Bio
I am past 80, born in 1943. A mere list of my ailments becomes, by sheer weight of fact, a list of complaints. I have Parkinson's and ABI and so I have a history of falls. I have osteoarthritis and osteoporosis. Somewhere in these lists I broke my hip and now am confined to a wheelchair.
My bones are as brittle as biscuits. The list of what I can no longer do is daunting.
Truth, beauty and goodness must be given strength amidst the mindless inevitability of the universe which, our best minds assure us, will itself run into nothingness deeper than we can imagine over a period beyond the control of our reckoning.The world is weaponized against us.
It has ever been
the law of change that when everything
reaches the peak of flourishing, it must begin to decay.
Death itself is awkward –
So much investment in self enrichment
Then …
What then but memories–if you are lucky,
Lucky but not your own.
The of point the whole is not you
It was never about you–it is recurrent endless enrichment of part of the species,
There also can be healing–
What use to be ambition, aspiration or simply greed–
Death is the question
The answer is sex.
If by chance you should want to know me, come with an understanding heart, and say, "he managed to be happy."
I have found the vulnerability of art. So can you.
I have discovered a keyword in my life is alienation. For example, these poems no longer seem mine, and yet they persist.
Be careful of the word “I”. Its meaning is multi-valent for a couple of examples there is the narrating “I”, the reflective “I”, the expressive “I”, etc.. You can fill in the rest. Just don't imagine that you know who is speaking in a poem you probably don’t.
Dedication
My life is an open wound
that has never healed.
Why did the knife cut so deep?
The blood is still moist,
glistening in the ambient air.
Why is help so dutiful?
Everyone is too busy
for anyone to care.
Old age is about loss
upon loss,
upon loss,
upon loss,
upon loss,
until one is exposed –
vulnerable to the appropriate disaster.
Yet the embodied soul persists,
in seeking experience, in seeking
love
Oh my beloved the slightest
memory of you is a sunrise
in my mind sealing, all wounds.
to my wife and daughters
contra et propter
I: Fever
I'm so old I can remember
my first TV. My grandmother.
gave us the money because (she
said) I was sick--a star of light in
our living room, a bulbous square rolling
bands of black and gray like
a laughing epileptic, horses with
long legs cut their hooves through
rivers of sweat and the rocks of the
canyon were cleft like flanks of the
sun parched downspiralling when
the boy awoke to his father's ah
he's only faking it and my mother
sat at my shoulder on the bed.
No more was said. The fever cracked like
a rotting egg so that I could watch Ed Sullivan.
I never got things straight, not
for years. We never talked (still
don't)--never needed to when
TV filled the silent breach with such
rich movement while each ignored the
still forgotten hurt. When I needed to
know where the hidden streams and
fissures lay so I could ride my
life into its only future I
watched Little Joe and Hoss wrap
urgent problems in solutions trimmed
to fit commercial time.
My children now have colour and
comedy's the thing. The plots are
telescoped through pratfalls and
embarrassments for both sexes
and one-liners are scored off one and
all--wonder to wisdom in a
little over twenty minutes.
Life in easy units eases all this
human wreckage into the refuge of
a spontaneous roar of joy.
We are such stuff as laughtracks are made of
and our little lives, if properly recorded,
can outlast the longest sleep.
II: Mozart and Lady Day
Caught in the freedom between time and time
doing simple variations on a chart
I listened for once to Lady Day
harvesting sun and shadows with her
soft threshing voice and laying
in my heart her permanent
abundance, which sadness now can never
touch. Many men will make money here
but that is her tribute, and this:
she makes dead sound seem live.
Does every man feel that he could hold her?
Here? Now? The delicious cycle of sleep
and waking that touches lightly and repeatedly
on our death breaks through every
quaver of her voice with light and
I want to explain her! Hang my eyes
out on the line to shrivel and dry
and pierce my ears if ever I shatter
the shell of magic that contains that voice.
Money has more reason here than knowing.
The great projectors of our race who turn
oils into sfumato or words into a bright shock
slip through the markets of our minds
unharmed. R.D. Laing who can roll a piano
with the best of them finds accounts
of his feeling in the music--here's where
he takes the turn away from artistry. Mozart
in his mother's uterus sings and the
song won't stop for more than 30 years.
And so what I am making here is worth as
much as money. Art is a discourse
that captures what busyness must miss,
a way of being no bottom line can reach.
III: Das Kapital: Eruption
But I must pay my bills. My mind is costive so I return repeatedly
to public washrooms to try to work it out: I admire the stench of
stronger men whose thick black leather shoes I see beneath the
cubicles and those who boldly shoot their waste into the urinals.
IV: Stroke
Dance dance dance dance dance said he
I am the Lord of the dance
and you must dance with me.
Money saved is power earned.
Invest your sex in a proper wife.
Even the dead can have their moments,
even a worker has his life.
Invest in registered savings plans
to warm the rage in your aging bones;
then you can rant in political ease
and clip your coupons in solid homes.
When a man turns thirty he's had enough
and bitterness fouls his limbs and breath,
but the young still grow up strong together:
blind joy and sex will conquer death.
When the doors are shut and the locks turned tight,
dance in the dark inside your head.
Your passion is your only light,
and the dreams that ravage you in bed.
Flex your buttocks and bend your knees,
work till your back is bright with sweat
and your skin has burned to white or brown.
Make money, children, industrial debt:
This is the only dance in town.
Capital is an endless sea.
Speech is profit.
Dance with me.
V: A Slow Recovery
Can you see Psyche
with her iridescent
wings the wind can shred
floating over the sea like a
bird that has forgotten
land come to perch
on three sharp corners:
animal
human
and the numbered essence of the world?
*
Power is still the only word
and sex and money and growth and pain:
The Lord of the dance is lover and tool
and he loves the woman who loves the game.
*
VII: Core
Clambered uphill from sea to village
under fat white sweltering sun
and empty sky.
Airstill silence. Goatbell's curt tin clang.
Silence. Clambered and felt
through the smooth hot rock
his anger enter me. Pointed beard
jutting erect, words spout like a
rupture without refreshment over
a dried airless land.
So what did the old man say?
Did the reprobate pull the sed tacendi
tactic again? It is time he shut up
that late swill. My own anger is
enough for me to swallow now.
I have spoken words that balanced
the world on anticipation, but I lost
my centre fighting the world, not, mind
you, in the struggle, but while my
ordinary mind was intent on elsewhere,
my soul like loose change slipped
through a hole in my pocket, is
scattered somewhere, and my body
won't die.
Why see me? Why come? Why raise
this dry ghost again? My words are
stones in my belly, and yet you
rattle me, so
here's the whole thing again:
Everything's been said before
said our homophile Gide
but no one listens so it must be repeated:
If you live long enough and
deep enough you will decipher
your own life's code and
there will be answers, I promise.
Doppelganger
I am one of those people who mourn their adolescence as wasted time. I developed my imagination but little else, and even the imagination thrives best on action. My middle-age is full of incident, trouble, and pleasure. I think of those concentric circles I've seen sociologists draw, but the schema seems inadequate, for my life now has at least four epicentres--family, work, church, and art--and they are more like fractals than points. I haven't the mathematical muscle to realize such a trope but I do dream the equation that would make bright shadows of that figure dance on a VDU. Even to dream such imaging gives me a centre of calm motion and grace out of which to write.
The essence of my technique I learned from Yeats, the persistent doppelganger of my adolescent loneliness, but I have no interest in the alternative states or beings which preoccupied him. Orbiting about those fractal epicentres has shown me there is more than enough reality to hang the words on. Thus, when I set out to write these poems I chose three topics--sex, meaning and money--but when you write poetry you don't write about topics. You collaborate with the words. That much Yeats taught me. What emerges is more than the writer's intention. It is a revelation that luckily happens to include the writer. By this luck the writer is privileged, more so than any reader; she therefore has a duty not to corrupt the words by either dominating or submitting to them. But there's nothing mysterious here--no muse, no inspiration, no daimon, no trance.
Think of the words as probability waves in a semantic field. Each packet draws, synchronically and diachronically, on both the culture and whatever reader or writer happens by. If a good poet is in an altered state he seems to me to be more like a good mathematician or a poised entrepreneur than a priest: alert, at least, or perhaps in a higher orbital, where more of those precious probabilities can dance at once in harmony on the VDU.
Tell me, quickly! How many critics can dance on the point of a metaphor?
I: Evensong
He has come too late:
she has begun already,
undisturbed and steady,
her slow descent
into the landscape of her sleep,
where inner darkness lets
her mind illuminate
the secret corners she must keep.
The darkness he mistakes
for shadows on her face
is how the untouched
distance gathers to itself
the common recognition of a place,
releasing all into that isolation
whose firm denial has become her skin:
she is so unreachable for him,
and he has come too late:
within her striving out of sleep
he feels the cold and unfamiliar weight
of something other, deep, resistant,
dark and gentle, lax,
the way the evening sometimes
imperceptibly can change
the aspect and the feeling of a room.
She has become a garden, drained and distant,
turned (converted) to
the inadvertent ecstasy of bloom.
II: what up rising
Where will will rising up?
Where through rock cracks?
what will happen?
What will
does it make no difference?
is it even dangerous
to push so much body push
effort to push the thick
moist the damp soil walls
pressing what rising up
will happen finding
where rocks may be weak
stone fissure ooze rise up
why rising up? what?
I tell I'll tell tell you
something some thing will
come lick lick and you
will be be not
you be in some thing in some Oh!
That will happen will
rising up below up to air.
III: The Edge
She often thought
of suicide, not
because she wanted to die,
but simply because she’d
rather not live
with the embarrassment
of not being able to find your
keys to the car while your
son is waiting or
coming to the checkout
at the supermarket
and finding you're five dollars
short, or lying under your
husband listening to him snort
with passion while you feel
really nothing--
petty things that accumulate
a treacherous poison
in the brain, she thought,
while she slid a cool blade
across her wrist, a petty slit
that gauze and bandages would heal.
The pain at least,
unlike her death, was real.
I: Noise
He had gone to bed late and woke
up early. After washing and
readying himself, he brought
her her coffee just when the
morning sun was brightening
their room. She stretched her
smooth soft arms (soft as the
comforter) and, in a voice still
thick with the honey of dreams,
murmured, "Where are my
babies?"
"What kind of question is
that? I sent them to China!"
he said, mouthful of vinegar
and darkness.
There is too much noise in the world
so bite your tongue.
There is too much noise in the world
so cross your heart
and hope not to die.
There is too much noise in the world
like a radio giving all the news
you'd really rather not hear,
like a movie that jumps its sprockets
and turns its music into
a jumbled scree of sound,
like women, children, men
sliding helplessly down an icy scrim
into a mock emotional death.
There is too much noise.
At church I sing.
While trying to reach God with the tune
I hide my crow's voice
because I've heard men sing like me
and it's embarrassing.
There are some hymns I think I know;
Praise God from Whom etcetera and
Our Father are two. I try when I
sing to hear the men and women round me
and to blend my voice with theirs
but only once on one amen did
the sound come true and my
whole body from soles to
crown vibrated with intense
harmonics, startling me into
a new communion. O God
I and others have been weak
or careless and in spite of you
in spite of us have sinned
but then I was buoyed, awake
a wave (each one of us) on the same small sea,
or so it seemed to me, turned up
by the same clear wind.
II: Daughters
I admit I missed the money.
It's like having windows without
glass, like the sudden persistent
stench of sewers on a pleasant
evening's walk, always
reckoning failure into the account
while hope has shrunk to worry.
I would sit alone in the kitchen
when the children were in bed
while he found somewhere else
to hide and I would drink
coffee watching as the light died.
He would come home sick with
beer saying, "Baby, it's dark in
here," and flick on the light.
O God, don't cry. It's like
looking up and seeing the whole
building's derelict: places
need people or they die.
A heart can crack and fill
with dust when the money never
comes, when there's no trust.
One day while I was cleaning I
looked for whatever it was
we lost–
The room in which my mother
died is like a sleeper snared
in dreams, motionless, distant.
On her dresser are cheap plaster
kittens, perfume in swirls of globular
glass tied with velvet ribbons, their
scents forever sealed, and at the
wall is a television placed to
face the bed. Memories
accumulate like rumpled sheets,
straightened, smoothed, and
disarranged again, but always
indecipherable even to the
most elaborate and passionate
intelligence. My parents' life
for me is a series of specimens,
in the end unknowable.
A room is the still mirror of a mind.
Whatever it is we lost, I know we'll never find.
In church again, returning
to the word people pass on
as the word of God, the
organ stops suddenly on
the fourth verse:
Time like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all its sons away
All children, God. All children.
They fly forgotten as a dream
Our voices which before seemed
strong enough to fill the
high-ribbed sanctuary now
unaided quiver, shatter like
glass under the heavy weight.
Even together, we are alone.
We must find shelter in the organ's sound.
I touch my daugher's shoulder
and she leans against my thigh,
an eye of hope, a seed.
Amazing how simply
need answers simple need.
III: Fleissig
Anyone who works hard can
do the same, said Bach when
questioned on his genius and I
can't help but hear beneath
all that piston contrapuntal
work the distinctive breathing
of industrious sex. Over twenty
children meant he had to
work more than his hands on
a regular basis, bringing to
a climax an entire era of music
in his multitudinous offspring.
If his sounds could swell
in praise of God and human beings,
he was all one body which could
as easily give a working praise
to wife and children. It's all
joy, you know, from
beginning to end.