the bear and salmon show

[For a glossary of the once-nonce, now-minted words used below, refer to their context usage in: "beer foam on terra firma."  Or, skip to the next decipherable word and ignore my nonsense altogether.]

Ether,

It's been a while since our last communication.  I have been busy elsewhere from Elsewhere, namely over at Swallow, Socrates.  It's a long story but I'm sure, given your nature, your Eminent Diaphanousness, your broad-band acceleration through the whole web of Philosterous-Nonesucherol, you could scurry over there and scurry back before I know you're gone.

I'll assume you went.  I know, I know--sob story, isn't it.  But that's there, not here.

Here, Elsewhere, that is, I was updating my publications list on stage left (your right) and decided that I might as well toss some literature your way.  And, I am painfully aware, in the way of the chortlesome crows.  Let them laugh--I'm far less humiliated now by my smallish poetic efforts than when we began our correspondence back on April 12, 2010.  (We're getting old, Ether.)

Preface to the poem:  Now and then, great things surface on that predominantly insipid crust of media--Amorphilacious-Antaginons--which is to say in the parlance of Substantiopetrapopulus, Facebook.  Such a thing was gifted to me by my friend Mary Maxwell.  It was link to a site on which one can watch bears catch salmon in real time.  See for yourself @ explore.org.  

I'll assume you went.

At first, I unabashedly admit to watching this magnificent phenomenon, transfixed, for thirty minutes at a stretch 3 or 4 times a day.  Over the last two weeks, my time and frequency have diminished but I still check-in regularly.  It helps that I adore bears to the point of distraction but I can't imagine not wanting to behold such an ancient and vital display of wildness for at least a minute or two, adoration or not.

Meanwhile, other things have been going on in the world besides the bear and salmon show.  Noxious things.  A man is proven to have wreaked ruination on the lives of young children for the satiation of an aberrant urge while his compatriots abetted for the sake of convenience.  Another man meticulously plots and executes an ambush of terror on a theater full of harmless humans.

These monsters and the usual suspects, as well:  One candidate makes too much money, one candidate takes too much money.  One restauranteur disapproves of your convictions and capitalizes, one restauranteur approves of your convictions and capitalizes.  Oh, and Kristen stepped-out on Robert to hook-up with Rupert and now the whole thing's gone south--lachrymose teens and inappropriately concerned adult women are incredulous, distraught.

The handbasket is woven, the brimstone is molten, and all passengers are boarding at this time.

Out of these conditions and due to my obsession with bears, I wrote the following poem which, in reality, has very little to do with either.  Its about bears and salmon.  And a gull in cameo support.

In Lieu of Human Scandal: Live-Cam at Brooks Falls

Harvest season for the brown bear—

Pink salmon hurtling upstream.

One atop the falls, eyes locked

On the foam; a flying circus,

An urgency of fins, pelt the heron-

Patient beast—portrait of awkward

Majesty.  When now and then

Lucky maws clamp in purchase,

The bear shoulders into the plunge

To eat her catch on the banks,

Trailed by a covetous gull.

any random square

I wrote this poem four years ago in February of all things.  As you will see, that month does not come into play--a fact I'm not sure struck me as odd at the time though now it kind of does.  Today, it is coldish for late April.  Even so, that is not the point; it is simply what reminded me of this poem.

 

To Get the Sense of Drowning

I wanted the moments of my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered.  I might as well try to catch time by the tail.

                                                                                                       --Jean-Paul Sartre

Some Spring mornings feel like Autumn, some

Autumn ones like Spring, and for a moment

I get dizzy--

Days spent confusing them with others. 

And once, in a vortex,  I felt myself slipping into

Singularity—

A preposterous mathematics. Once revived, still barely alive

I mistook myself

For everyone.  Now huddled over my direful chest—all lungs and clinging to barely life—now praying to God, now God Itself, now the pretty paramedic.

June always sneaks impertinently in when I’m not quite

Done with May.  December does this too with its ticking bomb

Of shopping days and ball drops and

My own pallid birthday

Compared to Christ’s impending one.  And middle-Alabama knows

Its shocks of heat and rain on any

Random

Square of the calendar.

Of the jillion cigarettes I’ve smoked, I remember

Two in particular.  One—I sneaked past the nurses and into

My convalescent lungs.

Two—mother caught me with my head out the window, her

Disappointment matching mine at all possible

Points in time.

The poet warns of rosebuds, the prophet of infidels.

you may have to squint

Here is the promised Christmas poem. What it lacks in joy, it adds to hope. You may have to squint to find it, but it's there--in the postman's hand, in Santa's poise, in the silver-glitter she'll have to shake alive.

Furthermore, what's a Festivus without some grievance?

Ciao for now.

The Snowglobe

The snowglobe settles slowly

Into the townscape. She watches

Fretful for the postman

Caught in the storm. And what’s worse . . .

Caught in the glass—perpetually drowned.

She saddens. She shakes the globe.

For the movement of it. To stir the foam bits,

Frenzy the weather vane

On the farmhouse down the lane.

The postman holds a letter.

From the farmer’s son, off to war? For the wife,

Who’s worrying the hens just now?

The snowglobe settles bleakly

Into the townscape. She sips cocoa,

Tongues a marshmallow and sucks it gone.

The firehouse is red. The firetruck

Is red. There are no fires.

She saddens deeper.

She shakes the globe.

For the wonder of it. What will become

Of Santa astride the icicled house

—brick like hers back when—

Or of the gifts in the chipmunk-

Cheeked, velveteen sack?

The gift for the postman—a new pair of boots.

The gift for the wife—a basket for eggs, this time

With a handle. The gift for the weather vane—

a buffer for the verdigris.

She has her own gifts. In the attic,

Hidden. That soon she’ll wrap with last year’s

Paper and this year’s tape.

She will gladden

As she scissor-blades the ribbon into curls,

As she marks the cards with a silver-glittered pen.

But just now it’s far too sad—the cobble

And the fences lined with crows.

Too immediately terrible—the drowning

and the blizzard and the always of it all.

slush-piles and derreire-mistletoe

Tis the season for rejections. The weather outside is frightful. Jack Frost is nipping at my nose--which is creepy and rude. And everyday my snail mail box or its electronic great-great-great-great grandbaby are stuffed with rejections from literary journals like so much undeliverable North Pole correspondence.

Why so cruel in these joyous times? Academic calenders. Time-crunched MFA candidates with their own stories and poems coming back like just-thrown message-bottles not heartily-heaved enough into the azure horizon. (FYI, aspirants, the adjective "azure" is frowned upon by the MFA establishment as having run its poetic course from gorgeous to cliche: an acceptable usage, however, is ironically (not literary irony, per se, more like hipster irony--eg. check out this wicked fedora, I scored it off a homeless dude in exchange for my Droid . . . oh, crap, wait . . . BRB) as I have used it above.)

Having done a stint in literary arts editing, I am familiar with the routine. Submissions are handled as follows:

[a] Immediate rejection after a quick scan for words like "azure" and "ironically"

[b] Eventual rejection after a round-robin gauntlet-slap from assistant editors who confirm the genre editor's initial misgivings, a concurrence typically correlated to the underling's abnegation of self-reliance vis a vis the overlord's presumed omniscience.

[c] Immediate acceptance after a quick scan for phrases like "in the fetid aftergrime of human sex . . . " and "more than that, no, more than anything, Catriona hoped for the moonbird to land and splash in the bath of her plain blue eyes."

[d] Eventual acceptance after a round-robin chin-stroke-pensive-nod-fest from assistant editors who confirm the genre editor's initial intrigue--see above explanation of concurrence.

[e] Belated rejection/ acceptance after languishing for 5 months in a slushpile of equally unstunning pieces--neither so malodorous as to warrant an unceremonious disposal forthwith (Aspirants, do not send you're only copy of unstunning work) nor so transcendent as to warrant a personal phone call to the author, ASAP, before s/he receives an offer from a more immanently prestigious institution. (Aspirants, delusion is a valuable trait--always include your phone number in your cover page.) After those 5 months, i.e. The Epoch of Ignominious Oblivion, the editor-in-chief informs h/is/ers genre editors that the journal is too skimpy in its present state and will need to be stuffed from the slush-pile as a petite filet mignon is plated beside a steaming pile of smashed-cheesy-starch to make the meal seem more substantial. Another round of assisted reading proceeds, this time with more exaggerated moans at the truly insipid and more hysterical laughter at the inadvertently humorous, until, at long last and with final-exams impending, the staff settles begrudgingly on the remainder. For the deigned-upon--an exuberant email overstating the journal's honor of publishing your work. For the failure-to-the-last--a prefabricated post-card overstating the journal's distress at having to pass on your worthy piece and/ or pieces of prose and/ or poetry . . . Sincerely, Current Editor.

So yes, tis the season. I'm like Santa . . . publishing entities line up to sit on my lap and tell me what they do not want for Christmas: my worthy piece/ and or pieces.
And they tug on my very real beard and scamper off into the jollity of the teeming mall and I call for the next in line and daydream of hanging mistletoe above my ass for the behoof of all and for all a goodnight.

Happy Holidays, my friends. Thanks for following along in 2011. Next week, I'll post a Christmas poem. And after that and after that . . . who knows.

outside in gambols

Here lies a confessional piece. I wrote it last year sometime to commemorate an epoch of literal powerlessness in my life. Before I wrote this poem (as indicated in the first two lines) I had written very little in the way of direct acknowledgment of my on again off again struggle with incapacitation. Since I wrote this poem, I have written more freely (at times more pathetically--allowing myself the occasional wail of self-pity) of my tenebrous condition.

Because such poems are practically and rightfully poor stuff for at-large publication, my little blog here makes for a decent outlet.

The Playground

I have not said enough of the bed

Or the five weeks I spent there

Daily funneling through the slender

Middle of an hourglass

until the end when all of me

Had settled in the bottom.

Five weeks and I’ve only a few lines

To show for it. The comforter—ha!—

Was red, faded from use and ultraviolet

Rays. Windows are crap for stopping

Light and no great conquerors

Of playground sounds either.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

The great triumph of some days—

Crawling to the bathroom; the white

Flag of most days—pissing in a bottle.

Family bought CDs of jokes, L’Amour,

Music interposed on lapping waves.

For calmness. For calmness slows

Funneling grit. That was the theory.

At last, I lost my mind. Five weeks

Finding shapes in the ceiling:

Horses, mostly, horses on a carousel

Without poles, without children—

They were all outside in gambols.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

What else? It’s important

To be forthright. As I gathered

At the bottom, pinned by the Wrestler,

Watching my million grains cascade

Upon me. Me in the third person—

Out of body because in of it reeks

Of sweat, fear, the last several meals

And unwashed armpits. To be forthright.

It’s important. What else? Envy.

Sadness. Radish-bitter daydreams,

This one of many: Me in a tree,

Limbs like a ladder, up and up.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

Sometimes, I sang. I’ve written

Hundreds of songs but none

Of them came to mind. I sang the hymns

Of my youth. God on a horse

On the ceiling, me and the comforter—

Faded, stitched together; it cannot

Budge beneath me, I cannot rise

Above it, we are each others’ jailer.

No bars. Just keys. Jangling

From the ceiling. Do I remember

Any psalms? The twenty-third, is all.

It’s enough. For an hour. Then not even close.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

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.