Clever Beast

reading poetry

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reading poetry

not for the language, sirenous though it may be

nor for the ideas to later recite

but that I may read into being the self embodied


writ honest, artless and alive

touch still warm on the page

whose pungent nearness

to the voyeur doth arouse

 

originality of such virginal haste

read, yet ‘til now unplucked

näivemasterwerk of the soul

too freshly ruined to chance omit

the body stemmed

and resinous

 

 

The Whole Shebang

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        Hear now the cosmic yawn of the universe.  Its flat note blustering mute the thick airs of tradition to recommence in back alleyways a forgotten pact from our youth: “God is irrelevance” –prim and lewd and briefly infinite; its loos’d revelation happening like butterflies.  In the new paradigm we need only hold each other, irrelevantly, and all shall be forgiven; the grand scheme shimmied off wantonly like a champagne party dress.  In deference to the old rituals, let us roast another bonfire; char away the confessions curling inward and rote catechisms of truth; in lieu of truth, rearrange the stars & heavenly bodies (decimal points shifting to mollify the proof).  Only then to discover God trumpeting from a car alarm, so early on a Sunday morning even the good Christians fail to hear the call.

        Run, run clear of the classroom screaming, for frothed in its prattle even Nothingness is something, overworked with meaning (yet how curiously the child overlooks the abyss).  And while Stanford & Harvard are quick to chide our metaphysics and demonstrate in manicured terms how all can be contained, sociological and psychological, and need not be called God, still praise and call it God.  Ever more assertive, an atheist’s God.  Sure, the atheists smile their metal smiles, cordial hooks in their hearts to prop them up, greeting the world in full paradox – it’s enough to make one religious.  Tremble not before them for they have language to report back to and isms to churn from phlegm. 

       Without acknowledgement of God there is only relevancy, a steady diet of it - day in, day out - until unsuspecting on an unpaid coffee break in the doldrums of March you jerk awake, half-crazed, and discover to your dismay that everyone is playing their somnolent parts with such silly, crooked pride; hungering to be right, to be heard, to be actualized.  Hell bent to fill the bucket that leaks.  Rather we should break apart, expose, and entangle these multi-discipline, multi-faith, soothsaying, relevancy-pushers; for our children, if not for us.

       My son… my son swarmed by a new and improved reality bullishly rewritten by the minute.  Each new experience, each new word another interlocking piece in his repertoire.  My child is leaving me.  Try as I might to be in the moment and live it fully, it’s never enough, never sufficiently lived.  Habits carried over from another’s script ghost into my life - the heart on automatic, stale compulsion for distraction a quarter of an inch ahead of me.  And he is absorbing it all writ in the telltale signs of my demeanor.  He too, if not told, will come to expect answers in order to be understood; he too, will forego the magic of the universe in order to belong.  And what, in the end, is ever truly understood?

       I am this meat with a face transcribed by lines delineating the edges my form inhabits.  The sheer elegance of this machinery with its branching diminutive parts is a vessel worthy of Whitman’s salvo; and yet, as Pessoa said, a face to live mercifully forward, ignobly crouched to appear one-time reflected in a stream.  Such little effort spent on my presentation that it goes to show there are things-in-themselves if only to account for my face being arranged in spite of myself.  Perhaps it is as simple as this: you provide my meaning, and I provide yours.  Knowing this at the same time is a kind of grace.

       Steinbeck saw the good in people, folk worn threadbare and decent. “Maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit-the human sperit-the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of”, the preacher waxed in The Grapes of Wrath, eloquent and empty-gutted.  There rising like a loaf of bread, a morsel of truth: it’s in people, this goodness of sperit, but not owing to any higher principles of love, nor ethics, nor any such germ susceptible to dogma — all dogmas are flagellations for the feel, a round of champagne before readying the cross –- no, sperit is but spirit to be alive, a sovereign whim to stand outside godlessness and God Almighty.  That we are made creatures of digression, capacious and alive with apocryphal natures untold, this alone our source of goodness, this bulwark against humanity’s noblest intentions.

       In the truncated string of pi there’s a chaos calling out for you, your birth, life, death, everything spilling over, untreatable, irreverent, laughing; you are always a number away from knowing (a chaos in name only).  God is there to be the chimera that absolves us of the certainty, suckers the soul as metaphor and spares us the indignity of meaning so that we may be ourselves, finally, in the hiccupped head-on, ten car pile-up collision of now, now, now!

In Washington

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In the cognizant stillness of a hurricane freshly passed and the appointment of a President soon to come, Lina and I took to walking and marched upon Washington. A city carved from the wilderness and laid out monumental as if for a race of giants. Dwarfed by its riches and short on time, we elected to divide and conquer: museums by day, memorials by night.

In Washington, how curious the echo of footsteps.  Supplied in part by the grandiosity of its design, yet also underfoot, the cumulative weight of history.  The city carries itself like a memorial, a time capsule, a necropolis. A place where Walt Whitman is still a civil servant, and Watergate, a hotel.  One can almost smell the gas-lamps down stately corridors with their bone-white facades, picked clean.  A smug confidence chills the air born of some half-remembered Golden Age, every urban space clicked into place without a seam.  Perhaps the echo is the conquering of time, with but a defiant flock of pigeons to blunt the inlaid precision of it all.

Into the sky like the gunshot scatter in Dallas. For here Kennedy slept, and there, some say, the rifle that got him (a must-see exhibit), and over there, across the bridge, beyond the Potomac, where I could not reach - his body. In the gift-shop of the National Archives a book by Mark Lane accuses its host of collusion in the assassination it presently profits from. Beside it, a book by Bill O’Reilly soothes in support of the official record; only crazy people kill.

A November wind struck home as we turned past the obelisk onto the west Mall. As forgetful tourists we marked the memorials with our uninspired photographs -all but the one paying tribute to the fallen soldiers in Vietnam - here we walked wordlessly and reverently past names that meant nothing to us at all, to hang meekly by the binder of registered names as if intent on finding some long-dead relative.  How many pages did we turn before we moved on?

By dark we reached the Lincoln memorial and found in its temple some reprieve from the cooling evening air.  Lina read the inscriptions on the walls dutifully; bused-in children darted through the crowd; a mother fed her newborn on a stoop; and I, slurping a Dr. Pepper, stared blankly at the statue of Abraham Lincoln, inventorying in my mind the movie backdrops it had served.  Outside the sky was blushing. As if cut from the draping clouds there broke an oblong circle of sky.  Winking in the dark of the wooded edge, it seemed undignified; a blemish to the otherwise postcard symmetry of the horizon-tipped monument.  

As night fell we retreated from the Mall in search of food.  Just up the street from the theater where Lincoln had been slain, I savored a birthday meal of sea scallops, sauteed spinach and crab-meat hash.  I would later learn that a childhood acquaintance was dying right then, perhaps dying as I took dessert. He had been 36, like me.  Our last correspondence occurred a week before his death, in the thread of a Walt Whitman quote I had posted on Facebook; his epitaph was short and unsweetened: “Pretty deep!”.  I offered no reply. Outside the restaurant a civic sign reminds the passerby that this is “The Street Where Lincoln Lives On”.  O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done… O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells.

Deposits of a life leftover come back and ring.  That echo again, chilled by the dead expanse that memory edits out: the construction scaffolds outside of Union Station, the salvageable goods of homeless occupiers strewn by statues, the crooked old newspaper box that ate my loose change. For all of this is Washington too. In the unrehearsed symphony of nothing much happening one bids the moon to be more luminous.  What is happening and what has happened never quite meet: the memory rewrites itself; history is set in stone.