aches and fever in the virus-ridden flesh: designing, with me,

some unprecedented opening. This duet of visages, I then

decided, were the risen and collective manifest suggestion

that two points-of-view could more than theoretically begin to link

with mine, whatever mine was: indeed that such a confluence

was happening already! – and once I knew it was, I’d know

at last I’d made a serviceable verb of “think.” The brink they

brought me to was not a rift: the lift they taught was what it meant

to generate a breathing thought. Only then might proverbs gain

a pulse, could Word approach the Flesh and gird the cosmos

with its latticework of joined ecstatic differences: the gone, the here,

the old, the new, now steamed into a life-begetting stew, to swallow

which would be what a Communion symbolized: the sole soul food –

the soul itself, the pelf beyond all other wealth, the art the heart

imparted. I’ve no idea, of course, if this is what they’d wanted

to convey. All I can say is by the time I put my pen away, they had

departed. I nearly said summarily. Assonant with verily. Capricious

fizz, this tic, this specious rhetoric! Is that what meaning is?

Reflexive speech? Maybe that’s what they had come to teach.

.

But Sometimes There are Perks

Don’t you hate it when you’re sitting

half-submerged in perfect cool-warm water

just a step down from the smoothly tiled ledge

that rims your favorite oblong swimming pool,

about as utterly unwittingly a fool as you would 
never have remotely known you were had those 
irradiating radiating lines of force now verging, 
coursing from your spine not just begun again

to undermine belief that there might, finally, be

some relief from the resurgence of their outward

push, which keep you wrestling restlessly with

all the stupid shock and mindless ambush

of existence, eternally determining to block

whatever small incursion your embattled psyche

might this time have dared to hope to make into

at least a slightly greater if still theoretic likelihood

of spending several minutes in from what those

unafflicted few around you drew their reassurance:

shared reality – some sense, however specious,

of a commonality? But sometimes there are perks.

Novelties, distractions, glittery arresting little things –

say, angel wings. This time round you grow a pair

of those. Perhaps this time you’ll even get
to fly with them. Before you decompose.

.

rhyme crime

   

you’re the best. you pass the test:
commit the crime of rhyme
more for its beauty than from duty 
to appear as if you’re clear

as you pretend you can suspend
your disbelief or feel relief
to think capacitance for assonance
will automatically requite the lust to write 

more verse. that can be the curse.
not every lens will cleanse.
angles of the light can tangle up & fight.
prisms can be prisons.

but you shine as the example of a fine
receptor – except for
your decision now & then to requisition 
quantities of zen-like mindless blindness

as the license fee to pay for the licentious way
you must pursue, as if it didn’t bother you,
to go below
to hunt the fish in which abides your wish –

flirt with, lure & kill it; free the blood & spill it –
steal its flesh while it is fresh
so you can eat it – not entreat it & repeat it
like a rabbit with a habit.

it’s unfortunate you’re so importunate.
you write like this too often. you ought to soften
rather than get stiff inhabiting “as if” –
forever trying to be clever.

but isn’t that the aim? how you get acclaim?
isn’t there a ‘should’ in good?
believe, perhaps, in magic. in the pelagic
realm of fishes, wishes, rabbits.

.

All Art Wanted

All Art wanted in this life was to obtain a little boat,
get away from all the din, make it cozy as a tub
within whose sweetly quiet confines he could float.

And so he did. We watched him and his boat begin

their random way across the bay’s reflective surface:  

the sides of his bateau all jeweled by the glitter of its

rippling sunlit sheen. What Art had not foreseen,

however, is that bays get bored and lonely and are

desperately keen for novelty: on the hunt for any

new companion they can find to tease and follow

and rock up and down and ultimately swallow.

Swallowing to bays is their equivalent of kissing.

Art seems to have gone missing. He’s not been found.

This bay may just have clowned around with him until

he drowned. You know bays. Bays have their ways.

.

To Pledge Allegiance

To say it is to pledge allegiance to it.

I wonder if that’s always true of any word

we choose for any reason. We mouth,

we write, we type, we envision the letters

of the word – say, “breath” – and as we do,

we strengthen our familiarity with it, our

commitment to use it, to mean something by it,

depend on it to convey or reflect something

useful or illuminating: rely on it to re-make

reality, to believe its promise that it can: to give

experience the dimension of the spoken.

But intuitively we know a word isn’t the same

as a physical reality, say, the phenomenon

of breath. To write “Take a breath” and then

actually to take a breath are inviolably distinct.

They do not, cannot be twins. We decide they

mean each other, but we lie. We lie because

we must. How else would we agree to speak?

Words are lies.

What a terrible thing to say or write!

(And then you become Ezra Pound.)

But right now it doesn’t seem terrible.

Acknowledging words are lies suggests to me

there’s some dimension I don’t now know how

to inhabit, enter or register, in which

the experience or “truth” a word wants

to be and pretends it is can be found,

can be had directly. But wait, of course it can!

We are already having it directly.

We breathe as well as say we breathe.

Is ‘separate’ a turn-on? Maybe that certain

categories of phenomena can’t be bridged by one

another is a very great pleasure. Do I operate

on a pleasure principle? Inarguably. But oh,

what strange turns and twists that principle

insists upon! Separation: life. Rhymes

with strife. Unity: death. Rhymes with breath.

.

Simon Jay

Simon Jay

knows all our little ways –

he’s felt them rise

within himself in waves

then sink to the unspeakable:

those dark and leaking lovely

places you’d as soon forgo,

though don’t forgo,

but say you do

(can’t wait to come back to).

Simon Jay, though,

never doesn’t ferret through

the slew without insidiously

laying down the traces of his

DNA the whole way in and to

and out from all those

untoward graces

you believe you’re better than:

the fettered man,

the dense lump of a Trump,

undone by fun and bumped

into The Moment – where

you hear you should be living –

sieving you ungivingly,

intending surely to foment

so much of everything

that Simon Jay can say,

first thinks he won’t

(“no, don’t!”), then does.

Oh, by the way, the buzz

is that he’s not not gay:

Yay Simon Jay!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s_kB2c1rjQ

.

The Art of Not Being Descartes

(for Donna)

“What is all this?” must surely be a candidate

for the iniquitous ubiquitous first question

asked by sentient beings everywhere; well,

asked by those at least who dare to cleave

to their galactic versions of Cartesian reason:

you think therefore you are. From that self-serving

point of view, who else but you could be the star?

A star exploding into untoward elements which cool

on spinning orbs to sod: can Word be lurking far

behind, all ready to be Flesh, Body of the Letter?

How more neatly to suggest that thought is God?

(Harold Bloom says add the Odd and you have

something better: genius.) God is Phineas Fogg,

finding, naming, blaming worlds. Existence

is a language test. But you and I will shock the rest:

we’ll dock them in our pockets of resistance.

Like nests availing birds, we rest on other

than another’s words. I am the place you live.

You are the thing that lives there. What undergirds

this into grace? What theory does God have waiting

for us to remind us of our place? We don’t care.

I am where you live. You are who lives there.

.

Momentary Trick

At last, George Frideric Handel

cuts/caresses to the quick:

his baroque concerto grosso

in F major does the momentary trick:

distracts you into thinking

his accomplished comfortably

corseted amusements might slice

through this dull lugubrious confusion

and relax you: straightforward theme,

untaxing fugue, much less exacting

than Bach’s tediously virtuous etudes.

Interest doesn't have to irritate.

Expletives can be implied.

Euphemisms can abide. But ha! –

tough (gerund of the “f” word) luck.

One ride upon the wings of Handel’s

sweetly inter-gliding strings and you’re

bestride your yearning for a certain

kind of touch, and everything

is once again too much.

.

Climb on – rhyme on!

Climb on –

rhyme on!

Mime us all a sample

of today's cuisine,

all you've seen

& heard in

every moment's ample

feast.

(I may be a beast

but you're no burden.)

And oh, the times

we'll have

with all the rhymes

through which your presence

lends

its lavish

salve

and spends

on presents

meant to ravish

us

without

a doubt

or fuss -

but with a quiet effervescence.

You bewitch!

You must be rich.

You know how to live

you give

a penny

turn it into any

glorious

uproarious

occasion

whose persuasion

manages

with its advantages

and views

to lift,

to choose,

with heart,

another's

gift -

a truth:

forsooth!

a mother's

love

of

art.

Mabel and Fable

Mabel the mother had always been drab;

Fable her daughter, formidably fab:

so fab she had long since become inorganic.

Mabel looked on in a panic as Fable inhumanly

groomed herself into unnatural angles and folds

and extravagant dips, over time, as she somehow

divined in, and managed to wrench from, what

once were her hips – amid all of the other hot-house

mutant forms she’d assumed, involutedly

blooming into yet another synthetic esthetic –

which to Fable expressed jubilation! But Mabel

assessed mutilation – a doom, not a bloom,

with no room for what Mabel believed to be soul.

Then they posed for a portrait together. Expecting

to weather the shocks once again of their rocking

antitheses, ha! – their antitheses had become

intimacies, new and mild, without threat

of attack, like the unquestioned fact of a mother

and child. Who cared about theories of soul,

and their basis? Mabel and Fable had always

known homeostasis: had always been whole.

If Fable were able to make herself look like a bowl

made by Gaudi, well Mabel was glad, just as glad

as she was to remain unreservedly dowdy.

.

Another Way to Know

Fixations are predations. They subject the psyche

to a mindless sway in which we say and pray

all night and day I-likey-likey-likey-likey till we’ve

drained the language of its juices and most uses:

dropping all but one auxiliary verb – the sole necessity,

demonic talisman, the god, the holy writ of “must.”

Fixations earn because insist on trust: they can be

trusted to exhaust and to deplete and yet forever

promise plausibilities of the replete, the unimaginably

sweet outcome in whose pursuit we end up spending

every slice of who we are: we hold onto a great gold

glowing chunk of what think is star – deaf to all

entreaty to do otherwise. And yes indeedy, darlings,

this becomes the size and content, then, of life.

We do so like its glow. Which for a heretical few

illumines a mystical purview: another way to know.

It is a star. Everything’s a star. When we’ve really

looked, we see we can be seen to startling advantage,

hooked. There are pleasurable purposes in claws.

There is peace that passeth understanding in

this pause. Release afforded by quite other laws.

It isn’t what we’re told, it isn’t what we’re told.

It may be, surely is, some other enterprise as well.

But heaven doesn’t seem to be a part of it, or hell.

.

Lovers and Loves and Lovers

You think you’ve had them.

You know that there were times

you were excruciatingly obsessed –

that what determined your desire to live

was nothing more or less than the degree

to which he could be beckoned into loving you –

by which you never knew exactly what you meant.

Loving was a sort of shoving into or away from

something else. There weren’t words for it,

or couldn’t be until you could permit

existence to exist: until you could

be interested in what was really

going on. But that would take

so many decades to discover.

The dawn was coming, though. Today

you knew that it had come. You saw

the one you had resisted seeing: the one

whose being tortured you for so long with

its worn-out iconography that you no longer

had a clue what really “turned you on.”

You saw him and it wasn’t he, the last one

you had wanted. Now he was the first one

whom you didn’t want at all. People weren’t

things to want. Love was not a thing to want.

The dawn’s become a morning now.

Soon you’ll see your life’s first

afternoon. In four years you’ll

be seventy. It will be still be light.

Then love may come. Love may be the night.

.