Finding a Rhyme for Linda

 

Finding a Rhyme for Linda

 

https://youtu.be/4yRAK94GzXM

 

My mind, last night, like a cat, came to paw

and to knead – interceding to show its affection

it hoped this time might make me draw

when I woke, overcoming whatever objection

 

that seemed to run through me in streams

faintly tainted with slightly unhappy confusion

which kept me from seeing the innermost beams

of the sun that would open to one sweet effusion

 

I’d longed to inspire me – wishing for Linda

to come to the fore and to open my door to the joy

that she couldn’t not bring. I felt a soft wind a

mercurial shifty small poltergeist blew to deploy

 

a strategic solution to finding a rhyme for her name.

He cheated (stuck wind-a to Linda) but lent me

a dream filled like clouds with soft faces – a frame

of some graces of human reflection – which sent me

 

to pick up my pencils and markers and faith

to apply to some paper: Linda’s wisdom runs quiet

and sweet through the thing, like a sly smiling wraith

of her humor. Of which you’d heard more than a rumor

 

from me in the panoply of all the souls she delights.

Whom do these faces depict? You got me, honey.

I asked around which got all my ghosts into fights.

One said he might tell me, if I had the money.

 

But money I lack. And Linda is far more

than funny, to this Kettelhack.

She is dimensions of Kind, Wise & Smart.

And I give her my heart. And I won’t take it back.

Two Songs with a Poem In-Between, in memory of John-Frederick Williams

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRlpjH8LpqQ

 please watch & listen to the video.

…………………………….

1. “The Sweetest Sounds”

…………………………….

2. A Stripped-to-the-Skin Singularity

 

In Mourning for John-Frederick Williams

 

Which was your truest New York?

Was she utterly like, or utterly not

likd her clamorous claims to fame?

What was your newest New York?

 

Does one have to become certifiably

something requiring rehab to prove

that one cannot imagine inhabiting

anywhere else on the planet but here -

 

in her gut, breasts and testicles, penis,

vagina and sinuses - all of her vast

and celestial variety, emptiness, fullness

and grief, thereby finally in a position

 

to earn a satiety all of her lovers must learn

she can lend in a breath - sending each

of us harrowingly and hilariously

into what, after all, we discover is death?

 

She was a bitch, and she’s a bitch still.

She’ll randomly keep you alive, or kill.

But she burst your strife into glorious life:

And you burn more brightly than I ever will.

 

This is a poem I posted probably too hastily during the last day or two of John-Frederick’s life, knowing he’d be gone soon, but wanting to write it in time possibly to read it to him while he was still breathing, albeit in a coma, in his Mt. Sinai hospital room up on west 114^th Street. But I didn’t read it: I don’t think I had the balls to read it to him. His partner was there and I didn’t want to disturb him, which was probably silly because his partner had to have been as tough as John-Frederick was, so he would have borne whatever piddle-paddle I had to say. But I still didn’t read it aloud there. And I always read my poems aloud to John-Frederick; he was such an enthusiastic audience. He thought I was much better a poet than I ever would esteem myself. But the fun of it arose from his perfect understanding of what I was doing. Which was basically being funny, or trying to be. Or at least having fun. He knew all the pulse points – his, mine, and those of everything living. I won’t go on about him now because it’s still too early and I don’t know what to say.

I did however know what to sing, this afternoon. Or any rate convinced myself I knew, this afternoon, why I wanted to sing “The Sweetest Sounds”, which opens this cobbled-together business, and “Softly, as I leave you” which will close it. Karaoke background shamelessly exploited. “Sweetest Sounds” is a charming song written for “No Strings” – music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers: it’s lovely to experience him as both melodist and lyricist. It’s among his best songs. A little thing with a capacious heart. “Softly as I leave you” was written by Tony DaVita (music) with lyrics in Italian by Giorgio Calabrese, translated into English by Hal Shaper. “Sweetest Sounds” is about a life not yet lived, but hoped for; “Softly, as I Leave You” tackles a striking notion, that these are the thoughts of a man dying who wants to spare the love of his life the pain of having to watch him fade from life into death. It’s an extraordinary premise, and it gets into my brain almost virally. It asks us to be this dying human being, and to feel as our last conscious experience in the last breath of our mind the whole giving miracle of loving. I think they’re extraordinary songs, and they came to me this afternoon as the only means I could imagine of saying what still seems to me this moment between life and death is for me – not just because of John-Frederick’s death, not just because of more than a year of feeling half-buried in this Covid Era of Erasure, not just because I will become 70 years old in about three weeks, but because I apparently need sounds and words and behaviors to manage at least for a moment the unorderable, the unfathomable, the unforgiving obstinacy of Existence, with its complete refusal to tell us why. Why what? Why anything.

………………………………

3. “Softly, as I Leave you.”

 

Actuality, an Hypothesis (Existentialism 101)

As possibly a blanket defense, or biologically as the first faint dimmings of the onset in me of Alzheimer’s (with or from which my father and his mother died), no memory of anything in my past stands out in any sharp detail. The stories I’ve told and repeated to myself about signal moments in my life are what recur, but nothing with the clout of the initial substance of a moment - vivid smells, colors, faces, places - all of that is sort of what my memory has turned into hearsay. Frankly that’s true of whatever it was that happened to me this morning walking to and back from Rite Aid where I picked up a prescription and stopped in at my Chinese takeout place to pick up lunch. It’s a sort of hazy view, no real sense of immediacy. I’m only ever sure I’m in ‘reality’ in the instant I’m in. The tapping of my index finger on the iPhone keyboard is actual because I can see and hear it (my fingernail, though trimmed, still makes contact with the screen and audibly clicks). But when I stop doing it its reality will become hypothetical almost. I’ve never expressed this instant swallowing of the actual with quite this clarity before. It’s not exactly a surprise - I can’t imagine anyone not knowing through his or her experience what I’m saying - it provides an angle of perception which seems to me almost designed to tamp down memory so that it doesn’t interfere with the immediate impact of actuality. But the forgettingness of things also seems to me so self-protectively defensive. And one of its casualties, for me, is to becloud any memory of anything. It becomes harder to believe in actuality if our experience of it can’t be entirely recollected. How do we know that anything actually happened? Or that anything remembered isn’t just a story we made up to provide evidence that corroborates what we want to believe happened? I know this is Existentialism 101 but it bites me anyway.

Attached are pics of what caught my attention en route to, from & in Rite Aid. It would be churlish of me not to accept them as things actually perceived. So I’ll coast on the sleigh that says they are such a thing.

A Foregone Duty

 

A Foregone Duty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI65Ehi1t_0

.

Apoplectic anorectic -

biometrically unsound -

New York City, once electric:

has it run its power aground?

.

Or has it always played

this trick of seeming sick -

doomed by fate to fade?

Oblivious to slow or quick,

.

when or then, again, before - it

knows what it is, it’s more.

How could horny New York quit

its favorite role as whore?

.

But it’s mother more to moods

than sin. Outer and inner -

to New York they’re foods

of the feast. Loser and winner -

.

fall on it, savor its beauty's

perfection, its chaotic loss

beyond measure. Its duty’s

foregone: it’s the boss.

.

Whispers

 I shall rashly suggest (in the wake of finishing this in the early pre-dawn of a blizzardy February) that this may be my best work yet. By which I mean, I had a helluva good time entertaining it, that is, allowing it to entertain me. The video recitation, which is part of what I like to think makes this fly e'en through the snow, is, in fact, done in whispers - though stage whispers of the kind that should be audible. Do expect to kick up the volume, though, if it's annoyingly too soft.

 

Whispers

 

.

https://youtu.be/uYTZ1GrGXB4

.

By the time she’d trotted powerfully out to plant her ass

flat on the floor close to the safety of the southwest corner

blissfully to suck up through a giant straw inside a giant glass

.

half half-and-half, half cold sweet coffee – oh, to warn her

not to drink too much, whatever it might be! – is all you

wished to do and would have done had you been nearer.

.

But now, from her sly knowing eye you somehow also knew,

with not unwelcome certainty, it could not have been clearer

that you’d merely caught her in the act of drinking iced sweet

.

mellowed half of this and half of that: no more. Your view

had changed and oddly prospered from this cul-de-sac: neat

trick! this heretofore unknown blessed invitation to pursue,

.

pursue, look into, voyage through, the unsuspected blithering

and blandishment and random glories in a heavy down-pour

of the rest. You look around: the sky and ground are slithering

.

into another circumstance, a dancing fanciful romance: much

grandeur now arrives - more heads, which with yours number

ten. Six are yellow, three evince pink greenish-nesses such

.

as might be bound in and surrounded by fluidities of slumber

that you’re subtly kindly pressed to entertain will not so much

decree your destiny as be it. All this folderol! At last you see it.

.

 

What I Guess I Came to Say

 What I Guess I Came to Say

https://youtu.be/xF6TPfTwRZc

(the video is maybe worth seeing, mostly because of the light that dims at the end, exactly on cue, which it did entirely on its own recognizance.)

.

.

The practical reality of doing what I do

seemingly impracticably makes me climb

back into reinventing plans to mimic who

I think I was or what I did the last time

.

I believe I had succeeded: that’s a pain

with little prospect of a gain: “again”

is not a notion to rejoice in: but to feign

a former me, to re-ingest some madeleine

.

to re-inhabit memory - may be the best

maneuver I could conjure up to shoo in

inconceivable catastrophe, to fail the test

of being serviceably human, ergo ruin

.

the renewal of what had been an ability

I now had lost: to render calm accord

from those so rageful with malignant incivility,

no calm could now arrive except by sword.

.

But that would be uncivil and untoward.

Then, at last! I now recall their favorite condition.

“Hit the ground!” I yell as I move forward.

With great relief they do. They love submission.

.

One twists and turns and burns

to find a serviceable way.

I suppose that’s how one learns.

I guess it’s what I came to say.

Bubbly Ding Dong

 

.

https://youtu.be/IP_OxSZXYrA

.

City stone is mostly what my art observes

to find its way. From 1880s scroll and column

on my block I heard today what bell deserves

my notice, and for whom it has to toll. Solemn

.

though this business may appear, New York

fears nothing about death. It plays ping pong

with it, and life - can’t wait to pop the cork

to toast the art it spawns with bubbly ding dong.

.

Hence the pitcher and the lizard here, I think:

who find themselves in lurid hues a city bell

would welcome. They’ve drunk the drink.

Feeling well. Not in hell. Art’s rather swell.

.

It’s amazing how little things matter. They

don’t matter at all, and they matter the most.

Every life we bring on we will shatter. Hey!

But don’t leave in a huff. Make a toast!