| ECOLOGY | SOCIOGRAMS | PLACES | IDENTITY | INTIMACIES |
| VIOLENCE | DEATH | GODS | WORLD |
You tell of long ago,
as if it mattered,
but the teacher's changed,
the uniform's different,
the woman in bed, well,
why talk about it all,
why talk at all,
no point to walking out
upon brick streets
just to
watch for a trolley car,
as if it mattered.
(1926)
Go meet your father at the corner
said the mom immersed in cooking
and the two boys
scampered down the stairs
and out to where stood the firehouse,
and the street car passed screeching
and stomping the bell
to sidetrack the wagons
and rocking on its rails.
The boys peered around the corner
from where they hid themselves.
There he is!! He's on this one.
They descried his familiar figure,
and ducked behind again
to startle him when he passed.
The trolley hissed and slid on sand to stop.
He steps sure and hard off the front end
that's been open to the air
and swings by the fatal corner.
Booh! Wahhh!
Hoots and hollers.
Fearful cries!
They are pleased to see him
so alarmed and terrified.
His arm is raised to strike
his assailants with the
Daily News and a clarinet case,
only reluctantly it seems
does he relax and smile
looking about at the sweet evening
when your boys are young
and affectionate still
and your job is done
and the windows are raised
and your wife is cooking
and gets her kiss
and throws open the oven
of the sizzling lamb
and the boys in a minute flat
set the table to eat it up.
In the seventh year of life,many things are smaller
but most are still bigger, especially people. So
bear in mind that more and more
the world will be smaller and you will be bigger,
until one day you will become
the same as the next day.
I will show you, see?
The people are all the same
and every last one is different.
You will never be wrong,
if you look at each person so.
I will show you, see?
How do you know you are young or old?
By looking to see if you have been growing,
which you tell by looking at people around you, or
if your clothes no longer fit,
but parents may fool you if you ask.
I will show you, see?
Everything takes time, meaning,
one thing happens after another,
and things that happen now
are followed by things that happen next,
and things that will happen next
have had things happen to them before,
meaning that time goes forward
into what you do not know
and comes from what you knew before,
remembered.
I will show you, see?
All the things that happened
before now are called history,
and your own memory gives you history,
but everybody's memories all added up
give a bigger history,
a giant memory.
I will show you, see?
And now we have machines called computers,
whose first job is to remember
whatever you or somebody, of any age,
tells them to remember,
no matter how stupid.
Then others or yourself
can tap-tap take out any memories,
take out a lot of history.
I will show you, see?
Reading, writing, and arithmetic
are easy to understand. If somebody
wants to tell you something
but you can't hear him,
he can make certain marks
to mean what he is saying,
and if you knew what he was saying,
you could match the marks with the words --
you could read. And if
you gave him back the same words and
changed the marks a little,
he could maybe figure out
what you mean too --
he could read too. So if
a lot of people did the same thing
with each other, soon
all the world could read!
And write! because
you just gave him back his words
by copying the marks,
so you can write just like he did.
And your marks and his,
because they are alike
are a language. And if you coax
everybody to use the same signs
you are a language teacher,
and you can call the language by a name,
Jessie-Jimmy, or English, Swahili, or Greek.
I will show you, see?
Arithmetic is thinking about
putting things together,
then making bunches out of them,
then taking them apart, and
also putting them together fast.
I will show you, see?
If I learn anything more,
I will let you know.
swill ah poca vodka.
sotto voce
snivel wishes:
"auspicious pisces."
inna mone, ennemy moan,
shiwa bone, she wah boan,
wahh!
tweeta mezzo voce, greeter.
filler litre frus.
slurp an burp de
ornges twinged jus frus.
inna mone, ennemy moan,
shiwa bone, she wah boan,
wahh!
o da luciasistist piggie
broke de frostiestist twiggie,
wen da full moon cometh
ovva minnetonka loam,
wen da icey age goeth
vom der heissgemachteth home.
itkin hoppen, iddid hoppen,
inna mone weh shiwa bone.
alto voce, hallelujah!
she wah boan.
(1977)
Dear Sebastian:
I hope these dog days find you nicely nested in Capri.
Being it's your birthday, here's a poem:
It's sixty o'clock
since I fell to Earth,
my ears ringing.
I've done many things right:
Surviving contraception,
my mother's depression when grandma died.
I survived 109 of typhoid fever
I survived my brother's birth,
and even his moving into bed with me.
When they tore up the cobblestones on my street,
I ate of asphalt and survived.
Only I, my teacher thought, should sing
"Happy-go-lucky they call me,
happy, and careless, and fancy-free."
A long string of such successes ensued.
The squabbles of Christmas, the death of friends
the edible garbage, the mad eye of history,
committees, footnotes -- all behind me.
I've been more wrong than right --
57.3% to be exact --
against the national average of 66.8.
So a firecracker or two would be proper,
and even a weak whistling.
Love to Lucia and you all.
Here is a saga of hard work and birds of passage.
In a poor and barren manger,
Mary bore a holy stranger.
With the cows and donkeys round her,
gave us Jesus Christ our Savior.
For this love I hold for you,
Go to sleep, my baby new..
Peaceful sleep, peaceful sleep,
Rest my baby in
Heavenly sleep.
*****
(Nina povira manciatura,
parturiu La Gran Sinura.
Menzu lu voi e l'asiniedu
fici Gesu Bamminieddu.
Pi st'amuri ca ti o,
Dormi fighiu e fai la o.
Fai la o, fai la o.
Dormi fighiu
e fai la o.*)
(*The original composer and lyricist of this Sicilian lullaby are unknown,
but it may be a folk song of the Middle Ages.)
(Die Kinder bei der Krippe)
Now come little children,
oh come one and all,
to be by the cradle
in Bethlehem's stall.
See here what this
holiest evening has wrought,
our heavenly Father
great gladness has brought.
*****
(Ihr Kinderlein Kommet, O Kommet doch all,
zur Krippe her Kommet in Bethlehems Stall
und seht was in dieser
hoch heiligen Nacht
der Vater im Himmel zur Freude uns macht.)*
------
Original music by Johann Abraham Peter Schulz (1747-1800) of Luneberg.
Christoph von Schmid (1768-1854) of Dinkelsbuhl wrote the lyrics.
Here only one of three verses is rendered.
The defeat of youth is age,
unconditional surrender to sour fat.
Wrinkles, rough veins, and sag.
Seared fantasy, wounded game,
savaged times twice and thrice
conquered, ravaged but sweetened and fuller,
beaten, beaten, still it is
"Chah!" and "zUT!" a choked
screeching against shadows
playing images of youth upon old faces
with clefts, scars, shrivelling
-- adolescephalia magnified --
estimating its unerring flight to an end,
while the mouse of love scurrries
from corner to corner to avoid
the wierd eye-beams of old cats of desire,
narcissistic pets, captors.
His years of life hang flapping
forlorn in the smog of windy city.
What was it all about --
the racket for sixteen years?
Diapers, bottles, mush
mommy. daddy, look
measles, croup and cavity.
Book, shirt and drum.
Joke, complaint and where to go
where not to go in summertime.
Study, drive and kiss
Togetherness, apartness.
Write me once a month,
You can't take it with you.
Take care of my stuff.
What about the holidays?
Surely we'll see you then.
Maybe you'll need something.
The birds do it in a season,
so do rats and bears --
disgraceful turmoil
and the
abandoned nest.
What next, in this new silence?
Why did it seem forever, and important
what was it all about?
When my heart was young
its bifasicular bunches sparking well
it swung wildly in its fine membranes
to pound the steel door of our partings.
I did not bother to excuse it from excess.
But now I look at parting
through a visor of self-containment
and unwrap your body in the dawn
without a clutching of flesh
I kiss you with fuller pleasure
without burning eye and sick stomach.
Has my love changed
or the avid mechanism:
what have I lost
what have I gained?
If they will not give your name, Lord Bheema,
Beam in the infinite Eye of the Buddha,
To a University whose bright joy and pure mind
Come from your first stages of power,
It is because they are afraid of the word that you carried
Which sprang from the roots they could not extirpate,
Acala, Duranama, unfolding Abhimukh,
Always Sudurajaya.
But from their fear they will dissolve and
In your Sadhumati let them whirl about
Like butterflies around the crown of Lord Bheema,
Watched in Mudita by the fifteen crores
Of your own, now of the whole world and
The Ten States of Humanity.
I thank my friend the poet "Sadguru" Chanda Mohan Wagh for enlightening me. The poem was delivered at the 95th anniversary celebration for Dr. Bodhisatta Babsahel Ambedkar (1890-1985), often called the "Father of the Constitution" for his work in designing the basic structure of the new-born Republic of India. He was born the brilliant son of an Indian Army sergeant, an untouchable outside the Indian caste system, and studied in India and at Columbia University. He led the movement for social, economic, and political eqality of India's great population of untouchables. He converted to Buddhism, whereupon he is called Lord Bheem II here, Lord Bheem being the Buddha, and many thousands of untouchables did the same. When the government proposed to give his name to the new University of Aurangabad, opposition from Indian caste leaders, some of it violent, forced the government to desist.
The proper names of the poem come from the Ten States of Humanity of the Buddhist eschatology and have the following meanings: Mudita=joy; Vimala= purity; Prabhakari=brightness; Arcisimati=intelligence; Abhimukh=the unfolding of existence; Durangama=far away, and with Babsaheb=infinite compassionate identity; Acala=immovable; Sadhumati=all-penetrating timelessly;' Danima-Mecha=in the infinite eye of the Buddha. Alongside my recital of the poem, I addressed an appeal to the outcastes of India to be enlisted in the Kalotic movement for world union and government.
(Dec 25, 1973)
Will you take a poem for Christmas,
Ninotchka, having enough of everything else?
Except money and I have no money to give you.
And love -- ah, yes -- of which
you never have enough
and I can't give enough no matter how I try.
The chilly smog conceals the Eastern sky
where another day of the comet Kohoutek dawns
The sparrows chirp, aflight
before the pigeons, exploiters
of people also still abed.
Free, fat, stuffed with DDT and gasses
No horse manure or early worms for early birds,
and my eagle eye can see far from my tall cage, although
it's my 54th year of Christmas --
when will they stop pounding that into me?
Don't they know I am incapable of celebrating such a serious issue?
The street lights are still on though the Christmas lights are dimmed
Criminals are more to be feared than foolish wisemen in bedouin dress
It is too late to catch anyone for the extinction of souls.
Come Donner, come Blitzen and
all you other reindeer of Santa Claus.
The polar star is falling and we must
be away in our sled, bringing
presents to our fearful little friends
around the world.
Booze for Daddy and
Face-cream for Mommy,
Toy-guns for Junior
and the Ouija board for Sis,
and slow down to dump the remaining debris on the
heads of the extended family
including the postman and a pitiable stranger.
Glory Hallelujah! Dear Handel harmonizing
upon the spheres, hanging upon fears.
Glory indeed. Haven't you noticed that
people are interested in lower animal forms
and the secret life of plants.
A bad sign for Bach.
Give a mouse for Christmas.
I cannot name the plants who grow
quietly in every room. What
vibrations do they give and take?
Will they one day be carried to
somebody else when we go to a
faroff pagan place for our
Saturnalia of the Year's end and end of an age?
What are all the people carrying who were carrying packages?
What were the trailer trucks carrying which
threatened to stop carrying it?
Why don't we all drop our packages?
The pains of Christmas that I recall
are unrecollectable by you, for you
can't be sure that you are permitted the
indulgence of memory. Your memory
reaches dizzying peaks
but drops into deep valleys, while
I muster mine like disciplined small
squads on the plain.
The jealous troops and the gloating ones
The ungrateful lined up with the disappointed.
The overstuffed with the annoying relatives
The fevered and coughing squads
The people who took too many pains
and cared too much, the
discipline for lifelong chains or hasty flight.
"What did you get for Christmas?" asked kids.
Why don't we give it up?
Babies are not welcome this year.
There ain't room for them
Whatever the vicars of Christ say.
Come Donner, come Blitzen:
The time has come to renovate our plastic dolls
The time has come to strip our land of oily shales.
The time has come to shroud the Cadillac.
The time has come to drink our sewers.
The time has come for Christ to stop behaving like a Baby.
I know what bothers me.
The world needs its head turned around
But it's not like a doll's head,
which you can revolve and even,
in the more expensive kind,
take apart, I feel frustrated.
But I can't give up and be happy.
So Christmas is a gloomy day,
an anniversary of broken World promise,
if I sit and think about it,
so better to drink a little more,
and move around,
and gab and mutter it away.
(For Stephanie Neuman)
We are assembled here on a memorable occasion
to salute one of us who has come of age --
Finally!
From out of Israel an apparition fleets to China
cross the seas blowing a kiss.
A Portent!
Past time recalled to mind, future time fast nearing,
times meet endlessly, here and now, with a fulfilling
Crunch!
Move-fast, talk-fast, scribble-quick, no stop to pin a medal,
nor stops the sun over Gideon.
Busy, busy!
Herculean feats, finding worms in the Big Apple, the bad egg
in the Bald Eagle's nest, a distinguished career
Just begun!
It has been rumored the nation is leaderless, and
sure it's not run by the people -- who then?
She then!
Fear not for the future in such capable hands, viz.,
the same hands that grasp firmly the tiller.
Hers!
Peace, peace, when there is no peace, nor truce, or surrender,
so when will it all end or end all?
She'll say!
Holy Lady, full of grace and bounteous beauties,
blessed be thou and the fruit of thy womb, sit by us in the hour of our need, and
Eat! Eat! Talk later.
Wish we life away so.
many Fridays thanking
for not being Thursdays
or others days of grinding.
The silken tides of
children's times course upon
the mills and motors
wettening our chronic cords
to stretch and let us slip
out after cast aside.
A long walk
by the path of notched trees
will pass Humpty Dumpty
splatted where he fell,
a ball batted high,
a dog barking seriously,
a book opened upon
unthreatening worlds,
rain, soft stilly falling,
so slowly that mind
moves leisurely between drops,
drop by drop.
Draw back all those weeks,
weary breath,
into the fresh unblackened
lungs of youth.
I've spent my life
preparing to run the world,
I've been ready for a long time.
The world, though, is unready
and I am getting tired of drill.
I should take up another trade
with fewer workers unemployed,
wherein edible bread is baked
and useful tools are provided.
Or be a great lover, or traveller,
or a stay-at-home with my TV set.
Our town offers many sports and
entertainments for low-brow and high.
But the world is moving erratically
and all these ordinary affairs make me
nervous in the light of the great comet
-- that is our Earth --
proof of its exact ellipse notwithstanding.
What moves about like
an old monk snuffing candles,
smoke rises, some smell --
of what, yes, no, of what?
No choice of what to lose.
Snuff this candle, brother,
not that one, if you please.
No answer, no control,
the hall becomes unlit.
We turn to the outside for consolation.
Don't ask questions
whose answer I cannot recall.
Don't put things in my head to be stored.
"In and out the same day!"
Play golf, there is little to recall.
Play checkers: it's all on the board.
Brother, yes, you can endlessly
perform your task. The candles
are infinite. Some day
a gust of blood
will take away your job.
Or the air will foul in the hall.
That will do too.
Elderly southern ladies
sitting on the veranda
and rating the population of town and country
in terms of its distance from their grandfather's
kith and kin, are a pleasant sight.
Socially harmless in itself.
bosh might go on forever,
and let it be --
But these sweet ladies
brought up children,
bought goods,
counselled men,
spread words --
not all of these nice,
or in the spirit of
Martin Luther King Day.
They sit and smile, nod and dream.
What they once were,
and their parents were before them,
which is not dead but moves along,
dragging its smashed limb and withered arm,
all the more wicked the gleaming
of its desperate eye.
Move in among their ancestors
on this April day of mourning,
Dr. Martin Luther King,
and all the rest of you
to help them celebrate
the new propriety for being nice.
(April 8, 1967, additions of 1990.)
Are you superb for turning on the light
to stop the flower from closing?
Soon after birth, you assume life
and think "I can live forever."
You are a daredevil driver
scornful of limits on speed.
You live as a squid
in jets of eager pulses
whose in-between acts are void.
As you grow old,
for driving more carefully,
be scorned for crawling.
The less remains of life,
the more precious it becomes.
Your greatest regret will be
to have never been properly used.
Reinventing eternity,
so far as you are concerned,
you will always look your best
in heaven.
It is useless to address you,
if this is all you say:
"Behave as you would all others should behave."
because I have found a revivifying way,
"Act so as to represent all future existence."
So now, why will you not let the flower close?
You must not be modern
nor romantic nor atavist.
Every hair is in place.
The ruined castle is a bouquet
with a place for you to ride
among the trees outside.
The water is in a giant cool well.
You must not be impatient,
for ideas must wage a war
of attrition against a plan
that controls nature to the end.
What remains of primitivity
is a foundation stone, a water
source, a clump of mushrooms
Every intrusion is an incident
assimilated into perfection.
What influence can it have here?
What influence is infinite?
The trains are toys that string along a cliff.
The bells are rung on a sophisticated score
The food is gathered from aroundabouts.
Effort is excessive but dissolved in its setting.
Add moons, add suns, add
silver trails off lakes of night and day,
add all species and handiwork.
You must be savage enough for the best ones.
You are not fire,
but lie gratefully in a wrapper of abundant means.
Poet says:
Who came first and who'll be last,
he with the words not the music,
who speaks profoundly and is understood,
the poet, now and of ages past
while composers blow through brass and wood
to cover their mutely humming strings,
music's beastly, Shakespeare said it well,
to sooth the savage breast,
crouching or brazen in the right-sided brain.
We have a million words, a hundred voices,
infinite combinations of the parts of speech.
Composer retorts:
What poet can succeed to voice this brilliant run,
without an imitation of musical noises
drag out this round quavering tone
or bang that massive chord again and modulate again,
and where is the rhythm that can smash all silly words
Hours on end, we never tire,
who among poets can one hire
for this and a resounding finale.
Poet:
But look: the more you speak,
the more we are together:
the voice monotonous is maimed,
I'm most ashamed and must be blamed
for having forgotten our common ancestor
the madman himself and capering,
don't forget dancing, all the while.
Alone we are only sporadic truths
spoken part way up the magic mountain,
confessedly poetry is but philosophical
ejaculation waiting for its animal companions
like the goddess and the rampant lions.
No more high licks,
lost my lip, baby,
can't get high no more.
I start down low and stay low.
There's things to do, sure enough,
a lot to blow below,
sweet, oh bloody sweet
and swollen lips.
Characters wander on-stage
anxious over the state of their hearts,
one actor counting up to 6000 beats of his own
to score points over the others,
reciting the "time's petty pace" passage from Shakespeare
all the while -- quite a trick.
You have to do something else
while thinking of your heart to be superman,
for it's only a muscle, expanded into a electrified pump
many trillion beats ago, think, my actor
John Wilkes Booth, had you thought of pumps
and the original warm beating of your heart in a worm,
you would have thought less of killing Lincoln,
since your act would have less meaning,
and you longed for meaning so, goofy man.
The heart has occasioned trouble besides its beat,
long before Jesus got into the "Sacred Heart" business
and Paul began to preach how much went on there.
Now the heart reversed the vulva,
which was better suited to stone age walls,
and actors among others are confused as to whether
the heart means courage, lust, or causus mortis,
or the rusty pump to be cut out and replaced by the heart of
a victim of a drive-by killing
while the clever brain, itself an even more pathetic mess of tissue,
is figuring out when to dispose of people no longer useful,
whatever useful means.
Oh, my dear Life Partner,
rescue me, loosed from my moorings.
I should never be let out among people.
I made a luncheon appointment with herself,
promised to call himself, giving proof
that the Emperor Constantine was un-Christian;
registered an order for a book I will not read,
and picked up a lurking book I must return,
then told Shelley of a wine she must try,
of course I would drop a bottle by,
but only if she would phone me when back
from Laramie where she made me promise to visit,
and I assured her husband, to appease him,
that I would clip the talking Labrador yarns
from my dog magazine, "Barking!"
imprinting my voice upon six answering machines.
Worse, I bought an old car sobbing for repair,
and rented a house upon the Grand Massif,
all of this on a glass of sherry,
fuel efficient, sober as a judge,
atop an ennui of the third degree,
turning my leisure into a dedicated frenzy,
in the course of being a sweet guy,
whose personal hygiene and mealtimes
are enough to handle on any day,
as for "My Life's Work" -- forget it!
Orate, porco!
"Linda, don't you love me any more?"
"Comrades, there's a traitor amongst us!"
"As babies go, it is pretty."
"The Dow industrials rose nine points."
"I can't tell by its shape if it's human and it barks like a seal."
The human race should be restricted to eighty words per day,
freely chosen, hopefully vital, possibly true,
proffered in common linguistics,
plus an infinity of musical sounds
including indecipherable flatulence.
So I pre-empt and preach:
Canta, porco!
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