The Mad Boy Writes Feeble Colors For Love - Some Heft For Dark Times

[Photo by Mario Novak. I have no claims to rights for this photograph. From the book, Croatia, ArtCroatia LLC, 2007, 340 pp., ISBN: 978-0-9798691-0-5 (English). Mario was a friend. Miss him.]

for Mario Novak, d. July 2010

"What thou lovest well remains." - Ezra Pound, Canto 181

But first, to orient, some ground, some Robert Creeley: "As a kid I used to be fascinated by people who, like they say, “traveled light.'...The scene is always this: “What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really 'travel light'...I'm really speaking of my own sense of place. Where “the heart finds rest, ” as Robert Duncan would say. I mean that place where one is open, where a sense of defensiveness or insecurity and all the other complexes of response to place can be finally dropped. Where one feels an intimate association with the ground underfoot...with that crazy water, the trickles of water everyplace, the moisture, the shyness, and the particularity of things like blue jays. I like the rhythms of seasons, and I like the rhythms of a kind of relation to ground that's evident in, say, farmers; and I like time's accumulations of persons...This is a very basic place to live. The dimensions are of such size and of such curious eternity that they embarrass any assumption that man is the totality of all that is significant in life. The area offers a measure of persons that I find very relieving and much more securing to my nature than would be, let's say, the accumulations of men's intentions and exertions in New York City. So locale is both a geographic term and the inner sense of being."

- from a Paris Review Interview, Fall Issue 1968, Issue #44


As I get older, my relationship to ground is problematic. Balance is no longer an assumption that delivers. Is it the room that leans or is it me? My sense of place has never been too pleasantly real or here (but for parentheses happy-enough and for these I am indeed thankful) , and place has been and still is found more in sound, a very early childhood thing, in what I hear by ear or eye when I read. Totem in this my life is the book and it's associated familiars. And now, older than I have ever been, which is a painfully obvious tautology standing long at the urinal waiting, waiting, a poem may arrive more quickly than other flow, poetry has taken on an urgency which orients me, grieves me, and leaves me somewhat in relation to light though I burn the midnight oil to work a poem through the dark, and my eyes can no longer focus...but, it's ground work. Gives some heft, makes some meaning. Still, can't say I have traveled light. Not really. But heart's the better for the journey forced, or freely taken, pockets full of pieces.

Soon be ground myself, though. Hope Creeley's somewhere I can meet him.

from And The Daylight Separated The Mad Boy From His Shadow - Cancion for Garcia Lorca

The mad boy
writes feeble colors
for love
the halt the lame the
mute which within
around which intends
bends
distorts (in your glass
case)
twists takes
traps light to
separate
the mad world
from shadow

Both
we are
contortionists

thus take our
place with clowns who
know tomatoes thrown
and juggler's (bare necked)
necessary concentration.

You are the maestro here
whom I trail behind at respectful

distance

murdered by the too ordinary
controllers


So long

So long to image
to suffer on dear
bruised M the
void of course

o bring me
beauty no matter
how terrible

created by His
own opening
which makes
Him forever
Lorca's girl

"a pomegranate
[a god] biggish and
green and I can't take
her in my arms or
dress her.

Won't she come back?
Why won't she?" [from Lorca]

You, dear, will read
of my heterosexual shadow

a great lover who serenades
Her in the terrible contradiction

of the moon caught
in bare tree-limns/strophes

just outside Her window
the fool below in rouge

head hung, singing

O hurt

heart's tin can
tied to belt loop behind
of his ragged pants
pants

waits

to be filled with
whatever flows

in the dirty lane
he leans his
love against


*
Imagine
this asterisk
which contains an aster
is a rose transforming yet again
because it can
because

Lorca

has willed it obediently into being
letter by letter, petal by petal
bee-kissed by brazen bees
a clutch of stamens
assassin's ink
out flowing

*

Are You Hungry? - Poems for Departure

for Karthik, departing

"Who has twisted us like this, so that-
no matter what we do-we have the bearing
of a man going away...so we live,
forever saying farewell." - Rainer Maria Rilke


Prologue

Out of decibels
out of hearing,
the last sense
to go
sing to me now
before ears take
leave and I shall
have no more need
for words, sounds,
even these my sighs
heard as I hear you
drop the soap in
the bath.

I imagine you bending
vague in the steam to
find the bar by scent
as you wash away
your own which has
so compelled me
again and again
into much life

So gladly the
little deaths
cleave to this
I say aloud
though you may
not hear my plea
in there
from where I sit
bent doubly-over
multiplied with grief
for leaving all this
assumed pre-
sence chalked
now upon crumbling
slate.


1

I wait with this
sense of what
is unfolding just
out of reach,
once familiar
now fogged
with herbal scent
clouding the
bath, my heart
embarrassed
to speak of it

remains,

cocked,
to one side
tilted, to hear
all news of
you that is
left in there
touching the
lucky water.


2

You emerge
from the bath
reaching for the
towel, soft, obeying
daily habit, wipes you
dry, each cleft, the pit
of my longing rubbed
without caution.

I am caught up in this
vision without glasses
squinting for what is
real or not though you
are faced to mine as I
obediently move my
shaking hand to your
belly, the scar there,
edges still hot
to the touch.


3

Much there is I will
make of this moment,
drying your back as I
have daily done -

once
began the rite
first night

gathering now
the last

o when
the towel easily un-
folded, drank

woven
little mouths many

deeply
into what
has become
natural in me
with the wiping.

In this
I am become
free now of
thinking intent
to this my task
to last, this minute
or two, to linger,

each is
become a touch
this one.
and this,

without
decibels.


4

I am right now to speak
of this, retrieving the soap
which clings one strand
your hair tangled there,
a cypher I read
with joy grown
long into cleaner
disorder.

5

a leaf upon the
bathroom floor
blown in through
the night window
random now
for discovery
a gift

I bring it to
you calling to
me from the
bedroom
as you pack
fumbled upon
the unmade
bed,

Are you hungry?

[Painting by William Hawkins (Self-Taught American artist, 1895-1990) Horse with Yellow Tail Ricco Maresca Gallery, New York]

A coda, this indulgence, verses here from Missive For Darkness As Vocation, William Hawkins In Mind :

I once, your other darkness, quoted Hopkins to you,
'seasons of dryness, ' in the bitter pitched midst
his discovery, 'What I do is me, for that I came, '
not a text for self worship but, rather, an assent
to keep world woe personally felt in that greater
perspective, making poems from orphan woe,
from ever furtive grace which eludes then surprises
in bleakest place, sudden, parses newly in the
greener green of things while pleading still,

'Lord, send my roots rain.'


The shorter light, the extended nights of cold and
star-bright questions, may cast clumsy net forward
into what it all might mean to fretted you, to me,
stretched, though I will not thrust these words any
longer upon your pen or paint but make offering
with thanks for your own work to feed us through
the eyes, perhaps time to mount that Hawkins horse
and soldier on or to fall off again, gain Damascus
perspective yet, from one's back watch vision
distort the massive horse into God receding into
necessary darkness foregoing image in order to
see what may form in the spreading dirt,

what resurrection there is in the smell of paint.

Moments From The Orange World

[Photo by Amanda Friedman, from Saeed Jones website: http://saeedjones.wordpress.com/]

Here is a poem which partakes of "harvest" - death, dreams, love, dirge and demi-urge, the task of harvesting consciousness from unconsciousness, from the clash and claw and cling of opposites, each has their tasks, the dogs on the edge of the orange world, Death, too, has it's purpose rendering from that which nascently exists and is coming to be to not be again. Selves and part-selves are birthed/deathed to incarnate myriad possibilities of being which is the human experiment, each is a harvest returned to fallow ground. Each is a murmur, a sound expressed then passing into stillness. And myth.

Murmur: "(A) to make the sound mu mu or mumu, to murmur with closed lips, to mutter, to moan...(B) to drink with closed lips, to suck in..." - Liddell & Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, 1897 ed.

"In such cases myth is the truth of fact, not fact the truth of myth." - Kathleen Raine, "On the Mythological," Defending Ancient Springs"

"The repressed value contains transformative energies and a consciousness of its own..." - Charles Ponce

"The Saviors do not lend themselves to art successfully: they are outside the pale, beyond, as incomprehensible in their love as in their example. They have never become incorporated in the blood stream. Forsaking the world, they become as the idols they sought to destroy. This is human perversity. Throughout the ages it displays itself in the individual life, and now and then it bursts forth in cosmic waves of futility and self-destruction." - Henry Miller in an essay on Kenneth Patchen


As Dew On Grass Sleeves No Longer Stiffening In The Wind
- Moments From The Orange World - After Kenneth Patchen

"...do not grieve, therefore, those who are lost to you; they were ever so to themselves..."
- Kenneth Patchen - from "There Is One Who Watches"

I've lost my way and wait for signs.
Distant signal fires indicate 'wait here'.
No gate ahead. The iron dogs are waiting over there
to chew all who approach edges of the orange world.
Best to settle in, grin at stinking Death who is
sinking into the ground winking at me as if to say,

You will soon sink. You will soon sink.
Who do you think you are or were?
Step forward if you dare.

I've observed how furred things give up without much complaint.
They grab often enough so Death grabs back.
They sigh or call out in their animal way, Son of a bitch!
but in the end they relent and they sink leaving only their
pink tongues spread out over the dawn as if to say.

I blink in the dark looking at edges distant fire.
I wink back at Death who's left only a bony hand
on the ground where He waits just beneath.
How trite He is but it does the job, conveys His trap clearly.
When dawn tongues awaken licking dew from my face,
and my fears, I shall raise both my hands, too, as if to say.

And flaunting these two hands to Death's one, and with flesh,
I shall walk away the way I came having done with burning signs
and a night's work of waiting, my presence taunting the dogs,
Death baiting as if He has forgotten one hand upon the dirt.
We have flirted, Death and me. Not the kind of company
I like to keep preferring furred things to winking bones,
Death's head all teeth and no whistle. But I earn my pay.
I walk away, my own tongue licking as if to say.

I can barely contain myself arriving back at camp where
She waits dreaming shyly in our tent, a Bedouin soul bending
gently over wells in Her keeping on Gentler Hill.
I shall lick Her face then. I shall not tell Her how
I have survived the night with Death at my feet,
the taunting signals over there at the edges, iron dogs alert.
I shall not hurt Her with knowledge of this orange world,
all the dark things within it. I shall softly settle beside Her
where She breezes as dew on grass sleeves no longer
stiffening against the wind.

I shall bring Her in as a fisherman brings
in his boat, softly singing a fisherman's tale,
his throat a song-sore nocturne rocking night waves,
beacons ashore flaring where his Love lies sleeping
awaiting conjectures, his folding, folding into Her
gently suspiring guesses -

Is my love away at sea, at sea,
dark as wine presses as he will
surely press me?

O drink from the wells I tend -
I earn my pay - and away with
ocean roaming!

Distant lights demur sure in their beckoning.
Sudden, he turns singing boat and heart to shore,
starfish near at hand yearning beyond foam for depth.
Dawn tongues slowly raise up the land-sunken houses,
stilled curtains in darkened windows not yet stirring.

Nearing, he shall not shake the dew from his cloak but gather
as much as he can to bathe Her - feet, hands, those parts
Death cannot sink into but he can. And life will continue on.

As will the other, his lost brother of the inland tent
now gratefully at rest forgetting the ever orange world,
edge fires signaling unseen until dark,

and then the dogs,

and Death's hand,

and then back to work again.