7/27/21 - EXPLAINING IT ALL

EXPLAINING IT ALL TO MY DOG REBA

THE DAY AFTER

the day after
Independence Day,
July fifth, the day after the seasonal peak
in sales of fireworks and plastic flag
pins, the day after sanctimonious
right-wing politicians profess their deep love
for the very same country
they continue to undermine
for political purpose,
the day after left-wing dingbats
join their radical-right counterparts
in finding government
conspiracies
behind everything from post office closings
to the traffic ticket they got
after they were caught on camera running a red light,
to the intrusive government ban
against copulating
naked
on main street, to the provision of polio immunization
to the children of the Taliban controlled
backwaters of Afghanistan, I mean, you name it,
from male menopause to hairy moles
on women’s noses,
all due, according to these people,
to the machinations of the fascist/socialist government and their coterie
of bureaucrats, lawyers, sociologists, sex advice counselors,
and Fox/MSNBC liars, commentators and scoundrels
exerting mind control over the ignorant
American
mainstream who would rather get their news from
supermarket tabloids who at least understand
the important things like who’s getting divorced
because they refuse to engage in sex play
involving diapers and feathery paddles,
and the latest on Lindsey’s alien encounters
etc.
etc.
etc.

and who can blame them,
when everyone lies and nothing can be believed,
why not believe the most scandalous
and interesting options
available

let’s face it,
I got my periodic rash of virulent ravings
from that right-wing, fascist fellow this morning,
the most anti-American of all the people I know
who hide behind
the American flag, the flake who takes it
upon himself
to berate me for my sanity

and I have to admit
it does shake me to know that this fellow
who used to be a pretty good poet
could descend into such determined madness

making me want to just rant and rant
like I was as crazy
as he is

This poem is by Mexican Nobel Prize winning poet, anthropologist, philosopher and art and literature critic Octavio Paz. It is from his book, Configerations, the first of his major collections to be published in the United States. It is a dual language book, with Spanish and English translations on facing pages. The poem I selected for this post was translated by Charles Tomlinson.




Ustica

The successsive suns of summer,
The succession of teh sun and of its summers,
All the suns,
The sole, the sol of sols,
Now become
Obstinate and tawny bone,
Darkness-before-the-storm
Of matter cooled.

First of stone,
Pine-cone of lava,
Ossuary,
Not earth
Nor island either,
Rock off a rock-face,
Hard peach,
Sun-drop petrified.

Through the night one hears
The breathing of cisterns,
The panting of fresh water
Troubled by the sea.
The hour is late and the light, greening.
The obscure body of the wine
Asleep in jars
Is a darker and cooler sun.

Here the roses of the depths
Is a candelabrum of pinkish veins
Kindled on teh sea-bed.
Ashore, the sun extinguishes it,
Pale, chalky lace
As if desire were worked by death.

Cliffs the color of sulpur, 
High austere stones.
You are beside me.
Your thoughts are black and golden.
To extend a hand
Is to gather a cluster of truths intact.
Below, between sparkling rocks
Goes and comes
A sea full of arms.
Vertigoes. The light hurls itself headlong
I looked you in the face,
I saw into the abyss:
Mortality is transparency.

Ossuary: paradise:
Our roots, knoted
In sex, in the undone mouth
Of the buried mother.
Incestuous trees
Tha mantain
A garden on the dead's domain.
 

I continue to push my art, even though my first formal showing won't be until early next year. But, as a long time self-promoter, I believe it's never too early to flack your jams and jellies.

From Seven Beats a Second, my first book.



STORM WARNING

gray and white gulls
swirl overhead,
thick,
like a cloud, 
blown in the wind
like smoke
from a cane field fire

the shipyard
acoss the bay
is hidden 
by black clouds
of rain
lying across the water
like crepe on a coffin

lightning
arcs between the clouds
and thunder echoes
against the bluff

I hear you in the driveway,
slamming the car door
with a crack
​like a rifle in the dark

This a public health warning from someone who smoked for 40 years and who has now not smoked for the last 25, a fact to which I owe my continued life in my 78 year.

WARNING LABEL

GODDAMN CRITICS EVERYWHERE

she has watched me for several days
now

as I sit at my table
and type

finally
she speaks

“I’ve been watching you,”
she said,

“and I’ve been wondering
what you do.”

“I’m a writer,”
I said.

“oh,”
she said,

“what kind of writer,”
she asked.

“a poet,”
I said.

“Oh,” she said,
“what’s your name?”

I told her
and she asked,

“Are you a good
poet?”

“I’m okay,”
I said.

“I was wondering,”
she said,

“cause
I never heard of you.”

“I never said
I was a world-famous poet,”

I said.
“Well, that’s true,”

she said,
“and I guess you’re not.”

“not what?”
I asked.

“`World-renown,”
she said,

as she turned her attention
to whatever trivial, unimportant,

non-world-renown thing
she was doing

before
and I was thinking

if one of the two of us
ever turns out to be world-

renown, it’s sure as hell
going to be me

(with my seven published books,
purchased by literally

dozens of readers
who are neither family

nor friend)
before anyone knows

her name from either Adam or Eve,
and satisfied that I have

put her
in her place

I return to my computer
to continue my daily chase for

truth
and beauty and

by-god
show her

how this world-renown thing
works

ANOTHER PRACTICE BOARD

This poem is by Adrienne Rich, taken from her book, Dark Field of the Republic.



AND NOW

And now as  you read these poems
- you whose eyes and hands I love
- you whose mouth and eves I love
- you whose words and minds I love -
don't think I was trying to state a case
or construct a scenery:
I tried to listen to
the public voice of our time
tried to survey our public space
as best I could
- tried to remember and stay
faithful to details, how
precisely how the air moved
and where the clock's hands stood
and who was in charge of definitions
and who stood by receiving them
when the name of compassion
was changed to the name of guilt
when to feel with a human stranger
​was declared obsolete.

JUST A LITTLE POLITICS

Right-wingers have long been persistent crybabies, complaining constantly that it's not 1955 again as they make their way to their gated neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, the left is becoming more and more the same with their endless and never changing compilation of "oh mes and mys" that they load on you at the slightest instance of your demonstration clear-headedness.

Stop it!

Photos from a mid-October visit to the Blueridge Parkway, Strong cold winds of early winter pushing against our back.

FINDING MY BOOK IN A SECOND-HAND BOOK STORE

so I found my book
in a second-hand book store
in a city far from home

do I think:

oh, wonderful, someone read my book
and brought it here
so that it might be purchased
and enjoyed by a second reader…

or:

oh, woe, this book, this labor of love,
discarded, done, old news, no
leaves pressed between the pages,
no carefully preservation for poetry-minded
progeny, a remembrance forgot,
not to be cherished and saved for another generation
or maybe for a current lover
who will hold it dear as
they hold you,
oh wonderful and sensitive people
who sleep every night with a book of fine
poetry tucked beneath their pillow
never to sleep over
mine…

or, simply,

oh, look, someone bought my book, money
in my pocket, easy-earned cash from a few
small scribbles

on the road to riches now,
let's go out for
dinner…

---

taking in the sights
in a new city, finding
the familiar
where never expected

RECONSIDERING THE PROBABILITIES OF GOD

SIBERIA ANXIETY 
​
it’s
like a damn Siberian winter
out there…

well,
not really…

but it feels that way,
after a week of cold, damp,
dark days…

vampire weather

that sucks the blood-life
right out of me

weather that slows down
to a turbid slug
the synapses that might
in better days
come up with a new idea,
some spark of creativity,
some little flash
of a phrase
that might link lives
one to another, conjoin hearts
one to another, something to spark an idea
that leaps the gaps of time
and space, a spark that might
open minds bound
tight one from another, minds
closed in distrust and confrontation,
each against the other…

that’s what this weather
takes from me
for I am a clear sky
bright moon warm sun
type of person, sometimes a rain person
too, not rain that hangs frigid
in the air, but rain that I can watch
fall, rain that i can hear come flooding
off the roof, rain that causes the creek
rise and roar…

instead
a week of dark days
and I can feel that same dark
rising in me

EVERY POET SHOULD FIND THEIR GROUPIE

there
was a beat poet,
dead now as are most
of the early days beats (and considering
how they lived, the wonder
that so many lived
so long)

this now-dead poet
never wrote his poems down,
performed them extemporaneously
at the clubs where dark-eyed poets hung out
drinking
thick coffee and existential dread,
his poetry known now
only because of friends who went
to listen to his poems
and transcribed them as he made them up…

now
consider Homer
by fire light, telling his epic stories
of heroes and monsters,
while in the flickering
shadows
acolytes
wrote them down
for us to read today

---

how fortunate for Homer
and for us
to read him now
only because of his
sharp-eared, quick-writing
groupies…

perhaps,
for the sake of immortality I should
recruit
a groupie of my
own

WHAT'S NEW

a big Ford F-350
is idlying noisly next to me at a stop light,
on its back bumper, a bumper sticker prodly proclaims,
"my daughter is a U.S. Marine"

and I think back to my military service,
four years, 1965-1969, and recall not seeing
a single female soldier until, at the end,
the Captain who processed my discharge...

it is one of the few benefits of being old,
every day a new unthinkable
beomes common place
and it's one of the very good reasons
we all want to stay alive, cause
only god knows what's coming next

and what sentient being dosn't want 
to be here to see it

A last photo for this post cause it seems kind of droopy not to do something with color in it.



FAIRIES FLEE A SEQUESTERED MOON

One  more, since my proofer is on holiday.

But, yea, she's back.


PECHEUW, PECHEUW
​
I figure there are at least 75,000
Mexican restaurants
in San Antonio,
and only about 5 or 6 them distinguish themselves
from all the others
and it takes eating a lot
of lousy Mexican food to find them
catching up with them
are Chinese, Thai, Korean, and Vietnamese,
numbering about 50,000
but I only go to one of them,
the one with the great pad Thai
meanwhile
I’ve only found three German restaurants,
two closed recently and the survivor is downtown
where parking cost as much as a meal…
one of the ones that closed
was source of my favorite bratwurst
with red cabbage and the best oven fries in the western hemisphere
it was owned and run by a woman
who always sat up front
smoking cigarette after cigarette,
a GI bride I always assumed
because
it was just the way I always saw her
nice woman
always said hello,
killed by the cigarettes is my guess
because she always had that
look
of a cigarette-smoking-person,
gaunt and shrouded
in smoke,
death always looking over her shoulder…
---
which
reminds me
the booth in front of me, a kid,
maybe 4, maybe 5,
going pecheuw, pecheuw,
as he points his fingers like a gun
at his big sister
the question,
how do boys seem to know at birth
that finger guns
go
pecheuw, pecheuw
is it perhaps
genetic?
born to finger-shoot
big sisters
and other interlopers
into the joys of boy-morning?
---
and why such a deep philosophical
and mystical query
in the middle a Sunday morning
breakfast…
because the kid is now pointing his finger
and going
pecheuw, pecheuw
at me
and I haven’t done a damn
thing to deserve it,
nothing,
at least, as bad
as his big sister does
every day