A Little Rude

Roast pig turning on a spit –

there is, of course, no hope for it –
there hasn’t been for quite some time.
Whatever eager piglet ran to climb

upon his mama’s breast to suck a teat –
wherever he discovered means to eat –
that’s all gone now. Now he’s dinner.
Doesn’t seem like he’s the winner.

Watch the crackling skin get brown:
watch the juices trickle down.
Watch the piglet turn to food.
It really seems a little rude.

And yet, my dears, not in the least
are we immune: we are a feast
for many populaces: like bacteria –
for whom we are a cafeteria

of tasty prospects, opportunities
to lick now this, now sample these –
to serve up succulently cellular amounts
of us, ‘til they get fat, and bounce

into repasts that other hungry mites consume.
Endlessly omnivorous: there’s always room
for more in this Existence –
which relies upon its own persistence

in the hunting down and following
and mad insentient swallowing
of bits of its own self:
until there’s nothing on the shelf –

until there is no shelf.

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(I drew the pig & wrote the poem in June 2009; came upon both just now and oh, how they cried and oinked to be put into the limelight again! What could I do but succumb?)

Relations with the Moon

This center of late winter afternoon

incites with something swift –

it has relations with the moon

which underlie its drift.

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Words that Rhyme with Oh!

Unbidden thoughts – random doodles – errant dreams –

are all of these identically induced from hidden

schemer-less regimes – at senseless play in everything

including anything that seems to us we meant?

Are we suspended over an abyss by them: are they

what hold us up? Are we lent our frail existence

by their accidents of absent-mindedness? Are we

the sweat of their duress? Are we what they erupt?

I dreamed of languorously floating things just now that

made me think this might be true. They didn’t look like you.

Silly thing to end this with, I know. But let’s come up

with words that rhyme with oh! Low, blow, no, go…

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Kettelhack Males

I've been thinking about the Kettelhack males, those I've known, that is. The only other Kettelhack male I know anything about is my father's father Hermann, who died in about 1922. But we three - Carl, Bob & Guy - seem to me now an interesting collective phenomenon - with what strikes me as a particularly idiosyncratic relation to what a man is, or what "male" means. The idea of a "man" was probably never more touted nor offered up with stricter parameters than it was for our baby boom generation -- those of us born between 1945 & about 1964: strictures, almost, about what was appropriate in male appearance, behavior, likes, dislikes, jobs, and all of the rest of the American masculine model whose characteristics anyone born then needn't have tediously recounted here.

But the Kettelhack males, by my best reckoning, managed to dodge a lot of those bullets - as bullets they now indeed seem. I think I can put it simply enough. When I pretty much understood myself as having the sexuality I have - which I date from my first extended moment of having sex with men in London, at age 20, on a half-year abroad semester in London in 1971 - and when my brother 'confessed' to me a couple years later (after I graduated from Middlebury in '73) that he too was "gay", I think I can say for both of us that it wasn't finally all that big a deal. Not that there wasn't plenty of angst for us which maybe more than peripherally had to do with the Sex Thing, but mostly just had to do with consequences of being who we each inimitably were (including being a Kettelhack): there was angst aplenty I suppose. But the idea of being or not being "male" I don't think was central to any of that. It's true, I liked looking at dolls in Christmas catalogues when I was a little boy, which I knew to keep secret - I wasn't good at any of the things '50s boys were supposed to be good at (baseball, etc.). I was 'talented' in the 'arts' - then often taken to be a dead giveaway for sexuality (I think, amiably, of the numerous straight organists I've known, always assumed to be gay) - all that stuff which probably did shove me in many people's eyes into a probable category of The Sexual Other, but my actual experience - even back then, even when I felt shame about not being in the Little League or something - didn't bear any of this out. Or rather didn't put in any terrible light the things I loved and the people I was attracted to.

That's where the Kettelhack part comes in, I think. My father was terrible at the whole list of what men were supposed to be good at then: carpentry, grilling anything on a barbecue, evincing any interest or involvement in sports (everybody else's dad it seemed was always building a garage or going to Dodgers' games, etc etc.). My father had a glorious high baritone operatic voice, he was a talented artist, he was funny and polite and goofy and devoted to helping and loving my mother, and often wore an ascot. He did love working in the yard, and learning however slowly and awkwardly to do things like climb ladders and nail shingles on the roof -- but he hadn't the least natural instinct for the mechanical. My mother was the one who oversaw the finances and sort of kept the ship in organizational order - she too was a talented artist and a beautiful woman, but not one who ever fussed about - I don't know, the beauty parlor or whatever. She was direct and quietly effective in ways that are often thought to be archetypically male (able to think linearly and well about what to do about getting the car seen to, etc) -- far more associated with a man's presumed nature than a woman's. So they weren't The Man and The Woman of the time, exactly; but neither weren't they recognizably female and male. They were really both gorgeously that. It just didn't seem to matter that much.

Neither my brother nor I was effeminate - that is in any marked way that I'm aware of. Neither did we strive to be 'masculine'. All we ever found ourselves able to be was us. And I guess that's the gladsome news about all this. From the get-go, the Kettelhacks managed to stay on the planet with any degree of happiness probably not least because we never had the idea we couldn't. And that's I think one of the greatest blessings from them I still enjoy and which still keeps me sidling into unexpected moments. We did things - we Kettelhack males - AND my mom, about whose 'femaleness' there was no reason to doubt - because we didn't know we couldn't.


That's all. I guess that's a lot, though.

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"But this is human life..."

A friend just wrote me about how he'd been able through a kind of self-talk of reassurance truly to take the heat out of a recurring anxiety yesterday -- which intrigued me enough to write this back:

 

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That seems very advanced to me. That you can assuage that kind of reflexive fear thru self-talk, 'reasonableness'. Although I surely do the same thing when I'm anxious, I don't know how effective it ever is. It's an odd business really. Because anxiety (which seems so dire! really sets itself up as a terror about whether you'll be able to 'go on' or not - therefore usually about money, for me) would appear to be so ghastly an attack, its capacity to rile may have other uses. Donna sometimes likens it to the phenomenon of ponds turning themselves over for no 'reason' - just because it's the nature of ponds to turn themselves over. (I'm surely not describing it well.) I wonder if a lot of what we not unreasonably 'hate' in these internal turnings-over is something the whole system of us in a sense loves, or anyway must have, or anyway WILL have. That sharp sweet Keatsian phrase to which I turn all the time - "to makes us feel existence": perhaps we really MUST feel it, "or else." "Or else" may have a biological as well as existential (what's the difference?) function. Is it possible to temper anything, really? Effectively, yes (sometimes), it would seem: but then we get to that conundrum of free will again. I don't feel like a puppet of whatever is manipulating me into me exactly: but rather perhaps like a puppet colluding with the 'puppeteer' so interchangeably they amount to a single business. I think I've just (again!) described why I can't write anything like self-help books anymore.

 

“But this is human life: the war, the deeds,
The disappointment, the anxiety,
Imagination's struggles, far and nigh,
All human; bearing in themselves this good,
That they are still the air, the subtle food,
To make us feel existence, and to shew
How quiet death is.”

Keats, Endymion

damn that touches the pulse. "and to shew/ How quiet death is." I always forget that coda, but talk about reassuring self-talk: for me anyway, that last line DOES quiet me down. So maybe language can after all assuage. If it carries sufficiently particular 'tone.' (Henry James.) Or shudderingly startles you awake. (Emily Dickinson.)

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The Question of Duets

(a new show germinates)

The question of duets today occurs to me

less cursorily than it has before – now that

I’ve scavenged such a lot of creatures from

their chests of drawers to press them into couples

on my floor – to see who softens just enough

to adumbrate some willingness to enter a relation,

to seem at least to want to brush another fate with

theirs. No compunction to find mates: just the hope

that they can bear the likelihood of being seen

by others as blind dates. They won’t, I know,

forgo a show of great dismay if I subject them

to the barest sentimental whiff, or wish that they

convey affectionate regard in any way: they’re

a caustically resistant bunch, by dint of their

insistent unassailable autonomy: one therefore

guardedly proceeds on hint and hunch to dare

to pair them into duos. The tenor of our tacitly

agreed-to pacts far from unnaturally breeds

a range of sadomasochistic pleasures (among

which bleeds excruciating désespoir, as, du matin

au soir, they mutter to me en français) –

but I’m the despot, you conniving sneaky lot!

I shoot the final shot. And all of it, of course,

as surely is foregone, is play. Wouldn’t you say?

So here are they, dueting. The not-so-secret

secret is they crave the promise of exposure

this display prophetically suggests, indeed one day

(they pray) materially will beget. Gazing into

middle distances, as is their fashion – performing

thoughtfulness with sensitive dispassion, not

regretting being showcased in a sort of wedding,

this at least is clear: no one here is fretting.

Back to the Factory

The artist is a freak –

a warrior with mutant ears

(the things he hears!) – his art’s a helpless

creature in his care. Neither is nor ever will

become aware of what the other does,

will do, will be or was; it’s not

within the slippery circumference

of what they guess are their intentions

to know more than that they stumble through

the untoward manufacture of a wonder,

when it happens, which is rare,

all done in an unconscious dark

and usually wounding art, though sometimes

not. When not, they’ve a pot to piss in!

They release their flow, and systems go,

and art and artist start to breathe a different air.

They know that something’s there;

though don’t know what. Soon art becomes

an invalid again, and artist numbs himself

for war, and when as usual he can’t find any

enemy, he mumbles to the scrawny blue thing

parked and hung upon his torso

and refractorily stumbles with it

through, into, a new unconscious dark –

back to the factory.

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