246 Mythology poems

[facsimile] He awoke, fully charged. You can bring water to a horse but you can’t make it ride. All poetry is conceptual but some is more conceptual than others. Ambient difficulty leads to poetic license. Poetry has no purpose & that is not its pur- pose. You have to get over be- in- g over. April is the cruelest month for poetry. And May is not much better, is it? Why write in prose what you could write as easily as poetry? The poem is a crutch that allows us to think with and throu- g- h it. Every poem must have 13 distinct frames, devices, motifs, styles, forms, or concepts. Poetry emasculates prose. The body: can’t live with it, can’t live without i- t. I want to be understood, just not by you. Last week’s weather is worth a pound of salt, just like the lot of  wives or the snowy pillars of  Danton. There’s not a crowd in the sky. Familiarity breeds content. Yesterday’s weather is as beyond reach as tomorrow’s dreams. The move away from close reading often got drowned in the bathwater, even if   we could never find the baby. I wouldn’t  join a poetic tradition that would recognize me as a member. The wheel needs to be reinvented because we’re still stuck. I am for almost new art (gently used forms) — easier on the pocketbook and on the b- rain (undergarments not accepted). The only true innovation is God’s. Others pay cash. This is a lie and that’s the truth. Better truth in the shade than a lie in the sun. The taste of madeleine ain’t what it used to be. (taint what it used to be) ... all alone and feeling ... Operators are on duty. Call now. As dry as a bubble, as expectant as the dead of night. Without product placement, poetry as we know it cannot sur- vive. Poetry should not be in the service of art any more than religion, ideology, or morality. Poetry should be in the service of nothing — and not even that. If  you can identify someone as gnostic they are probably not gnostic enough, for my money. I believe in my disbelief, have faith in my reason. The sacred in a poem is nowhere seen and everywhere felt. There’s more to transgression than ritual, but not enough more. There is more to liturgy than doctrine, once in a blue m- oo- n. I left my purpose in my other pants. You’re not the only paddle in the ocean, shadow in the dark, line in the poem, lobster in the trap, pot on the stove, wheel on the truck, letter on the keypad, scythe in the field, lever on the controls, cloud in the sky, fruit in the tree, rat in the lab. Reality is usually a poor copy of the imitation. The original is an echo of what is yet to be. Time is neither linear nor circular; it is excremental. Beauty is the memory of the loss of time. Memory is the reflection of the loss of beauty. American poetry suffers from its lack of uncreativity. I have no faith in faith, or hope for hope, no belief  in belief, no doubt of doubt. They say God is in the details. That’s because the Devil has the rest covered. God is weak and imaginary — a flickering possibility. The dogma of an omniscient and omnipotent God maligns hope and denies the sacred, as it turns its back on the world. God has no doctrine, no morality, no responsibility. To sin against God is to use that name to justify any action or prohibition, whether murder or martyrdom. I’ve got authenticity, you’ve got dogma  ...    proclaimeth the Lord. Saying one more time: It’s true but I don’t believe it I believe it but it’s not so. “My logic is all in the melting pot.” [wittgenstein] Better an old cow than a dead horse. Alzheimer’s: What’s that again? So it turns out I’m not a bull in a china shop but china in a bulls’ shop. Sometimes a penis is just a s- y- m- b- ol. In their gloom, the Jews go and come Talking of Bergen-Belsen. (I saw time but it didn’t return my gaze.) My heart is like a water bucket that returns from the river seven times full eighth empty. Zeno and Heraklitus are my father’s milk. I think with the poem not thr- ou- g- h it. Turns of phrase / my stock in trade. Negative capability: sure. But also positive incapacity. I always hear echoes and reverses when I am listening to language. It’s the field of my consciousness. When we stop making — manufacturing, imposing — sense then we have a chance to find it. A professional poet throws nothing out except the eggshells and the coffee grounds. I think the idea is to be unoriginal but in as original a way a- s possible. Poets are the Pershings of the imaginary: piercing themselves as they perish in spite of native ground. I wish I was still in my pajamas. The unironized life is not worth living. When people tell that joke, three Jews four opinions, what they don’t say is that two of them, the schmucks, have the same opinion, while the third ... Ouzo something to me and it ain’t pretty. Absinthe makes the heart gro- w foreigner. “Throughout this prospectus, ‘object’ refers to the digitized file.” Yesterday is a stone’s throw from tomorrow & each new year a vast canvas of impossibility. Kalip in North Folk, you’re on the air. Stand clear of the clo- sing doors. • Too much is still not enough. • Blameless as a sheep at slaughter, am I Guileless as the toll of tidal tug There are no absolutes except this. It was a veritable bow across the shot. “Sacred means saturated with being.” [berssenbrugge] So does scared. So does scarred.

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees, Facing a sheer sky. Everything moved,—a bell hung ready to strike, Sun and reflection wheeled by. When the bare eyes were before me And the hissing hair, Held up at a window, seen through a door. The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead Formed in the air. This is a dead scene forever now. Nothing will ever stir. The end will never brighten it more than this, Nor the rain blur. The water will always fall, and will not fall, And the tipped bell make no sound. The grass will always be growing for hay Deep on the ground. And I shall stand here like a shadow Under the great balanced day, My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind, And does not drift away.

The woman is daft. Invented her own sect. Has upside-down sex. With alternate species. You see her on the street. Corner of   Sansome and Pine: Morning rev up of sf financial types. Instead, there she is, beneath a gigantic hat. Hair wild, in coils, like a rattle- Snake. Smiles like she’s got the shakes. Every cell in her seems to vibrate. Psst! Could you turn that to low? The gray-suited, heads bent to cement, pass. Edges of  her sleeves are threads; Her clothes mismatch. The shoes Are not a pair. She stands as you stare, Or better yet, ignore. You ask Her if she’s fine, and she replies, Fan- Tastic! As if  this were the day She’d finally learned to levitate, And her eyes are the doors To a holographic universe, And she looks right through you, As if  you too had won the lottery of the soul. And you look down at your shiny, perfectly symmetrical shoes, Like, Man, that’s more than I wanted to know. And — Didn’t anyone tell you you need a reason — A  house you own, matching clothes, Translucent skin, sheen of fashion, A pulsing bank account, like our galaxy always expanding — To feel so friggin’ over the moon? Who are you? How do you justify you? What made you you? What context gave you you? And on the curb you kick, swing, scuff your shoes. The woman is daft. Invented her own sect. Probably has no sex, or too much. With any species. She hasn’t yet learned That happiness is contingent — It depends upon The things aforelisted. She’s just riding on the being of   being. Hedonist. On her hand, a rock As if, eons ago, the glacier had swung by and deposited A boulder on her finger. The elemental pinned to her. The woman is daft, I tell you. Adrift. Steer clear. The glint In her — shield your eyes. Downcast. Don’t let it get to you. She will die Alone — while you, you’ll have — Have — Resist. Do not, I say, do not Long for that magic.

In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours, Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers: Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. It is the little rift within the lute, That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all. The little rift within the lover’s lute, Or little pitted speck in garner’d fruit, That rotting inward slowly moulders all. It is not worth the keeping: let it go: But shall it? answer, darling, answer, no. And trust me not at all or all in all.

The spell is a mouth’s perilous-o as they dark circle the boats in their most resplendent pliable armor. The concept fish aligning with girl or love with death to bring down men at sea,temptation confused into offering, the mismatch of like plus unlike really likes, straight to rock bottom. No equation has ever been this badass. It’s the men who will enter the spell so far into exhaustion as weather, as waves, the tide pulling toward if, letting go then over the whale road in the company of the dolphin, the only other animal, I’m told, who can do it solely for pleasure. It. You know what I mean. The lower half aglitter, the top half brainy as beautiful is sometimes, murderous lovelies, their plotting and resolve and why not get these guys good, the lechers. To see at all in the whirling, to hear what anyone might in wind roar and faint whistle — don’t worry about girls shrewd as whimsy, legend-tough to the core. Don’t. But it’s their spell too, isn’t it? Locked there. Aligned with singing, dazzle razor-blackened green. Not that they miss what human is like or know any end to waters half born to, from where they look up. Men in boats, so sick of the journey. Men gone stupid with blue, with vast, with gazing over and away the whole time until same to same-old to now they’re mean. After that, small. Out there, the expanse. In here, the expanse. The men look down. Aching misalignment — gorgeous lure that hides its hook steely sweet to o my god, little fool’s breath triumphant, all the way under and am I not deserving?

No one has touched me for weeks yet in this drugged, gilt afternoon, late, when nothing is safe, I’m paralyzed, as though so wildly desired—passing solo through the garden’s cinnamon, marigolds, famished roses, where a matted shingle of the swept-up human hair I begged from a local beauty shop & spread out fruitlessly among the blooms & canes to keep away the deer might well be a satyr passed out in the palace’s candied gold— that something regnant with a strange, godlike power could not help but reach out from the umbral blue to tap my white arm. It is a day to die, the light autoerotic, theatrical, with an unbearable listing, stalled in cusp, in leonine torpor. Is courage artifice? As though to answer were within my means. Or to even move my mouth.

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow. —The Tempest The only potion I saw him brew was tea of his own blend, a mash of leaves and bark. Good for whatever ailed you was his claim, as if he could see the leaps and falls he’d named “the heart.” Who knows? For argument, just say he had no need, had made me up: one in his likeness, who wouldn’t touch the stuff. Who tried to see a window where he outlined in air its air of distance, ladylike, a pane designed to cut you off from the world of the dunghill and the worm. Who fashioned a cloak of leaves that aped his cape, mine only as magic as waterproof, a screen against the downpour day after day of sun, unlike the one he wrapped in and became no longer Father but some other, a stranger— the island’s only one—the local god, or was it merely King of Somewhere Else? Or mother country, I his colony? He held forth promise of some other isle, no drier but more “cultivated,” not just with crops but with quotation marks. How he held forth, dutiful silence mine to guard. I borrowed foreign names from the remains of a map that washed ashore, my own worn out through under-use. So, Carolina North, or South? Virginia West? As long as I remembered not to answer to “Miranda!”, the call of parent bird to fledgling ingrate, then I was not the heir apparent but your normal castaway, a little bored with ins and outs of tidepools’ smelly courts. Perhaps not world enough, but I had time to watch a hermit crab align himself and back into a vacant whelk and haul the home he wore from rocky A to B. All that watching—watching for what? A sail blown off its course by my uncalled-for sighs? A gorgeous morning, same as yesterday, I in the same old shirt he’d handed down, divining rightly that if it failed to fit, a scabbard’s belt would cinch it as a dress. To the crab’s new quarters a small limpet clung. What did I want to be? What did I know but him, the man who’d loved his subjects less than his library, who’d lost his kingdom, who couldn’t put down a book he’d yet to finish? How close the air remote upon that isle, the like of which I have not breathed again. How it held water, building up a wall by keeping molecules apart. How close those castles, not to be counted on except to rumble, then to wilt late afternoons, all squandered weakness. Whatever I had sensed about my difference I caught from him or from the books he carried in his head. Such dreams he made on me. I am a leaf torn loose from his drowned book. All men are islands, though they swear otherwise. All islands are alike in their unhappiness.

It’s autumn in the country I remember. How warm a wind blew here about the ways! And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber During the long sun-sweetened summer-days. It’s cold abroad the country I remember. The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain At midday with a wing aslant and limber; And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain. It’s empty down the country I remember. I had a sister lovely in my sight: Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre; We sang together in the woods at night. It’s lonely in the country I remember. The babble of our children fills my ears, And on our hearth I stare the perished ember To flames that show all starry thro’ my tears. It’s dark about the country I remember. There are the mountains where I lived. The path Is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber, The stumps are twisted by the tempests’ wrath. But that I knew these places are my own, I’d ask how came such wretchedness to cumber The earth, and I to people it alone. It rains across the country I remember.

Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake. I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take? Leathery toad that ruts for days on end, Or cringing dribbling dog, man’s servile friend, Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat, Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat: Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea. What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me. These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough. No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof. Into what bulk has method disappeared? Like ham, streaked. I am gross—grey, gross, flap-eared. The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature. My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature That bites through anything, root, wire, or can. If I was not afraid I’d eat a man. Oh a man’s flesh already is in mine. Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine. I root and root, you think that it is greed, It is, but I seek out a plant I need. Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly: Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot, From milky flower to the black forked root. From this fat dungeon I could rise to skin And human title, putting pig within. I push my big grey wet snout through the green, Dreaming the flower I have never seen.

Momus is the name men give your face, The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland, Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray Against horizons purple, silent. Yes, Momus, Men have flung your face in bronze To gaze in gargoyle downward on a street-whirl of folk. They were artists did this, shaped your sad mouth, Gave you a tall forehead slanted with calm, broad wisdom; All your lips to the corners and your cheeks to the high bones Thrown over and through with a smile that forever wishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all the iron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, gone into dreams, by God. I wonder, Momus, Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look with deep laughter On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known, solemn repetitions of history. A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from your kindliness of bronze, You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple, silent; Granite shoulders heaving above the earth curves, Careless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and women Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil, the salt of tears, And blood drops of undiminishing war.