A Poem for Memorial Day: "Taking Chances"

Last night I watched HBO's movie, "Taking Chance," about escorting a dead marine home to burial in Wyoming and I couldn't sleep all night because the movie didn't have more than the most fleeting courage to question the Iraq war and the country that took this PFC's life. So this morning I tried to conduct my own memorial service. Chance Phelps was the name of the marine who died and Cindy Sheehan was, to me, the name of the mother he left behind.

TAKING CHANCES
for Chance & Cindy

1
The river was on its best behavior today.
It didn't want to thirst men
or beast. It didn't want to shoulder tide
or head for a mothering sea.
It didn't want to chase the scudding clouds
it mirrored over head.
It just wanted to run so slow
it could pretend to stand still
long enough for just
this one piercing, sheltering once
to echo once
for always.

2
Alias looked in the river.

Alias saw the man he used to be
poised forever for a drink
from his 10 gallon hat.

Alias saw a convoy of minnows
practicing zig
zag maneuvers
with a precision of survival
men could never learn to imitate.

Alias felt the ache of morning
like a soft shrapnel of song
its refrain of loves lost or found
the kindly remnant of struggles with an angel.

Alias heard the wounds of time
ringing more than hurting
somewhere inside a vast inoperable longing
everyone he had ever loved knew
and kept to himself.

3
The wind ruffled the river's surface
blurring the algae masses
and the long limber strands of grass.
Chance remembered when the river played host
to a rampage of waters
surging with ends of days
for livestock and homestead
surrendered to the mercy of mutability.
His great grandfather was famous for saying
his was the last generation
to know more men who died from flood
than war. "You could go years without
hearing of a death not due to natural causes."
It all belonged to God then, Chance thought,
a taker of life who stayed true
to a gentleness of giving.
Suddenly he felt the urge
to pray for days
when the worst inexplicable that could happen
was a saw mill accident or steam boat collision.
"Restore us to old beginnings," he requested
there in the quiet
peering into the waters
"when rivers were gods
and gods were only good
for granting things
like starting over
and over
again."

4
Peter fished in these rivers
taking weights from the Galilean's tackle box
slowly filling the floor of the row boat
with groupers and bass
for a feast the shady after
noon of that very bright morning.
Papa John was always telling the other fishermen
there was nothing to worry about
and that the very least that could happen
was never less
than enough
for a feast.

5
Never mourn the dead
the Galilean said. For better or worse
it's over for them. Pray for the living
who today marry one
to one another
in a brief embrace of water
before rising to the rest of their lives
from a containment
that wishes men
only deepest well
being.

6
Alias knew the river would betray its coldest depths
to reflect heights
that only birds could reach
as if they were thoughts of men
sent to seed clouds with the rain
no river
or ocean it flowed to
could ever dream of
praying for.

--Narberth, Memorial Day, 2010

What I've Learned About Socialism from Jack Spicer

Dear Danny,

Let me start by copying out a fragment from a fragmentary Jack Spicer Perry Mason script begun (and never completed) in 1956:

"R. Hamilton Burger: Look at man basically, your honor. He is a child. He wants to grow up. As soon as he realizes he is too old to grow up, he dies. Somebody shoots him or stabs him or he dies of pneumonia or a heart attack or commits suicide. This is what we in law call the basic law. Angelism [true human embodiment] is like leprosy. It tries to thwart the basic nature of man. It cannot succeed. That is its basic treason. If it could succeed, if the leprous person by having his face eaten away could make his bones seem so beautiful that all men would kiss them, if leprosy exposed the heart and the heart only, man (and nature) would not consider leprosy a crime. If there were any secrets the broken skin could lay bare, if the broken skin could display anything else but broken skin. But, your honor, you know, I know, all men know, there is nothing broken flesh can expose but more broken flesh.

Perry Mason: Your honor, I object. My client is not accused of leprosy.

R. Hamilton Burger: I accuse him of leprosy.

Mrs. Doom {the Judge}: The attorneys will refrain from personality. . . ."

Spicer never got to launch a defense of what he called "Angelism," active dis-invention ( he called it, similar to Lew Welch, "unventing") of the lie of hard-core Christian corruption or any definition of the human being as separable from God (and therefore open to trumped-up, trumpeted charges of failure). Imagine a Philip Marlowe who reads Rumi and you've pretty much got the "persona (very much gratis)" of the poet. "Angelism," he tried to tell his friends and students at this time, was the truest (appearing in its American incarnation as tough and rugged) propensity of human spirit. The truest nature of Human Nature. Spicer fought all his life against a Catholic and Calvinist sense of us as fall-guys for the Fall. Paradise, he taught me, is as much a down staircase to Earth as an up staircase to Heaven. It's got to be two ways, bi-ways, always. Angelism was to reveal another purer, incorruptible state beyond the Fall. Call it the Full. But too many boys and burgundies got in his way. So he made THE way his poetry and made it tougher than any desire--even the desire to write it and be good at it.

The first time I read Jack (some excerpts in a Gilbert Sorrentino review of "Billy the Kid") I knew Spicer was a true poet and that all true poetry prophecies liberation. How? By practicing it. "Real toads in fake gardens." Or was it "fake toads in real gardens." Both sound right. Both are right. The establishment calls such dis-invention (of the status quo) leprosy and makes it a crime like suicide. If there must be Satans (monotheisms thrive on them), then let them be the Satans of Job and the Gospels, God's handyman, absolutely dependable in his mayhem. [Note: I just finished listening to Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel's "Joan of Arc at the Stake," which concludes with Joan giving the flames permission to consume her by sending flesh-combusting flames of love from her own heart. I don't know what actually happened up there on the stake except someone burned alive but I am convinced Paul Claudel thought he knew and Honegger believed him.]

The socialism I groped for last night was like Spicer's poetry: a socialism of instinctive rapture and regard (sometimes seeming like, or putting on airs of, rage) for the world as a protectorate of beauty. Poetry, had of necessity, a saint's kind heart but with the kicker's foot of a Christ-like Beckham giving the boot to money changers in the parking lot. It's a tough-minded, unsentimental socialism that forces the student to grab the cat whose head the Zen master is threatening to sever from the master's hands and put it back down on the floor, saying, "I rest my case." Saving the lives of threatened beings and things is the only satisfying reason for and successful argument in defense of socialism. The redemption of life is living proof.

What we are seeing in the Gulf, I fear, is a triumph of leprosy. It may be too late for the protection that is the only practical, practicable proof of God. Thankfully, we are bi-sexual--angel and man all at once. I never fail to learn the best about myself from Spicer. "Angelism" is a code word for the most irreducible form of Socialism. "Poet be like God," Spicer commanded. Angelism is the aegis and agency by which we do so. The stewardship begins, for me, with clear, articulate perception--a husbandry of speech. To see things as they are is my Socialism. Like-wise Bawa, who contrasted hard-hearted Communism with heart-to-heart Communasm, saved his best visions for song--often bursting from free speech into freed music. The first time I saw him do so I thought he was behaving like my mother, who chose to switch from English to Yiddish just when the story started to get good. One big difference: Bawa's Yiddish was perfectly intelligible. In fact, it was true speech.

I've been allowed to save some of my past with my teacher derived from snippets of song. I realize now he was confirming a lot of what Spicer and Olson were trying to teach us--but in an ashram rather than a barroom setting. This morning I felt like I was sitting in the mosque he built, sunlight pouring in, with bonus breeze. In my last days as a church-goer, I used to call the mosque Moscow and thought the imams were all KGB members. Then I remembered a Sid Caesar skit where he plays a gangster by the name of Harry Mozart ("At lest the name of Mozart will be famous!" he exclaims at one point) who exploits a law that allows men to flee burning banks with their money. I fled that burning building with plenty of wealth intact. But it can only be spent in prayers of clear perception and understanding. This wealth cannot burn a hole in any pocket because it can't be stored there. It exists only in use--its highest and best use as, in my case, song and its subsidiaries.

Here's another of Jack's incredible Boston poems, with that wonderful survivalist Philip Marlowe voice rising from the depths in the death-defying "calmness of poetry":

A POEM WITHOUT A SINGLE BIRD IN IT

What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not even know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only know that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun's over. The picnic's over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad,
But the calmness of poetry.

--Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry, Wesleyan, 2008, p. 73.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Kasowitz"
To: "David Federman"
Sent: Saturday, May 29, 2010 2:04:48 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Stewards of the Earth

I don't know what you mean by "socialism of the rich" or "socialism of the poor", or for that matter "socialism of survival". What socialism does mean is wresting away the natural resources of this world from the corporate profiteers and entrusting them to responsible stewards of the earth. That was the gist of the article I sent you.

My Gulf Coast Blues: Jack Spicer's "The Day Five Thousand Fish Died Along the Charles River"

So they sent Bill Clinton last summer to offer Rep. Joe Sestak an advisory job in the Obama Administration if he would drop out of the PA Democratic Senate Primary Race against Arlen Specter. Mr. Sestak would have won by an even more resounding majority if the news below had broken sooner. Obama never ceases to amaze me with his likeness to Herbert Hoover.

Meanwhile, I feel like I'm trapped in a planetary version of Luis Bunuel's "The Exterminating Angel," with no one able to leave the party or change the conventions that are crushing the life out of them. No food in the pantry; so eat each other.

Yesterday while driving home I listened to an oil expert worry that this oil spill might set back drilling for decades--compounding this disaster with an even worse one. Is it fair, he argued, to hold the equivalent of one Chernobyl against an entire industry?

No one seems to have asked--not even the whimpering Louisiana congressmen on TV last night whose childhood fishing ground is gone forever--whether a CHERNOBYL WAS NEEDED IN THE FIRST PLACE. What does it say about our 'standard' of living that we must drill for oil one miles below the surface of the ocean using untested technology that cannot be controlled if it fails? No one has yet asked a single question in any press conference I have watched about reforming the scale of living, or redefining the norms of individual energy consumption and resource use. The party will continue, that's the message I'm hearing. And Mr. Obama intends to host it for another seven years.

As a writer long familiar with jewelry industry despoiling of ocean bed and mine field, I see BP's escapade as the latest chapter for a book called 'Blood Oil.' Only we don't see it that way because the victims are fish and fowl, flora and fauna. Last night, as I watched footage of a bird cleanup, I had this horrible image that BP had gone on a rampage--tarring every feathered thing in its omnidirectional, omnivorous path.

There's a Jack Spicer poem written while he lived in Boston in 1955 that deserves to be read in defiant as well as elegiac conjunction with this catastrophe. It's right up there with Bessie Smith's "Back Water Blues" started in a rowboat during the 1927 New Orleans flood.

THE DAY FIVE THOUSAND FISH DIED ALONG THE CHARLES RIVER

And when the fish come in to die

They slap their heads against the rocks until they float

Downstream on one dead eye. From rocks

The Irish boys yell and throw rocks at them and

beat them with their sticks.

Gulls wheel in the fine sky. Tall as an ogre

God walks among the rocks. His angels cry,

"Yell and throw rocks at them and beat them

with sticks!"

But watch their upturned eyes

That gleam like God's own candles in the sun. Nothing

Deserves to live

--Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry, Wesleyan, 2008, page 56

May 28, 2010, 10:14 AM

White House Used Bill Clinton to Ask Sestak to Drop Out of Race

By PETER BAKER

H. Rumph Jr./Associated PressPresident Bill Clinton with Joe Sestak, and his wife, Susan, in 2006, when Mr. Sestak was running for the House of Representatives.

President Obama’s chief of staff used former President Bill Clinton as an intermediary to see if Representative Joe Sestak would drop out of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate primary if given a prominent, but unpaid, advisory position, the White House said on Friday.

Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, asked Mr. Clinton last summer to explore “options of service” on a presidential or senior government advisory board with Mr. Sestak, the White House said in a statement. Mr. Sestak said no and went on to win last week’s primary against Senator Arlen Specter.

The White House disputed Republican claims that the conversations might be illegal or improper. “There was no such impropriety,” Robert F. Bauer, the White House counsel, said in a memo released to reporters. “The Democratic Party leadership had a legitimate interest in averting a divisive primary fight and a similarly legitimate concern about the congressman vacating his seat in the House.”

Mr. Bauer went on to say that such horse-trading has been commonplace through history. “There have been numerous, reported instances in the past when prior administrations – both Democratic and Republican, and motivated by the same goals – discussed alternative paths to service for qualified individuals also considering campaigns for public office,” he wrote. “Such discussions are fully consistent with the relevant law and ethical requirements.”

Representative Darrell Issa of California, the senior Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the interactions described by the White House “represent an illegal quid pro quo,” even if the position was unpaid. “It is abundantly clear that this kind of conduct is contrary to President Obama’s pledge to change ‘business as usual’ and that his administration has engaged in the kind of political shenanigans he once campaigned to end.”

Federal law makes it a crime for anyone “who directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or any other benefit” to someone else “as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office.” It is also illegal for a government official to use “his official authority for the purpose of interfering with, or affecting, the nomination or the election of any candidate” for Senate.

While many have speculated that the White House offered to appoint Mr. Sestak as secretary of the Navy, Mr. Bauer said that was never the case. The White House did not offer Mr. Sestak a full-time paid position because Mr. Emanuel wanted him to stay in the House rather than risk losing his seat, so he considered “uncompensated advisory board options.”

The White House did not disclose what those options were, but people briefed on the matter said one option was an appointment to the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a panel of prominent Americans outside government who provide independent oversight of the nation’s spy apparatus and advise the president. But White House officials discovered that it would not work because Mr. Sestak could not serve on the board while still serving in Congress.

In a statement Friday, Mr. Sestak said Mr. Clinton had conveyed Mr. Emanuel’s suggestion that he join a “presidential board” while remaining in the House, but he declined. “I told President Clinton that my only consideration in getting into the Senate race or not was whether it was the right thing to do for Pennsylvania working families and not any offer,” Mr. Sestak said. “The former president said he knew I’d say that, and the conversation moved on to other subjects.”

Mr. Sestak first mentioned publicly in February that he had been offered a job but provided no details, and the White House for three months had refused to discuss it, generating intense criticism from Republicans who accused it of trying to bribe a congressman and deep consternation among Democrats who called on the administration to answer questions.

Mr. Emanuel was eager last summer to clear the way to this year’s Democratic Senate nomination for Mr. Specter, who had just left the Republican party, and to bolster Democrats’ majority in the Senate. Mr. Sestak, a retired admiral and two-term House member, was already planning a run.

In tapping Mr. Clinton as the go-between, Mr. Emanuel picked the party’s most prominent figure other than Mr. Obama and someone Mr. Sestak had worked for on the National Security Council in the 1990s. Mr. Sestak endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton against Mr. Obama in the 2008 presidential primaries, and Mr. Clinton was one of the first to call to congratulate him on his Senate victory last week.

Mr. Clinton was at the White House on Thursday to have lunch with Mr. Obama and join him in greeting the American men’s World Cup soccer team heading to South Africa.

As chief of staff and previously as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Mr. Emanuel has not been shy about trying to steer party nominations to those he considers the stronger candidates. The White House under Mr. Emanuel has also leaned on Gov. David Paterson of New York to drop out of this year’s gubernatorial race, which he eventually did under a cloud of scandal. Mr. Emanuel’s deputy, Jim Messina, suggested a possible administration job to Andrew Romanoff to get him to not challenge Sen. Michael Bennet in a Colorado primary, The Denver Post has reported, citing unnamed sources.

Whether that constitutes ordinary political horse-trading or crosses a legal line has been debated in Washington for months. Democrats and some Republicans have said it is hardly unusual for presidents to offer political appointments to clear the way for allies. But Republicans have suggested such actions may constitute a crime.

Mr. Issa and all seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have asked the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor. The Justice Department wrote Mr. Issa last week that it did not need a special prosecutor to investigate if it chose to do so. Government officials, who asked not to be identified discussing legal decisions, said that neither the Justice Department nor the Office of Special Counsel, an agency that looks at violations of the Hatch Act governing the political conduct of federal employees, is investigating.

While declining to discuss what happened, Mr. Obama on Thursday said, “I can assure the public that nothing improper took place.”

An Answer to the Jewish Question

Stuart Z. Perkoff wrote this small epic, "Feasts of Death, Feasts of Love," about growing up Jewish in the 1930s and coming to terms (if terms can ever be reached) with the Holocaust in the 1950s. I first encountered this poem in Don Allen's epochal "The New American Poetry: 1945-60," and sought for years afterwards to find Perkoff's complete poetry. That event didn't happen until 1998, when Allen persuaded the National Poetry Foundation to publish Perkoff's collected poems--a harrowing volume with one of the most affectionate and intelligent introductions (by Robert Creeley) to any volume of poetry I have ever found. Perkoff could only find mobility and coping skills as a poet. He could not hold a job, only a pen. Although physically functional, he was a kind of a metaphysical paraplegic, living as a drug addict in small apartments and smaller jail cells--but always writing incredible poetry in every one of these confinements--no matter how extreme and tortured. This poem will shed light on Perkoff's long, living social martyrdom and the beauty he thereby saved for us, his readers. Make the appropriate time and space for this journey into the boyhood of an American Jew living in the deep, dense swampy shadows of WWII in a way no one who fought (and even perished) in that war could have ever known. This is a poem about the weight of history. You will be rewarded with a record of a truly transcendent survival.

A personal note: It has taken a lifetime to NOT demand of, or even want, a God who must be responsible for the actions of his children. If anything, that God--a God I no longer seek--must contemplate the heinousness of his children and still keep the unshakable faith that is the preamble to Creation. Since the Creation is not a crime, to ask of God such fortune cookie wisdom is to inflict cruel ingratitude on the always-constant, meant to-be-comforting thought of Him. I live with that thought, grateful for its anchoring. All is, I realize now, subsumed in this Creation and the love it requires for its fullest expression. To even say another belabored "alhamdulillah!"--all praise is to God--in the face of our inhumanity to each other and therefore God is to cling to the old Father God who will make things right, hopefully on this side of the grave and wearing Hawaiian sackcloth with outrageous flowers printed on it. As Bawa said, God has given us everything; there is nothing else to give, not even a second thought, for that would make him separate from us. I think a courage of simple self-reliance and an adamant belief in my own recombinant possibility constitute true divinity in this workshop now.

As a coda, I have appended an excerpt from Perkoff's meditations on the Hebrew alphabet that could serve as a credo for his art and the poetry he succeeded in writing and to which I still aspire. I give his short meditation on the 7th letter of that alphabet, given for a 7th day of resplendent wholeness where all is coherence, where all is meant to make things cohere. From warship to worship is the path.

One last thing: I offer this poem as solace to my dear dear friend Ed Weiss, awaiting the surgeon's word about his 41-year-old son. Nothing, Ed, can make me regret (for longer than a forsaken instant) this birth into the life we have shared together and share forever.

David

P.S. It is an honor to be a scribe this morning.



FEASTS OF DEATH, FEASTS OF LOVE

I

1.

down the Wolf River
backs to the sun thru water shallow & flat
beautiful girls & boys
the birds wing tip to tip
swinging thru & around
calling, calling

we carried city eyes
over the rushing water
the stunned vision of scene after changing
scene
expanding & including
as our shouts & grunts & songs
wailed outward

(I had to get out, once, & push the canoe from behind, my
body from the ankles up was hot, sweaty, sun gleaming, my
feet cool in the river, lifting & pushing the heavy canoe.

I thought the others wd get too far ahead, & we wd be lost,
off in the Wisconsin woods, where there were neithers Jews nor
cities, a world hot & in winter my feet wd be like encased in
the cement of the river, & the canoe wd never be pushed over
the flat scrapey sand.)

the river movement
coiled around our eyes
the quiet sound of the breathing of work
set the beat
of our songs


2.

The next year we took a different trip, out Lake Tomahawk
& an adjacent lake, I don't remember which one. In that part
of Wisconsin the lakes lay on the land like a thousand eyes,
peering into & thru each other.

from lake to lake
between two mountains
all blue green quiet movement water
in the air & eye
the huge walls rising
a great grass field
covered the inlet
& the canoes went thru
as over land, it looked
so quiet
rustling of grass
the soft voices
hot beautiful girls & boys
hot beautiful summer day


II

1.

wake up! to a morning
sun shining thru even newspaper
headlines
sun on
men in sand wading thru
blood

"Woe
woe unto
the bloody city of Litchfield'
he cried
with his bare feet
in the gutters of blood* [*an allusion to Quaker seer George Fox's cries at a vision of a Roman mass execution of Christians conducted in England's town of Litchfield a millennium before]
naked feet
naked legs
naked eyes
into the market place howling
along the streets howling
in the living room
howling

the sun! shining shining
in our eyes


2.

at the edge of the water
the glass house eye of God
embraced us, pure
in white

clean after communal showers
& communal food

'Boruch ataw Adonai
Elohenu melech ha'olam
ha'motzi lechem
min ha'awritz'

reverberating thru the food
the eyes
the air out out into many rhythms
& tongues

sitting on the benches, bodies warm & throats filled with
joy & love

we offered worship
sitting warm to warm, eyes & skin touching, love flowing
we offered worship

we sang
& spoke languages & poems
offered worship & love
mixing the birds of passion & the swords of God
in our beautiful young eyes

It wd always be dark by the time the services were over.
& secure, in the glass house, lit by the God that shined all our
faces, the burning candles of love in our bodies, sharing the
glow outward to trees & wind. & the youngest kids went to
their cabin while the older ones had a dance, & carried on
love affairs & intrigues & political arguments until 11:30, when
the boys walked the joyous road back to their portion of the camp,
singing & shouting, clean & alive.

By the time the Saturday morning services were over, we
were so full & whole that anything was possible.


3. political song

the people circle the room
coming together

the blood circles the body
coming together

the earth circles the sun
coming together

hang on, man
as it
wobbles around

hand to hand
as it
wobbles around

o living communities
men & women who love & are loved
o living bodies
men & women who love & are loved
O loving cities
men & women who live & are lived

eat
drink
embrace
each
other
inner
face


III

1.

I see clothes piled in great heaps
against gray sky
with the smoke & sun in the air
of human flesh
& in the pockets of those beasts
who wear my name
things of value jingle & clank
in those black pockets
teeth & eyes & skulls & skin
in those black pockets

there are bodies
naked
not talking of love

in their last waters
naked
not talking of love

naked hunger
naked hatred
naked minds

howling in the crowded boxcars
howling in the dark barracks
howling in the hot showers
howling & whimpering in the final chambers

silent in the furnaces


2.

such visions
wove their shroudeyes
thru our songs
such knowledge
blackened the edge
of every flame

each kiss
bittered with the salt
of their blood

(Many summers later I hitchhiked over a thousand miles
back to the Wisconsin holy lakes, to speak anguish to a wise
man, seeking comfort, seeking peace.

& we sat outside under a fat moon, at the edge of an open
field of grass, scenes of love & myth echoing in my mind.

I asked him why the six million had died. I thought somehow,
this man, an Aronin, descendant of the first & holiest priests of
Israel, humble seekers & generous fountain of love, wd have
an insight, a knowledge, a hope.

God's plan? If there had not been such blood & terror on
his mouth, he wd have laughed. & told me he had no answer,
no peace. & told me of the many nites & days he had fasted &
prayed.

& found nothing?

found only hope that came from the realisation of the
cleansing & purification of pain.

Whose? I, so young, so bitter, so needing an answer, sd
whose? good for their sould? or ours! so bitter, so young,
such needs.)

even now
it is difficult for me to fix in my eyes
the image of
the God/Priest
lifting sin from the souls of the people
my soul, my sin

clothing these six million in my sins
& thrusting them in their foreign wrappings
into the flaming mouths of agony


IV

when the sun dies
many other suns will still flame

all things contain the seeds
of their own completion
all seeds contain the things
of their own destruction

the sun
makes a morning
bright descending on hooded eyes
the sun's morning
floods into the sands of war

wake up
hang on

coming together
coming together
coming together

--Stuart Z. Perkoff, Voices of the Lady: Collected Poems, National Poetry Foundation, 1998, pages 171-8.


ZAYEEN

the sound of a dropped
bomb, before it
hits, the long high shriek
piercing the air, opening the
air, before the earth
is erupted
is not language

the sound enormous exploding
fragmenting, the stroke of the scream
definite, given, the point of
culmination
is not language

language demands
connections, delicate structures
must be firm
at the core

its arithmetical number is 7

--Stuart Z. Perkoff, Voices of the Lady; Collected Poems, National Poetry Foundation, 1998, p. 80

The Book of Commons

Dearest Mo,

I awoke from a dream that was intolerably vague and purposeless, thinking I was wasting my life because it did not lead to clear dreams--and should by now. Then I thought of Hayden Carruth's poem about men turning this world into "God's grave" and immediately felt that somehow such atheism was really devotion because God must be more than an inescapable, hounding thought--but a thought worthy of thinking once the scarecrow has a brain. My musing straw man's mind jumped in at this point and said something about how the mind has ceased to be proper housing for the thought of God (my current story line for The Fall of Man). I wondered in what sense I had meant that. Was the mind as a house for God poorly built? "You don't even have a building permit," the wise-ass part of me said. "This hovel you call a mind wouldn't even pass inspection." I then chastised myself for what I will now call "metaphoric intemperance." Still lying in bed, I decided to seriously, and with great focus, pursue the thought of God, like Descartes pursuing the "I am," as a necessary occurrence. That's when it happened--a thought unlike any other I have ever had. "What if God Himself is the last act of Creation?" I asked myself. "And what if we as human beings are sent to bring His name into the world by pronouncing it?" Impossible, I thought. Essence (God) precedes Existence (Creation). But something in me then said, "Things are their opposite in the world of matter. First is last. Last is first." I had no idea what I meant. The humbled wise-ass part of me suggested meekly, "Things are different on this, the other (Created) side of light. Things are different when the light slows to the lower frequency of song. There it seems Night until bird calls make the world worthy of Day and Light. Like the birds of morning, you are a receptacle for song--a Logos of song that slowly fills the trees with points of light that chatter and swirl like stars buried in a Rothko blackness dam-burst into a Van Gogh night. What would you have that erupting song say about God?" That's when I dragged myself to my computer and wrote what follows, perhaps as prelude to bigger (housing) project.

David (of later life)

P.S., Try to imagine the faith necessary for a God his subjects have bifurcated from His Creation to believe that His final bestowal is to be a name among names, His native flowing regained in the emergent/merging life we have been given. Try to imagine this Creation as an inseparable act of faith like "a river that runs through it." I realize now that what happened this morning is the result of watching that movie for the first time in years and re-reading the book on which it is successfully based.

THE BOOK OF COMMONS

for Mo

1

What if the last act of Creation

in the story we most commonly tell about it

is of a God dispensing life like seltzer

whose name is to appear like a signature

in small scrawl on a painting?

And what if the painting isn't finished

and the artist still unknown?

What if the subjects of this painting

have yet to satisfy the maker

into signing His name

at the bottom like rocks

along the floor of a river?

What if the subjects are to appear first and foremost

as sailors braving the rapids

of a wild river that moves like a deep, wide crease

through a land which stranded men

would call the Valley of Death's Shadow?

And what then if the Creator's brush is driven

to depict a river bed that is now a dry basin

representing some perplexing second thoughts

about the abilities of men to cruise those crushing waters?

What if Creation has become a subject whose original excitement

has quieted to sadder shadings?

What if the rapids of this uttered world

have become too dangerous for men to ride?

And what if the roar men hear

is no longer a matching hum?

Monkish Commentary:

Om is river rush, neutral no matter how powerful--free to become h(om)e to dwell in but just as

free to become (om)en of destruction when reduced to cascading thrill ride or wreckage-strewn flood tide

risen from unkempt, torn levies. O, men, make of this world what is best for house keeping. Let the gods

enter each perception, thought and dream as if the sentience that invites them is a national park entrance.

Do not give into fear and greed that turns each door into a fire exit. The world is made for embrace not escape.

2

I struggle with the world

in its defrocked complexity.

I struggle with the world

as if it is a church whose founder left it.

I struggle with the world

whose first place is a public garden

where, rumors have it, sex scandals

and oil drilling have turned it into a hiding place.

I struggle with the world

whose nights still bring a scented wind

that flows through the trees

with an estuarial grace

and a tinge of honeysuckle.

I struggle with the world

and God's discarded dreams for it

in the unworthy shrine of troubled sleep.

I struggle with the world

as a birthplace like Stratford-on-Avon

where we are permitted entrance

only as groundskeepers--

all other rights and reasons

but reverence through upkeep

revoked

for the time being.

Monkish Commentary:

The grounds need tending. They always need tending if they are to be true grounds for being.

This is not meant as a pun, although it started as such. See into the adjacency of meanings

when the same words can be used to signify birth and death and the life they share in common.

When turrets syndrome is the proper behavior

No wonder Wendell Berry reveres the poetry of Hayden Carruth (1921-2008). I got beaten up by the following poem of his this morning. Called "Waterloo," and written around 1995, it is one of the most startling and powerful anti-war poems I have ever read and explains my own frequent lapses into turrets syndrome tongues in public places because of it. Carruth, who drank as much as he wrote, felt compelled to inhospitably bad behavior on the subject of war and what he sensed was unconscionably serene or at least imperturbably stolid sufferance of it. This poem is about the carousing of conscience in the face of such sufferance and I implore you to share it with every friend and acquaintance you have. Maybe such sharing will help it become the world's swiftest and most successful chain (e)mail ever. If enough people receive this poem by noon, it will reach our old-style Republican president's desk by evening. Let this be the morning of the most ferocious anti-war arousal in history. Let us all stand united as "former citizens" of this, or any, warfare state.

David

P.S. I translate the phrase "un citoyen d'autrefois" as "a former citizen," but my French is bad. Some help here, any of the faithful few passersby.

WATERLOO

Overlooking the battlefield, on that grassy
ridge where the ladies and gentlemen of Brussels
brought their servants and picnic hampers
and card tables to watch, you could smell
the exploding gunpowder and hear shrieks
in the distance, you could see the brightly
uniformed bodies of men running and firing,
clashing their swords and falling,
and he became ill. He couldn't help it. His hands
trembled, his mouth trembled, he retched
and vomited over a picnic table, he tried to drink
from a bottle of champagne and spilled it
down the front of his shirt, he soiled his trousers.
It was unbelievable, atrocious. He felt worse
than he could say. He went from table to table,
seeking comfort and reassurance, he didn't know what.
The ladies in colorful dresses and huge hats,
the gentlemen in brilliantly tailored suits
were talking and smiling, looking through their
opera glasses, pointing here and there to explain
tactics and mark the approach of fresh legions
on either side. But they paid no attention
to him, they couldn't hear or see him,
as if he were invisible, un citoyen
d'autrefois. The smell thickened,
the stench choked him, and the screams
of the dying men and horses became
piercing and unbearable. He looked closely
at the people around him, yet no one looked
at him. Perhaps he wasn't there. But he was.

--Hayden Carruth, Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems 1991-1995, Copper Canyon Press, 1996, p. 88

Starting Over Toward Faith--This Time Without Religion

I was watching the movie of William Saroyan's "The Human Comedy" made during WWII when it was important that none of the multitudes dying died in vain or didn't somehow remain substantial and sanctified by memory. For the first time, it was hard for me to accept such sentimental solace for lives lost in war--or just lost for no reason, or anything reasonable. It is one of the burdens of losing your faith that things become inconceivable and inconsolable. Don't get me wrong. I have simply lost faith in the certainty that things become understandable or reasonable farther and later on. We have allowed our lives to be made destitute of any chance for meaning here and now; and faith that it will make sense seems like an insult to both life and faith because it excuses the inexcusable sufferance of a world so disincarnate and inscrutable. Only kindness practiced both individually and collectively provides a blatant and scrutable solace. The advancing mass of oil in the Gulf should loom and terrify us as much as if a colliding planet loomed unavoidably large in the sky. No, make that larger since this doom is man-made. That oil expands in a gulf of our own unconscionably meager understanding. No wonder it kicks the living day & light out of us.

I'm not saying there isn't heaven. I'm just saying it isn't as much reward as it is relief--a kind of spiritual fail-safe for the impossibility of reason (forget reasons) in the midst of the world we tolerate. I do not know what I have forfeited by my sufferance of this world. The loss is explicit in the loss of any idea or sureness of God as a function and result of daily contact with this world and its members. Atheism flourishes when we lose earth-born and borne membership. We seek to unearth what is inseparable from earth. God exists in manifestness and that manifestness, I think, must be daily and forceful--found on the surest ground of being that we have known.

Yesterday, BP dropped a container on the least dangerous of its three (known) oil spills. Supposedly, this container will enable siphoning of oil into ships and then, presumably, refinement of it. It's a good metaphor for the discomforts of religion, the inadequacy of the understanding it promotes about human affairs. If God and Man are one, and that oneness is proclaimed by the sacrifice of a son, then the resurrection of that son is sheer imbecility like making meaning of the deaths of sons and daughters in, or through, war. When Christ says that today we shall be with him in paradise he is a different Christ than the one who asks his father why he has forsaken him. The thought that even Christ can't make sense of his murder is, of course, unbearable; so we split him into two: the two cross-mate thieves, one of whom accepts his death and the other of whom doesn't. Then we betray the humanness of such ambivalence for a final miraculous consummation of full acceptance. That may be alright for people afflicted with conditions like cancer but not ones who die young and solely by dint of the human condition.

So we live with dust-to-dust despite assurances from Zen masters that there is no dust, nothing to be lost (except ignorance) or found (except ignorance). That unblemished mirror is, these masters say, unnecessary and non-existent. This Christ doesn't die on a cross, and refuses (better yet, he is unavailable) to accept a sentence to one. That Christ high tails it out of Jerusalem before his enemies can lay a glove on him or charge him with sedition. That Christ says the reader is always greater than the book that is thrown at him. That Christ says solace is the only scripture to be followed, which allows the Logos plenty of latitude among all things named.

What I mean is this: If we are all part of a greater incar-nation, then we must not merely render to Caesar what is Caesar's but make it so much less a portion of our daily rendering. Caesar's salad versus God's salud. In this way, we all earmark the major share of our apportioning for God. This God is not other-worldly or non-human. He must be manifest as ourselves, hence nearer and dearer than what Caesar gives us, reified as daily bread and the baking of that bread in our own actions. Only then can the wafers we make be the wafers we take in communion. Only then are we permitted belief in the blood and body because it is our own--and its preservation and sustenance is the most sacred measure of belief.

This is the best I can do today, except to type out a poem by Hayden Carruth about the brave, defiant inconsolability I feel daily ever since I ceased to be a Mormon/Sufi/believer:

NOT TRANSHISTORICAL DEATH, OR AT LEAST NOT QUITE

Jim Wright, who was a good poet and my friend, died two or three years ago.
I was told at the time that we did not lose him.
I was told that memories of him would keep him in the world.
I don't remember who told me this, just that it was in the air, like the usual fall-out from funerals.
I knew it was wrong.

Now I have begun to think how it was wrong.
I have begun to see that it was not only sentimental but simplistic.
I have examined Jim in my mind.
I remember him, but the memories are as dead as he is.
What is more important is how I see him now.
There, there in that extreme wide place, that emptiness.
He is near enough to be recognizable, but too far away to be reached by a cry or a gesture.
He is wearing a light-weight, brightly colored shirt.
His trousers belong to a suit, but the coat has been discarded.
His belt is narrow and sometimes stays straightly on his pot belly.
His shoes are thin and shiny.
I think he bought those shoes on his last journey to Europe.
He is walking away, slowly.
He is wandering, meandering.
Sometimes he makes a little circle.
Sometimes he pauses and looks to one side or the other.
Sometimes he looks down.
Occasionally he looks up.
He never looks back, at least not directly.
Although he recedes very gradually and becomes gradually smaller, I continue to see all the aspects of his face and figure clearly.
He is thinking about something and I know what.
It is not the place he now occupies in my life.
He cannot imagine that, only I can.
He is neither what he was (obviously), nor what he is (for I am quite sure I am inventing that).
Is he Jim Wright? Is he someone else?
Yes, he is Jim Wright. No, he is not someone else. Who else could he possibly be?
When I die, he will arrive at where he is going. And I will set out after him.

Hayden Carruth, Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, Copper Canyon Press, 1992, pages 349-50.

A Summons on the Mount

"To buy gold is to short the dollar. To buy
gold is to conclude that Congress will eventually ruin the
currency. This means that the promises of Congress are not
reliable. Very few Americans can bring themselves to
believe this. So, they remain on the sidelines."
--Gary North, May 4th, 2010

Are we on a de facto gold standard? With gold at near $1,200 per ounce and poised, like a cat ready to leap up on a window sill, to hit $1,500, I wonder if I shouldn't be shorting the dollar, too and spending my hard-earned unemployment compensation on coins (1/4 ouncers and the like).

One thing I know for sure, as toxic tongues of oil begin to lick the shores of Louisiana and Florida, we are all participants in a vast ruination of natural wealth and the material world. Is believing in the dollar like believing in an abstract, immaterial God whose protection is best expressed and most manifest beyond His most sacred and intimate manifestation, the Creation? I think it the most abominable atheism to dematerialize God because it rationalizes our colossal failure of stewardship and confirms the cowardice of our faith in and the failure of our flesh to be incarnation. Capitalism is waging and winning a war of self-hatred against Nature--and its success at doing so poses a far greater threat than nuclear weapons. We are using weapons of economic mass destruction every day and refusing to elevate these acts above the category of misdemeanor. Why are the safety rules for oil rigs not as tough and zealously monitored as those for nuclear facilities? An exploding oil rig is tantamount to an exploding nuclear warhead. Hence it is a war crime and should be as actionable as any attempt to blow up a tourist area.

A HASTILY CONSTRUCTED CREDO OF PRESENT BELIEFS

Here's what Libertarian Dave believes: Every bank bailout decriminalizes corporate mass destruction of habitat. We should adopt a "too big to succeed" yardstick and prevent any institution from amassing the capital means to commit economic or environmental mass destruction.

Here's what Imagist Dave believes: The great glacial meltdown is only a vivid, accurate metaphor for the blind friction and terrifying heat of money changing hands in the Christ-less temple courtyard of Creation.

Here's what Sufi Dave believes: If there is one world that we live in, it is the Incar-Nation. Hence we have no choice but to be the sons of God and no chance for continued existence without sharing this fact and deciding to be so. Our birthright can only be found in preserving our birthplace.

Here's what mad-dog Dave believes: the anti-Christs like Monsanto and Haliburton (which operated BP's oil rig)--all run by God-fearing men--are on the verge of final poisoning of the planet, the only known staging area for mass salvation. Killing 10 million shrimp and every other estuarial life form is tantamount to turning an ocean into a slaughter house and concentration camp. Thus we must ask: Who is guilty of the greater genocide? BP (and its proxies) or the latest dough-faced Pakistani Taliban proxy trying to blow up an SUV in Times Square? Why didn't the FBI abort the takeoffs of every corporate jet belonging to these companies that plot against the Incar-Nation?

Here's what Left-wing, One-World Dave believes: Only when we frame the organized exploitation of nature in kindred contexts of mass destruction and eco-terrorism will we begin to address the calamity that has arrived.

Here's what defrocked atheist Dave believes: The terrifying parallels between our belief in the false infinite wealth of money, rather than the true finite physical wealth represented by gold (sorry, all you believers in "Lord of the Rings"), echos our belief in a God who rules by fiat--a disembodied corporate God with a leadership style akin to Jack Welsh not Jesus Christ. It should be considered both absurd and impossible to believe in a God beyond His creation or separate from it. That distance simply mirrors and projects our own alienation from the Creation and our adamant irresponsibility as a result.

Music, maestro, please--in this case, "The Best Things in Life are Free."

For All Rumi Camp Meeting Followers

Dearest Friend and Friends,

Seasonal greetings! Thank you for your recent inquiry into possible spring and summer travel in these hereabouts. As sitting and serving trustees of the Imagi-Nation's Department of the Exterior, we want to inform and assure you that we have picture-perfect Rumi-esque days here on our eastern shores where you will arrive by ferry (we have no airports and cannot be seen from the air). We have enclosed a poem by James Schuyler that we hope will entice and suffice as proof of perfect harboring weathers in all seasons and on all surfaces in these parts. We invite further travel inquiries into contemporary American realms of fully imagined world where "God," it is said, "is shyly, slyly present" in vistas of sometimes ebullient particulars. For those who prefer deity ensconced in inseparability from its evidence, may we remind you that sightings of the Tao, declared endangered elsewhere, are common reportage here. As we like to say, "The Tao is richly resonant when keenly observed in even the tiniest detail and most reduced of circumstances. The only poverty recognized here is the easily ameliorated one of undernourished and underemployed perception."

Your humble servants,

Walt Whitman IV
Dahlia Dickinson
Chester Creeley
Jaclyn Kennedy Kerouac

P.S., The Trustees recently voted, for ceremonial purposes, to unanimously renew a never-lapsed moratorium on all off and on shore drilling for meaning that would endanger future intactness of fully endowed and observable pantheistic plurality of our common wealth. When the unseen can no longer manifest in the fully preserved and practiced purity of the seen, the obscene ensues. Come breathe in and sing out our fresh air. Come spend happy days on our open roads where eyes are free to follow the never-ending beckoning of the present. We look forward to meeting you and your needs.


[Enclosure]

LIGHT BLUE ABOVE

Light blue above, darker below, lightly roughened by the stirring air
and with smooth tracks on it. There goes Reynald Hardie's lobster
boat, taking a colorful load of pleasure-seeking shoppers to Camden.

O Air

the clear, the soot-bearer, the unseen that rips
that kills and cures, that keeps
all that is empty filled, the bright invisible

into which we move like fingers into gloves
that coats our rolling home with the sweet softness
between grape and grape skin

in silent laughter in a glass pushed down
into basin at retreating puzzled water
constrained to rising elsewhere up
the sides of the basin, of the glass
up fingers and hand and wrist

clinging to arm in mercurial bubbles
that detach and rise and join itself

the quick to heal
that wriggles up from hot
heat-wave pavement like teased hair
or has a wintry bite, or in the dog days saps
or is found at the bottom
of a mailbox on an empty house
or in a nest between twigs, among eggs

and we go on
and it within us
upon a dust speck
in bubble air

--James Schuyler, Selected Poems, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, paperback edition 2007, page 61