Lines From a Dream
Sweet leaf Keats drew my whole life over
It gave flesh to me
***
Lines Written Immediately Upon Waking
Tumbling over mountains over
rivers, through valleys
like a borg in heat
She stoned me
and cried for me
Absolved of nothing
yet resolved to everything
I entreated the sun
Infrared rays revealed
astrological scars
amidst the ruins,
like a farmer's car
amidst faint
festoons of
pansies.
Really
Genevieve was talking in her sleep.
I thought I heard her say, "What is real?"
"What did you say?" I asked her.
She repeated again, "What is real?"
"What? What is real?"
She answered, "Really."
BAKTIB
In my dream this morning I learned the word "Baktib."
According to the dream this word is Turkish and means "lame travel."
It's a state to be desired. You hope to travel "lame"
so that you can go slowly and experience more.
When I awoke I did an online search to see if the word existed.
In Cairene Arabic "Baktib" means, "I write."
For Jack Collum
Send up the clowns
Roll in the barrels
Shoot the player piano
The marvelest monarch
in the maelstrom is leaving
fabulist prints of wings
that mutate like Colorado skyscapes
Open all the books!
Ode to Fortitude
In Hamlet Fortinbras says,
"Go softly on."
Go softly on, dude
what else is there?
40 days in the flood followed by
40 days in the desert followed by
40 winks.
Whenever I shut my eyes
and let a word come to me
it's the word "Fortitude"
Sometimes it comes out "Fortified"
like in a cereal commercial, “Fortified
with essential minerals and vitamins”
Those fricatives
like little sonic word forts
the ramparts of verbal attitude
Made a fort in your living room
out of couch cushions
When you were 4
4 years later
put a 45 on the turntable
a rousing, hair-raising rendition
of 16 tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford
14 years later
made a fort at the beach
Against the wind
drinking a 40
confiding in a friend
nothing left to hide
Drove a Ford Crown Vic
four to the floor
over the hills of San Francisco
Drove back through the backwoods
of Joplin MO
in your Grandfather's Ford
Going all the way back
to the first man
in the first Ford
A Ford on either side
like Ford Maddox Ford
Like The fjords fortifying Norway
jutting up from the depths of the sea
into sheer mountain sides
Like Karl Ove Knausgaard
jutting up from Norway
as a literary force
Like Superman in the fortress of solitude.
The fortitude of solace.
Like Garcia Marquez's 100 years of solitude
Forty years old
and you’re an old dude
Forty more and you're worm food
Fortifying the worms
food for the next generation of food
Finally quietude
Stand on higher ground
Fight against the flood
until the flood overtakes you
The flood overtakes the floodlights
The fortitude to stand against the tide
until the next generation
can take over
Like a blood infusion
The next generation
fortified with your blood
Then as if on cue
this very morning
the Pope appeared
in a Ted Talk and said
Tenderness is not weakness
It is Fortitude
Go softly on, dude
A Moment
In between one daughter's
presentation on community
workers at one school
and the other daughter's
presentation on an animal at the next
I’m sitting at the front window
of the cafe at 40th and Queens Blvd
looking up from "The Artist of the Beautiful"
the short story I was reading on my phone
thoroughly charmed
by the language of Hawthorne
which I am in love with
like Melville before me
My fingers tapping a rhythm
to the flamenco on the stereo
the coffee working its magic
watching the April wind lightly
ruffling the hair of a woman walking by
These Public Things are Private
The way Emily took absolute care
for nobody
Follow the rhythm
the little trot to triage
the snow dope
fallen branches inside
startled asks, ask
Toddler anchor
Father feeling
It's easy to complain
The answer comes later
In the refrain
The radio takes over
Woke Up Like This
My body disappeared
Away into the night
like a thief had taken me
a ghost his prey
I feel it don't feel it
a surge of negative
for one disappearing instant
an ember floating up out of a fire
a shooting star in reverse
a speck going dark and then poof it's black
I speak but can't hear myself at all
sound in a vacuum
no room any more
no you there next to me
no more Me
I can't breathe
nothing to breathe
even the air has disappeared
I suck in with failing force
until I suck myself inside out
not even smoke comes out
silence not a sound no matter
not even nothing no trace left
as if a few black lines
on a page of digitized air
were zapped by a solar flare
the whole cloud zapped
and then even this
no longer here
***
Lines from a Nap
The night is full of fire.
the falling stars wed him
whom weather won't.
Birthday Wish
When I blew out my birthday candles this year
it seemed a sacrilege to wish for anything
beyond the moment itself. I just blew. No wish.
Dexter and Nori brought a bottle of Hudson Valley Bourbon,
burnt caramel, wood smoke, sun. I passed it around.
Got a magic 8 Ball from KC Trommer.
Lilla brought a peach torte from a patisserie.
Amy brings a peach pie,
Cristina, fancy snacks and socks,
Therese a painting of a hummingbird,
Catherine a handle of rum,
Nonna and Papa boursin cheese,
Marco oak-aged beer,
Quinn guitar strings, picks and a pear,
Tyler and Karen, wine and a watermelon.
Flicks & Jazz played in the Garden.
I threw a giant frisbee straight up
so it would come back to me
as if I was playing catch with the sky.
Dozens of kids swirl around.
Brooklyn Raga Massive played Zeppelin
with Pyeng Threadgill singing.
I danced with daughter Lucia
and she was so fantastic!
The Flushing Remonstrance played next
followed by old Felix The Cat Cartoons.
The girls were both lying on me comfortably.
It was a warm night with a cool breeze.
Full harvest moon! No bugs!
The night expressed it better than I could.
Now thoroughly tired, and pinching myself to see if this all
might be a dream, but instead of waking up, I fall asleep!
42
I almost went
into a trap
but was sent
a map
of the senses
by the deuses
ex machina via
a phone call
so I went out
dancing alone
into the glance
that becomes water
Leave weddings
for thunder
and alight like summer
despite winter warnings
Abate and desist
in orderly fashion
Soon we'll insist
on therapy sessions
Who has the time
has water is water
and who comes after
is on time every time
How Beautifully
When I first moved to NY
I was looking for a place to rent
and picked up a Brooklyn Rail at a cafe.
I opened it on the L Train
and there was a poem by Cedar Sigo
in which I recognized one of my own lines.
I shook my head in wonder.
Cedar had borrowed one of my lines!
It was a very New York School thing to do.
The line was perfect for the occasion too:
"How beautifully the brakemen allow the blood through."
I felt as if I had been given the Key to the City.
The fossilized Lightening Bolt
A man walks down the street with a t-shirt that says,
"Your weakness sickens me"
A man passes him walking the opposite way with a t-shirt that says,
"Your derision thrills me"
They moan I,
says Simone White
The way I look at bridges
Pink petal-strewn courts
Telescoping
Thread music
Into April’s elephantine
pumpkin seeds
Honeycomb gospel
Yardbirds’ Leyenda
COFFIN DROP
I am compelled to wake up in the middle of the day by a conundrum.
It is almost, almost, as if this thing, or things, were born of dreaming.
But it was not a dream. As I lay there sleeping, wide awake,
two beings appeared before me. Not appeared, exactly.
They became me. The being on the left was the shape of language
or rather was the stuff language is made from. At times it was the shape of feelings.
Other times, sight. Light presented itself to the small imp on the left.
The right side was silent. It was something else, still.
While the left side spoke an ever-changing and barely discernible
stream of images and words, the right side sat mute, waiting and watching,
a sentinel. The right side then became, for that moment, a shaggy ewe
bleating, saliva dripping from the corner of its mouth, the right corner.
The left side, the one who calls itself mammon for a moment,
and then man-moth and now wooly mammoth is prone to suggestion.
The right side encapsulates. The left is an imp bent on
surprise and exposure. This is the mutable undergirding of expression,
the immovable center of the left, and now the right. The right rises up
as an empty space with a palpable nothing; the isness of space.
Something must come of nothing. That something must be self.
There is a smell. There is a headache. The headache came from the left.
The headache is felt on the right. Inside are two monkeys, chained
to a rock. On the left Bruegel bubbles from the lips of John Wieners’ font.
On the right the monkey chatter hurts my head. The monkeys
are a symbol of themselves. They are plastic dime-store
novelties. The left is taken up for watching. The right pops a drawl.
There is no naming of the left. We can say the right is correct.
The right is fooled by shame, desire & nausea. This side is stopped,
keeps stopping. You see your mother now on the right. The head
expands. The hair is a new spice and takes commitment to grow.
The left is a rolling ball of clay set to animation, claymation.
The dough is stretched in space. To the right is the dough
in mom's kitchen being stretched to make bread. Good bread.
The smell of manna that takes us back to the womb.
Then the smell of animal and guts of sweet dew and underwater salt.
Those scents, from the womb, that are tantamount to what the tongue
lacks. The tongue made of clay. The shape bouncing off the center
into wordy vibrations. The station plays on, now a deejay with a soft voice
running down a baseball game in 1967. My father passing out to the drone,
the crack of the bat barely interrupting. The crowd hollers, the dreamer watches.
A curtain falls. The monkeys fall endlessly, a kind of trick in time.
The chatter seems to get lost in the fall. As heard from high
above and at the same time from below. Echoing chatter that is speeding up
as it falls. The head swirls in sickness and excitement. The fall continues apace,
two sides in a race, a perpetual tie. Focus in on the vision of the eye
on the right attached to a corpse come back alive. Now inside that eye
become that eye and on the left the surface is gummy. Walk upon the street
made of candy. The candy road spins off the rotating sphere of language.
The feet stick to the road and make loud god smacks with every step.
Stand still and feel the wobble. Push the surface in waves with one foot
and then the other. The waves wake up the baby. The babbling of the baby
becomes the waves, a synaesthesia of becoming. The curvature of sight
and sound undulating. The sensation spinning out from lower back now
as a sharp pain. This is on the right. As well as all of the new physical sensation,
which starts on the left. On the left the station changes to Socrates giving fits
to one of the students. The student is holding his head. He weakly smiles
at Socrates. Socrates bows to the student, with a slight tilt of the head.
The student puzzles over Socrates. What is he doing? The women start to cry.
The men are even crying now. The tears dry up into fantasy. The cries impinge,
originating on the right. The left is only momentarily frightened. The left takes comfort
in two steady hands that hold it tight. Study. The hands become breath, left breath in
the right breath out. The driver turns the wheel one-eighty. In the center of the wheel
is another wheel and so forth, as far as the eye can see.
Wildwood Holler
Way up in the Wildwood Holler
Face to face with my killer
He raised his voice
He raised his fist
I raised my glass
I said here's to you
Here's to me
Here's to us
Now kick my ass
Way up in the Wildwood Holler
Face to face with my killer
He raised his sun
I raised my moon
He raised the knife
I raised a spoon
He raised the gun
I put the flower in
Lightning bolt
and thunderclap
I had to laugh
Way up in the wild blue yonder
face to face with my creator
He raised the sky
I raised the balloon
He raised the bar
I raised the saloon
He raised the Ante
I raised the gin
He raised the morning
I raised at noon
Lightning bolt
and thunderclap
I had to laugh
Reggaeton at the D
I’m standing behind the bar
Staring in awe at the dancers
Tearing up the dance floor
When a drop of cold liquid
Hits my ear. I turn to Diandra
And ask her why she did that.
She says it wasn't her.
Well, who was it then?
She says it's the sweat
Of the dancers, explains that
the heat causes it to condense
On the ceiling and the combined
Sweat of all the dancers
fell into my ear. Sweet,
I said, it’s the perfect metaphor.
Yuck, she said. Salty, I thought
And left to join the dance floor.
ESTHETIC REVELATION
The girls are down for a nap and I have a moment.
What will I do with my moment to make it a MOMENT?
I will read. I pick up Elizabeth Bishop's “PROSE”
and turn at random to a letter in the middle and read,
“I’ve always thought one of the most extraordinary insights
into the ‘sea’ is Rimbaud’s L’eternite: ‘C’est la mer allee,
Avec le soleil.’.” Voila! I don’t read French, but I know this
Line. I used it as an opening quote of a poem or my daughters,
plucked it out of a New Yorker article on Rimbaud in translation:
“I have seen it. What? Eternity. It is the sun matched by the sea.”
I kept reading the Bishop, my interest piqued by the Rimbaud. She
writes “This approximates what I think is called the ‘anesthetic revelation’.
(William James?).” I was intrigued so I did a google search
for “anesthetic revelation.” I arrived at a wikipedia page not for William James
but for one Benjamin Paul Blood, a 19th century character. I read,
“After experiencing the anesthetic nitrous oxide during a dental operation,
Blood concluded that the gas had opened his mind to new ideas
and continued experimenting with it. In 1874, he published
The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy.”
(The first time I had nitrous oxide at the dentist I experienced this,
a rushing backward away from all current reality into somewhere
other, I want to say nether, and was filled with a bright euphoria
so intense that when the assistant took off the mask
kissed her. Oddly, she kissed me back, as if also swept up
in my ecstacy. Reality quickly came quickly back to me.
I was embarrassed and we both acted as if nothing happened.)
The Wiki article also pointed out that Ben Blood admits
to having never lifted a finger in anger and says
that his entire life had been fun. Fantastic! Finally
I read that Blood also patented a successful swathing reaper.
What? I had a moment of recognition, a super-recognition.
A revelation (perhaps more aesthetic than anesthetic) wallops me
between the eyes. First I have to back up and explain to you
that there is another Adam DeGraff. If you google me,
you’ll probably get him. He’s a virtuoso violin player
whose YouTube video of himself playing “Sweet Child ‘O Mine”
has gathered over a million views. He is me. “I is another”
I recently noticed this Adam DeGraff had given
a TED talk and so I watched it out of dopplegangerly curiosity.
Surprisingly it was not about violin playing at all, but rather
about reaping, literally, reaping swaths of grass by hand
as opposed to using a lawn mower. Adam said he had found his thing.
There is something about scything swaths of grass that just
makes me happy he said. And this is what I remembered when I read
about Ben Blood, the happy farmer, who also loved to reap,
and who must’ve found there, like the musician Adam DeGraff, the secret
of the trance. I sent the other Adam DeGraff the Wikipedia link for Ben Blood.
Imagine his surprise when he gets an e-mail from Adam DeGraff
about reaping and anesthetic revelations. I went back and looked
at the Wikipedia page again. I read there that Ben Blood was friends
With Lord Alfred Tennyson, another poet I love and a link
back to Bishop. It then became clear to me that this entire moment
was a poem waiting to be written. Therefore I am quickly dashing it off,
before the babies wake up so I will remember. (So far so good.)
***
The Match
Upon the back of a swan lay
a velvet blanket from Bombay.
The boy astride carries a torch
to light his way, but has no match.
The swan is flying through a maze
of endless days and blinding haze
searching for one who might say
what only a burning flame may.
The Thorough Thoreau
I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on this coat,
for it may do good service to you whom it fits
Better if you had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf,
that you might have seen with clearer eyes what field you were called to labour in
Contracting yourself into a nutshell of civility
Making yourself sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day
Not being immortal nor divine, but a slave and prisoner of your own opinion of yourself
What you think, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, your fate
Not to betray too green an interest in your fate!
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity
To stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future,
which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line
This is the only way you say, but there are as many ways
as can be drawn from the radii from one center
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look
through each other's eyes for an instant?
The Button Holding Together the Universe
I was taking a walk with the girls down 39th Ave
when I happened to look down and see a clump of
faded golden grass. In the center of the dead grass,
dead center, was a golden button, the same faded gold as
the grass it was laying in, as if the two were related,
As if the two were meant to be here, were fated
to be found together; the way the leaves
were splayed out around the circular curves
of the plastic button. The four little holes
suggested a square, pointing to the four poles.
Squaring up the center of the infinite surrounding.
The button was holding together the world, suspending
the earth itself, just as Wallace Stevens' jar in Tennessee
does, holding back the hills leading up to it. I was lucky
to have been there at that moment, to see it so improbably
arranged, just so, like that. I picked up the lucky
button and put it in my pocket, aware now, suddenly,
that I had just unbuttoned the universe, as crazy
as that sounds, even to me. (I'm not that crazy.)
I didn't think about it again for a few days, but then I
put my hands in my coat pocket and there it was.
And there it was the next day too. I would buzz
a little bit every time I touched the cool plastic
of the button between my thumb and fingertip,
like a talisman, or a worry bead, or an old Roman coin;
I rubbed it like it really was some magic thing
and not just a piece of trash. Maybe it was trash,
but either way, when I touched it, it became a fetish,
proven through my own unconscious reach.
So flash forward to after Anselm and Eileen each
read poems at Dynaco and I'm talking to Anselm’s daughter,
Sylvie. She is showing me her button collection. Are
you kidding me? It was a terrific collection, but I smiled
with satisfaction because I had the best button. I pulled
the button from my pocket and unfolded my hand.
Carley Moore was there and asked, are you giving that
to Sylvie for her collection? No, I said, not this one!
There was an awkward pause. I have to keep this one
because I found it in the grass, as if it was Whitman reborn
and holding up the tender button of Gertrude Stein.
It was holding the universe together! Sorry, Sylvie.
Carley was embarrassed for me. But Sylvie
flipped the script and reached in her pocket
handing a tiny red button to me. I took it
and then it occurred to me that I was an idiot. I pulled
the big gold button back out of my coat pocket, rolled
it once between my thumb and fingers, for luck,
and handed it over to Sylvie. She took
It. The little red button that Sylvie handed over
Is now the one holding the universe together.
