night class

Here is another poem recently published in print and now at my copyrighted electronic disposal.  I know, fine phrasing for so-called art, right?  A modern concern writ small, dilution and saturation in one fell-swoop. Be assured, though, this is not a soapbox I'm not genuinely on because: [1] soapboxes require calisthenics and I'm tired, [2] so-called artists are as indiscernible as ever from bona fide artists with respect to the beggarly-chooserly maxim, and [3] if I was an earnest purist, I'd spread my stories and songs in the wise of this old man man.

Night Class

By campfire, under the useless umbrella of embers,

Listen to the hoary man when he says,

Never confuse how much sky

you can cover

by your hand

at arm’s length

with how much

of it you can hold.

When he starts in a palsied A-minor to sing of wolves

Through cigaretted teeth, red-eyed, listen:

She was white as snow, a snow wolf, that is,

            hiding in the powdery drifts

            she sniffed and I knew I was

            a goner.

The flames will settle like restless children as the concave

Belly of space hulas in its spangled skirt.

The tree frogs will concede their limbs to sentry owls,

And the cricketing will crescendo.

The hoary man will stand, dust bark from his pants,

Pour his coffee on the fire; but before he retires,

He will hold out his hand, erect his thumb and say,

No matter where it is or how seemingly big,

            you can cover

            the moon, but

            from your eyes

            only; and you

            can never ever

            squash it.

And you should listen.

Let damp morning do its worst and listen,

Even as he snores.  

  

(First published in Bacopa Literary Review, 2013)

dealing with my dumbness

Once upon a time, in a physiology far, far away, there lived a fellow of my height and build (minus, say, ten, er . . . twenty pounds of flesh) with my blond hair (plus, say, fifty, er . . . seventy-five percent more volume) who was considered a man of astute perception, now and then erudite, always inquisitive, and, more often than not, brimming with strong, at-least-partially-justified opinions.

His exploits were many. Armed to the hilt with gleaming rhetoric and razoresque wit, he set about vanquishing armies of brute Ignoramuses, felling along the way fey beasts of sundry ilks--It of the Daft, It of the Dunce, It of the Downright Dippy.

All was well (discounting, of course, the alienation of friends and family) until one day, a day of doom, he was greeted by the grinning dragon--that coiled wyrm of distant legend--Oligodendroglioma. For years they fought, meeting in the wilds or along well-traveled paths. At first, they were evenly matched. He met his foe with aplomb and jocularity. But time wore on, as did his nerve, his will, and his strength.

At last, the Recondite Knight was forced to lay his weapons down. Very little has been heard of him since. Legend has spotted him napping copiously and staring, nonplussed, into the depths of space and time.

_________________________________________________


Moral: I'm dumb anymore. And one of the greatest feats of my life to date has been coming to terms with my chronically benighted state of mind. Every day and all around, issues of great importance mock my decreasing ability to comprehend them, much less expound upon or rail against them.

The seeming and/ or real, literal and/ or emotional disenfranchisement of Mexicans; Occupation of paved roads against amorphous fiends; the Ontology of Me and the Otherhood of You. It's like . . .you know . . . er . . . yeah . . . what do you call it? . . . uh, is that a rabbit over there?

But I am coming to terms. Slowly, unsurely, I'm relocating myself in the scheme of things. Where answers elude me, beauty finds me. Where gravity drops me, I rise on an invisible gust, transported to a realm of shrugged shoulders and wide, wondering eyes. Sometimes it's pleasant here. Sometimes excruciatingly lonely. The loveliness and the horror vacillate. But I belong here. Whether once I was meant to know, to understand, to argue, is irrelevant now. Now I am meant to guess, to ponder, to behold.

In short, the poet has a place and mine is in nature. The heart is a short migration from the mind. The knight trades his tower for a hermitage, grows vegetables and talks sensibly with invading bunny-rabbits.

Happily? Leave that to the utilitarians. Ever-after? Leave that to the metaphysicians.

The end? Leave that to me.

something for the season: a sonnet of sorts

Growth

We’ve gathered autumn acorns for the vase

We’ll fill with them—an ornament to place

On the tabletop.

We rest beneath the oak, our chill-stung lungs

Recuperating; down from knuckled rungs,

A brown leaf tumbles.

Corinne begins to pluck the woody caps

From their nutshells. Her cousin Lily slaps

The offending hand;

She says, Those perfect acorns . . . now they’re spoiled.

Corinne begins to cry; her humus-soiled

Fingers streak her face.

The sun grows red. The earth grows cold

Against our jeans. The year grows old.

gem-stumbling in german thought

Sporadically, I study the angst-smothered yet-somehow-delightful writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Well, "study" might be a stretch--I quit studying a long time ago--probably a phenomenon concurrent with quitting my cigarettes--the latter being a function of the former along with heavy drinking and pre-medicated anxiety. So let's just say that every now and then I pick up an unfinished book of Nietzsche's and pseudo-studiously read a few pages with the intent of one day finishing the dang thang.

Today I laid some more inroads in the seemingly interminable and largely inscrutable The Will to Power. Of the several Nietzsche offerings I have read, this particular one would come least recommended by me however so integral to N's over-all "philosophy" the musings might be. And they are integral, best as I can tell.

At any rate, as so often I have in the past, I stumbled upon a gem of concurrence between the grumpy sage and I.

For a long time now (and longer and longer now and now), I have sought subjects for my poetry that disturb the common notion of beauty. I have modified my proclivity towards the Wordsworthian Sublime to include an adoration of the stultified mundane and the staggering mutant. (A modification Wordsworth himself made as he grew older, less assured of his faith in memory and nature. But enough scholarship already . . . I have no cigarettes, no booze, and my medication alone is a poor defense.)

So as to my affinity with N. regarding the above:

"To represent terrible and questionable things is, in itself, the sign of an instinct of power and magnificence in the artist; he doesn't fear them . . . There is no such thing as a pessimistic art . . . Art affirms [. . .] The things they [such artists] show us are ugly; their reason, however, for showing them to us is their love of ugliness [. . . ] What a relief Dostoievsky is!"

Bear in mind, I claim no magnificence as an artist nor fully subscribe to N's perception of the "instinct of power." However, if not the spirit of the argument then the stuff of the argument stands. Life is mostly gross. Mostly stubbed toes and F-bombs. Mostly venom and bile. Mostly cow-cud and llama spit. For every daffodil, a million weeds. For every wandering cloud, an ominous, hail-gorged dark one.

I will end this post with one more quote from N because 1] it is apropos and 2] it makes me giggle.

"It is absolutely unworthy of a philosopher to say that 'the good and the beautiful are one'; if he should add 'and also the true,' he deserves to be thrashed. Truth is ugly. Art is with us that we may not perish through truth."

And finally with a bonus quote from my poem, "Ten More on Sandstone Tablets":

I shall stop and smell the sewage, too,

Otherwise the rose is just a rose that’s just a rose.