HERE AND NOW
(AGAIN)
 red embrace so many lights in the neighborhood… porch lights area lights motion sensor lights the battle of human against night and the dark continues with every downing of the sun thus it was, always so - fire, freedom from the black travelers of night, held at bay at the flickering red edge of the camp fire always waiting for the fire to die… still they wait today those shadow things always there on the black edges of our imagination and still we push them back, from the falling to the rising sun we make our circles and build our fires, wrapping all we love in the fire’s red embrace  in a Mexican courtyard, 1959 a Mexican courtyard under a rhinestone studded sky on a black, border town night… she dances, slowly, like a cat, around the courtyard, pausing before every table to stretch, again, like a cat, perfect in its shadow body, feet barely brushing the dirt floor, compact, sleek, full breasts, dark Indian nipples erect, no burlesque, no go-go dancer, nothing overtly sexual, more like a cat stretching, except she is naked and it is a whorehouse and it has to be about sex, sex as a cat can be like sex, slow and sensual in every step, every smooth, silky step a caress of the night…. 15-year-old boys clutch their tight crotch under the table and wonder if the girls they know could ever be like this  The rest of the poems in this post are from my book, Always to the Light, available, as are all my eBooks, wherever eBooks are sold, including, most prominently, Amazon. There is a dark side to life and a light side. One can choose which life to lead, dark or light. This cover, illustrated by the photo, says to always look to the light, the light being a more rewarding and fun and safer approach than the dark side.  From where I sit from where I sit I cansee past a small grove of winter-bare oak to Interstate-10, east & west routes, the one way to Houston and, through Houston, Louisiana and points east and north beyond the other route, followed westerly 600 miles through hill country and high desert to El Paso and four states beyond, the orange setting sun reflected on Pacific waters... most of the people I see passing are not going so far, most know the futherthest you travel in any direction, the closer you get to home, so why not just stay there, untraveled, but satisfied, right where you and your life belong... myself? I don't know that I've ever been at home so I'm always pulled between leave and stay... today, under a cold, overcast sky, I think I want to stay tomorrow? that's why we have night and day, night a curtain that comes down between old and new, a sign to us as it rises every morning that new things are possible after all what use a curtain if nothing changes between acts  Smile for me it's the lunch side of Sunday brunch & the place is packed, a mixed crowd of church folk in their Sunday best & the just crawled-out-of-bed crowd in shorts & flip-flops, bed-hair flat on one one side, sticking out on the other like a porcupine in heat, & the golfers from the quarry, clip-clop clip-clop-clip in their golf shoes & grandmas and pregnant moms with last year's babies in high chairs, dads in khakis & hard-starched checkered shirts thinking how simple life is at work & that baby again, looking at me from across the room talking talking talking hyper-alert, smiling a big toothless smile for me this swirl of sound & color is like I'm alone, unmoving in the center of a whirlpool of sensation, all moving, sound & color streaming like paint flung in a circle except the baby, talking talking talking smiling a big toothless smile for me  Slow lane it's 10:30, the movie we want to see this week starts at noon, so we have some time to kill meanwhile, I've had my breakfasrt and the multiple coffees needed to set the world back to its proper rotation, and the Sunday morning peasure of both my local paper and the Times, slowly read Dee just out the door for a walk and some window shopping and me, here, with this making me think, as writing a poem always makes me think, this time about how much pleasure there is in these slow Sunday mornings and how happy I am I'm not hung-over as so often I used to be because of the way Sunday mornings always followed the self-abuse of Saturday night  Scattered in the wide night sky scattered in the wide night sky are pinpoints of light bringing star-heat to worlds like our own biological stews pining the universal spark on some and on others, life at its most simple is cradled, protected from the cosmic storms, and on a relative few, creatures who strive and dream like you and I I know this like some people know God, such knowledge a product of longing in the lonely bright for a comanion worthy of our best nature  Here are two short poems by Nanao Sakaki, from the collection, Break the Mirror, published by North Point Press in 1987. Sakaki was a Japanese poet, author of Bellyfulls and leading personality of The Tribe, a loose-knit countercultural group in Japan in the 1960s and 70s. He was born to a large family in Kagoshima Prefecture, and raised by parents who ran an indigo dye-house. After completing compulsory education at age twelve, he worked as an office boy in Kagoshima. He was a draftee radar specialist stationed in Kyushu in the military, and surreptitiously read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kropotkin, Marx, and Engels as time allowed. After the war, he went to Tokyo, living in an underpass near Ueno Station. Vinegar With vinegar I clean up windows. I clean up mind's windows. I clean up green forest blue sky, white clouds. I clean up the universe. __________not true__________ Now transparent windows----- Againist the glass Chickadees, robins, jays hit their heads and lose their lives. In charity I pick them up eat them up with friends. Winter Flower Trails After two days snowing A rosy evening glow. You remembrr suddenly The star shining in daytime And flowers blooming her in summer. Star light Snow light And icy thistle field. Staggering with heavy boots You break dry flowers Into small pieces of the sun. Stare here Your footprints Animal tracks Flower trails Shine over the zodiacal light Along the Milky Way.  A found poem, from a story in the New York Times, Front Page, January 14, 2009 Praise God from whom all blessings flow a man on a motorbike pulled along side her asked what seemed an ordinary question "are you going to school?" then he pulled her burqa from her head and sprayed her face with burning acid 17 years old and bravely back in school, she says, "They want us to be stupid things." praise God in all his cruel and hideous forms amen  My younger brother, my older brother, (both deceased) and me Beat down but never backed down I always admired those whip-thin guys who run their lives on instinct who, when disrespected, lay the offender out on the floor, light a cigarette, walk to the bar and order another beer while I'm still lost in internal dialogue... "what did that guy say? "did that guy just call me a punk-ass motherfucker? "he did, he did by God. he did just call me a punk-ass motherfucker. "why would he do that?" I would query myself. "Im a nice guy, plus, I never did anything to him. "well, I don't care. I can't let anyone call me a punk-ass motherfucker! I'm gonna have to take him down!" "where'd he go?" of course, by the time complete my internal dialog and react, he's probably moved on to his next stop, laughing with his friends probably forgot he called anyone a punk-ass motherfucker, and everone else in the bar, disappointed that there wasn't no fighting after all, has turned back to their beer and moved on... and, I'm standing in the middle of the room by myself.. one of those whip-thin instince guys would have swung first and thought about it later and you can see from the scars they swung first when they should have thought about it maybe just a litle bit longer... my older brother was one of those whip-thin guys, gone now for more than fifteen years, beat down, sometimes, but never backed down  This poem is by Mexican novelist, poet, essayiist and translator Jose Emilio Pacheco from his first book City of Memories. The book, published by City Lights in the United States and Ediciones Era in Mexico was winner of the James Asuncion Silva Award for best book of poetry to appear in Spanish from 1990 to 1995. The American edition is a bilingual book, with Spanish and English translation by Cynthia Steele and David Lauer on facing pages. It is a true poet's poem, cast our for whoever might want it. For You Not a bottle at sea nor vampire's flight, more like a torn scrap of paper blowing toward you in the street, the poem. It's one or the other: you trap it or let it go by; read it or throw it in the trasn. The wind blows where it will: putting it in your hand or steering it toward nothingness. It's a miracle that your eyes linerger on a scrap of paper in the street. Do with it what you will.  This pictureis from about ten years ago, taken on a day like this day, the second of the new year, in San Antonio, were the sun is bright and the temperature is in the mid-thirties, reminding me of the pleasure sitting outside on a cold moring, by a fire drinking the morning's first cup of coffee. Pumpkins a little frosty today pumpkins a little frosty this morning and the footbridge across Apache Creek a little slippery with a light rime sheet, dog pulls I slide along behind… it’ll be 60 degrees within two hours of the sun’s rising… colder tonight, warmer again tomorrow morning no wonder we are confused --- cat scurries, no more a friend of the cold than me… dog thinks it’s all just mighty fine I take her off the leash down by the creek and she runs and runs and runs, wide circles in the low cut grass, then stops to jump up to my chest for a scratch behind her ears then runs again and again and again in wide circles in the grass… wet paw prints on my coat where she jumps --- a bird on a bush right outside my window not sure what kind maybe a mocking bird, but feathers so fluffed against the cold it’s hard to say a ball of gray fluff, like the soft lint you pull off the filter in your clothes dryer sharp little beak, tiny, coal-dust eyes, looking in at the warm people on the other side of the glass, especially at me since I am nearest, a black stare before it flexes its fluffed chest and flies --- Sunday morning it is, a time to prepare for a slow day to wind and travel  Photo taken near sunrise, January 1, 2010
Medicated meditation drifting a small boat on calm seas, ripple suggests, but forgotten, lulled by soft tides that rise and fall such a very little bit, day to night, night to day, drifting small boat calm seas day to night night to day drifting a tiny whirlpool of nowhere soon
0 Comments
In the time of emergence an old Navajo chant speaks of the "time of emergence" and I think of the all-there-is emerging, not a product created by the hand of a god, but a creation that emerges from the mind of the all-mother/all-father, creation, not as a single event, a job of work, complete over the course of a week of seven god-days, but a continuing process of never-ending creation, a creation-flow, an emergency of ever-deepening truth, like the night emerges and from the night a day emerges and from the day, a night, like the sea emerges from the deep, breaks on shores far from where its water essence begins, then returns to the deep that sent it, and back again to the same or different shores, far-traveled, enriched by its journey; like rain on cut hay left in the field overnight, the fire of creation processing within, its must odor rising again with the fallen rain to become a cloud, drifting over continents, over prairies and mountains and cities and great forests, across the oceans, bringing the musty smell of wet hay with new-falling rain around the world and back again to mowed fields where it began, in a moment of passion emerged from one of us to another, then the continued emergence through a life of ins and outs, comes and goes, contributing as we come and go, our own passions to the universe we are part of again, flowing through our time until our end and in a moment of death-ecstasy, souls singing as we join the all-there-is from whence we came our part of the great emergence complete, until we, like the sea return again to new and different shores, enriched by our time drifting in the creator's emerging conscious  Chaos management "I am not afraid of chaos because chaos is the womb of light and life. What I don't like is mis-management of chaos." - Franketienne, Haitian author, poet, playwright, painter there are patterns to the univese, from the orbits of galaxies to the circling of the tiniest electron around its mother neutron anchor to the greening and falling of leaves to the daily commute of bankers and painters and donut makers to the soft sleep of babies and the long, dry nights of old and time-worn men, all circling all circling, each circle a world within itself, inter-acting with its fellows in shadows of confusion, like looking at the color patterns of gumballs encased in glass, patterns seen only through a one-eyed squint from some great distance, the further away clear becomes the organization, red upon green next to blue under yellow, each placed in a structured chaos, like the universe in all its chaotic glory, structured truth we can never get distanced enough to see, an incubator spewing chaos, indestructible unalterable manageable only through the indirection of unseen hands that must never fumble or chaos will solidify and all the circles will stop their spinning and fall to the lethargy of inertia stilled and all that is will, like Lot's wife, turn to salt crumbling on a silent palin in the steady wind of never-again...  The poems in this post come from New Days & New Ways, my most recent, and probably last, book of poems, specifically from the 6th and last chapter in the book,"Out There," an attempt to close the book in a more philosophical vein. I don't expect to ever again do the work involved in putting a book together and putting it out there for people to read.  Bang I believe we are all children of the big bang and that nothing truly new has been added to the mix since... and while I don't know what came before the bang, I'm guessing we'll figure it out before the end... multible bangs, maybe; bangs within bangs, bangs bouncing off bangs like a six bank corner pocket hustle; perpetual bang, one bang banging another like steel balls hung from strings banging one after the other in a row in a forever and ever progression; bangs banging out there, banging in somewhere else - that's one to imagine, creation in reverse, the Garden of Eden returning to uplowed field... or it could be a single, once-and-only bang - that would make us really something, us and all the universe we know, or don't, our stars, the only stars anywhere you and me, the only us anywhere... somehow, I just don't feel that special Starburst  Born again, and again and again and again I know many people who proudly proclaim to have been born again, under-achievers I call them since, not satisfied with being only twice-born, I have been born again; and again and again again for I am a being of universal elements and thus, certain to be born again as I have been born before uncountable times, uncountable times, for the parts that make me as old at the universe itself and so must be all the things I have been, things near to home and faraway - lost in the vast unknown regions where stardust still drifts - vastly traveled are my parts, so vastly traveled I must be as well , so varied and old and well-traveled look around you at the vast everything-ness that we are, have been, and will be a part of ... consider how marvelous I am, and you as well sometimes I think of the me that was a daffodil, and how beautiful I was, much more beautiful than I am now, though rooted and consequently less curious than the proto-cat I was, roaming with early felines, newly crearted to hunt that was the me, that was the deer, or the beaver, or the small mouse hidden in high grasses, or the grass I might have been, or the wiggling worm that fertilized the grass-of-me with my worm droppings... so many places I have been so many beings I have been, so more than the twice the pentacoltals brag of , and so much more than twice-born I will be in the millennia ahead, so much more to be, so much longer to be them I can imagine how jealous must be those who consider themselves to be only twice-being Explosion at the Campbell Soup Factory   Discovery the serenity of the moment before the particle of a second when the universe stops to inhale before breathing again with a gasp of stars shaken and stirred in their orbits the idea, the thought complete, all pieces floating in confusion slide through the chaos to find their place together... and you know, you finally know how your life fits in the greater, pulsating, ocean of creatures both like and unlike yourself the greater theme is finally yours to know... now it is only to not forget again  This poem is by Marilyn Hacker, from her book, Winter Poems, published by W W Nortorn in 1994. letter on June 15 I didn't want a crowd. I didn't want writers backbiting in a restaurant. Last night's leftover duck, some chilled Sancerre (you've called fresh-tasting) beckoned to me more. I crossed the Pont Sully, into an eight- forty sunset, toward home, and whom I'd meet. In the letter that I didn't write, I tell you, I was meeting you tonight. You in an envelope; you in the braille of postmarks footnoting the morning mail. You, bracked from life with someone else though part of every page is what she tells you; not my morning clarity of bells to matins, phoned links to life with someone else. I met you here as if geography wee all that separated you from me though hand to hand and lovely mouth to mouth magnetic norh and doubly polar south are on lost maps, the trails are overgrown. It's warm, it's almost dark, it's half past ten. "I can't imagne Paris without you" was the tearjerker on the radio when I begana to cry in Julie's car under the Nashville skyline where you were the bottom line. By the time we got to Phoenix (with bald tires and gluey hot seatcovers) I was already half way back to Paris without you. In time, with luck, anyone can imagine needing less than all this food, these books, these clothes: excel uholstry, distraction dead wood, bloat. You're what I had to learn to do without. I did. But there you are, no farther than the whirring of the small electric fan we bought that summer when you had night sweats, then a sore back, then just a cold, then doubts that you'd blot out with morning lust against my chest, my cunt my mouth, as evdence that you were present. Later, you'd deny what you'll admit to now: the late Julythree-quarter moon on shuttered bars, the meat and vegetables, the dim glow when you lit a candle in the chapel after Mass. An ancient park attendant clears the grass of kids who where imagined jouissance when we conceived and miscarried out chance. We each have whispered, written, other names.s There are more dead for whom to light small flames. Down on the street, waiters crank up the awniing of the cafe en face. Tomorrow morning I'll be no farther and no closer than your walk down to the post office with Jan along a storm -pocked tertiary road. Word-children, we will send eac other words that measure disances we have to keep defining. When I lay me down to sleep you stack up your day's work sheets on the porch table, light up, lean back. Two silver birch trees for a twilit arch above your head. I't hours before you're going to bed. True Romance   Inside/outside it's all a circle, these lives we lead, everything goes, and in its time, comes again like this bright and beautiful morning, sky clear, the light blue of bright yellow sunshine and yellow-laced shadows... i've been here before and, with luck, be here again - and again and again, knowing even as I luxuriate in this cold bright, that dark will come again, welcoming that dark, for bright is not bright without it, as day is not day without the brackets of night, as people who live in the dry desert, how they welcome the rain, people who live under a forever cloudless sky, how they marvel at a cloud's slow passing... and as I think of my circular life, I think of my dog, lovely, sweet Reba, for whom every minute is the only minute, like all dogs, living in the moment, every minute a lifetime, sixty life times in an hour, how disconcerting, how wonderful to be so inflicted by nature, so blessed to live like that, to live outside the circle of time, to live in the constant changing forever strange and forever new and I wonder if I could ever be dog enough to live a life of so many lives  A cold, fishhook moon a cold, fishhook moon floating in a black, star-specked sky... the universal pool of all overhead as I walk the path down hill in the goose-bump cold of this post-midnight, pre-dawn morning... I wander in the star-lit dark, searching, as I sometimes do in the night while others sleep, searching for the answers that even in these late years elude me, searching through the mysteries of night whether full-moon light or dim, no-moon dark for the the whys and ways and whats of a day in the life of the one among millions that is me - carbon-cluster me, assuming, with the arrogance of my kind, that there are answers that are mine to know  Anthropocene that's what they are now calling "The Age of Man" meaning, I'm not sure, either the time humans began to occupy the earth as masters, or the period beginning earlier, when man existed primarily as small, sampering jungle and prairie prey... but I'm pretty sure "the age of man," hower defined, came after the "age of dinosaurs," about which I'm not sure were they reptiles or mamalian cousins of man that just happened to lay eggs, or, as I've begun to hear, somehow related to chickens and I'm not sure if chickens are reptiles or mammals with wings, or something else, along with turkeys and hawks and eagles and red,red rohins, and even carrion eating vulture... but I am delighted that there is a chance that the "age of man" followed the "age of chickens" and, considering how stupid chickens are, whether the "age of man" would have ever come about if we had been competing for an age of our own with something smarter, a dog, or maybe a pig, leaving us, had it been thus, scrathing fleas and sleeping a slop pen in the "age of dog and pig" and putting all that ancient history aside, I can't help but wonder whose age the next will he... considering our record so far during my particular part in the "age of man", tkhe "age of ash and cinder" might seem a fair prospect for the next age. or, maybe a better scenario, like the "age of cockroach" (think of that the next time you squash a cockroach with your pointy-toed cowboy boot, it might be your heirs you are suashing, and heaven forbid they have a long genetic memory - plan for the future, that's what you have to do when you're responsible for a whole age) ----- meanwhile, across the way, a herd of deer graze across a broad pasture, except not bunched like a herd, but scattered individually across the field, as if each deer, walking his on way,, decided on its own to stop for a bite of pasture grass, solitary deer each at its own meal, not Texas deer, too much alone, New York deer, maybe, commuters at a quick-stop pasture, adapting to the "age of man" and my cockroach mean mood is lifted... maybe there's a chance for an "age of deer", a return to golden fields and forests, a return to the "age of first nature" - befor the jealous god split timel and brought the misery of ages to humans and all the other creatures alike or maybe, if I believe that hard enough it will make, at least, a better day  Who will be the poet then?
say that a poem is not the word spoken or the word printed in some proscribed form designated as poetic by tradition or fashion of the time; go instead to the image the words, however presented, are meant to provoke and find the poetry directly in the vision, images in the air of real space and time, transmitted through your senses to that part of your mind that dwells among the visual cues and clues of the world, the de-randomized pieces that combine to for a picture that means an emotion, visions that fire chemial reactions that push eletronic jabs to our frontal cortex to createl a contex within which emotions form, think of poetry as transcending words, internal visions of the poet going directly to an external vision to be seen and shared... (the most beatiful poem I've ever experienced, a French short film of horses, a herd of horses running through fields of high grass, the beauty of their flesh and their muscled bodies, and the sweat blown from their nostrils, and the steam, too, from their mouths and nostrils, the internal heatof their great bodies under great exertion blown into cold air, and the colors of their coats and the grace of their great running leaps over high grass and shallow waterways - the most beautiful poetry I've ever experienced and not a word was spoken - no words written or spoken could match the image direct) think of poetry as visions transmitted through some visual media, like the screen of your local cinema, or think of future poetry, transmitted directly into your dreams... think of the day when dreams are the ultimate poetry and poets the ultimate dream-makers... who will be the poets then |
|
RSS Feed