happy 191st, Old Man

“He was a vagabond, a reprobate, and his poems contain outbursts of erotomania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature could hardly be found with the author’s name attached. For his fame he has to thank those bestially sensual pieces which first drew him to the attention of all the pruriency of America. He is morally insane and incapable of distinguishing good and evil, virtue and crime.”

Chastisement or high praise? When propounded by Max Nordau in the late 19th Century, the old snoot certainly intended the former; but I am comfortably sure that the inimitable Walt Whitman would have (had he been alive to do so) accepted the invective as congratulation for his success.

On this, his birthday, I am mindful of Whitman’s sense of posterity—not of the hereditary sort, but of the sort that carries a bloodline of courageous creation to future poets and readers of poetry. He had an eerie knack for situating himself not only in historical context but in a sort of ghostly futurity cohabitant with his reader. In a favorite poem of mine, that mixture reads thusly:

“Full of life now, compact, visible,
I, forty years old the eighty-third year of the States,
To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,
To you yet unborn these, seeking you.

“When you read these I that was visible am become invisible
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,
Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade;
Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)”

One almost feels the poet’s breath on her neck as she reads. While I don’t know how literally he meant these sentiments, it is clear that he had an uncanny awareness of the flexibility of time.

I am pleased to find similar insights elsewhere in my Romantics to whom I cling, almost inexcusably, like rugged crosses. Wordsworth writes of a “serene and blessed mood” by which he is transported from “this corporeal frame” into an apprehension of a life unbounded by linear chronology.* Shelley’s investment in the romantic teleology that relies on the transcendent sublime is, to me, unparalleled in literature. To wit, in his “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley implores that “wild spirit” to “drive [his] dead thoughts over the universe/ like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!”*

In the annexes to his Leaves of Grass, Whitman contemplates his legacy with a more cautious but no less prophetic eye—like Coleridge from his lime-tree bower* and Wordsworth when recollecting his childhood*. The aging Whitman considers his life—the living of it and its concomitant verses—as a sort of fertilizer of perpetuity, something of him that outlasts his particular time, place, and mass to enrich the lives and verses of subsequent (all and any who so choose) generations. He recognizes (and rues, he’s human, yes?) in his waning years, the relative frailty of his once mighty existence. However, just as soon as he laments his “last lingering sparse leaves,” he reiterates his earlier conviction that his poems are “Not meagre, latent boughs alone” but are made of the stuff that will engender “some future spring, some summer—bursting forth.”*

Last year, I wrote a poem for Whitman, assuming as I do that he is breathing on my neck, a response to some of these latter sentiments. Because, while I appreciate his unending career, I think he should save some sparse vitality for himself. But who am I? Just a suggester. Merely a mimicker—as you’ll detect in the following piece.

Kronos Devouring One of His Children*

And discover if there is anything to be got at last for the said grim
and time-bang’d conch . . . –Walt Whitman

Why spend every last lingering drop of sweat and sperm
On us? Who are we
That you should? Retire. Rest.
America, so vast, can hide you somewhere
In one of her dripping caverns.
Surely, as you strode—a Kong amongst men, hirsute
In your birthday attire, testicular—you must
Have straddled some tucked-away dell.
Go back there. Leave no note. Soak your calluses
In the hot-pool of a secret spring.

I saw you as a boy (me as one, not you—though
One could make an argument) in
A bustling bough of oak leaves. I sent you back your acorns.
We had a catch, Bearded Father.

Think gymnastic, think electric, think without thought—revisit
Those stars we sat beneath without constellating
Or enumerating, just sat and shared the coming-
Unsown quilt, hands warm in between
Each other’s calves and hamstrings.
We felt the minutest dust of meteors. Scalps tingled.

Our poems co-exist.
I smudge the yellowing of mine as I thumb the wet-ink of yours.

See, Manhattan’s felled erections, the farmers sitting on their ploughs, the dust swirling,
See, democracy in infancy again, Washington aggrandizing, envy not of youth but toys,
See, the shrugged and hobbled soldiers, the mother’s sapped breasts, the crutched and caned and clinically insane, the best of our median generation drooling and shocked, and now my generation slumming in the same streets though they have been swept and sanitized and littered with shops full of the antique and dainty.
See, the smog.

Why dribble your last? We are doused, dripping.
Let linger your halcyon thoughts;
Let wax again the apples, the gourds, the new
Moon, the buffalo plains,
The lips of innocents and their attendant juices.
Retire. Rest. Lose your head.

one I like, just do

Docket

She parses her split

ends, waiting for

the judge. The scab

on her hand is week-

old-pink and probably still

winces at a touch.

His honor calls names

at untimely

intervals,

and she raises her head

at each. Perhaps

thinking of answering

in the place of a no-show;

perhaps forgetting,

in the courtroom crock-

pot of the unwashed

and cologned,

in the goulash

of driving privilege abusers

and disappointed mothers,

the meaning

of names

at all.

some more title

The Vindication of Einstein by Eddington in Principe on the Occasion of a Solar Eclipse, May 29, 1919, Thus Ending the Great War Between England and Germany. [get the whole story]

Romance of relativity leaves

positivists leery,

loath to dream

of an actual world.

World for lovers of seeing

things skewed,

things hidden, say,

by the sun. Or, say, another

World of lovers seeing,

as it were,

or will be,

things skewed.

So photo those ancient

lights, newborn

to our blind eyes,

scores of unwashed

stars skewed

By the glint of our dullish Sol.

be afraid, be moderately afraid

You are searching. The sun is painting another coat of burn on your tilted neck. Sweat drips--one drop, two drops, three drops--from your underarms and creeps down your side like the spider you're just absolutely sure it is; and you squeal--not much, no one has heard, but still, for a moment there you thought you were a goner.

The tall grasses reach your thighs, tickle your bare, bramble-pricked legs, and manage to sway despite the absence of breeze. For that, you are jealous. What you would give for the slightest, ghost-finger of wind, right now. Among other things, you'd forfeit the ball you are searching for and drop one of your myriad others. Drop it somewhere cushy, some tuft of turf amenable to a solid, if amateur, shot. Maybe reach the green in regulation for the first time all day. But no, it's hot and you're in it now and you're lazy and it's easier to just keep trudging the bramble and marsh reeds, plucking other hapless hackers' Top-Flites from the caked-mud earth.

And then you hear it . . . clonklareee, clonklaree . . . the demoniac screech of the red-winged blackbird. He rises from the foliage like some demented ninja and hovers, flapping, chittering, beak agape--it's your warning to scram or suffer the perils, the seething, hateful perils of . . .

oh wait, he flew away. Seems he was all clonklaree and no bite. It was a good effort, you suppose. For a moment there, you thought you were a goner again. You hackled like a frightened kitten and you bowels clinched, but no one heard, no one saw. Go drop a ball.

fling, flung, flang

In last Tuesday's post ('when the eyes blur') I was too lazy to hunt down the poem with a mockingbird in it. Here it is--I fling, it's flung, we flang.

Morning Beer

With the mockingbird running through his repertoire
And the morning still chilled like the last cans of beer
From yesterday’s barbecue bobbing in the cooler,
I tell Cheryl (my long dead friend of whom I have sung
But never written), “My minutes are mine, but my days
Are Death’s.” Because it’s true.

It’s a chipping sparrow just now from the mockingbird
On the roof, quite proud, you can tell, of himself.
My pajamas are thin and my legs are goose-fleshed.
From the chill but also because my minutes are plunging
Irretrievably into the day, drowning, sending solitary
Sad bubbles up from the muddy depths of Lost Time.
“Cheryl, can you flick those little pennies back through?
I would like to roll them.”

The robin in the yard is nonplussed—where is her mate
Calling from, what could he want?

I scold the mockingbird and immediately relish the phrase--
“Scolding the Mockingbird.” I imagine my posterity
As a temple full of proverbs and this one warns against
Futility. And if by posterity I mean what cans still float
In the cooler after a well-thrown barbecue, then, “Cheryl
These minutes are mine.” But if I mean a temple of proverbs,
“Cheryl, my days are Death’s and soon I am yours.”

The filcher postures a warbler. I usually don’t drink
In my pajamas, but the beer is still cold—
Day-old cold.

add this to the next

The following poem is where the line "Elsewhere crows are laughing" came from. I wrote it at the Sewanee Writers' Conference last summer. Of my more recent poems (those written in the last couple of years) this is easily one of my most abstract. Though grounded in almost exclusively concrete language, the poem's purpose remains vague. For that reason, I don't expect this piece to make it much further than this blog, publication-wise. Of course, that's true of most of my poems, so you never know. The market does tend toward nonsense. Nonetheless, I like it for its stream-of-consciousness pace--the pace by which we normally travel, especially the speed of our thoughts and the associations that come most quickly.

Sewanee from Humphreys Hall

Elsewhere crows are laughing,

Giving each other hell, but the two

That I am watching keep their cool

And peck the earth.

A rocking chair is fine

On a fine day like this.

But mine won’t rock.

It only sits.

My two crows share a space

I’d otherwise think

Was too close for their comforts.

Bat-berserk , those elsewhere crows

Rout each other out of trees,

Only to relinquish moments later.

Such a fine day for July.

Eighty degrees tops and a breeze

That rustles up an October sense.

I think of brunswick stew.

In July. It’s a lie,

I know, but take what you can get.

Come next week, August,

At the latest, I’ll think of now

Like a story I made up

And confused for real

But came to terms with in the end.

Remembering the fiction, the headache

Of setting the scene.

Blocking the dialogue between me

And my crows that have flown.

To the graveyard, of all things.

But make nothing of that.

Or of the septuagenarian reading the names out loud,

The dates—

Her hand is in the elbow of his light jacket.

Or of the church bells donging four.