9/12/09

Back in the ‘seventies, in the laundromat off Longfellow Square,
an old man passing me offers parting words, Never get old.
And the absence of teeth around those words I can recall
as if that laundry Sunday were just last weekend.
Gloomy Longfellow Square, ghosts shuffling around the centerpiece,
Longfellow’s statue around which traffic streams.
Ghosts are beginning to outnumber the living pedestrians.
There will always be a sex shop across from the smoke shop.
The people crossing the intersection slow down as watch-parts do.

Now you cannot purchase a decent wind-up watch without
a cheap quartz chip embedded in the circuitry, from Taipei or Shanghai,
Circuitry waffled and delicate as a kanji character that speaks
of several conditions or dependencies that all begin at once:
a certain seasonal green and a mood that goes with that green:
alertness, acceptance, quietude, hopeful disposition toward the future,
order of lower and higher magnitudes, harmony in arrangement,
balance of complementary attributes, ducks in a row.

But no more watches, no watch springs, no brass gears or casings or teeth.
Where are the orreries mimicking the planets in lovingly cast parts?
No longer can you buy a cheap hooker or a flask of 20/20,
Drink it sitting on a milk crate at the base of Longfellow.
I blinked and thought I saw the pedestrian traffic slow,
Their faces no longer familiar, been there once before.
All bums have been expurgated from the book of life
Along with the testimonials of the sons they wanted.

prose of Sept 5 09

Surely this would be a day to sail upon the open sea,
a day to be a skipper on one’s own sea craft. Who are these people
who decorate their houses from ships and the ships chandlery,
who this pipe-smoking patriarch who mutters to his guests
about floor-boards retrieved from what antebellum schooner
of which he thought he found a print in a second-hand shop?
Who are these people, nearly immobile, among so many instruments
for movement, polished in their disuse to shine, but once tarnished
by exposure to the elements, use? Who presides over the local
historical society, which would-be seaman has lost his mind
among these maritime artifacts, whose mind has halted
among the chandlery items, muttering about the places on the globe
from which they came? Which port of call? The cocoons in the trees,
wrapped in silk, among oaks, don’t sway, the air so still.
A river pushes through a dam, water ground through turbines
Into threads of silky water — the old man who mutters, leaning on his mantle,
has lost his mind to thoughts of water’s power, relating
the history of floorboards as a schooner’s deck beneath the feet
of teller and those to whom the tale can yet again be told.
But for the listener, the tales sound rehearsed, about the compass,
astrolabe and floor-boards, as if the house were the ship,
this somnolent teller the captain, and the arrows in the artifacts
could move, ship sunk in earth, ready to sail, its crew spellbound,
the listener as neccessary to the tale as the teller himself,
leaning there, all the the paintings maritime, old sailboats, stormy moons,
lulling voyages, whose itineraries lull their passengers into stone.
Of the shipman who stands before the mantle, house guests before him
—well his mind stopped long ago.

Sept 5 2009

Surely this would be a day to sail upon the open sea,
A day for being on the ocean for a very long time,
This is a day to be a skipper on one’s own sea craft.
But who are these people who decorate their houses
From the ships and the ships chandlery, who is this
Pipe-smoking patriarch who mutters to his guests
About the floor-boards retrieved from what
Old antebellum schooner of which he thought
He found a print in a second-hand shop, where?
Who are these people, nearly immobile themselves,
Among so many instruments for movement,
Polished in their disuse to shine, once tarnished
By their exposure to the elements? Who among them
Is the matron of the local historical society, which
Old would-be seaman has lost his mind among
These maritime artifacts, whose mind has come
Almost to a complete halt among the items
Of the chandlery, among the brass instruments,
Muttering about the places on the globe
From which they came? Which port of call?
The cocoons in the trees, wrapped in silk,
Among the white oaks, don’t even sway,
The air so still. A river pushes through a dam,
Water ground through turbines to threads
Of silky water—the old man who mutters,
Leaning on his mantle, has lost his mind to thoughts
About water’s power, relating to his guests
The history of the floorboards as a schooner’s deck
Beneath the feet of the teller and of those
To whom the tale can yet again be told.
But for the listener, the tales sound rehearsed,
About the brass instruments, the compass,
Astrolabe and floor-boards, as if the house
Were the ship, as if this somnolent teller
Were the captain himself, and the arrows
Inside the brass artifacts could really move,
A ship sunk in earth, ready to sail inside
With its spellbound crew, the teller
Necessary for the tale with the listener.
And all the paintings are maritime,
Old sailboats and stormy moons,
Lulling voyages, whose itineraries
Lull their passengers into stone. Of the shipman
Who stands before the mantle, house guests
Before him—his mind stopped long ago.

August 22 2009

I bought a new desktop with a flat screen. The flat screen is a black mirror that is staring back at me, like a pool of oil or of negative space, making you think negative space is what you have when you subtract all of nature—landscape, flora and fauna and men and women and their dwellings and their interiors, nature recombinant , or artifice. Or the negative space, or the space void of light, millions of particles of light, like the signs held in Pyongyang stadiums composing the face of the great leader as he stands with his father on Mt. Paektu. But just as the stands of that stadium can be silent in the time between festivities, so is the screen when dark, almost as dark as that vacant interlunar cave in which stares Samson in Gaza, eyeless.

It wasn’t an Achilles heel so much as a swollen toe that brought me low, so that I could neither walk nor run, nor barely stand, just soak in the bath or bind a truss around my foot. You must be as old as I am said a gym club member I’d crossed in the supermarket, either on his way there, which he praised for its Jacuzzi, or on his way back from the same place. Once there, he circles between the strength machines and the men‘s room, day after day. This infirmity stops me from making a similar path, so do the hours of the day, so does time, to which there are limits, as many limits as a box has sides. We’re bound to cross one another again, if not in this place, than in another.
Moisture in the atmosphere clings to the skin and so conducts heat. The spirit congeals and cools in the body. Various jellies with various degrees of hardness. Indian metaphysics devised a way for the metempsychosed self to escape the humid and entangled world; moisture entangles the self in a weather it never wanted. Spiritual planes, metaphysical tiers, skies populated with after-lives and over souls and thrones and archons, orreries and post-lunar spheres are means of turning consciousness away from the humidity of the body. Space is the ultimate clean and cool environment, a vacuum filled with colorless and intangible forms, Emerson’s transparent eyeball of detached and bodiless omniscience, narrator of the beginning and end.

Wild

The land that you neglect to trim away,
sumacs and spiny weeds, grows back.
The class, if you don’t shout stop! I say!
Return to chatter and laws of the strongest,
the bully, the gang-leader, form a tribe
to steal candy from the weaker children,
carrying coats and wearing colors of the strong.
Children ushered into tribes by bullies
in the weeds engulfing lawns, cracking curbs open,
breaking into gas stations, then Seven-Elevens,
handguns concealed: a world gone to seed.
Pack now before the neighborhood turns, to brush,
then forest, when the sidewalks crack open,
offering sink-holes, maelstroms, to drop in.
The children who refused to listen are feral,
blaming you for what the world’s become.
Among the weeds and lots they rampage.
Or wait in weeds, with knives and maces
and rusty shanks culled from bedsprings,
no longer schoolchildren. The weeds are wild,
are woods again. You recollect the first sumac
shoots on the lawn, the first back-talk.

August 15 2009

Heaven help the warrior, Santa Claus
Come from the sky. From a million washroom mirrors,
One simple and novel idea shall save the day,
Making cranberry muffins from belly-button lint.
But that’s the fearless spirit of enterprise at work,
Which redeems the backwards steps taken.
Ornery aunts shall not dampen the lampwick,
Not with a bigger bang or whimper,
Nor with deeper pockets nor bigger feet.
Australopithecus shall be his name.
The bathroom jokes loosened up the ambiance
And cleared the air of any highly regimented
Mannerism so redolent of the last century.
To straddle the cup that embraces the world
Rather than clean one’s own giant room,
Extending from the hilly verdure in the shadow
Of the St Lawrence Seaway to the Arabian deserts
And steppes and archipelagos where dwelt the red paint people
Spearing the blue whale with a stone harpoon in a blue sea
Or the wide-open Pacific on which waft those temperate winds
Driving the inhabitants of Hokkaido onto the coast of Peru.
It’s all yours, you can tell yourself with no small right—
How convince the inhabitants of your big room with its blue ceiling
That what you claim is yours, that you are the first man
That you know of, the sense of right from the seat of your pants.
How do you close the door of this room that is all of you
And all of them? You have a deed and title
For the moon’s illuminated hemisphere, you speculate
On the vacant temples of Atlantis, you plant your finger there.


The circulation either flows or the circulation’s blocked
But the circulation moves with the tide.
The tide of a land-bound continent, of the body locked in land.
Knows only the arteries in which to flow,
To swell or to retreat from the extremities,
Intuits the sea-lanes, bound in its current envelope,
Restrained by the body that moves and inhales.
What if the swelling of the tide upon the banks stopped cold,
When the absence of pain became numbness?
The sea-leaves that sway to the throb of current,
The sea-floor for which you’ve composed a claim—
No treaty can take the unexplored space from you.
You’ve composed a flag from linens and tea-leaves
To mimic the sway of those underwater herbages you’ve never
Grazed nor viewed with binoculars or stethoscopes.
The owner tells her barking dog it doesn’t own the world.
And the numbers don’t lie.
Let’s review the numbers after we crunch them,
Then I can create or claim a space in which we can see
These current affairs differently, not as losses but risks,
Ways to sally forth into an immaterialized future
Of rewards that are both fountain and wellspring
To gush until the end of time, visualized as a box
With a single opening or playpen for the spirit.
One’s infirmity enforces spontaneous practice.
Jarring notes, summer traffic works both ways.
Roars the daylight, the sun leonine.
The full moon ursine, hiding behind
Low-slung rain-clouds nearly rubbing these rivers
Whose banks are choked with weeds?
Past a rusty bridge and a yard of pine pallets,
Silver smokestack and a clinic. Know thy neighbors.
How lively the library, an example of gilded age architecture,
Copper turrets, terra cotta rosettes, oaken doors as thick
As some medieval fortress, crystal windows curved
Precisely, as if chiseled by lens-grinders.
Overlooking the waterfall, and the mill become spa.

7/28/10

Break up lines, fill space,
shuffle words, don't add to them.
There is always a surplus,

The empty space as costly
as the space occupied.

Cost-effective is the line
zoned in by space around it.
Be terse, name your price,

then make yourself scarce.
Pennies per word multiply.
Each sentence unwritten

another zero on the check,
hole up, count the money
they owe you already.

from 1/4/10

To mimic, to mirror is not a reward in itself--though nothing
to sneeze at either. I've admired the tenacity of the wild grape
climbing the still unsturdy maple saplings behind the work-shed,
not the rambling of the sumac. What I would give for bamboo,
an invasive wall of bamboo growing everywhere and restoring
the silence before time, to which I feel as entitled as my neighbors.
__________________________________________________________________

Well before the two world wars was an interest in bringing two or more disparate sounds together,
Witness Charles Ive's father conducting two bands marching around a single square,
or playing trumpet from the lakeside as the bands circled an empty gazebo.
And stereoopticons brought an artificial depth to the eye.

How I'd rather watch the wild grape thread the maples than the sumac

sprout those flowery cones and stringy pinnates of ruddy however
invasive pepperoncini-colored leaves whose tannin smothers

the lawn surely as the leaves of the maple in the fall.

Don't let the local setting down. Do you need a yard on which to sprawl,

or a garden of geometrically trimmed hedges?