Hughlings Himwich

One and done

You sit across the page, spelling

Your name like mine

Except it rhymes

And no one suspects you are lonely

Or looney or so hungry

you could eat this paper,

folding it into a star

popping it in the microwave

where you and I and the universe

will be one and done.

Svmer is icumen in

Let summer take me by the hand

And scatter me in golden sand.

A bird sits upon my tongue;

All that’s lost is ever young.

A Fool's Errand

It seems, without my knowing it, I’ve earned the privilege to have a brick engraved with whatever I like at the top of the walkway under the blind Academy arches.  Mine will not bear my name, but it will say in Latin (of course!): 

Noli sequi
in vestigiis
sapientium.
Quaere novas
vias ad
veritatem.

‘Don’t follow In the footsteps of the wise.  Seek new paths to truth.’ This is what I’ve always tried to do.  I half suspect the truth is a mirage, but I feel drawn to it, believing that though it is an illusion, it nevertheless gives life its meaning and value and allows us to become truly ourselves.  As Melville says in Moby Dick, such a phantom is the key to it all:  

        And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting,
        mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves
        see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Was Ahab an absurd, tragic figure? Surely by the conventions of this world he was, but every half-step that towering, one-legged old man took was taken on a path that was heroically his own. He sought meaning in a meaningless universe, what Melville called the Whiteness of the Whale, and went prodigiously mad.  It was a fool’s errand, but Ahab was a grand fool and achieved the full, senseless glory of what it is to be human. 

I am no such staggering figure. There is no white whale that haunts my dreams, unless it be that I would speak a few poetic words or lines that would make this meaningless, soundless universe betray itself in song.  Call it the Music of the Spheres . . . human voices flickering alive and then dying out into deepest night as if there had never been any sound at all, no word, not in the beginning or end, such markers being themselves but illusions. Nothing ever begins or ends except that which is always beginning and always ending. 

Would you join that chorus of dying voices? To take your place there you must follow your own path,  passionately seeking a phantom that is no more than a reflection of yourself and mocks you at every turn along the way.

Call it a lie and a fool’s errand. Yet, it is a truth worth living and dying for, even though that dying be in my particular case but slumber, a comedy unworthy of an Ahab or a Quixote.

Musa Sepulta / The Buried Muse

 

                        Hic poetae omnibus incogniti

                        iacent sine nomine aut ulla voce

                        sua. Aves venerunt et cantant

                        de longo itinere eorum a mari

                        et naviculis eos huc ferentibus.

 

                        Here poets unknown to all

                        Lie without name or any voice

                        Of their own. The birds have come

                        And sing about their long journey

                        From the sea and the little boats

                        That bring them here.

 

In Latin, 'poetae' is masculine and 'aves' is feminine, so that 'eorum' (their) and 'eos' (them) refer ostensibly to the poets.  In the English translation, there is felicitous ambiguity.  

 

Of what is to come

The body’s carnival gives pleasure
to both barkers and buyers,
to the young who swing from limb
to mouth to foot to its very root
and find in that dark common ground
a readiness for whatever will come:
bruises, the scent of lilacs
or words that go wrong. 

And sometimes there comes such
sweet longing for what the body
alone can give up, life for life,
like the moon and the sun. 

It’s the song of the sea,
of what is to come. 

Where is that?

During a thunderstorm when everyone else was running for cover, one woman remained outside and seemed not to be bothered in the least. They all looked out from their hiding places and wondered at her.  It didn’t hurt that she was strikingly beautiful.  Well, soon enough they all came out into the storm, feeling a bit ashamed, I suppose. At first, they couldn’t keep their eyes off her, glistening as she was in the rain and flash of light. Eventually, however, their eyes followed hers to the sky and what they saw was only a roiling grayness that seemed to envelop the earth. They asked her what she saw.. Home, she said. And they, like the dumb little fish of another story, asked, “Where is that?”

One last class

He looked alive or at least no one seemed to notice that he was moving too deliberately to be an actual living thing. He retreated undetected to his office. He sat in his chair and, without really looking, took note of unread books that he knew he would love and at the papers of students whose writing at another time would have made him glad. What to do? Nothing is better than something, he thought. By some chance he heard a passing girl say, Fuck this shit! and began to write. His writing took on the curve and vitality of a woman he had seen the night before. She caught him looking and didn't care. He described her too too tight dress and her dark eyes, her uninspired cursing and the jerk of her hands as she bitched on and on about how some clueless creep with balls for brains had treated her like dirt. She was beautiful! When he walked out of his office to teach his first class, he was almost gone. The students hardly noticed he was there. He sat in his cathedra and began to rock back and forth to their highs and lows, just pleased to catch them unaware. He continued writing about that badass beauty on the prowl. She was happy to oblige. The student to his right stirred and began to write. Then another. When would class begin? It never did. After all, it was spring. He had nothing to teach them. Soon enough they were all writing. About what? He had no clue. No one noticed he wasn't there. 

Nighttime in the Lyceum

Before the light changed and I forgot

the rules for how to see things as they are,

day was day and night was hidden in my heart.

What is not there

Though I am known to God
As Hughlings, my friends call me
Hugh and leave it at that --
Grace takes care of the rest.

Though I do not believe
In anything or have any Jesus,
Yet I retain a kind of genius
For harmless lies.

It is as if during the day
I can still see the stars
Blazing out of the night
And truly see what is

not there. Some say
it is a harmless madness --
My friends though look deep
Into what were once my eyes

And all they see is night.

Botanical Terminology

                        -for so k

So, here you are

only different in form

prima puella

'heart blooming

irises'

even at night. 

Our first night

We met when raw desire
first flowed like fire
through the dark fullness
of simple night. We met
in the play of wind and wave
upon an unsung shore,
where rack and shell
called out the time to come,
the time that's now
and will always be
and be no more. 
Before there was love
Or hate, our names were
Inscribed in every sigh
in the golden harvest
of our first night.
You came to be
as I lay dying, barely
breathing, ready
to be born again
and praise the light.

Out of Time

When they removed the tree they moved the place
Or rather the place became a barren field
Where light through the green, still moving shade
No longer marks the ground like rain. 
And yet here I am with you,
Your face bent over mine the air
rippling with laughter the tree
covering us in its bright shadow the earth
yielding as we fall out of time. Out of time?
What is left but song?
Listen! the ringing in the air, this rain
These tears hammering out the tune, time and place.
He, she, and all you love, draw near. 

 

The Fall

He fell (he was always falling)

Or rather, he jumped, missing the water

That would have taken him, leaving his remains

to flow in the rhythms of his speech,

Washed clean like one hoping to please

Instead of what was, a silent heap,

Though there was heard from a nearby street

What some would call a melodious scream.

5 Pieces

                   1

What you see is not the flower --

Lo, the flower unfolds itself

Within you and Behold! You

Are there as though one apart

from the blossoming of your soul. 

                  2

Were I young once only


I would not know now


how to walk with trees


or fly south with the geese.

                  3

Would you know yourself

If you were to see the beauty

Of your eyes in mine

Or would you see the mountains

Rise up and kiss the sky?

                  4

The journey

makes this rock

a place to rest --

so too the moon.

                  5

Be still.

Even the wind may rest.

 

 

 

Kiss and Tell

 
Who but a god

Could look at you

Sweetly laughing

And not die


For a kiss, dying

Again and again

Like gods of spring

that never truly


Die. Your lips

Like night

hold back the day

And close my eyes . . .

Awake! Awake!

You are no god

To kiss and tell

Of life and death.

 

What's left to say

He was watching the parade
The clowns, the words, the trumpeteers
And in his dream he was awake
Or he was awake and dreaming.
He closed his eyes.
No matter, he heard the drums.
He opened his eyes a second time
And saw himself marching
Now to a different tune
A martial cha-cha-cha
And wet his pants.
There is little more to tell.
The daily Tribune records
That during the St. Jude Day Celebration
Saturday passed and a forgotten man
Had died, shouting blessings
Upon one and all. 

The Sound that Wind Makes

(for Maya)

I want words to breathe like I do, weep when I do, and bruise easily.

I want words to dream and remember those dreams that first set me on this path.

I want words to grow old with me and become like the lines in my face and tell me
      old stories that keep my stumbling spirit from falling and new ones that tell of
      love forever young and freely given.
I want words of no regret even for the sorry waste of all I have left undone, unsaid.

I want words to hold up a mirror and see there all who at some time have gone hand
      in hand with me through this life.

O what a wondrously crowded reflection that would be, all of them in the morning
     of their lives, young and old alike.  

O that words would fall like these tears and mark the page in silver and gold, the true
colors of night, that these words would live on in their hearts and find some rest there,
though I myself be nothing but the sound the restless wind makes on a cold night,
the wind that sweeps down the mountainside and past all the houses in which loved ones
have died and gathers up all those lost souls and scatters what is but dust and ash
through the deep space of time. 

River Notes

As I sit here writing tonight at my desk I am on the river and see myself in the flow of all things . . . the sounds of water, bird and wind are my voice, and all my senses are alive as though the stars were at elbow and foot . . . I breathe in the night and orion, aldebaran, and procyon come closer, and there you are again, musa, luna puella, your body curving and folding in the current, laughing and inviting me to dive with you beneath the rippling and lose myself at last, these words nothing but the falling rain.

Being Blue

(for my students)

Just remember the orange
Is not in the orange.

It is always you
Like a thumb in the eye.

The blue sky
So glorious today

Is also you.
Be beautiful!

Vision Quest

He was losing his grip on everyday realities. Location and time became but a wandering tide, as if the sea had forgotten how to breathe. Then it happens. A skyless bird dives into song, his wingéd heart soars and he dies again and again until he is one, no one, nowhere, whole, nothing, lifted by the love of beauty that sustains all things, bird and air and light but a single note, the silent pulse of a cosmic drum.

As you once were

Set out beneath the stars
on a solitary raft
that drifts along the shore
on a current
that will bring you
out to sea and sky
beyond all imagining

as you once were
as you will be again.

Death makes strangers of us all

I met her first in high school. Her name then was Alice Cyan. We dated and did what teenagers usually do, being full of hormones. When we went off to college, we wished each other luck and that was it. I met her again in law school, though her name now was Francine Bedower. She didn’t remember me, but I knew her the first moment I heard her laugh. It was like wind rattling through dry leaves.  She was beautiful. I mean, really beautiful, statuesque, as they say.  I slept with her once then, but so did almost everyone else. We didn’t see each other all that much and, though we graduated from law school in the same class, there was really no reason to stay in touch. When I met her the third time, her name now Townsy Harper, she was working for a law firm in San Francisco and I happened to be close by. We would meet for drinks. She was divorced, had two kids, a daughter and a son, and a lot of cats, but no dogs. She had made a point of that, no dogs. She had grown so thin I almost didn’t recognize her, but she knew me. She reminded me that when she and I were dating back in high school, her father had died and that’s why she liked me. That puzzled me a little, but okay, that’s as good a reason as any I suppose. Then she  stopped coming by. When we met for the fourth and last time, I was in the hospital for what I was assured would be a routine colonoscopy. Her name was now Sally Caulder, same last name as mine, though spelled differently as it turned out. It startled me at the time. She was stooped over, staring down at me as I lay there, waiting my turn. I had recognized her right off, that same laugh, but tart. When I asked her who she was now, she spat her name Caulder in my face and told me she didn’t know me and that she never wanted to see me again, biting down finally on "asshole" but seeming to look through me like glass. I can't say I blame her. After all, as I was soon to learn, she did not have long to live either.

Who could love someone like you

He loved everybody, boys, girls, women and men. He found lovable what others considered shortcomings like protruding teeth or flapping ears or a nasty looking scar across the forehead.  He even found drooling a reason to rejoice. He couldn’t help himself. Others thought he was delusional or simply a dirty old man, until one day, he suffered a head injury in a bicycle accident.  After he recovered, he seemed to find crippling fault with everyone.  His constant refrain was, “Who could love someone like you?” He said this whether the person was overweight, stuttered or blinked too much. Some remembered the “dirty old man” and said to each other, “He used to be such a loving human being.” They asked him what had changed and he said, “I woke up.” One day he took a good look at himself in the mirror and saw all the faults he saw in others in himself and banged his head as hard as he could against the glass. This time he didn’t wake up.

Love is so strange

Every time he looked at her he scowled.  She finally had enough and asked him what was his problem.  He said, “You’re so beautiful.  I can’t help myself.”  She didn’t understand. “But your face is so ugly when you look at me?” He didn’t understand and, of course, all the while he was scowling and making himself look ugly.  Finally, she asked, “Can you smile?” and he answered, “I thought I was.” “No, a smile looks like this,” and she smiled for him. He scowled. Then, for some reason, she kissed him. When people see the two of them together now, hand in hand, he scowling and she smiling, they wonder aloud, “What an odd couple!" Love is so strange.

Song for Richard

You spoke the only true word I know
And that word became an open wound
They cleaned with lye, not knowing
Your pain, your tears were like wine
That would save their shining souls.  

Pick up the rifle, son
No you said
That’s no SIR, son
Pick up the damn gun!
No you said. 

They called the captain
They called the priest
They called the doctor
Are you crazy, son?

No no no

Come with us!
You walked away.

I see you now forty years later
alone on that far thundering shore
    “I will not fight your fucking war!”
You are carving a face out of driftwood
the face behind the face of everyone I meet
I have it still and think of you.

You came back. True to your word.
And they sent you to Leavenworth
Where your bruises became sores
Your sores gaping wounds
Your screams the blessing
That saves our sorry souls. 

If you speak

This silence wants not your word

unless it be like wind to flower

raising its hallelujah to the bloom

of sky, unknowing as morning

kisses are to lovers not knowing

what else to say or do but sigh:

if you speak, I will surely die. 

A Boy at Play

I celebrate youth, both the youth in my students, young and old, and the great unspent youth in myself. When I was growing up, my parents allowed me to run free of any apparent supervision. I literally leapt from one building to the next, dodged trains on the railway tracks, gathered tobacco from cigarette butts to smoke in my corncob pipe, roughhoused with friends, often leaving each other gleefully black and blue, ran naked in the summer rain before disapproving eyes, imagined myself a good guy in combat with all manner of monsters and evildoers, and everywhere I looked for a risk worth taking. In short, I came to know myself through play.

Of course, some of these adventures did not turn out well. In one instance, I opened a large gash in the back of my head from a tumbling fall. I was in hot pursuit of an outlaw and tried to leap over the railing of a porch, intending to land on my feet about 8 feet below. Where I took stitches still occasionally aches. I lost teeth, broke bones, and often came home crying. But I survived my own recklessness and I now see that such adventures have become the stuff of which my life has been and continues to be made. I will not speak here of my adolescent and young adult adventures, except to say that they took on a more consequential turn. I was told at various times in my life that I was unpatriotic, irreverent, and even mentally ill. And for all these judgments there were warnings, threats, and consequences. I now see it all as a happy adventure, though a few of the individual episodes could have cost me my life. There was one occasion as I was hitchhiking about that a man told me he would kill me unless I had sex with him. I refused and I survived, intact. That and other experiences taught me that there are no guarantees.

Now, as I look back and forward, I see that most, but not all, of my outward exploration has turned inward. I understand my writing of poetry as an inner version of that youthful play. I play at ideas and images and words, and there is a risk. I speak not here of the risk of ridicule, though that is real, but the risk of losing the very meaning of life -- because words and ideas by which we explore the meaning of our lives may turn out to be nonsense. And worse yet, unlivable.

Play reveals meaning. Some will see this as a frivolous idea. So let us begin our play with the idea of universal justice, that all men are created equal. Absolutely equal! Without qualification or reservation. No serious person would ever propose such a reckless idea, let alone try to live it. It lives first in the imagination of a boy at play. I remain on the lookout for a risk worth taking.

Storytelling

To begin, all that is necessary
Is to close your eyes
To the darkness around you
Like you did last night when you looked at me
And forgot my name.

Let's begin again to tell stories
Of the train station and lost luggage 
Of all those lost souls on the prowl
Like tigers hiding
Like me, a

Shadow sighing
For a name or a destination
Somewhere near the sea
Where I can hear your heart beating --
O how I wanted you then!

Surely you know me now.
Surely you know I am love.

What she came to say

Though he is dying and lost in time,
She will not permit the truth be spoken
Or any other game be played
Until she says what she came to say
To one who knows her wilder ways.

(The sun and moon now count the time;
The trees and shadows bend his mind.)

She, undressing on the forest floor,
All green and gold and shimmering song,
Takes him to ground and shapes his soul:
You will not die and never know
What it is to love and be alone.  

(She holds him in a last embrace
And turns his eyes to see her face.)

That Bird

I. 

When I came to school today, I did not come alone. There was a bear with me. No one seemed to notice except for one young girl whose eyes were filled with the glory of the morning and whose red hair played in the light air.  She gave me a look, laughed, and asked who my friend was. "What do you mean?" I  replied. She laughed again and said "you can't fool me" and flew up into a tree.  Later, walking from one building to another, I heard a bird call, and there she was walking beside me. Cautious, I asked, "Who are you?"  She seemed surprised I didn’t know.  She said she was my student and had been with me from the beginning. This time when she flew away, I growled annoyance and padded on hand and foot to my next class.  

II.

So, I thought I was alone on that beach when a sudden gust of wind blew my old tattered hat away.  It was like the hat had wings or was some sort of kite, diving and lifting over the sea, but having no string attached, it disappeared over the water and surely landed wherever it is that kites go once they are set free.  But then there was this bird call. I turned around and there, where there had been not one solitary person for months, was a girl wearing my hat.  She laughed at my surprise, handed me my hat, and flew happily off.  I knew then I was not alone.  

                                                            

Man

What goes
like a wolf
in the morning
like the sea
in the afternoon
and the wind
at night?

The wolf is desire.
The sea is the journey.
The wind is what remains.

The answer is always man.

All that blue

Your beautiful head, rich in curls and gold,

Lopped off here at my feet, drools, smiles

Makes this day and every day more lovely

For all the horror the world brings to you

As a gift for all that sky and all that blue.

The only true word I know

I don’t know how you know you have to make a change. You just do it and think about the whys and wherefores later. And in any case, I would only be making it up to sound like I wasn’t crazy or something, as though I actually had reasons for doing what I did. Maybe it was the rain. Who in his right mind would throw a few things in a backpack, leave his car and bank account behind, and just set off walking in the rain?  That's what I did. At nightfall I found a place along the side of the road to sleep, but I couldn’t stop shaking.  It didn't stop raining until early the next morning when the sun came up as though for the first time. 

I had started out in Rhode Island but hitched rides that left me the next night in Georgia and the next day I was in the panhandle of Florida, walking down some back country road that would take me wherever I was going. I really had no idea, but I was going and I was going to stay gone. I know that this all sounds crazy, but it didn’t feel that way then. It felt right and for the first time in a long time my head was clear. 

When I had started out I had only a couple packs of cigarettes and about twenty dollars which paid for coffee and more cigarettes for awhile. The kindness of strangers supplied the rest. Folks who picked me up were curious about what I was doing and where I was going. What interested them most was that I didn’t know. They saw my sorry shoes, shook their heads, and gave me money for a meal at the end of the ride. One man said he had never picked up anyone before but now he thought he would the next time he saw some young person thumbing a ride. It had somehow been interesting. I told him that was a bad idea. 

I went wherever a ride would take me and that’s how I found myself in a small West Virginia town, where an old preacher picked me up and took me home for a meal. He showed me with pride the wooden casket he had made with his own hands and how he was all set for eternity. He called it his boat. It was really no more than a crate, though its dimensions where about right for a coffin. I don't know about eternity. What I was really curious about were the huge old books that were lying on the casket as if to keep the lid on. He said the truth was in those books and I could see for myself if I wanted. The first one I opened had the picture of a  young woman, tied to a stake, her breasts exposed, looking up at the heavens ablaze with lightning.  I swear her whole body looked like it was electrically charged as though she were having an orgasm or something. Beneath the picture were the words, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” I turned over the page and saw the words "I ad crucem!" scrawled over the English text. I knew what those words meant alright: "Go to the cross!"  On another page was the picture of some wild man who was having a crimson X branded into his chest. After that I was in a hurry to go, but the old guy kept me there talking about how half the town was dying of cancer because everyone was marrying their own kin and goin’ to hell. I got the crazy idea that he was about to ask me to nail him and his books up in that crate and set him adrift. I told him I had to go. He wanted to know why I was in such a hurry. I  told him someone was waiting for me in Winchester, which was just across the state line. He said he would drive me there, but I just walked toward the door and thanked him. I closed the door behind me and didn’t look back.  

My next couple of rides landed me in New Orleans. I was beginning to realize that though everything was new to me, I was not quite a stranger to the folks I met. In New Orleans, I fell in with others about my age who looked just as lost as I did. They had liberated an abandoned house, worked at odd jobs and did drugs at night. When I didn’t partake, they became suspicious and shortly came to the conclusion that I was a narc. I had never heard that word before but its meaning soon became clear to me. They said my story about going wherever the road would take me just didn’t add up. That wasn’t the last time I was suspected of being a narc, but later it somehow didn’t matter. They could just think whatever they wanted. The first time, however, it was a shock. I had been glad to have a place to crash for a few days, but they told me I had better leave.

I ended up spending a month or so in New Orleans, making some money by working out of a day load outfit that sent out sober men like me on jobs that paid ten dollars a day. If you didn’t quit the job – loading, unloading, throwing bricks out of boxcars and digging holes – you got paid at the end of each day. In the late afternoon after I was paid, I felt like some goddam saint. Cripples, men with no legs, drunks and drifters like me were lined up along the sidewalk with their hands out. One fella, mounted on a board with rollers, had no arms or legs, just a cup. I had a simple rule. I would give away half of what I made and keep the rest. It was more than enough for my needs. They would call me father, though I was younger than they were. Maybe I looked older because like them I had grown so thin. A fellow worker had his own room where he let me sleep on the floor and he knew all the churches and other places where a person could find a free meal, though sometimes you had to pay by praying after you ate. I didn’t like that and said so. I ended up basically stealing the food before the praying started. The problem with that was that they were on the lookout for you the next time. At night, I wandered the French Quarter looking in the jazz joints and at the girls who looked right through me as if I weren't there at all. I can't say I blame them.   

I forgot to tell you that before I left to nowhere in particular, I had been a desk clerk at an otherwise respectable hotel called the Pilgrim Inn that catered to a certain class of working girl. They were all somebody’s daughter and they sent the money they made back to their families. Some paid guys who protected them and would beat them up to keep them in line. I would take payment for rooms from the johns and take them up in the elevator first and then the girls. It became routine. I liked the girls, but they all thought I was queer because I hadn’t done anything with them even when they offered for free. They would laugh and ask me if I knew which hole to put it in. I didn't mind. Everything had been going along fine until one night I was arrested along with the girls in a police raid and spent the night in jail. The next day they just sent me home. The hotel's lawyers had worked something out. The girls had to pay a fine. After that, I felt like I almost belonged and everyone treated me as if I were one of them. Then one night a little later I got beat up really bad by a guy who demanded to know where a certain girl was and when I wouldn’t tell him, he came around the desk and let me have it. It all happened so fast I didn’t even have time to be afraid or even feel any pain. I was kind of numb or stunned I guess. After that, the girls treated me like a brother, which I guess I was.

After I had saved a little money in New Orleans, I set out again. I had heard from others about riding the rails. It was fast and straight but they also told tales of railroad bulls that discouraged me. I thought hitching was safer. My first ride, a long sleepy cruise through the night, took me to Texas, a little west of Austin. It had been a sweet ride; the stars out the open window seemed to pump their light right into my veins. My very next ride, however, changed everything, but I have written about that before. I don't really want to go into it again except to say I came out whole after a man tried to force me to have sex with him and maybe for the first time in my life I had been brave. That was then. What I really want to talk about is Richard whom I had met a year before all this craziness began, never saw again, and miss every day of my life. Before we parted he gave me a small carving, made from an odd piece of wood found on an east Texas beach. He had used only the sharp edge of a stone. It was like something out of the prehistory of man and had three faces on each side, one emerging out of another.  It is the face of every man I meet. For forty-six years I have kept this carving with me. It really is Richard's story that needs telling, not mine, though maybe his is in some way mine as well. You see, he taught me the only true word I know and he taught me by example and it cost him dearly.  He was the most honest person I have ever known and the bravest.   

https://www.hhimwich.com/hughlings_himwich/2016/03/song-for-richard.html

https://www.hhimwich.com/hughlings_himwich/2010/04/this-i-believe.html

Photograph by Her Himwich 

now east now west

 

now east now west

the road has a mind of its own

and my feet obey

 

the rest of me stays behind
treelike

 

above

the sky grows gentle

 

MY HEART OPENS

the road goes on

as if not knowing

which way is best

On Poetry

Poetry is inspired song. The breath is the soul of the poem. The poet gathers the air around, the blue from the sky and her curling eyes, the warmth from the sun and his lover's body . . . and sings. The air is measured, the lover's body rolls with the waves and her eyes become one with the night. In the morning, the poet crawls out of the sky like a bear, stretching full out, searching again for the sweetness, searching in the movement of cloud and leaf and desire.  He sings. If his words resound in skin and bone, in the stone-cold night, if he enchants the air with his song -- it is poetry.

Metaphor

Metaphor is the mystery. The poetic act is both a participation in and apprehension of that mystery.  A poem may affect us by its lyricism and its passion, by its matching sound with sense -- but without metaphor and the mystery it confers, poetry belongs solely to the decorative or rhetorical arts. It is by metaphor that a poem draws us back again and again to trace the lines that lead to the heart of being and to ourselves.

The Meaning of a Poem

The meaning of a poem comes not from the words, but from the transmutation that occurs in the heart of the poet at the time the poem is written.  In all poetry that is not simply decorative, there is an elemental activity of consciousness, a sustained golden moment that triumphs over raw experience.  The meaning of a poem is that activity of mind, triumphant over the despair that the words of the poem may convey.  

The poem that follows has elicited the dreaded no comment except from one good friend who did me the kindness of asking about the word ‘gimble'. Nevertheless, I continue to enjoy the poem as if it were written by someone else for whom poetry brings into view such beauty that we but suffer the more for its absence. It is a backward way of praising poetry.  That’s what I think antipoetry is doing. Anyway, here is the worthless little bit of a stinker in its final ode-rous form. Hold your nose . . . . .   

 Poetry Stinks

    Poetry gives us just enough of what is real
    to make us howl and gimble in the night,
    too far from moon and what is our fate
    To make it right.  It stinks a lot!

At Seventy-Two

As I have grown older, I have plunged into language as though I were one of Melville's Catskill eagles. Poetry has given me a kind of second sight that sustains me in the dark places and makes me invisible in the light.   Now, at seventy-two, poetry is leading me into a deeper knowledge: to be truly alive means to experience myself as essentially compounded of earth and wind and all other living things. It all breathes fire. I now want more than words. I seek to understand simile and metaphor as reality itself.  Man is as much wolf as wind, as much rain as mind and so I would be.  I know that I am approaching the age of oblivion whose plentitude is ALL, an empty mirror that is yet full of life.  What I tell my students is that to be truly alive is to strive passionately for one’s own truth. My truth is the poetry of mind and heart and of Being itself.  

Two fingers or three

(boy girl, sitting on a bench in lamplight)

There's something else bothering you, isn’t there?

No, I’m fine.

No you’re not.

I tell you I am fine.

I’ll believe that when you can tell me how many fingers I am holding up. 

Two.

No, I was holding up three. 

No you weren’t.

Yes I was. Try again. How many fingers?

Two!

No, three again. Something's not right.

Well, there’s nothing wrong with my eyes.

Maybe not, but I know there’s something bothering you.

You’re right! YOU are bothering me.

I knew there was something.

I hate how you always think you know.

Like now?

Exactly! I'm leaving.  

Then leave.

I can’t.

Why not?

Because I don’t know where to go.

Home?

No.

Why not?

I can’t tell you.

Well, you can come home with me.

Thank you. 

Two fingers or three?

Just drop it. 

What?

You got what you wanted, right?

What's that?

Me.

Summer Rain

If it would only rain my words would pour forth like girls and boys too young to know shame O they are bold as I would be the rain falls I am young again dance touch while the music plays so falls the rain O she is here there are tears of joy tears songs of praise for the beauty of the day earth yields up its flowers to her hand turns to gentle thunder her body lifts and holds her laughter makes the night shudder unbinds her hair and falls to me now here now there like summer rain

Leaf Fall

Follow the path
of leaf fall,
the short cut home
twixt sky and dream.

When you're there,
you'll be right here,
safe with me. 

Surprise

Suddenly
this morning
I knew the rainbow
to be a bird

of my soul
taking flight 
and vanishing
into cloud and sky

as I am bound 
to do, shimmering
not with color
but surprise

to be at last
not here. 

Blue hair and all that

For -Bel

In the beginning your hair was blue like fire and you had webbed feet and no knees. You were different and beautiful and strange and somehow despite all the daily crushing normalization, all those pretty pictures of what we are not, despite all the soulless practicalities of life and more and there is so damn much more, especially the cool hypocrisy required just to get along, you are still strange and different and beautiful, blue hair and all.   

She: What? Where did you get all that? Was it something I said?

He: You tell me.  Where does 'all that' come from?

She: That’s not an answer and you know it.

He: Sometimes I don’t seem to know the difference between a question and an answer.

She: That seems pretty basic to me. 

He: The “not knowing”?

She: No, “the difference”.  It’s the simplest thing. You can’t keep answering a question with a question.  It's annoying. 

He: Well, then, let me try again:  a question is when you hear the wind calling and an answer is when you stop listening.

She: You’re so strange!

He: I suppose so. Hey, is that blue hair natural?

She: You tell me.  What do you think?

He: And your feet, they’re webbed? And you have --

She: I know, I know, I have no knees and all that.  

She had had quite enough and told him so, though the air was moving. When she spoke again, she asked almost in a whisper, "Is my hair really blue?" But this time, all she heard was wind. 

 

 

a dead-wall reverie

Ibidom. Is no thinking thing here but the peepinghouse round it goes is there nothing there from sea to rounda coda no knowing no browbeating to hoedown the adamses and damses looking roundaway the wailing goes awagginawaning about the off wall but there shebares all to what is not there the museymusik makes you trot and drop so rainruns and her lastofall. There!

Oranges

He was determined this time not to cut his fingers as he sliced the oranges.  He would focus and keep his fingers well away from the blade.   He remembered all too well how previously his blood had flowed onto the oranges and pooled on the plate.  He knew it wasn’t just because he was getting old, fading into memory and the lure of the trees and his first kiss.  She had been as nervous as he and had closed her eyes.  Now all he could think of was feeding her oranges and the taste on her lips.  And suddenly, she had bitten his lip, making it bleed. And then, more softly, she was feeding him. She was delicious and he . . . . he was lost in the trees.  He put the knife down and wept.  

Touch

Your skin like this ground

Upon which all things run

Is scarred and cracked

yet yearns for life

and wordless words

that speak of love. 

You lie there

and think of spring. 

You are as old as rain

and ever young. 

A way of dying

He held her feathers in his hand

But the wind took them for itself.

There was nothing but these words

To write on this dry coarse paper,

Her skin, the red ink she died of

Running off like a mountain stream.

What poets do

A hawk is as little

a darting thought

or glance

As it is a sky-wolf

or windborne voice.

It is a name

for what cannot be

named within ourselves

and would else be lost.

So we stop and die

But would bravely say,

We dive like hawks

and climb the sky. 

So deep his eyes

                        for mickey

There is life and death

and life again, ground

to common cosmic

dust. Here we end

and begin again,

his eyes so deep

we find in death

his life and love

within ourselves.  

On not explaining ourselves away

It is a common response in light of all that neuroscience has told us of our circuitry to ask how a machine, however complicated, could ever exercise free choice and thereby allow individuals to be responsible for their actions, as we in fact experience ourselves to be. If we are machines, then free choice is not possible. We might well ask if there is not some other approach that would resolve the question of personal responsibility, one that does not require any determination regarding free will or the findings of neuroscience. One such possibility is simply to look to our engagement with life and allow our actions to speak for themselves as irreducible facts that are not to be explained away by any manner of ulterior reasoning. Our answers to the questions of value that life inevitably puts to us would be thus plainly stated and speak of the only reality and the only truth we can ever know. 

 

 

 

No, not I / Revision

No, Not I*

I did not do
the thing I did,
nor say aught
that I have said.

Nor will I die
Like other men.
I will decline,
and lie in bed.

            *Hamlet, III.i, 96-97; V, gravediggers

 

            *    *    *

 

Revision

If only 'lie'
would take a nap,
but like my tale
it likes to wag: 

nor did I say
what I have said, 

Which I prefer, but
would miss the play.

Most would say, what’s the point?
Such slender threads are all my thought.

“I am not Prince Hamlet nor meant to be” --
Eliot says and does not say,
revels here are ever ended.

Dying well

She wore no more
than her eyes,
She held the ring
and spoke her vow. 
Simple as breath,
as wind she died.

We turned now
to hear him speak,
but all we heard,
as he fell, was
the fall of rain
in every word. 

We all agreed
they both died well.  
We could not hear
each to each
their vows betrayed
in the river's deep.

Reading lesson

(for Peter)

Mom, who is dad talking to? Friends who write.

Where did he meet them? In books.

Is he talking to himself? Yes.

Is he crazy? Yes, a little.

Will I be crazy like dad one day? Just keep reading.

Can I read dad’s books some day? Of course, he is talking to you.

Are you crazy too, Mom? A little. I am talking to you, aren’t I?

But Dad is so quiet when he writes.  Yes, he talks and talks.

Like me? Yes, little one, like you.