Ritual
Ritual
Like a banner at a medieval fair,
the white chevron bisects
fields of pink, rectangular above
and two triangles below,
and at its center a dark crest,
a mythical beast with a wild black mane.
The white is the skin that lay beneath
my Speedo at the beach, the pink
the tender skin that my cycling clothes had covered.
With my abs above and thighs below
like flamingos or high clouds at sunset
or suckling pigs, but hard and strong beyond their years,
and the dark mane a thatch of wiry hair
untouched by gray, my crotch
the youngest feature on this middle aged terrain,
diminished neither by doubt nor disuse,
a proud lion on a drought wracked plain.
Away from the mirror, long swim trucks
pulled up and tied, through the showers
to the university pool, across the cool tile,
over the edge, the shock of cool water.
I adjust my goggles like an aviator on the runway
and push off, parting the smooth blue surface,
sensation of bubbles jetting past
clean shaven legs, as Neruda writes –
nothing but the pure, the sweet,
the thick part of my own life,
nothing but form and volume existing,
guarding life, nevertheless in a complete way –
in Ritual of My Legs – mis piernas –
in the delicious years before the Spanish Civil War,
and he adds – People cross the world nowadays
scarcely remembering that they possess a body
and life within it – and so it is that I am reminded,
by the sting of the sunburn, by the outlandish
pink and white bands, and by the slippery
interface of flesh and water, the strong
rhythmic stroking across the blue skin
of the world, and by the sweet smile
of the lifeguard when I retrieve my ID card
and turn for the locker room.
July 4, 1983
(A first draft, I may come back to this one)
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We woke too early in the honeymoon suite
of the Mark Plaza Hotel, compliments of Scott,
my new brother-in-law who had flipped me the key
when he and Sharon left for an early flight at O’Hare.
No time to linger in luxury and the absurdity
of three beds pushed togther for two newly conjoined,
we fled Midwest conventionality as fast as a taxi
could take us to Mitchell Field, our escape route
to the freedom of the American West, Fort Collins
our enclave of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
and independence just for independence’s sake.
It’s afternoon already outside Stapleton,
thumbing a ride north on 25, the past to our right,
the future to our left and the present
rushing to meet us at 70 miles an hour
past Longmont and Loveland, three rides
in quick succession, the last five miles on foot,
a time when people walked and all you needed
fit in a backpack. Home on the Front Range,
sun slipping behind Long’s Peak and Horestooth,
we walk to City Park to watch the fireworks
and the ducks and geese, heads tucked
under their wings, and the other young couples
under the star spangled sky.
Stripes
The way your feet fit snug
to the end of this thrift-store couch,
who would dream you didn’t belong?
That’s how the stranger comes
to rest in this strange land –
like shrapnel encapsulated in flesh,
you only feel it when it rains.
Fucking hell how it rains!
Some days you wake to sun
afflicted by the bless-ed blindness
of the new day, a thin blue field
between you and the pinpoint stars
so far away you cannot really remember.
Traveller, the purring cat is the hum
of the Universe, the stripes on the cushion
are the years of your life. Don’t bother
to count, or even think about
the small black birds on the wing.
July 2, 2009
New Poem Fell Into My Mind Last Night
Annealing
If I were a lump of virgin Keweenaw copper
A shining orange nugget embedded in hard quartz
Extruded with molten rock thrust through fissures
From the depths of this grim and obdurate Earth
You could hammer me to conform to a pattern
Of your pleasing, or heat me in your immaculate forge
And plunge me in your cooling fount one time
And again, that I would be tempered, not brittle
Under the reworking and shaping to your purpose
But I am not malleable, my spirit is a living thing:
Wood. In the waters, I am wave-jounced and spun
By eddies. In the fires, I am consumed.
June 30, 2009
I’m working on it, no luck yet
poem seeds
pants pockets
clothes pile
dirty laundry
white scraps
spun dry
nothing you
could call
well written
not enough
for kindling
no harvest
plow under
sow again
paper mulch
As Green as the Earth
As green as the earth
the 18-gallon plastic container
you bought at WalMart
for 6 bucks and change plus 50 cents
for fine black fiberglass screening
to cover the 10 round 1-inch drain holes
evenly spaced
2 on each short side
and 3 on the long ones
that you and I drilled
as if we could impose order
on a pack of wild worms
close to the fridge
out of the traffic flow
the most beautiful object in the kitchen
except for the no-stick frying pan
that gleams like jet
for rectangles never top circles
and green plastic can’t outshine Teflon
and anyway the best part is inside
where 500 red worms
are eating what we do not want
like broccoli stems and last week’s beans
and apple cores turning to compost
inside that green plastic container
that is a lot like the earth
but it’s a box and isn’t the earth
blue and round
but it’s the air that looks blue from space
and I guess it does from here too
but you can’t see much alive
from up there except
the Great Wall of China which isn’t even
and the twinkles of cities
that could almost be stars except
then you’d be looking the wrong way
and you could never be sure
but I can open the bin
and pull out some dirt
and see our 500 worms
and they don’t even bite
and they eat all the leftovers
without ever sneaking
just one more piece of chocolate
just to even it up
cuz you never notice 1 one bite
but many ones you do
and after all you’re 4 months
pregnant and the bank manager
tells me the employee on the phone
is 4 months too and now I feel real bad
that I mentioned Nuremburg reflexively
when she explained that she was
just following orders
but that was Friday
and now it’s Saturday night
and we built today
the new worm composter
the second most beautiful thing in the kitchen
except when you are there
because you hold in your belly
the promise that grows with every meal
while the worms eat what we do not
and your belly is rounder and more perfect
than a no-stick Teflon frying pan
and your eyes are greener than the earth
and my love for you is older than worms
as old as dirt and like compost
because it remakes the world every day
more fertile
with the possibility of new life
and another spring.
Partial Draft, Yellow Moon 1
I just need to write this down fast as a beginning — much work ahead, not much here but a rough idea, a feeling that I can’t capture yet
Yellow Moon
November born, we were still 17
but college IDs were good enough
for Urbana bars in those days
and nights, like when we straddled
the double yellow line that marked
the border with Champaign, serenading
that ripe old prairie moon
with Neil Young and Bob Dylan,
call and response like a prayer
ricocheting from town to town
and back, finding our rhythm,
blending slow and sweet, then
fast and wild my hands
your hips a drunken reverie:
(Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Sundown, yellow moon,
Yellow moon on the rise,
I replay the past,
Big birds flying across the sky,
I know every scene by heart,
Throwing shadows on our lives,
They all went by so fast.)
We shared pitchers of warm beer
my flannel shirts
drags on your cigarettes
a twin bed beneath a window
and Jack Kerouac:
(The air was soft, the stars so fine,
The promise of every cobbled alley so great,
That I thought I was in a dream.)
Two far out hipsters in frayed jeans
holding hands across the monumental Quad
skipping to the boom boom beat
of our young and joyous hearts
listening for the far off rumble
of the raw American Midwest
holy night barreling west
across the big river
to the Great Plains
and the mountains and deserts
and sea beyond, end of the world
Which is where I went.
What could I share with you now,
Ghost lover from beyond the horizon?
My oldest child is just like we were then.
My daughter’s a reader, like you.
My youngest is named for Sal Paradise.
I lived in Mexico and learned to read
Neruda and Lorca in Spanish.
And what could you tell me?
Is the Tasty Freeze still by the lake
in the town you left behind?
Does the harvest moon still shine
sunflower yellow on the upturned
faces of young lovers?
Would you believe it if I
read you this poem
And would you kiss me one more time?
my first song a few years ago
Oh Alanis
A D A
I am the particle and you are the wave
A E
You are the article that I always crave
D A D
You are my master and I am your slave
A E A
Or is it the other way around?
A D A
I am the fast food and you are the mouth
A E A
You’re northern latitude and I am the south
D A D
I am all sooner and you are all later
A A A
I’d sail my slow schooner round your fine equator.
D A
Waffles or pancakes red wine or beer
D A E
Whatever it takes to win you my dear
A D A
I am the kilo and you are the pound
A E A
Or is it the other way around?
D A
Oh Alanis
D A E
Oh Alanis
D A D
Oh Alanis
A E A
I feel like I just ran aground
A E A
In love or the other way around
I am the cheese dip and you are the bread
Your oversized lip has gone to my head
I enter the room and you turn to the sound
Or is it the other way around?
I’m Anacin and you’re anisette
I’m moribund and you’re more not yet
You are more fun and I’m more regret
Cuz I’m Morrison and you’re Morrisette
Waffles or fried eggs whiskey or beers
Bare arms and long legs pierced navels and ears
2 dollars a kilo a dollar a pound
Or is it the other way around?
Oh Alanis
Oh Alanis
Oh Alanis
I was lost but now I am found
Or is it the other way around?
In 2002
Nobel Savaged: The Jimmy Carter Travesty
by Ray Sharp
My first thought was, “Surely, you jest!” I still can’t believe they gave the Nobel Prize – you heard me, the flippin’ Nobel Prize – to that maudlin hack of a poet Jimmy Carter, better known as “the Bard of Plains, Georgia.”
I know, the award has been politicized in recent years, especially with the selection of novelist V.S. Naipul last year, but at least the man is a respected and noteworthy writer. His early stories, set on the streets of Trinidad, were a real hoot, full of memorable characters, great colloquialisms and lots of pathos.
Mr. Carter, on the other hand, couldn’t write his way out of a bag of salted peanuts with a sharpened quill. I mean, the man wouldn’t be able to hit the broad side of a Georgia barn at twenty paces with one of his cornpone metaphors.
Listen to this poem, from Carter’s 1995 clunker titled Always a Reckoning and Other Poems:
On Using Words
I first heard jumbled sounds
before they framed my infant thoughts
and didn’t know beliefs and dreams
would ride on random consonants
and vowels in the air.
Now when I seek efficient words
to say what I believe is true
or have a dream I want to share
the vagueness is still there.
I’ll say the vagueness is still there. That poem gives me a vague feeling of nausea, right in the pit of my aesthetic sensibilities. It seems that Mr. Carter is “always a reckoning” he’s a poet.
Must I persist? In “Rosalynn,” Carter drones “She’d smile, and birds would feel they no longer/ had to sing, or it may be I failed/ to hear their song.” Puhleeze. Karen Carpenter said it better thirty years ago: “Why do birds suddenly appear/ Every time you are near/ Just like me/ They long to be/ Close to you.” Of course, it should have read “just as I.”
It’s not like there aren’t any deserving writers out there. Heck, no less an authority than Oprah Winfrey picked one book a month for several years. And Ms. Winfrey and the Swedish Academy both liked Toni Morrison. Maybe they could have picked someone else from her list.
Or, in the spirit of democracy, they could have chosen a poet with high sales figures. I mean, I know they’re a bunch of socialists over there in Europe, but they must practice some kind of democracy, except for the kings and queens part.
So I looked up the sales figures for poetry collections and stumbled across this new young poet by the name of Jewel Kilcher. It seems she sold bazillions of copies of a book called A Night Without Armor. Get it?
Anyway, when I failed to find Ms. Kilcher’s book at my neighborhood library, I went on the Internet to search for some excerpts. Right away I found a photo of the young authoress presenting what appeared to be some kind of literary award or other, and the funny thing is, she was wearing a diaphanous dress. I’m here to tell you Ms. Kilcher is no Emily Dickinson look-alike. The woman has a very impressive body of work, if you know what I mean. (By contrast, the boys down at the Americus, Georgia racquet club say Mr. Carter’s getting a little saggy in the old pectorals.)
Needless to say, I was more than intrigued. At another web site, I found one of Ms. Kilcher’s poems, titled “Wild Horse.” In the second stanza, Kilcher writes:
I’d like to paint my poems
with desert tongued clay
across
your back
and ride you savagely
as the sweet and southern wind
through a green and wild Kentucky.
Ay caramba! How do you like them similes? But wait, there’s more. The poem concludes: “I’d be your hungry valley/ and sow your golden fields of wheat/ in my womb.”
Anyone who’s read Whitman, Lorca or Neruda knows what Ms. Kilcher is talking about here. Heck, I think she’s probably poet enough to take on the three of them at one time.
Clearly, in an age when authors like Jewel Kilcher are alive and breathing the heady vapors of Pure Art into their amply poetic lungs, it is an unspeakable outrage to bestow literature’s highest honor on a sour-faced, doddering fool. Why, it’s enough to make a man swear off Swedish meatballs.
