Shuddered to Think (from 1/2/11 notes)

“Arched in air,” first line of a poem
Lonnie handed me in the bookstore,
one I’ve never seen in print,
and honestly cannot recall.
Except it was about a deer
Before the lines stepped down.
Past the caesura I draw a blank.
Could there be other friends
who could recall the lines that followed,
who could be brought together
to bring together the earnest poem,
reconstitute it from thin air
in which the deer was arched once,
then transcribe it whole to typescript --
line by line, they’re far too scattered.

Next year, when Lonnie’s bookstore
Was rubble, a dead man staggered
from the charred frame in black-face,
frizzy haired in a harbor-front village.
That was Doug, who played guitar,
Strummed Tommy verbatim on a twelve-string
then perished from alcoholic poisoning
in a beach-front motel, the haunt
of defrocked mill-town priests.
His girlfriend had jilted him
And music was harder, had become work,
Which was hard if you were delicate,
Which Doug was, but he had a talent
As my parents would say,
Although the talent left him .
Here’s to you, those like you,
disenchanted with the outcome
but once lit up so much by life
you could have lit up the beachfront
with its pinwheel umbrellas
its tired sunburnt families
dragging their kids around
the weekend, its night-time drunks,
lecherous broken queers—

First I think of the galleries,
then their paintings in velvet,
and crying clowns in the paintings,
red sunsets behind the clowns,
sky a tincture of ripened mango.
Then I think of hackneyed landscapes
So much I build them in my head
The brush-work’s sincere turbulence
As if the artist’s hand shuddered
From thoughts of where his work would land
What basements whose garbage dumps
and then verses of defrocked ministers
who damn those notions of penance
among so much lachrymal feeling,
a vague sadness behind a performer’s face.
Every minister, even defrocked, must perform,
Even sitting a scandal out in some beachfront motel.
Like Wings Biddlebaum, hands once too free.

Then from the black rubble of post and beam
That Doug had cast out, had rearranged
In a pile that seemed to smoke still
In the middle of the quaint square
near the base of the memorial statue,
I retrieved this lightly damaged copy
of A Child’s Christmas in Wales
while no one looked.
[While no spectator looked.]

Then from the blackened pile
Of smouldering post and beam
Doug had helped to cast out,
In the middle of the quaint square
underfoot the wreathed memorial statue,
[and the bronze soldier’s vigilance]
I retrieved this lightly warped and damaged copy
of A Child’s Christmas in Wales
While no still-shocked spectator bothered to notice. [noticing]

_______________________________

Little caveman, half our size with half our brains, why should we trust you?
With half our cranial capacity, what have you to say for yourself?
Your cousins lost among the bamboo forests, foraging for shoots and peccaries.
_______________________________

To Charlene’s consternation, the shop owner sang hoarsely “The Mess Around” (Ray Charles) upstairs as the seamstresses ran their Singers in a steady humming vibration, not comparable to the vibration of motorboats in the harbor, or herring-boats all set to ply remoter waters, cutting the trap-lines of the lobstermen. Charlene was prematurely gray at 38 and fair to her subordinates. The duffel-bags they made collected in the closets of their retired owners.
The melting of snow in the yard exposes the scars of the snow-plow as it drives the snow into banks shaped on one side by the plow’s dirty convex imprint. Now even the efforts to keep the way clear have melted among a driveway cleared for passage. The efforts of the snow-plow have almost melted entirely in the objective that the plow-man sought.

A scary old man in a dirty overcoat who must be ushered from the coffee-shop by the paramedic unit or beat-cop. Whose dentures are lost. In despondency and madness. How’s that for a future.
The view of Los Angeles could not help but startle, a grid of lights among whose single filaments the eye could track a single point or node of light shuttling at an impossible speed, from one end to another. A Mondrian electrified and animated by the spirit of recreation and commerce.

The firing-pin, the controlled burn on the hillside, the ignition.