Listings
Let’s say you’re on the subway, or a car trip, or a hike, and you are noticing the people or the landscape, or the features of the path. And you don’t feel like sitting down to write a sonnet or an ode, and you want to express the wonder of your perceptions. Or let’s say you are depressed, or ecstatic, or beset with a bout of memories of past days. Or let’s say you’re just plain bored and want to take your brain on a little adventure to see what happens when you hitch that adventure to your imagination. Whether your journey is inner or outer, a good way to entrain it and show the passion you have for experience, is to write a list poem.
Lists are everywhere if you open you eyes for them. Homer’s catalog of the heroes who came to fight in the Trojan War. The Bible’s tracing of the lineage of Adam’s family in the book of Genesis. Fitzgerald’s description of the banquet in The Great Gatsby. Breton’s Blazon called Free Union. Christopher Smart talking about his cat Geoffrey in “Jubilate Agno”:
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the fore-paws extended…
Your friend and mine, Walt Whitman, was a prince of the list poem. He was a kind of literary Philip Glass of the 19th Century the way he burbled out his verbal arpeggios using sentence stems to keep them on track going this way for a little while then changed the stems to let them go that way for a little while:
What vast-built cities—What orderly republics—What pastoral tribes and nomads,
What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others,
What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions,
What sort of marriage—What costumes—What physiology and phrenology…
This is from Unnamed Lands. Later on he switches his stems to “I know” and then “Some” and then others. A stately dance.
One of my favorite poets, Wislawa Szymborska has a subtle, wistful poem called “Map” that uses listing as a strategy for describing a map, not only by stacking details one after the other, but also using stems in short bursts, like this with “I can…”
Everything here is small, near, accessible.
I can press volcanoes with my fingertip,
stroke the poles without thick mittens,
I can with a single glance
encompass every desert
with the river lying just beside it.
Whitman’s and Szymborska’s list poems have played starring roles in several episodes of my seemingly never-ending picaresque novel of a life, as you will see in the framing passages below, should you have the curiosity to press on.
Though it isn’t organized by stems, the first of my list poems below is maybe a good one to start with as it merges my life as an itinerant teacher (educational consultant who has worked in countless classrooms) with my artistry. It is just me out on the road through the hallways of schools all over kingdom come. This has been my fate. I accept it, and happy to accept it. When you read this one, just remember that a list poem, the way I see it, is a chance to unreel ideas with energy, to make connections at will, to let your mind fly.
THE HAPPY TRAVELER
No time for me to stop between my strokes, given the miles I swim from job to job.
I rest in motion and exert upon arrival the force inertial theorists like so much to discuss from their static armchairs.
At one terminus of contemplation amid action I find the list quote vote moat stoat boat Croat remote float goat dovecote, the language collected, recited, unembarrassed at its qualities.
At another seekers circle into groups to talk softly about the nature of uncertainty.
Sometimes I find my voice and other voices join the chorus in my travels from room to socializing room.
The golden thread that snakes through Blake to modern times pulls me through the terrifying strip mall Jerusali to my holy destinations wherein so many souls claw at the walls of the stony cells they’ve constructed in collaboration with their anxieties.
The farmers of ideas can calculate their limits only by abstract approximation. As for the nomads, we travel every day to tap with our white canes the insurmountable surfaces of space.
We wander the theaters, the marketplaces and the schoolyards and occasionally cross paths and may nod but never stop given the contracts we’ve signed with our lives of movement. If we were to truly travel together, matter and antimatter would have their ultimate date with weird destruction.
Words travel with me like burrs, tumble off here, get picked up and carried off there. To settle on soil and take root? Who has the time to know?
I get to be the happy traveler taking with me goat and stoat and dovecote and the reality of rising action at every station. No epiphany for me, and I have lost sight of the status quo far back in the fog of the beginnings from which I am now unbound – as long as I keep up my concentration throughout the continuity of the motion.
And when it fails? (All concentration fails.) No problem, only broken things come to be: glasses, relationships, spirits. We know – don’t we? – that as with atoms smashed in cyclotrons, it’s through the shards we know that thing or two.
What do you think? Brain splatter on a ladder…great fun. A bit opaque and maybe confusing here and there? Who cares? Pollack didn’t calculate where every drop of paint would fall. Or at least I don’t think he did. Hmmm…have to check on that. A list poem is not the place to get shy and retiring. Though you can be contemplative. One day I decided to just play with the stem “This is the thing.” It revealed that I had been feeling some grief. Interesting how writing reveals unexpected buried artifacts of experience. Remember that scene in Huckleberry Finn where the men shoot cannons over the river to make Jim’s body rise to the surface? Maybe that’s what a list poem (and other genres too?) can do, bring the hidden things up to be hauled ashore.
THIS IS THE THING
What is there to grieve?
Nothing.
This is the thing: I grieve anyway, grief being as inevitable as breath to the living.
Just wait. You will feel it.
This is the thing: Though it may be as dense as lead, grief is sweet nonetheless.
Think sweet sorrow. Think rum cakes.
This is the thing: Grief comes, grief goes.
I should know. It has curled me up like the fist of a corpse. Afterwards, my spirits have opened like the bud of a peony.
This is the thing. Everything is on the table when you notice the light.
This is the thing: The light is here. The light is now, be it sunlight, incandescence or fluorescence.
This is the thing: The photons loved us enough to call for the creation of our eyes.
This is daVinci’s thing: When making his recommendations for the development of a complete mind, he exhorted us to develop our senses, especially “learn how to see.”
This is the thing: I am still in the school of perception, but I am studying hard.
This is the thing: No diplomas in this program.
What is the problem with that, exactly? Who wouldn’t want the security of school for a lifetime?
This is the thing: Today, despite the light, my heart is dense and the taste of rum and butter is heavy on my tongue.
Who knew I’d be turning grief into the taste of rum and butter. Not me. Who knew the stem would become more of a narrator’s tic than a spur to new developments in a line of thought. It interrupts the flow. More power to it! Don’t those polished stones in that creek nearby, the one you haven’t visited lately but surely should, interrupt the flow? Go ahead, fill your head with rocks and shake your skull until something rattles out. It’s bound to be interesting.
You can tell a lot about how folks think and feel when they make predictions. Are they reasonable, fearful, hopeful, angry, all/none of the above? My shrink should use this technique. It would guarantee a few extra therapy sessions, finance his next August vacation. I’m not sure what this poem of play with the stem “I predict…” says about me. I’ll have to show it to him.
PREDICTIONS
I predict that I will never become as well known as Nostradamus.
That as a bacteria-like infection on the surface of the earth we will nearly kill our host, but that we won’t be able to administer the final coup de grace.
That my fingernails will continue to grow for at least another 24 hours.
That I will not live to be twice my current age.
That while my neural structures may become cheesy, they will remain intact enough to enjoy an occasional state of meditative serenity.
That when all is said and done, the universe will prove to be a most fascinating idea.
That ice cream will taste good to me for the rest of my life.
That my daughter will not break my heart, and if she does, she won’t do it too many times, and if she does it too many times, it won’t be fatal.
I predict that my country will not be able to resist the impulse to become more repressive.
I predict that while my country becomes more repressive, it will also develop strands that are more progressive.
I predict that even the most evil inhabitants of the planet will find occasional redemption in song.
I predict that humans will not advance significantly in their ability to tolerate ambiguity within my lifetime.
I predict that this will be one of the main reasons that my country will be unable to resist the impulse to become more repressive.
I predict that I will continue to write passages that contain many flaws invisible to my eye for several years to come.
I predict that I will write the passages anyway, with the subversive hope that there won’t be so many flaws that the passages are complete nonsense.
I predict that I will continue to have interesting insights, or at least the frisson of pleasure often associated with clever aperçus, for at least two more years.
I predict that the use of French loans to American vocabulary will alienate only a minor percentage of the readers of this poem, given that those who would object are unlikely to cross paths with it.
I predict that teachers will continue for at least a century to enlighten school children with a passion for helping them to realize their voices.
I predict that teachers will continue for just as long to abuse schoolchildren.
I predict that these will only occasionally be the same individuals.
I predict that mathematics will never lose its elegance even without conscious beings to appreciate it, and that the laws of probability that regulate both the measurement of subatomic particles and the assortment of genes will hold for constructivists and Platonists alike.
I predict that this set of predictions will end on this line.
I predict that the lady with the crumpled poster with charmingly bad graphics who collects money for the starving Ethiopian Falasha Jews and the man with the baseball size fuzz growing from both of his ears who says over and over “God is love” will be up to their usual practices in the Atlantic Avenue Subway station next time I transfer from the 2/3 line to the R/M line.
I predict that I will write an unorthodox haiku at the end of this list of predictions.
The man with ear fuzz
in the subway tunnel says,
“…love. God is love. God is…”
Wow! “Clever apercus”! (Not to mention “frisson.”) Who would have predicted I’d get to throw that French spice into the soup? And did you notice how the list poem can become a kind of album of the things you notice, that you would never otherwise keep track of? (Still astounded by that subway evangelist with fuzz bursting from his ears. The size of billiard balls.)
Speaking of the trains, here’s a list poem organized around the choral ending of each paragraph. I wrote it on the way to a school, where I would be working with some children, thinking of what might appeal to them. It went a little off the track in terms of child-friendly subject matter, so it became a kind of runaway train that links the worlds of adults and children:
THIS TRAIN
This train’s just a silver box.
What makes it rock along the track?
I’ll tell you what makes it roll:
The way the black passenger
with the zigzag cornrows waves her hands
when she speaks. That’s what
makes the train go by.
The way people are laughing
up and down the line. That’s what
makes the train go by.
The way the various Buddhas
strike their poses on the thankas
amid the dreamy clouds and the
flayed skins of humans and elephants
in the museum on 17th Street. That’s what
makes the train go by.
The way lizards crawl
through dry sand in deserts
around the pulsating planet. (Give it
enough time, and the globe will
throb to the rhythm of Ellington,
if not your heart.) That’s what
makes the train go by.
The equations that add up
to a fine affair between
space, time and energy
(scandalous triangle). That’s what
makes the train go by.
The voice of Patsy Cline. That’s what
makes the train go by.
The prayers of the Christians,
the Jews, the Arabs, and a stray Buddhist
in the streets of Jerusalem. That’s what
makes the train go by.
The burps of the earth from the
various vents at Yellowstone. That’s what
makes the train go by.
The infinite unanswered questions
of school children. That’s what
makes the train go by.
The energy of the angry immigrants
hanging drywall all day long for
the idle folks with the money. That’s what
makes the train go by.
Today, anyway. Who knows
what concatenation of events will
make the train go by tomorrow.
The elementary kids didn’t really understand it, but they got the spirit and took delight in it. I felt confident in reading it to them, remembering when I was visiting another school and the principal asked me to go spend time with some kindergartners whose teacher was called away for a half hour. I got out Leaves of Grass and told the kids, who were sitting criss-cross apple sauce on a rug, about Whitman, this guy who looked like Santa Claus and had passed away from the surface of the Earth a while back but lived in the clouds now and loved children and smiled down at them from up there. You could tell he loved children because of his poem “There Was a Child Went Forth.” I warned they wouldn’t understand every word of, so they should just listen to the music of the language, which would be like a waterfall of words. Maybe they would recognize some of the words as I read them. It would be like an Easter egg hunt, listening for those words. Afterward, we could talk about the ones they heard. The students listened raptly. Afterwards, they picked out some words. One was “phoebe bird.” Which gave me an excuse to imitate its call for them.
I am buoyed by the history of train songs. Think “This train don’t carry no ramblers…” Or, “When the train left the station…” Or “Get all aboard the love train.” Everything from “Chattanooga Choo Choo” to “Take The A-Train.” Who knows how many train songs there are in this world. It’s as if the planet were waiting for the development of railroads just to satisfy a primeval urge to write train songs.
Maybe this poem about trains is a good poem, maybe it’s not. Here’s a poem with the stem maybe that perhaps you’ll like better.
MAYBE
I heard on the radio today that maybe may be the wisest word in the language.
Maybe in using the word I can emulate Socrates and claim the superiority of my wisdom based on my certainty of its worthlessness.
Maybe the paradox in this thought will work like a koan to distract me long enough to avoid a certain anxiety I am feeling.
Yes, maybe it will work like a saw to cut through the barricade of the ego that must underlie the anxiety.
I will let my mind rest for a few moments on the image of the saw, then.
Without any trouble at all I can picture so many beauties from my days in the hills, hand saws, steam saws, water saws, power saws, cross cut saws, rip saws, plytooth saws, pit saws, table saws, chain saws, with all their sets and kerfs, their steely surfaces and oil applied to make their cutting smooth, and the actions of the cutter’s hands in sharpening the saws aware of the sets of the teeth, the gullets, the fleams and the rakes.
Surely picturing the hands of the farmers keeping their tools in top condition will put me at ease.
Maybe it’s better for my mind not to dwell too long on the saw itself, though, as even now it is striking upon the dreaded Catherine Wheel, threaded through the crushed limbs of live victims the better to serve the flesh up to the vultures until blessed death brings relief.
Maybe I needed to purge my mind of these violent images.
Do violent images help or hinder the path to tranquility?
Maybe since they can’t be avoided it’s better to move them through with plenty of watery thought to flush the system.
Is the coast clear?
The coast is clear.
I am free now to treat with further curiosities.
Maybe, for instance, one plus one equals two, and maybe it doesn’t. Mathematical evidence through the millennia says that it does, but then Euclid’s fifth postulate came into question by everyone from Omar Khayyám to Hermann Minkowski with his hyperboloid model of spacetime and all the doubts that sowed, like Cadmus with his dragon’s teeth, among linear thinkers. The Spartes attack me even now in my fantasies with their ultra parallel spears aimed at the centerpoint of my brain.
One plus one I can see in my mind’s eye, but it strikes me suddenly, in my current state of anomie, as a very abstract thing to attach numbers to objects.
Do objects know they fall into sets?
I don’t see how they could, but maybe they do. Maybe objects have a kind of mind of their own.
If Georg Cantor were alive, I would ask him about this.
Maybe if he hadn’t gone insane from his contemplation of infinite sets within infinite sets he would have been able to answer.
Maybe it was the idea of the power set of a countably infinite set being uncountably infinite that tripped him up.
Maybe I’ll sleep well tonight, maybe I won’t.
Maybe it will matter, maybe it won’t. I’ve had poor nights of sleep that have led to tranquil ecstasies.
If points exist (maybe they do and maybe they don’t), the one here is that you never know.
Robert Fulghum made the point about maybe on the radio. But I didn’t want to put his name in my poem because I’m a cheap bastard who is suspicious of things that smack of cheap self-help wisdom. He was a Unitarian minister though, and it was the Unitarians who set up Emerson, and it was Emerson who set up Whitman, and it was Whitman who my wife and I quoted at our wedding, so maybe I could be a little more charitable toward Robert Fulghum. At any rate, the thought of using maybe as a stem delighted me, as did the writing of the poem and the research that that prompted. I wallow frequently in a state of anomie, which is one of the reasons I like Beckett who apparently wallows similarly, so an homage or two to him seemed apposite. Marrying a humorous tone to dreadful violence and puzzling concepts made me think this piece might be worth reading. (Maybe so, maybe not….)
An aside on this topic of maybe: there’s a children’s book of Zen stories in which a farmer’s son breaks his leg. The farmer’s neighbor’s say, “Oh, that’s bad.” And he says maybe. Then the military recruiters come around, but they can’t recruit the son because of the broken leg. The farmer’s neighbors say, “Oh, that’s good.” And he says maybe again. I can’t remember the next event. I think the farmer’s cow gets away because the son can’t chase it and the neighbors say, “Oh, that’s bad.” And the farmer says maybe. And the story just keeps toggling along that way, like a train rocking down the Rock Island Line.
This next list poem is another that doesn’t rely on a sequence of stems. On a gray day, for lack of anything better to do, I just started to write down memories of a day that I had visited a school, then picked up my daughter from her school, then watched a movie. As I wrote the poem, a began to emerge. This reinforced my theory that lists help you find themes. Why is finding themes a good thing? Well, themes illuminate experience. Imagine being in a meadow in the springtime without knowing what to look at and being overwhelmed by all the sensations: insects, birds, flowers, grasses, wind. Too much! Too much! Then just saying birds. Now you would be able to see the gold finches flying from thistle to thistle, and the northern harrier quartering the field from above, and maybe the bobolinks on the barbed wire fence nearby, so after seeing that one thing, all the others would gradually connect. Look what theme emerges here:
HEALTHY HANDS
Images of the day against the gray:
The sunlight piercing my eyes over the subway station, and the long shadows of the trees.
The ancient pastel door akimbo on its hinges of the subway station at 9th Street stop atop the R/M line, which I push open with respect for the decades of working hands that have likewise pushed the door how many millions of times?
Are these the numbers that matter, then? The hands that touch the doors?
And how many coats of paint? The hands, likewise, that brush the paint?
The rotund crossing guard with her orange vest and clever hat that must have been designed the year WACs or the Girl Scouts were conceived.
Ms. Schuler the security guard at the school. “Good morning. Miss Schuler.” “Good morning, Mr. Dale.”
The faces of the Hispanic children, their glowing skin, their humility.
The concentrating faces of the black Americans and the white Americans who design the lessons for the immigrants.
The faces of the Hispanic countermen at the bagel place reflecting the faces of the children down at the school.
The gleaming silver teapot set out on the sidewalk on 4th Avenue between 13th and 12th Streets. Why? Whose hands will pick it up? Is the sidewalk now a stove?
The filigreed branches of the trees in the park across the street, and I did listen for the sounds of any birds along the sidewalk.
The junkie sitting next to Elly on the subway bench, dropping his roll of dollars, and my returning it to him, then his leaning over her once we got in the subway car and sat down and me reminding him time after time to stand up! Hey, man, stand up!
The Capra film You Can’t Take it With You, with its reassuring themes of family and friendship and joy.
A picture lingering from the film of an accountant punching in the numbers from a register.
How many waste their lives over registers?
How well are we hanging on here, anyway? Are we any better than the junkie with his groping fingers?
Yes, I think we are better, with our healthy hands, even if they are not squeaky clean.
We grip what we can grasp.
Sometimes, apart from this poem, I think of hands in a grand way. All the hands that ever touched a coin. All the hands that ever shook my hand. All the hands that held mine and the other hands that held them down to the beginning of the evolution of hands, and not just human hands holding human hands. When I was a night watchman at the Overton Park Zoo in Memphis, sometimes I would stroll by the cage of the bald uakari and find him awake. The poor fellow lived alone. In the Amazon rainforest, he might be part of a troop of a 100 other red-faced monkeys with hairless skulls that looked like leprechauns on a bender. They would be leaping and swinging through the branches having a riot of a time. This one sat silent looking pitiable and nearly human with his sad eyes. I would poke my index finger through the bars and he would hold it with his tiny hand for as long as I stood there. Memphis in the dead of night, homo sapiens and ukayali uakari having some silent quality interspecial time together.
Thinking about all those hands connecting to the beginning of hands puts me in a mood to include Creation Story II:
CREATION STORY II
The elements weren’t here, then they were.
The stars weren’t here, then they were.
The planets weren’t here, then they were.
The earth wasn’t here, then it was.
Organisms weren’t here, then they were.
An oxygenated atmosphere wasn’t here, then it was.
Genes weren’t inherited, then they were.
Memory wasn’t here, then it was.
Biological diversity wasn’t here, then it was.
Homo sapiens weren’t here, then we were.
Technology wasn’t here, then it was.
Language wasn’t here, then it was.
Art wasn’t here, then it was.
Mathematics wasn’t here, then, according to constructivists, it was.
Something new isn’t here, but it will be.
(Probably…)
This is whimsical prosaic poem from a freewrite one day, written while I was reading some material on the evolution of the idea of evolution. Some of my thoughts came from Natalie Angier’s book The Canon. Genes weren’t inherited at the beginning, and species were indefinite, with genetic strands freely exchanged in a kind of organic soup. Then cell walls began to protect the strands of DNA and species became more protective of their characteristics. Mutations then happened within the chromosomes of species, gradually changing them over time through natural selection. I am also throwing in the argument in mathematics between those who believe that mathematics is a creation of the human mind (Constructivists) versus those who see mathematics as something existing in an ideal state, waiting to be discovered (Platonists). The final point of the poem has to do with how improbable our own existence is and the probability that something new will come along (on the assumption that time is in fact a linear construct, which is debatable.)
Who knew, children, that you would come along, yet you did. And you don’t owe anybody or anything for being here, any more that does the bald uakari. This is a concept, growing up Presbyterian, I had a hard time accepting. Still do.
In this next poem, I play around with a time in the short term instead of the long term, returning to that stem, “This is The Thing…” The play isn’t conceptual here, it’s real, a limit to the stretch during which I can express my ideas. Poetic speed-dating.
THIS IS THE THING II
This is the thing: I have to depart in five minutes, so I can’t say very much under the circumstances.
This is the thing: you never have enough time to say what you really need to say anyway, so I may as well try to hit a high point or two.
The first high point is this: I’m hearing the voices of gentle people around me and watching the evening sunlight penetrate the window to mix with the painful glow from the fluorescents overhead.
Now I’ve moved from one chair to another, in a brighter room with a larger window, and the sight of spindly spring red oak leaves fluttering in the breeze is attractively framing the head and shoulders of a beautiful woman.
This is the thing: beautiful women.
This is the thing: beauty.
This is the thing: time passes and beauty fades, but time itself may not last forever, given its dangerous fandango with its alter ego space.
This is the thing: my time is up.
I don’t know if the stem worked once, much less twice, but I do know that tracking perceptions and impressions over spans of time, however short, reveals that we are awake, if we are awake, and allows us to play with our sensibilities.
On that idea of being awake: I practice zazen in my own lame way. I learned it from a bona fide master, who was probably wasting his time with me. My own way of seeing the practice is that it’s about waking up. The term “enlightenment” is used in relation to zen. I’m far from being enlightened, but it only seems logical that if you are going to be enlightened, you have to be awake. The sun could rise and set and you’d never know if you slept the whole day long. One feature of enlightenment to me is the ability not to be ruffled by temporary irritations that are outside of your control. This is how I know I’m not enlightened, in fact, because dogs who bark in the neighborhood when I’m trying to concentrate on something get under my skin every time. I find a way to keep from getting furious and committing caninicide is to imagine that the dogs aren’t just barking, but speaking a message just for me in dog language: “Wake up! Woof! Wake up! Woof woof! Wake up wake up!” and so forth. It always works…when I remember to deploy the technique. The problem is that I don’t always remember. I am, in essence, asleep. I am drifting around like Aeneas among the shades.
Here’s a list poem that brushes up next to that idea of shades and heads off in another direction:
WHAT ABOUT THE SHADOWS?
What about shadows? Has anyone noticed how, a couple of days a year, the sun shoots over the Hudson straight down the streets of Manhattan, creating a symphony of light and shade, from the slender darkness revealed by the body that extends a hundred feet or more, to the dancing forms made by ragged faeries of litter, to the miniature moonscapes created by the tiniest protuberances?
What about the way the shadows overtake the matter of the concrete and the garbage cans and the bodies of the pedestrians? Are they ghosts? Is this the emergence of dark matter from obscurity, come to dominate the universe at last?
What about those weird, empty moments when what you expected to happen didn’t happen, opening a hole in your sense of reality? Has anyone appreciated the opportunity offered by these lacunae for liberation from the machinery of schedules?
What about just being gentle with each other for a few minutes?
What about the effect of that? Might it not too stretch out a little way and stop injurious acts?
Conversely, what about yelling? Have we undersold the value of yelling, at just the right volume, at just the right person, at just the right time, for just the right reason?
But then there’s the problem of being yelled at. Maybe we need to be yelled at sometimes, to keep us honest.
What about my own personal preference not to be yelled at, though?
I will try to be gentle.
It’s hard, I find, to be gentle every conscious moment of every day, given the nature of time to blow into our faces from the stream of the future occasional shards of misfortune.
What about people very different and very far away? The kindly Bhutanese, for instance?
Or secretive Amazonian jivaros like the Huaorani, for whom there is no distinction between the physical and spiritual worlds, some groups of whom avoid contact with outsiders at all cost? Have we stopped for a moment to imagine them? Is it really worth the time and effort when it’s so difficult to touch them or make any kind of difference?
What about the custodian Tino, gray-haired stick-ball player, who advises me that I’m staying late to work with teachers “Because you’re good at it, and because it’s important.” Has anyone else stopped to talk to Tino today?
What about letting Tino be? It may not matter much to Tino, whether people stop to talk or not.
What about the way Tino sings as cleans the bathrooms, wearing his rubber gloves, pitching himself into his work? Is there any difference, in those moments, between his physical and spiritual worlds?
What about sentiment? Is it so terrible to massage sentiment into a few words here and there as they hover between the batteries of information that assault us and the ineffable beauty that consoles us?
What about the generation of personal rules to protect ourselves from bullies who don’t know any better than to bruise our feelings? Can we make those rules work? Can we afford not to?
What about my doubts about the validity of this work? Do they count? Why? Why not?
What about the mind invaded by the doubts? Doesn’t it have any way of writing rules that force the doubts to pay their dues?
What is the mind, anyway?
And, too, what about simple endings, where you don’t strive to prove any points, but just let the language peacefully rest where it lies?
I liked how this stem “What about…” emerged to evoke soft, recursive thoughts that I never knew I had in me. I don’t mind being in their company. It’s like being in the company of those I love. Being in your company, kind strangers.
And a word about janitors. If you get to know them, they always have something to tell you. Melissa is getting old and tired and wants to start a day care center. Ruben draws cartoonish portraits and wants to get into Pratt. Alton plays the stock market – making piles of money in his mind. Tino seemed happy with his job, as did Frank, a Vietnam war vet in a school on Long Island. He was the one who gave me some timeless advice when he found out I was helping teachers with their planning. “Oh yeah, planning. Have you ever heard of the Six P’s?” No, Frank, never heard of them. “In Nam we used the Six Ps: Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.” I advise you all to get to know your janitors.
One day not long ago when I sat down to work on the introduction to this section of the project, I couldn’t write because I was depressed. I hadn’t hit this level of despair in a couple of decades. Something told me – a muse? – to write a list poem about the depression itself instead of this framing material. What happened convinced me more than ever that writing is not a mere ornament. It is an avenue, however fleetingly revealed, out of the woods into the light.
DEPRESSION
It comes on like the weather that blows in without warning from the south full of thunderheads and sweat and the toxic smoke of tires burning outside Birmingham.
It comes on like a hitch-hiker you shouldn’t have stopped to pick up because he needs too much and he loves his knife and he can’t hear your words for the fleeting look of fear in your eyes.
It comes into town like a political convention with backroom deals and hotels that gouge and rioters looking for justice.
It comes around the corner to slam you like a bus you didn’t see when you stepped blindly into the road.
It takes the ones you love and exiles them to the far end of the turned-around telescope, where they wave to you with affection but they’re so tiny and distant….
There’s no language to talk about this dip into the darkness. You can try all the metaphors you want but it goes back to eras before our ears, jaws, tongues knew anything about grunting out any delineating thoughts.
There’s no language that anyone can make sense of when the flaps and glides that rise from your throat sound more like bullfrogs croaking in a swamp at night than like a soul in search of common sense.
There’s no language for this darkness even though the poets have tried through the years There’s just no blood essence in the spectacles they’ve striven to fashion.
There’s no language but maybe there’s a cadence or a tone or something, maybe the blues guys have touched on it. I myself have curled up fetally with the blues helping so maybe this is one avenue.
Tonight I don’t think so, though. I don’t even think the blues could uplift the life raft to the surface even by so much as a bubble’s worth.
Tonight I think I have to find some other way to get through the next few seconds, the next few drafts of air from the air conditioner, the next conversations with the ones I love.
Tonight I don’t know what that way will be so this is a source of curiosity, or would be if all the whys and wonder hows weren’t on sabbatical.
Isn’t it interesting how the darkness can snuff the candle of curiosity? Is this present question the hatch out?
Isn’t it interesting how if you can stall the beast it might get distracted into the sty and leave you free of its hot breath for a moment?
But for how long? How long can wonderment do its transcending work?
It comes on like a tidal wave. It lingers like a flood. It leaves its muddy mark on the walls. It can’t be measured in mere inches.
It comes on but it departs, which is the holy terror of it, because at any whim it could….
I thank the list poem form, and my practice of writing in general, for the modicum of relief that was provided that late Friday afternoon. It turned the telescope around and brought you back into range, where you weren’t waving from a distance, but came close enough to touch. And we mammals do need touch, don’t we? The folks who write the book A General Theory of Love discuss how essential it is for the strong attachment we call love.
Looking back on that spell of dejection after a few days, I’m thinking of how my cryptic zazen teacher once said in a teisho (a Buddhist lecture intended to demonstrate understanding more than to transfer information), “When you’re confused, do confusion. Don’t be confused by confusion.” As a thought experiment, I substituted depression for confusion to see how that flew: “When you are depressed, do depression. Don’t be depressed by depression.” That made some kind of cockeyed sense, and I vowed to look at my next depression that way. Then it occurred to me that depression could be said to be a kind of confusion, a mixing up of where to direct anger, or a pot-pourri of unsorted reptilian emotions: anxiety, frustration, fear, anger, worry, despair. So I just went back to the way my teacher said it. On that whole Buddhist premise that suffering seizes on desire like a cat on a wounded mouse, maybe the point is to just go ahead and roll with the depression and not beat yourself up wishing you weren’t depressed. Just do the confusion/depression and don’t get confused/depressed by it, next time. Let the depression take you up!
Here’s a list poem on that idea of letting yourself be taken up.
THE DAY TAKES YOU UP
You think you take the subway but the train takes you up
into its society of i-podders, bible thumpers,
romance readers and starers into the air,
incomplete without you there to be, to see,
to hear the bag gentleman bark without elaboration,
“240 million children across the world at risk!”
You think you take a job but the job takes you up
and moves you along through the chores and storms
of brain, exchange and submission, requiring
that time-punched surrender to the haze of effort
guided by what forces beyond any one of us
toward a reward every now and then beyond mere
survival.
You think you go out to take the air
but the air moves about, through, within
and without you, takes you up into
its various spirits, connecting you to
the pyramids of Egypt and the slums of Brazil
from whence it has recently blown commingled
with the particles from Alaska and the Persian Gulf.
You think you take lunch but the molecules
of sweet, salt, sour and bitter transport
your taste buds (if you pay attention) to the fields
and highways from whence they have recently arrived
in reverse motion to the sources who never knew
the outcomes but sensed there would one day be ones.
You think you take a lover but the lover, or,
rather, the ancient ritual of love embedded
in the genes of the lover from the moment
of life’s advent on Earth (or wherever)
enfolds and either warms or chills you. You see
you can’t take any person up – no, impossible to,
what with every being not taking but being taken up.
You think you have an idea, or maybe a feeling
(and where exactly is the border between them?)
but these excitations come to you unbidden
and sweep you up into their clutches – to caress?
To choke? Who knows? But you only trap yourself
in the hell of self if you persist in believing
you’re the responsible party in this physics lesson.
It’s what you do when taken up that counts,
since what you take up takes you up. Do you
take up what takes you up? Just relax and be taken.
That’s my advice. Take it let it take you up.
Yes, that’s definitely what I’ll do next time I’m depressed. If I can remember my own advice.
By the way, have you ever seen those images of the rapture? I grew up in a sober-minded milieu of engineers and Presbyterians and stolid suburbanites, and we didn’t have any truck with the rapture or being taken up by anything. We always did the taking up. “Betsy took up knitting. Todd’s boy took up the guitar. The Anderson family took up camping.” If we heard anything about those hillbilly evangelicals and snake handlers getting taken up in the rapture, we just ignored them if we were feeling polite, or mocked them if we felt at liberty to be a little rude. But for me those paintings of the rapture…that’s another thing. Wow, like flying in a dream! If I were a painter I’d put the subway up in the clouds instead of Saint Peter. I’d put books, music, sex, you name it….
Yesterday (whenever that was, as this project is not organized in a chronological fashion) I was taking a walk in the little park across the street: Mount Prospect Park, and I heard a redtail hawk shrieking from somewhere in a leafy oak tree. Where was it in that tree? I looked and looked and looked, in that state of complete concentration, pure inquiry, that birders know only too well. I was rapt. Out of a leaf clump popped the bluejay that had been imitating a redtail hawk. Pretty good joke on me. I got taken up by the rapture of a raptor that turned out to be a fake. Who cares? It was the getting taken up that counted…lifted me right out of time.
It goes without saying why I found this next list poem amusing to compose:
IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING
It goes without saying that all trees everywhere will scintillate vangoghishly whether you notice them or not.
It goes without saying that the energy to be interesting has to come from somewhere.
It goes without saying that the man on the subway doing pullups is reaping the benefits of the free world.
It goes without saying that the hand gestures between people in conversation around the world share a common choreographer.
It goes without saying that if you claim the title of teacher you’d better be able to read the humanity of your students or humanity is in the ditch.
It goes without saying that word ditch, unadorned as it may be by lilting syllables, could easily nevertheless be listed among the greatest ever.
It goes without saying that our vocal cords with their fricatives, flaps and glides are an evolutionary invention worthy of note.
It goes without saying that people will lean on doors even though the signs say not to.
It goes without saying that the Indian parents across the aisle, when they smile in unison at their children, are doing a service to the universe and maybe the economy too.
It goes without saying that pointing their idiocy out to idiots is a tradition past its prime.
It goes without saying that no-one really knows what will happen or why a significant proportion of the time.
It goes without saying that we can all be justified in our gratitude for beauty even if it appears merely in the form of simple rhymes.
It goes without saying that we’re not yet ready to make good decisions about where the energy that makes life interesting should come from.
It goes without saying that our longings exceed our shortcomings by wincing magnitudes.
It goes without saying that solutions for our thorniest problems are missing but there is enough oxygen – amazingly! – for our next breath.
It goes without saying that our next breath will be sweet enough if it somehow happens.
Those lines on energy emerged because I had just been reading Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy. The sun (as we know from “Creation Story II”) infuses life forms with energy. These forms die and turn under high pressure into fossil fuels over the span of eons. We pull these fuels with their stored sun-energy out of the ground and feed off it until human society collapses from our planetary orgy. What will happen next? Something will happen! (If, as I said before, time moved like an arrow.) On the wall of my friends David Hardy and Stephanie Rudolph’s house hangs a painting by one of their sons, an arty representation of the joke: “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” (Antanaclasis. There’s a word for the syntax of it.) Just to turn this around one more time: the physicists that I’ve listened to say there’s no reason, from a physics standpoint, that time should go forward like an arrow. The most basic physical processes of matter, in and of themselves, are not needing a forward progression to obey their laws. It’s only the pesky problem of entropy that seems to keep us bound to a present with a past that can’t be reversed. Getting that toothpaste back in the tube, the cream out of the coffee, the cruel word unsaid. Hmmm…I still think there’s got to be a way!
This next one’s inspired by those whiny generalizations that people make when they say, “People, they don’t respect the flag anymore. People, they don’t watch where they’re going because they’re looking at their cell phones. People, they don’t even vote, then they complain about the guy in office.” People, they whine a lot! Maybe this will put people in a new light, they way they behave:
PEOPLE, THEY
lectured me on tape about the complicated King Cnut, who didn’t make as big a splash in English history as he might have wished, though he knew something as a retired Viking sea king about keeping a fleet together, something the British (was he, or wasn’t he British?) can lay claim to too.
In lecturing to me about Cnut, people informed me that he compared himself to Charlemagne, reminding me of the Song of Roland, which I learned in France at the age of nine. I could feel the wind of Roland’s lungs in my own lungs, the fatal sound in my own eardrums, my heart breaking. Who will break boys’ hearts in a song about Cnut? How many boys’ imaginations go unimpacted for songs unsung about forgotten sea kings?
They made the roads that led me to the parking lot by the stand of trees within which sang so many species of birds I couldn’t count. A long road. A small stand. They thus reminded me of the idea I sometimes have that birds do what they do, given a chance, without complaint, without expectation, only with the hope of their instincts.
By extension they made me say to myself, “I suppose. Who is to know the inner life of a bird, but a bird?”
By further extension they allowed me a moment of anomie in which I further considered, “On the other hand, perhaps our evolutionary inner bird does know in some way the feelings of the waxwing in the tree, now that the fear of anthropomorphism seems to have waned in the face of our less alienated place in the scheme of genetic life.”
People shook my hand. At least a dozen. Maybe more. I approached them having absorbed the gesturing of my friend the tax accountant Jugal Mehta, who shakes hands in such a warm and friendly way you cannot doubt his sincerity.
They told me what students couldn’t do, thus raising my hackles, knowing, as I do, what students can do.
They discussed the relationship between DNA and proteins, deliberating the issue in a scholarly way until it became clear to all in the room. And I have to ask, how many in any given room fully understand this? Do they comprehend the great shrines that DNA builds routinely given half a chance: the bodies of countless species, which would “almost instantaneously increase to any amount, ” as Darwin says, but for the struggles they suffer in the face of the “heavy destruction that inevitably falls, either on the young or the old, during each generation or at regular intervals?”
And later in the day another they discussed the tricky period we’re in where engineers, willfully inconsiderate of any consequence, can willy nilly throw new combinations of species into the ecosystem that has taken so many billions of years to find itself. What is the ratio, I wonder, of scientists who open their minds to the influx inspiration to those who engage purely in the efflux of their egos? Evolution, in its third phase, will soon find the answer. What is intelligence anyway? What is stupidity? And which category do I fall in for taking a stand?
People asked me for favors.
I asked them for favors.
They cracked jokes.
I cracked jokes.
We had a chance to laugh.
How many chances do we have to laugh, in a lifetime?
Count them.
The number is finite.
Teenaged people entertained me at a Talent Show that seemed to me to capture the essence of the species, following as they did along the lines of the culture that we followed before them, and our parents followed before us, and I thought of this as an affirmation. One Elizabeth called, “School Love.”
People throbbed in their hearts with school love today. (It has taken me a lifetime to understand this feeling which I felt at their age but denied feeling, needing as I did to flee in search of demons with which to dance.)
Teenagers consoled me in their hearty kindness for each other.
People disturbed me today. Looking close, I saw their faces trying hard to mask the death that sucked the glow of life from their skin.
They lectured me on the life and death of Gram Parsons, making me want to go back in time and listen harder to the Flying Burrito Brothers when my tragic friend Debbie Blackwell played them for me not long before she was knocked into a permanent coma by the hoof of a giraffe. How I couldn’t hear then but could hear now if I tried, and Parsons like so many dying before he got farther along to understand all about it as the longer-lived and gentler-spirited Mississippi John Hurt would have put it in that traditional spiritual that has consoled me on so many occasions.
People, they made me feel grateful for getting this far along, a distance from which I can look back and look within and see something I didn’t see before, though not dying and ascending to the seraphic understanding implied by the spiritual.
People, in looking ahead to greater rewards, comforted me in the now, and made the concepts of future, present and past merge like the figures in a Picasso painting.
People, they allowed me to see and to understand something right now in this line in this word – every one, person and word, a teacher of some kind.
The zoo I worked in as a night watchman, the one of the uakari, the Overton Park Zoo, is the one where my friend Debbie Blackwell later took a position as a keeper. Attending a lot near the giraffes, she heard the newborn crying in distress. She leapt the fence of the enclosure and raced toward the calf, whose neck was caught in the fence. The giraffe mother, distressed, took Debbie for a threat, knocked her down and kicked her in the head. Debbie was in a coma for the rest of her life as a result. Before this incident, Debbie took me and other friends in a Volkswagen bug out to bluegrass music concerts in a barn outside Memphis. Once she arranged to have Furry Lewis play a party for us. Debbie could tell stories as well as Furry played the guitar. If I had been awake then, I would have listened to both closer. I was too busy dancing with my demons to pay the right kind of attention. Good morning, jury, what may be my fine? Maybe I’ll write a list poem about things I should have paid closer attention to, maybe not. We’ll see whether that train stops to pick me up in the next few days.
Or maybe I already wrote it and just need to go back in time to find it, head up to the speed of light, turn time around like Picasso turned space around, take up those threads.
For now the thread of King Cnut. I’d been listening to a Teaching Company tape on the Vikings. Probably got some of that marauding blood in my veins, which are lines in a battlefield between the Scandinavians from Sweden, the English, and the Irish. I guess it’s the Irish that got the worst of this deal, and I should do something to celebrate them. Instead, here’s a tangent on the names of Viking sea kings that could qualify as a list poem I suppose. It makes me laugh but when I showed it to another writer she didn’t see the humor or the point of it. What do you think, trusted colleagues? Is it worth anyone’s time? Thumbs up and I leave it in. Thumbs down and…I don’t know. I might still leave it in.
A SALUTE TO THE ANCESTORS
English and Varangian noblemen
Louis III the Stammerer, Ivar Ragnarsson the Boneless,
Harald Harefoot, Harald Bluetooth, Harald Finehair,
Edward the Confessor, Edward the Martyr,
Eric the Bloodax, Aelthlered II the Unready,
Arnulf the Bastard, Bragi Boddason the Old,
Charles the Bald, Charles the Fat, Charles III the Simple,
Gorm the Old, Harald Greycloak, Harald Klak,
Harald Kyrri the Quiet, Harald Sigurdsson Hardradi (The Ruthless),
Helgi the Lean, Erik the Red, Leif Eriksson the Lucky,
Louis the German, Louis the Pious, Magnus the Good,
Odo, Olaf Haraldsson the Stout, Olaf Hoskuldsson the Peacock,
Pepin the Short, Sigurd the Stout, Thorkell the Tall,
Unn the Deep-Minded, and Yaroslav the Wise (at last)
I raise the drinking skull of Sviatoslav, murdered by
Turkomen Pecheneg thugs, to you, your libidos and
your limbic systems, without which I wouldn’t be here
expounding peace and good will like a bloodshot berserker
on our embattled little monastery of a planet today.
Look at those names closely. How would you name our leaders today? How would you name yourself? How would you do so to describe, not to demonize? Dale the Penurious. That would be me.
“Maybe I’ll write a list poem about things I should have paid closer attention to, maybe not.” I said earlier. I did:
IF I COULD
I would reverse time’s arrow and take with me an iron to smooth the wrinkles of past times.
I would take a surgeon’s needle to suture the lesions of all I wounded, including myself.
I would put the bullets back in the gun, put the gun back on the rack, put the beating hearts back in the bodies of the songbirds and the frogs who died in my sights.
I would see before I pulled the trigger the cardinal cock’s body limp in my hands with its dark blood streaming among the crimson feathers.
I would reweave time to put in my youth the kind of attention I paid as an adult to the grey hawk in the distance near Nogales, the kinglet deep among the leaves of lilac bush, a violet crowned hummingbird vanishing over the roof in Patagonia.
I would depose Robert E. Lee off the cover of my high school yearbook, which I etched so cleverly, and replace him with the image of a lamprey eel.
I would unburn the four charred crosses at the bus drop-off the day that my Robert E. Lee High School was integrated.
I would return to the levee the dried wood gathered by the demons who danced around their bonfire in their white robes on the River Road, an event I noted with mere teen curiosity when I passed by in my car on my way to my girlfriend’s house.
I would answer the question: Does more attention get paid as history unfolds – or less?
I would splice into his DNA the mirror gene that the South Bronx teacher needed to notice the girl whose brain was wilting at the edge of the lesson, enough to discover she was an undiscovered poet of history.
I would give that teacher the language to coax the boy’s forehead off his desk long enough to hear he had ideas enough to stop or start a war.
I would picture the look on the face of the boy I bullied before the bullying instead of after.
I would unhurt the hurt of the lovers I hurt in so many ways, unhurting my hurter’s hurt along the way.
I would make supple the dry bamboo I used as a pole to vault the bar in that empty lot where I knocked good sense out my head for the rest of my life.
I would keep my foot on the brakes to let pass the oncoming cars that twice smashed my family’s cars.
I would see inside my father’s psyche with the vision of a savant and unyell the yelling I yelled when my own psyche was insulted.
I would curate my mother’s starving sensibilities with the skill of a child prodigy.
I would commission the Darwin-Mendel Team to crispr into my chromosoms a gene that would focus my attention at all the critical moments I let it lapse, and make sure that this gene showed up in my daughter’s quadrant of the Punnett square.
This would be the kind of attention I paid on the occasion of my mother’s death, when I noticed the decrescendo of her breath, and the chattering family took her hands up in silence.
Or the kind I would have paid to the telephone call from my sister before she vanished into the deserts of Arizona, if I had had that gene.
Or the kind I would like to pay when counting my breaths as I sit zazen.
Why can’t we pay attention when we need to, to what’s driving us and where it drives us? What does it take? Who can teach us to pay attention?
I’m sure I’m not alone. I think there might be many who pay even less attention than I.
Is the paying of attention a constant quantity, a zero sum proposition, so that if I pay attention to X, Y fades suffering into the fog?
I would guarantee the paying of attention to all of the things that need attention, at the time they need it, by the beings who need to pay it.
Maybe because of the pressure I put on myself when I wondered whether I would be taken up with the writing of this poem, I found I had to work it harder than others. It didn’t flow right away. I started with the prompt “If I Could…” and wrote ideas that seemed like a facile confession of all my past sins. Something that belonged in a confession booth, and I wasn’t even a Catholic, if being a Catholic were even a reasonable thing to be. So I re-wrote it using the stem, “What Could I Do?”, which made it sound like a series of Rodney Dangerfield jokes gone wrong. Plus that frame forced me to do a lot of prosaic explaining of each item. I tried to wedge the same material into a “List of Mysteries”, but that blurred the focus entirely. So I went back to my original notion about attention and retitled the poem “Things I Should Have Paid Closer Attention To (A Partial List).” Wow, that was going to finally take me where I wanted to go! But after one draft, I could tell it was bombing too. So I went back to my original “If I Could” and saw a way to focus the lines in a less confessional, more cold-blooded metaphoric way. This finally felt right. Like I’d been using a butter knife, then a bread knife, then a box cutter, then a machete before I put my hands on the scalpel I needed.
All the while I kept having to put up with an annoying debate in my mind: should I just abandon this? (I’m pretty good at abandoning false starts. If you want proof, fellow artists, just ask me to send my countless drafts.) But some inner voice kept nagging me to find the right way on this one. And I did, enough to satisfy me that I was hitting the right notes regardless of the other imperfections that might mar the piece.
So what’s the message here? Abandon your work unless your instincts won’t let you do otherwise? That seems solid.
One other point you need to hear if you’re inclined to emulate this process for whatever reason you might have: I left a lifetime out — a Remembrance of Things Past’s worth of material. Events and ideas kept trying to force their way in, on the premise that they were of equal weight to the material that was already included. After all, when it comes to social issues, I only refer to those racist incidents in high school when my college years and beyond are chock full of even more explosive incidents. When it comes to my family, I barely scratch the surface, considering of all the other topics that come up with my shrink. The experiences of nature have been vast in my life, and only some incidental ones are mentioned here. But that voice within was attached to a bouncer who kept these crashers out, and I’m wary of arguing the point with such a muscular muse. When I’ve done so in the past, I’ve invested years in projects gone awry. This one feels about right.
In the introduction to this section, I claimed that Whitman and Szymborska’s list poems played roles in my life. Whitman at my wedding, later in the room of kindergartners and on other occasions as well. Szymborska played her role in an incident relevant to this poem. The school girl “whose brain was wilting at the edge of the lesson” was a middle school student who was not reading the reading test text on the screen as she was supposed to be doing. When I approached to find out why, we fell into a conversation in which I discovered she loved history, and, though a young lady of Puerto Rican descent in the South Bronx, an ardent student of the Jews and their persecutions in the Holocaust. I happened to have a copy of Szymborska’s “Map” with me. We read it and interpreted it together, and she went on to write her own list poem about scenes from history that had impressed her:
WHEN I THINK OF HISTORY
I see black and white movies:
Bonnie and Clyde driving in their old-fashioned car.
They are laughing at the cops chasing them
as they escape with the money.
I see Hitler, bald with his moustache,
saluting people saying, “Heil Hitler”,
the gray uniforms with red swastikas
attached to their shoulders.
I see Abraham Lincoln trying to free the slaves.
He’s sitting in a red chair
on stage in an auditorium,
speaking to a crowd of politicians.
I see Gandhi giving advice to the people
that he helped, making their lives
and their living environment better,
their houses and huts in India.
I see fighting, houses and cars blowing up
during World War One. People begging for help.
The men shooting at men, army tanks riding around,
the nurses helping injured children who got hurt.
This was her poem. Better for her that particular day than a reading test. Liberating. Simple: “I see…”