How I miss the Seine – brackish
green-black waters fed by jars
where painters clean their brushes.
It doesn’t promise hope; one reason why
I miss it. No one swims there alive,
not Poseidon, not Apollo. During his
lunch break, Poseidon strolls along
its shores, then rushes to Monoprix
where he sells Speedos. Olympians
be warned.
I’m sorry I crashed your car. Your silver convertible was parked, windows down, on the other side of the street. What was I thinking in those ten minutes – ten minutes that could demonize my world, your world, everybody watching’s world. I was never good at U-turns, after all, a certain kind of high-stakes American performance – and pressure was mounting in this massively viewed U-turn. When has the fate of the world hung on a U-turn? I was thinking what if I flubbed it, I was looking too much ahead instead of behind, or behind instead of ahead. Then there was time travel…I was gluing a paper airplane for my sons, feel of the balsa wood and smell of the glue; I was fixing the air conditioner. Dad things.
Then bits of language foiled and curled in my mouth – funny what autocorrect does with words. My mouth has a bit of autocorrect in it. Dada, surrealism. Sometimes you get what I mean. When I hear lies, I think I’m on another planet. Those ten insane minutes before everyone in the world slagged off. (We might be ready for the metric system, if we base everything on measures of ten.) Anyway, the car was wrecked. It took the Russians Ten Days in October to change the world. We’ve had future shock; it took me ten minutes.
Memorial Day
Morning birds loose a litany of reasons
to be alive, to be young and tune their own chords
having memorized the sounds of their parents,
blowing an adolescent horn
squawking anointed sound.
In this trumpeting of summer, the young death thing.
Under the tangle of green, remembrance
the uniformed un-done, un-manned, un-ed.
In the wake of death, so much birth. So much birth
In the wakes. Vigiliance. A wake. Awake.
In all the extravagant noise about cicadas – co-emergence of different “broods” numbering in the trillions, Brood XIX and Brood XIII named like two massive gangs — does anyone hear poetry? It could be a giant poetry slam – sound coming from tree crowns, branches, bark, ground as unseen creatures exalt at the top of their lungs. What we hear is the plangent song, the voice of desire and urgency between deep underground and return. No surprise, then, that Plato told a story of cicadas turning into poets; later, the creature became a doomed romantic type, its month of life marked by consummate singing, love, starvation and death.
But pay attention to the voicing. Poet Alice Oswald says the Greek mind listened hard and heard the “thin piping quality that is common to old men speaking.” In a CBC radio interview in 2016, Oswald continues, “I have interest of the cicada as being the insect that poets turn into, if you going on speaking and speaking and speaking, you become nothing but a voice. A high continuous voice.”
Trillions of poets living underground for 13 to 17 years, co-emerging, trying urgently to convey their one untranslatable song. Imagine!
Flowers seem to blossom
one from another
the border of another’s petals
a blur, that enclosing wall
open to continuity like
the eggs of my daughters
magically there, born
in their ovaries when they were
still inside me, barely formed,
as I cupped them within my mom,
wave within a wave, seed in seed,
life in life.
Chag Sameach, Happy Passover!
Some thoughts: American optimism has had its appeal to Jews, especially after endless struggles in the old country – but helium in that balloon has the wheeze of exhaustion. We are now returned to realism, to our relatives and wisdom teachers which look hard at us. Refusing to sugarcoat, the tradition says about us, “eh.” Great promise, just off the mark.
Which include Wittgenstein: we are back to the rough ground. We go through the mud. Mud and desert; desert and mud. Spring mud, deep mud, detritus of history, mud on our face. Humiliation of being slaves mud, retribution mud. We were strangers in a strange land mud; of squaring who we are now mud. We can’t come to freedom without feeling the hardness beneath us; we can’t come out shining without the bone-deep knowledge of suffering, squaring, struggling.
Freedom comes in all kinds of wrappings. Epiphanies that burn through time, “a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning.” (C.D. Wright) In stepping out of historic time into mythic “I was there I know” time. Seeing that freedom, like being, is a ceaseless process, invented and re-invented with every stroke and gesture of composition. Against the hard ground we stand a chance; solidifying against apathy, softening for empathy. The poetry that is shot through our tradition, like all great poetry, comes from looking long and hard, into the abyss, the stars and the human heart. Reality looked hard at is light-bearing. Not for the faint of heart – but with true reward. Chag Sameach!
April stares back at us and asks:
What me, cruel?
Because mournful windows
rattle in my winds
and pots tip over, green
with rust or lichen?
Because hairs on your bare legs
shiver like crocus?
She finds us in her glassy eye
and springs:
You are morose, but life revives
on my terms (her smile impervious)
Because the couch didn’t mean anything to him –
the guy I knew in my 20s who hightailed it
every time a girl moved her couch to his place.
Because he was foul-mouthed and funny,
it stuck; I high-tailed it also, living
on my wits, always freelance, perpetual traveler.
Surprise! The couches now add up,
and all that indifference– things lost every day –
turns inside me –
clicking of a tongue in the strike plate
of a door frame
over-miked in the movie of our lives
mother’s house, door closed, don’t look back.
Don’t trust my nonchalance. The hard poem is yet to come.
Change of season: vital transition:
Material transfusion: new juice.
How does the introvert welcome that?
Mixed. Don’t make me give up
heavy curtains pulled to nurture
my wild interior! My own twigs being burned
for my inner heat and observation.
Observe what comes up
from winter’s meditation.
Attention to what comes up:
ground seethes: undigested.
Knuckles and roots. Women’s bony
fingers scraping for their rings;
from the mud everything breathes.
What bones rise alongside tulip shoots;
what shame to resolve; what liquid transitions,
connective tissue, whatever rises, as gunk
or random stuff — all holds clues.
