Last Poem He Wrote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94jFIdkWvbU

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Sometimes when we look into

each other’s eyes, don’t we see

the darkness not the light? –

.

darkness that embraces form

and swallows it, creates

the metamorphic night? –

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darkness, where all interest lies?

I  wonder if my mother or my

father or my brother when,

.

as I approached with each

of them their ends, identified

that darkness in my eyes.

.

Or had when I was born.

Had they always known

we’d never be alone, forlorn?

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Maybe they’d long realized

its size, and why we each

created night when we,

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half-cunning, breathed our sighs:

little nights we’d ride that joined

us as our glances met.

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Maybe we knew everything already,

dark matter massed invisibly inside,

the kind infinity and love beget.

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This Thing You’ve Got

(for Catherine, on her birthday)

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https://youtu.be/G4oi8EUNt34

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The woman’s singing to the girl, the girl

sings back – informing and reforming

to rewarm each other’s hearts

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and histories, their mysteries, to broach

a new approach, address a lack that now

has found a round replenishment in song!

.

I have known the girl and woman –

how they’ve thought they felt and how

they’ve felt they thought – but suddenly

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as they’ve begun to sing it’s like I hadn’t

known them long. I thought I knew

their essence: I was wrong.

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It’s your birthday, Catherine –

and the birth year of a new career: what

you’ve yearned for since the girl in you

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unfurled into her hunger for an unimpeded

life. To offer us a view of the immensity

of love which pours into your singing:

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a place for us to be a part of you.

Your “i” has found its dot.

It’s real, this thing you’ve got.

.

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Judy Garland Poem, Take 7,351

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https://youtu.be/LqXH68BwMRc

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“I think she looks pretty.” Sure, why not. She’s anything

you’d like. To me, she looks like what I look like when

when I’m so myself, so tired of my own insupportably

boring neurotic egotism that I can’t not spin out 

alchemically to transmute all that matted dross into

an unexampled purity – purity’s the right word, even if

it’s purity (which by the way it always is in everyone)

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made of mucking up your stories and your lusts, maybe

most especially your lusts, not the overt sexual lusts 

but the ones you have for scratching your dry scrotal sac

raw because you love the exquisite itch and translucent

crispy ball-skin flecks which flutter down, or your inability

to pass without subjecting to exacting scrutiny a single

fallen thing glossed by the rain at night – like jagged bits

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of broken concrete, rotting leaves, torn Doritos bags

promiscuously gleaming in the wet dark streetlight glow –

without having to take pictures of it; it’s the purity

of a keen hunger to gratify particular senses in particular

ways which never won’t make an odd angle of it or

require ambiguity to persist in its mess; it’s the purity

of being packed with amalgam ambiguity – so apparently

.

heterogeneous and clumsily casual – but so intensely

absorbed by its own sensations and obsessions it distills

into an essence which if you squoze just a few drops of it

out of your soul into Dixie cups, passed it round to random

passersby, would almost certainly kill them on contact, like

certain kinds of love do. Which becomes the sort of purity

you’d want to watch do anything at all, like stand around

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looking out a window humming to itself. Judy Garland

pretty? Or too beyond beyondness for description to begin

to tell you anything you could pass on that would do

justice to it, with the single exception of Joe Mankiewicz

who, in words that managed that feat, said “she knew what

music was for”? Try not to pass out while you try to imagine

what that could mean. That’s what I’d say she looks like.

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The Ever-Living, Ever-Loving Donna

https://youtu.be/MaIcL9ZFTP0

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Silly Incarnations always wondering about the words for things!

Let’s just say her Psyche, Soul and Funny Bone (that frabjous femur

is of course what God is) sit around and chat while cosmic blasts,

amid insinuating internecine senseless soft manipulations that

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accomplish nothing any sentience understands, applauded by

excited atoms detonating like fresh movie-palace popcorn and

the rest of what both crashes and/or doesn’t crash but falls with all

the sifting strangeness of all Accidental Art: recollecting steam

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she saw stream lucid and concise from her grandfather’s lips,

as if he both were taking sips and slaking thirsts of others looking on:

sending humid messages abroad with care to keep their weightless

delicacies perfectly intact: somehow with her certainty that they were

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destined always to exalt the highest purposes an Incarnation had

the nerve and fervor to enact, which meant some grand hilarious

shenanigan, too brusquely silly to permit you to retain your pee.

Humor when it makes you urinate with helpless incapacity is too

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exquisite to be borne. Which means supposedly you have to die before

you get to sample it. Until then, silly incarnations trample over their

confused sensations, looking for some Mystical Experience to help

them bend their over-prudent laws – transcend. But not her “soul”

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and “psyche” or her funny bone. They’d long ago jumped every fence

attempting to confine. Strange to be an incarnation and know nothing

is malign. It erases any need to die. “So be is what I’ll do,” explains

the ever-living, ever-loving Donna. “Why? Because I wanna.”

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To Get Our Business to Renew

https://youtu.be/AiMT-c1h67g
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To wander off from my menagerie as I have done
now for too many days, did not cause a catastrophe,
nor really any outcome in my creatures I could see
that gave them too much trouble. Their inimitable fun
.
had halted – and there was because of that a drying out,
slight giving up or in, an atmosphere at last that took
my breath and made it gasp, had me hunting for a hook
in their rare sea to catch some rapt insistence flying out
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into a wider, deeper realm than it had been allowed
to flow to for a while. That insistence was a squirming
snaky jaundiced monkey-being, smiling and affirming
to me that the hook I wanted to tug us away, endowed
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with a sufficient boost to get our business to renew,
was what it wanted too; indeed it knew the hook was me –
and so I find myself again the slave of my menagerie,
laboring to tug them out and through to baffle you.
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Homework Assignment

https://youtu.be/tM-LLIFkMMM

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Been a while since I have had a thing to do with you,

you keyboard with your aptitude for prodding me to skew

my facts of life – you implements of color and outlining

and chiaroscuro and perspective, all the mining

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tools you’ve said that I must use – the digging down to ore

I’m told at your insistence is my only route to finding more

than I’ll have found before in drawing - tools I’ll need

to enter into and enlarge my vision, and to weed

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out all the vapid and extraneous misfires that so far

have made up the great bulk of what I’m told by others mar

my name as artist (whatever “artist” could in my case mean)

and thus invite me to self-pitying attack: where I demean

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myself for all the shortcomings that constitute the lack

in me of being able to face truth: this Kettelhack’s a hack.

Not to mention the most mortal sin I have committed:

a narcissism so immense no other view can be admitted.

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Oddly though, how from my self-disgust, my feeble facture,

intellectual inadequacies and the rest of what effect a fracture

of my me-me-me, I experience this self-consuming pleasure.

Its lovely endless repercussions are a great dark pleasure.

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But even that, of course, is just another deadly dull cliché.

Cliché, apparently, has long been my established way.

Have I done sufficient justice to the braying and self-flaying

that this course requires? ‘Life: Lessons in Role-Playing.’

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Like Waiting in a Bathroom for the F Train

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https://youtu.be/3HdH-1NIMsU

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If the universe were fully tiled like a bathroom
would it not beget a frantic Zeitgeist in a math boom
where meticulous intelligences working in new styles
of assessment count up ever vaster quantities of tiles,

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making counting lose its use? In a sea of computation

that approached the infinite, no schema of relation

was imaginable, no organizing system was available

for counting or to count on. It would be unassailable
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that nobody could ever accurately calculate the sum
of shiny squares that would already have begun to bum
us out; their careful quadrilinearity would be a joke
which rudely rubbed a smugness in, thereby to choke
.
us out of any foolish notion ‘finite’ had a meaning.
This would leave us woozy, unsupported, leaning 
on exactly nothing that would bear our weight.
For what would we have been too early or too late?
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Perhaps some future evolutionary mutant miracle
will formulate a being who will grasp the spherical 
more than we can. We hang from brutal jagged edges -
perilously mortally suspended from repellent ledges
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slicing into skin, inevitably therefore to insure we fall
without once ever understanding what created All.
Unable finally to grasp the fullest calculus of ‘Round’
or to apply it to eternal tiles destined never to be found
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to which we therefore cannot lend the barest sense
so that we’d die in a condition as impenetrably dense
as we began, what woman or what man can render
Existential Clarity to Endlessness? Maybe a transgender
.
Prophet will arrive to wed the circle to the square -
create for us an “Actual” that won’t have bred despair.
This re-tiled 23^rd Street subway station makes one think.
Like waiting in a bathroom for the F Train. Hearts will sink.

A Society of Influence - My Avatars

A Society of Influence - My Avatars*

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https://youtu.be/MnDRz06N-_w

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Emily and Jackson
together form a faction
of a fertile unrelenting influence
in my peculiar heart. The confluence
.
you see of her unshaken gaze
beside his art of shoots and rays
and delicately wavering
amazements savoring
.
their own unlooked-for grace,
at last endows her with a place
replacing church where finally
with her rare air she can doctrinally
.
know liberty that loves revision.
Dickinson is dense in her concision;
Pollock practices a loose excess:
which in equal manner know success.
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They wrestle and caress calamity
to make of it an odd-god amity
you’d never think a mind could be.
They are forever linked, to me,
.
And linked to me. Although
it’s fine if they don’t care or know.
Their play will always turn a page; no entr’acte.
The warning sign outside the stage: Do Not Distract.

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*A friend of mine wrote to me that he was impressed by my having invoked forms like triolet and pantoum in a recent poem (I didn't tell him I'd written the poem 14 years ago and I couldn't tell you what a pantoum was today if my life depended on it). But anyway, in responding to that, I accidentally found myself creating a sort of aesthetic map - embodying principles (apparently) which direct my noodling mind toward whatever it is I do do do. Anyway, what follows is what I said to him. Sort of. (When he reads this he’ll discover quickly that while it more or less begins with what I said to him, it’s been edited and added to - up its considerable wazoo. Writers lie, as surely by now you know.)

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‘Oh aren’t you kind. I went thru a period years ago when I actually applied myself to learning ‘form’ in poetry by attempting to write in it: pantoums and triolets & oh, what was that annoying other one that Auden would do more than occasionally - oh god, yes, the sestina (I did three or four of those). They were basically little arbitrary puzzles whose successful object was to make me unhappy - and now I can’t remember them at all except for the Petrarchan & Shakespearean sonnet forms which I still can like doing now & again (which means I can follow the rules without their seeming disconnected to life) - that is, when I want to, which I usually don’t. When I decided I wanted to write poems and looked around for poets I liked I could only find two I wanted to have stick around: W H Auden & Emily Dickinson. They’re still pretty much the only poets I think of. (Not that I dislike all the others, I just don't think of them.) I’m not sure why, beyond feeling I sort of know why Auden and Dickinson do what they do and I can relate to it. Like Judy Garland’s vibrato and Henry James’ syntax, diction & tone. Good heavens I’ve just come up with my aesthetic map, haven’t I.’

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But where’s the rest? There surely must be more. What visual artists do I cotton to? What music? (Beyond Garland’s vibrato.) What about the violin?

The first thing that comes to mind is a single painting - the big Pollock one that takes up a whole wall at MoMA. I don’t know what it’s called but it rivets me. 

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Somewhat simultaneously, Bach and Brahms emerge, and when I think of what I want from them, and that I give myself when I play them on the violin, it's a moment usually in a minor key where they tackle anguish in aching intervals to produce a sharp but passing pain, a pang made tolerable because of its academic dress: it follows gratifying rules even then. The Bach B minor partitas I incessantly play collectively scratch that itch: you get both the thing that moves you almost intolerably (which is the heart of its beauty) and the implicit reassurance that it can be expressed without the world falling apart. 

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But for the moment anyway, at least to myself, I can convey what feels like the beating heart of what prods me in two joined visuals. Emily Dickinson's portrait, Pollock's big painting. Yeah, seen together especially, they ignite me. For the moment, they are my avatars. Maybe I’ll write them a poem.

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Ha, I just did. (I told you writers lie.) And you’ve already read it.

When Eve Began Mooning the Moon

https://youtu.be/uy7aPjoScX0

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She isn’t near, she’s here

(albeit barely in our view).

She’s where she’s always been. 

‘It was you who let me in,’

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she’s often chided us. 

When did we do that?

‘Back then. You know!’

Though we did not.

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What had ‘back’

to do with ‘then’?

Which, like Germans,

we pronounce as zen.

.

Zen seems more dimensional.

(‘Seems’ seems always sentenced

in a sentence to sustain it as its

one trustworthy word.)

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Having to pretend again we knew,

our nods were grave the way

they would be, we imagined,

in the actors in a Murder She Wrote

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mystery whose job it had been

to imagine plausibly and audibly

what they remembered, though

they lied. And to make it seem

.

remembering was easy and as actual

as fact. In fact, to us time is a hiccup

we have done our shaky best to take

on faith you undergo because you say so.

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To us if such a hiccup

ever had occurred

it would dismember

and disperse itself:

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ingest its hypothetical existence

in a blip. Never make a slip.

Clean itself up instantly

and utterly: be excellently gone

.

as only things that never were

can ever be. (Did you come up

with that canard ‘dismemberment’?

How do you dismember nothing?)

.

We may broach, then try

to breach, a brink to think

we might just once have felt Time

beating like a heart;

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but we’re never sure. If it exists,

it is unnaturally pure.

Purity to that degree

(if such a thing there be)

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we must suppose no one can

prove, expose, propose,

depose, affect, effect or, like

the Emperor’s new clothes

.

(especially his secret

cache of treasured 

négligées – yes, those!),

remotely see.

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Time occupies no place, no face

(except that of a silly clock), does not erode

a rock (water may erode a rock, and one can say

of rocks that they erode, or are eroded,

.

and patience will erode when it’s subjected

to more abstract language than it can appropriate;

too much of which we’re glad it knows that it

just ate): time leaves no trace that it was anywhere.

.

Perhaps a stitch in time saves nine,

but if, in fine, what you design, moreover plan

to wear, is made of time, why not reveal it on

the rarest evening in the rarest month of June? –

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which is, we hear, when Eve got naked –

finally, thank God!, again – and mooned

the moon! And belled a cat, as far as that obtains.

Eve is bold.

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What if it rains?

She’ll catch a cold

she’ll die of.

When?

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Are we back to when

and then again?

Is all we’ve learned that

we’ve not learned a thing?

.

Two words now

plead with me

to rhyme with thing.

Bring, and sing.

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Bring the thing

and sing it.

Do what we know to do,

and then append

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a two-word admonition

(après tout) to our single-page-

two-paragraph

agreement

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with the

Cosmos:

wing

it.

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