Free Verse

Let’s say you’re out and about or daydreaming at home or reading something that catches your attention and you’re lofted unexpectedly into a transcendent state, or you see with unusual clarity, or an odd notion strikes you out of the blue. If you’re prepared, if you’ve practiced, you might jot down some notes to capture an idea, or string some words together in a way that looks interesting, or record for a moment what you see. It’s been a liberating thing for me, on my path through the second half of the 20th Century and now well into the 21st, to pick up on these moments (or have them pick me up) and crystallize them.

In Nature Emerson wrote about his “transparent eyeball”:

We return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.

Don’t know if I’m part and parcel of God, but maybe these moments I’m describing are kin to Emerson’s, where your eyeball becomes a crystal — at one with what’s around it. Then the art starts.

In the List Poem section, I talked about using the form of the list poem to surprise yourself with what you discover in your thinking and feeling. That form, the way I employ it anyway, is not one to cut and polish like a diamond, but one to unleash like a reservoir of water through a broken dam, to run down through the landscape in concert with the gullies and the boulders. Responding to the “aha” moments in these free verse poems involves a different process, where you shape the outcome more carefully, translating the moment into a crafted artifact. (1)

I call them free verse poems for lack of a better term. They are not free of influence by metered forms or other formal structures of poetry. I am just free to shape them according to what the moment, the idea, or the senses demand. It’s useful to have a toolkit so you’re not just using a hammer to sculpt your piece.

Whatever you do, if you’re inclined to learn anything from my experience, open your mind first to your senses, to your inner promptings, to connections that may at first seem far-fetched. Shaping what comes through the window – the transparent eyeball – may produce something that wins a prize or it may result in something you only savor (or groan about) privately. Who cares? Your ego’s gone on vacation for a few minutes, you’ve had an erotic fling with your medium. What more could an artist want? And you are an artist, aren’t you, when you see with clarity and reflect on what you see?

In another section of this work, called Dreamawake Dream, I’ve organized free verse pieces according to a principle of connection. Those included here are the strays, the mavericks and the dogies. Having come to understand, believe or wish (I’m not sure which verb applies most accurately) that in the world of art, as in the world of dreams, chronology isn’t a useful concept, I’ve simply put them in alphabetical order, depending on the titles.

ATOP HAWK MOUNTAIN

The juvenile bald eagle
climbing the thermals
among the turkey vultures,
the light glinting off its back
as off an old penny.
The Cooper’s hawk
wedging its airy way
flap flap flap glide
flap flap flap glide
above the shaggy
fall oaks and maples.
The sharpie
zipping along
flappity flappity no glide
directly overhead
against the saturated
blue blue sky.
The redtails
in the distance
circling and circling
over the rise
their tailfeathers winking
terra cotta when they
mediate the sun.
The lone black vulture
turning and turning
looking lost
off the hillside away
from its red-headed brethren.
Not so many hawks today.
Well past the time
of the broadwings
who like to
rise up in funnels
by the hundreds
before they peel off
to glide south
along the ridgeline.
Plenty to see
in this bright weather,
but nothing profound to say.
What is authentic, anyway?

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The first version I wrote of this poem was 11 lines, basically a list of the birds, with the final question at the end. I was attracted to the statement of fact, the minimalism. But then I thought the poem was really about seeing, so I added visual details along with a contextualizing observation or two. I’m not sure this second version is a real improvement. It’s a different poem (with list-like elements – should I have put in the List Poem section?) with more music and sensations that maybe back up the idea that the world makes sense through the senses. As Aristotle put it, “What is in the intellect comes first through the senses.” Philosophers, artists and scientists have debated the idea ever since, of course. Here’s what Leonardo DaVinci had to say when he was in teaching mood, resolving the contradictions by advising we start with seeing:

Principles for the development of a Complete Mind:
Study the science of art,
Study the art of science,
Develop your senses –
especially to learn how to see.
Realize that everything connects to everything else.

In a crispier mood, he wrote, “Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! wretched mortals, open your eyes!” I agree we’re in danger of being wretched whole heaps of our time…until those eyeballs of ours turn transparent.

Coincidentally, my next free verse poem has a setting of mountains as well:

BETWEEN ME AND THE MOUNTAINS

Where I am: the Captain Cook Hotel.
Anchorage, AK, 9th Floor, North Window,
sitting on a king size bed, 8:30 A.M., August 23, 2007.

Where the mountains are: Maybe 15 miles northeast.

What is between us:

A crane that, amazingly, has just begun to move,
the first time since I’ve arrived.
Its spindly arm is swinging in an arc
pointing west to one pointing southeast,
like one of the numerous fishing poles
you see people wielding
in this area of the world.
A line drops plumb from the crane’s tip,
wanting to haul up what?
A bucket of concrete, perhaps,
to construct yet another obstacle
between me and the mountains.

Below the crane, which is now still,
having accomplished its move to the new position,
is a stack of cubes – white, teal blue, beige –
within which lie embedded dark windows.
Atop the teal cube an orange arch
whose meaning is impossible to discern
from this distance.

As if to reflect the arch,
the orange edges
of the levels of a parking lot under construction
slant into the teal of the building below
the crane.

My eye seeks orange and finds
two points of it, between me and the mountains:
a minivan and a delivery truck
in a parking lot off to the right.
Looking closer: an extensive smear
of orange rectangles appears reflected
back to me from the hall-of-mirrors distortions
of a flat black glass building hulking ominously
across the street from my orange hotel.

Finding no more orange my eye seeks red
and finds it in three stop lights and two walk lights,
a painted section of curb, a construction sign,
the paint of five cars in the parking lot.
A warning light blinks red
on a mystical circular grid
atop the tallest beige building in the landscape,
which is labeled with an idolatrous sign:
Conoco Phillips,
the lettering accented by a delta-shaped
scarlet slash that looks like a fresh wound.

For a moment, if I might, I would like
to meditate on the relationship between
the eye and the color red, red being the target
for the quick arrow of sight: think
lipstick, nipples, wounds.
Red is love, life and the action of death.

So much between me and the mountains:
the black buildings, the yellow, blue and green buildings
I haven’t mentioned, the idea of tombs,
meditations on colors, the thick bank of clouds
that obscures them entirely now,
and all of these thoughts of mine.

And time.
We hoped to go to the mountains yesterday,
and I don’t think we’ll get there today.

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Here’s that transparent eyeball at work, a product of my belief that looking carefully at the world around us allows us to see into the nature of being, or at least to create meaning, from the interaction of the observer and the observed. I remember seeing an exhibition of art in Washington, I believe at the National Museum of Art, that compared the art of the so-called “West” to that of the “East” in 1776. I hope I’m remembering this right. Please write and let me know if I’m off the mark. In the Western paintings, human images and structures covered maybe 90% of the canvas surface, with nature taking up maybe 10%. And half the time that 10% was of cultivated landscapes. In the Eastern paintings the ratio was reversed, and the natural landscapes were wild: those gorges and waterfalls and cliffs looking untamed and dangerous. The Eastern art seemed so much healthier. This idea’s borne out by research into how much we need nature to heal us, with its colors, shapes, sounds and scents that burrow into our fractured psyches and restructure them for joy, hope and gratitude. (The Nature Fix by Florence Williams is not a bad place to start on this topic.) Of course the “East” is no holier than we are these days, I guess because they got seduced by the whorish pleasures of the Industrial Revolution. Anyway, there is indeed a spectacularly chaotic obstacle course between ourselves and the mountains. I would wail and beat my breast more over this if I thought it would do any good. And a perverse part of me believes that if you suspend your judgment the next time you look out your window, the human artifacts that are there, strewn about with not a thought of art, like the left-over mall crap in a teenager’s bedroom, might be beautiful in their own existential way – if your eyeball’s transparent enough. Can any eyeball become clear enough for that? Jury’s out, I guess.

Don’t you find it interesting, by the way, how the eye seeks red? Something scary about that. I have another poem on that theme that will pop up later. And…I’ll be damned, look at this other one featuring the color red that is by sheer coincidence next in line:

THE CARDINAL

I was tired from working all day in a school,
but it was time to take a walk.

I stretched my legs through the peaceful Long Island
neighborhood in the evening light and the cool breeze

to the shore of Mill River, where I saw the patterns
in the waves – their amber colors –

and how they took on the shapes of overlapping fish scales
as they turned the corner onto the bank.

Ambling back to the car that would carry me
to Brooklyn through the river of traffic on the crowded highway

I heard the voice of a cardinal. It punctuated
the run-on sound of the wind in the notebook of my ears.

I heard its opening phrase followed by the tiew-tiew-tiew-tiew
but I couldn’t spot it in the spruce

until I’d circled the tree and set my hat
against the stabbing rays of the slanting sunlight.

I found it, the rich red muted in the shadows of the branches.
It was the first of the season.

The walk, the wind, the penetrating rays, the rippling river
and the signature of the songbird had made me

for the moment a peaceful man.
A woman with a girl and a stray cat following

came up the sidewalk on the other side of the street,
heading home, it would seem, to one of the safe

suburban houses on the block. I announced
the cardinal. And I showed them the dark pocket

among the needles from which the cock sang.
The woman told me they got redbirds at their birdfeeder

along with those blue birds she thought might be called
jays. We spoke about the redness of the one and

the blueness of other and the cat joined me for a moment
and rubbed my leg with its supple arched back before

padding into the recesses of the cardinal’s yard.
This exchange happened without conclusion,

without fear or hesitation, in March, 2006, in Rockville Centre,
a shrinking 31 feet above sea level. Temperature: 42 degrees.

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Time and change are the deepest of mysteries to me. Maybe they’re so enigmatic because I’m trying to separate them from space. Einstein linked them. Why can’t I? Recording moments like the one in “The Cardinal” are the best I can do to understand time and change. Snapshots that lay down markers for me to revisit experience. Of course the snapshots themselves change. The image fades. It loses context. The information becomes obsolete. A snapshot in language evokes less and less of the details of the memory it invokes. Eventually, the words themselves become archaic. From a geographic perspective, even the landscape described will change, and the animals in it. What will the species cardinalis cardinalis, cyanocitta cristata, felis catus, even homo sapiens amount to in future epochs? Taxonomies themselves have expiration dates stamped on them. Trying to combat counter-arguments to his theory of natural selection, Charles Darwin, in his chapter “On the Imperfection of the Geological Record” in On the Origin of Species, had to show that the intermediate varieties between former and later species were absent from the geological record for a reason. Understanding the reason entailed seeing how fossils were formed, the rarity of conditions that allowed them to be formed and, if formed, preserved, and the prevalence of conditions that prevented them from being formed in the first place. For page after analytical page he discusses rates of deposition and “denudation”, the intermittence of geological formations, the reliance of fossils on the deposition of silt during periods of subsidence of the land. His evidence and reasoning are intertwined in a structure as artfully woven as Spanish lace. To grasp his counter-argument fully, readers are made aware that they have to understand the vast stretches of time under discussion:

It is hardly possible for me to even recall to the reader, who may not be a practical geologist, the facts leading the mind feebly to comprehend the lapse of time. He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology, which the future historian will recognise as having produced a revolution in natural science, yet does not admit how incomprehensively vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume…A man must for years examine for himself great piles of superimposed strata, and watch the sea at work grinding down old rocks and making fresh sediment, before he can hope to comprehend anything of the lapse of time, the monuments of which we see around us.

For me, time is a juggernaut that can’t be stopped and which can be oppressive to the point of insanity without some way of transcending it. It tortures me like a nightmare tortures a dreamer, like the vision of a free summer day tortures a fifth-grader the last week of school, like a deadline tortures a procrastinator. I practice meditation. When I meditate I’m happy if I can brush up against that state practitioners call samadhi, where you are totally aware of the present moment. This is an escape hatch. But making yourself aware of a small moment in time and capturing that moment in a net of words also provides some relief. Even the form of it helps. By slowing the goose-stepping march of second-upon-second through the use of couplets, my narration of this encounter with a woman, a child, a cat and a bird on Long Island, I was able to tame that monster of time, harness it to my emotions and transform it into an experience of wonder. In relating an everyday exchange, and its innocent nature, in a quiet neighborhood, with danger lurking behind the scenes, both for the cardinal and for the people who live in a coastal area with the water rising from global heating, I found a way to capture it, along with the tension that abides in existence itself, from moment to moment.

Couplets helped me in this next poem too:

DEDEKIND'S TOES

Dedekind, taking a walk
from Point A to Point B,

decides to conduct
a thought experiment

on what it would be like
to amputate his toes,

so he stops. He slices
with his mental knife.

He discovers that,
to his distress,

though he can divide
the quarks contained therein,

he cannot cut the strings
that play like an orchestra

from one of those
hypothetical dimensions

those pesky physicists
are dreaming up these days.

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Haven’t given a lot of thought to Richard Dedekind lately? Okay, here’s a little background: He was a German mathematician who lived from 1831 to 1916. He got an education in mathematics and developed an interest in physics in his early educational years, but his education was not up to the advanced standards he needed to realize his potential. The influence of a fellow university professor named Lejeune Dirichlet changed that. As Dedekind wrote,

What is most useful to me is the almost daily association with Dirichlet, with whom I am for the first time beginning to learn properly; he is always completely amiable towards me, and he tells me without beating about the bush what gaps I need to fill and at the same time he gives me the instructions and the means to do it. I thank him already for infinitely many things, and no doubt there will be many more.

Not a bad guide to teaching, eh? Dedekind was most famous for his idea of what became known as the “Dedekind Cut,” which he recounts came to him on a specific date: November 24,1858. His idea was that every real number r divides the rational numbers into two subsets, namely those greater than r and those less than r. Dedekind’s idea was to represent the real numbers by such divisions of the rationals. In his own words:

Now, in each case when there is a cut (A1, A2) which is not produced by any rational number, then we create a new, irrational number a, which we regard as completely defined by this cut; we will say that this number a corresponds to this cut, or that it produces this cut.

In other words, the number line where every real number is defined as a Dedekind cut of rationals is a complete continuum without any further gaps. Look, I don’t get this like my mathematically more savvy friends would understand it, but that whole idea of having a cut in a continuum that prevents further gaps strikes me as a mind-blowing idea. I connected it to string theory in the poem and imagined Dedekind as a cartoon figure who likes to make cuts and who gets frustrated when he can’t. He would be happy you could split an atom but unhappy by the idea of strings in string theory, because those barely imaginable wiggly little units can’t be cut. When I write a poem like “The Cardinal” I’m fancying that I’m making a cut in time through which I can escape, like those spirit lines in Navajo weavings.

If I could sit down and have a glass of beer with Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind, I would ask him what he thought about time. Is it an unbroken continuum or a bunch of points on a line packed so tight you can’t see them? I would also ask him about how a poet should think about his other work on mathematical induction, the way he defined finite versus infinite sets. Somehow he stayed sane when he thought about the crazy paradoxes inherent in the ideas of infinite sets, whereas his friend Georg Cantor was driven to deep depressions in part by the ideas of infinite sets and the political problems he faced trying to persuade others of their validity. Cantor, by the way, made some very koan-like comments on this topic:

The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.
In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.
A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One.

In Dedekind Nachlass, Dedekind wrote:

Of all the aids which the human mind has yet created to simplify its life—that is, to simplify the work in which thinking consists—none is so momentous and so inseparably bound up with the mind’s most inward nature as the concept of number. Arithmetic, whose sole object is this concept, is already a science of immeasurable breadth, and there can be no doubt that there are absolutely no limits to its further development; and the domain of its application is equally immeasurable, for every thinking person, even if he does not clearly realize it, is a person of numbers, an arithmetician.

I would read that back to him over our bock beer and get him to elaborate, because if that’s true I should have paid more attention in math class. The problem is that math was taught – to me – in such a boring and incomprehensible way. In fact the whole reason I researched Dedekind and Cantor and a dozen other mathematicians was that I felt that in school a huge mistake had been made. A wondrous territory of the mind had left totally unexplored. Educational hacks and co-conspiring text-book writers had put up “Keep Out! Private Property” signs all around the field. I wanted to find out what I had missed. My new friend Richard could guide me to discover “infinitely many things.” Along the way I would ask, once the beer had loosened him up, why he thought his pal Georg didn’t ultimately sense the freedom he needed to stay out of the sanatorium. I would ask these things because I, like most people, like to escape traps and feel free, like to feel like that fifth grader in the park on the first sunny day of summer.

I would ask him if he agreed with his compatriot, the poet René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, when he wrote this advice to a young poet:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.

Philosophically, I’m attracted to the idea of living the questions when so many can’t be answered. As the son of an American Engineer, though, being under siege by an army of unanswered questions creates anxiety. Back to work.

Incidentally, researching the term Dedekind Cut, I came across a sound artist from Northern California by that name. I listed to his album Tahoe free online while writing this commentary on Dedekind. There were eight cuts on this dreamy album.

In this next poem, I’m still thinking in terms of slowing time down via short stanzas, in this case, haiku-like verse paragraphs:

DEEPENING THE SHADOWS

Shadows overlap with
different degrees
of intensity…

one fatigue…
one fear…
one anxiety….

It is the light
that makes
the shadow.

All of one.
All of the other.
No such thing.

So when we say
“enlightenment”
we are talking

about deepening
the shadows,
are we not?

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This one’s just a meditation on human (at least from the p.o.v. of this particular specimen) psychology, and what it means to be enlightened if you accept the premise that light and dark define each other. No big deal.

I guess that theme of enlightenment, i.e. a path to freedom, keeps popping up no matter how much I try to avoid it:

DISCIPLINE

Can you
strike stones against
each other for the rest
of your life without expecting
a spark?

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The word “conflict” comes from Latin, meaning “to strike together.” That’s a thought I like to have in relation to this poem. I am also reminded of an experience. When my family went to Belize for a vacation I signed on for a bird-watching tour in a wildlife refuge. Our guide, who had opinions on everything and thought the chocolate I brought was for women, whereas men should avoid chocolate and instead drink bitters to make sure they get thumpably wooden erections, was skilled at finding the birds. There is one species called a white collared manakin, a stubby little bird with a big head and a courtship ritual that involves the male leaping in a sprightly way from branch to branch making a sound exactly like striking two stones together. The female gets excited by this and leaps back and forth as well with an agility that’s hard to believe. Just watch a video of this behavior and you’ll agree. Then there’s a consummation, and the nimble leaping resumes. Some males spend a lot of time leaping back and forth without attracting a female. If they could talk, they could help me answer the question posed by this short poem. Manakins are shy, but if you think one might be hiding in the brush, you can strike two stones together and draw out the male. Our virile guide did this and our birding tour was satisfying, as a result.

By the way, for craft geeks, “Discipline” is written in the form of a American cinquain, with lines in a progression f 2, 4, 6, 8, and 2 syllables. A debt to Adelaide Crapsey is owed.

I’m finding as I assemble this collection that the theme of light keeps emerging. Look at this next one.

EMERGENCY INTERCOM

To Talk
Press, Release
And Wait For
Steady Light

This is what
the instructions
say on the
subway if

you want to
communicate
an issue
to an official.

Today I am
not interested
in contacting
a conductor.

I would,
however,
like to speak
to you.

I would
like to talk
about taking
the pressure

off, being
released
from all that
weighs us down,

and finally
seeing that
long sought
steady light.

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From a craft perspective on this one, I guess my only advice would be to keep your eyes open. You can find a message of interest anywhere, be it a phenomenon observed or the coincidence of words that can be converted to other purposes.

This next poem includes a lie:

EMOTIONS UPON GAZING AT A WINGNUT TREE

These are just emotions I know but when I
take a second to study the waxy geometric
seedpods dangling from your branches gravity

the artist using tension suspension a light
green palette forms built on the gnarled
columns the structure of your trunk chemistry

piecing life from the complexity of the carbon
atom psychedelic to this old hippie who walks
the earth a step at a time now I feel a kindly

kinship born from the ancient common origins
of our forms they enfold as well the twitching
cardinal chipping its cryptic signals warnings

from the shadows of your leaves Caucasian
Wingnut from West Asia surviving for my
pleasure and I thank you now in a byway of the

Brooklyn Botanic Garden with your thick roots
grasping the dirt for dear life holding on you’ve
got to be older than this institution how did

you get here how for that matter did I and how
too this loud silver jet plane knifing its way
through the clouds in the high hapless sky?

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I wrote the first draft of this poem on a whimsy many years ago as I walked through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. At the time I was farting around with ten syllable lines and stanzas of three lines – tercets. I applied my stanzaic, syllabic process to my first draft and came up with this. I know, it’s packed with too many Latinate words and is a poor showing indeed next to, say, Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” I will not execute the poem for these crimes, though. I am fascinated by the way “inkwell words” flow into the rhythm of Old English vocabulary and fit themselves into the syllabic pattern. I am happy with the themes. I like how the poem ends, and enjoyed the search for the word hapless, which took me a while. I’m grateful for the form of the ode, and with its slightly lunatic way of addressing objects directly as if they could hear you.

So, flawed as it is, it will not be chopping this poem down. I don’t want to kill the humor in the idea of talking like a dingbat to a wingnut tree, and I further like the challenge of running a long sentence through all but the last stanza.

Since writing the poem, I have adopted this tree as a shrine in my life. I go to the garden frequently and stop to admire it each time. I take pictures of it, finding new features of its many glories the longer and closer I look: its Halloween spindliness in winter, which makes you think it must be dead. The first signs of green on the twigs of its rambling branches that reach haphazardly every which way from a trunk that must be 30 feet in circumference by now. Its summer fecundity, with, along every branch, long strings of bright green seedpods the shape of, yes, wingnuts. The trunk of this particular specimen near oak circle in the garden is a marvel of chaos, with huge splits, horrific gashes, holes through exposed walls of sapwood that should not be functioning but continue to pump life blood to the proliferating seeds. Around the base are gnarly bolls, unruly patterns of thick, rough bark. I aspire to be like this tree. It looks crippled. Its greater branches need crutches. But it continues to produce life, shade, wonderment. Richard J. Berenson and Neil Demause, in The Complete Guidebook to Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, describe one branch, which: “charges off to the east with seeming disregard for the laws of gravity, suspended in midair by only the most tenuous hold on its trunk.” A crutch holds it up. Wire cables keep other branches from falling. Nothing this unruly should be able to survive, but it does, year after year.

For inspired writing about this tree, here’s a LINK.

The lie in my poem? I thought, when I wrote it, before I knew anything about wingnut trees or this particular specimen in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, that nothing this venerable could be younger than the garden’s founding date: 1910. I have since discovered it was sent as a sapling from Rome in 1922. So it’s not even a hundred years old as of this writing. I leave the line unchanged because, while technically untrue, it captures the spirit of the tree, which, in my view, defies timelines. Also, I can’t imagine rewriting the line without throwing the poem off kilter. Okay, maybe I’m lazy, too.

THE ENGINE NEVER SLEEPS

The engine never sleeps.
At night it idles in pain
on a bed of rivets.
The engine never moves.
Its gears are hitched to air.
The engine is just an engine.
All its energy does no work.
Nothing done in vain
because nothing done.
This engine would eat
all the food on the planet
if it thought it could.
This engine would offer
all of the answers.
But it refuses to dream.

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Is this engine flesh? A human product? Pure energy? Evil? I don’t know. It is just an engine of the imagination that never sleeps.

GOD IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

How many people have I talked to today?
I could list them, but I’d prefer to paint their faces

or mount a montage of their faces talking, listening.
The look of a face listening. Really listening.

The angelic look of a face listening.
It’s the idea of attention. Focus.

A face focused, in focus. A look of attention
drawing our attention,

and God paying attention to us.

Is that the reason we and the Big Guy invented each other?
To pay attention to our paying of attention?

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I wrote this poem back in the late 90s. Twenty years later I’m still working in the schools, still working on this idea of attention. Still working on my own ability to pay attention in a balanced way to trouble I may be getting myself into. I was running an institute this last week and for a raft of reasons not getting enough sleep. I ran into a teacher at the institute who, for reasons both narcissistic and developmental, simply cannot pay anything but the most unfocused attention to other people if his ego isn’t being served by the conversation. I said a snarky thing. He got me, the bastard! Now I’m remorseful for having lost my attention and gotten sucked into his trap. But there were moments at the institute where people were paying very close attention to each other’s ideas and communing in a state of musical harmony. This is what I live for when I’m doing my work. It springs us from the trap of time when we can pay such close attention. Is it my age? Am I getting senile? I don’t know, but I find I’m less and less patient with the kind of nonsense that distracts people from paying close and honest attention to each other. Life is short, why are we pissing it away otherwise?

Do you know the zen story about attention? Here it is:

A student came to Master Ichu and said, “Please write for me something of great wisdom.” Master Ichu picked up his brush and wrote one word: “Attention.” The student said, “Is that all?” The master wrote, “Attention. Attention.” The student became irritable. “That doesn’t seem profound or subtle to me.” In response, Master Ichu wrote simply, “Attention. Attention. Attention.” In frustration, the student demanded, “What does this word ‘attention’ mean?” Master Ichu replied, “Attention means attention.”

There you have it.

By the way, to set the record straight, I can’t say I believe in God. It’s a curious concept and gets thrown around every which way. I used it in the poem because theoretically God is not supposed to walk into public schools and start throwing her weight around. But, if there were a God, I figured he would be a pretty clever individual, and would find a way in anyway. That way in is through the door of paying attention. When everyone’s paying attention in the right way, it doesn’t matter where you are.

Something sacred is going on. (What’s the root of this word attention, anyway? Latin for “to stretch to”. I’m not surprised. You stretch your mind in the present to connect with another mind in that same present moment.)

Regarding gender politics with this poem, can we postpone the discussion about the use of “Big Guy?” Thanks!

Looping back to two things: my faux pas with the snarky comment and the zen story. I felt really bad about my zinger on this ego-maniacal teacher, even though he clearly deserved it. I found I was perseverating on it. (Paying too much attention to it, haha.) So I went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where I figured I would be able to settle my troubled spirit. This happened, and if a poem I wrote under the circumstances passes inspection, I’ll include it later to explain how. It involves a lesson I learned from a catbird. But while I was there, I went and sat near the Japanese pond. Haiku poetry is all about paying attention in the present moment. I was alone at the pond when a fish jumped up out of the water and made a nice splash.

This haiku came to me:

In time a fish will
break the surface if you wait
long enough by the lake.

It’s leaden and western compared to Basho’s frog poem, but it makes me want to go sit by a lake and pay attention again, so it’s not completely useless. Don’t you wonder why that fish was jumping? Was a snapping turtle after it? Was it going after a water bug? Was it just feeling happy?

A GOLDEN THREAD

Okay, William
and William,
what is it
about this
golden thread?

What is it
exactly?

What is at
the other end of it
for me?

I have been standing
far too long now
at the gate
built in
Jerusalem’s wall
and need to sit.

For me,
what will be
at the other end
of the thread
is a chair?

When I
look close,
I see two:
a desk chair
followed
by a rocking
chair.

So that’s
the golden thread
for me,
then?

To sit at a desk
chair until it’s
time to
shuffle over
to the rocking
chair?

All right.
I
accept that.

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William Blake, in his poem “Jerusalem”, has a famous stanza:

I give you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

He’s giving his island a chance to find joy and love by letting the Lamb of God in “to dwell / In England’s green and pleasant bowers.” I associate this idea of Heaven’s gate to the Zen idea of the “gateless gate.” How the hell do you get through the damned thing? That’s the big question.

The other William here is William Stafford, the poet with the idea that if you pick up the end of a golden thread, a detail, and you follow it, it will lead to other details of great presence and meaning and you will have a rich poem. Not only a poem, but life. In his poem “The Way It Is” he writes:

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.

When I tracked a golden thread the day I wrote this poem, it took me from one chair to another, very prosaic. But if you think a chair has no meaning, please study Van Gogh’s chair closely. It lives in London’s National Gallery.

Here’s a link to a picture of it: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/vincent-van-gogh-van-goghs-chair.

Middle school students, who would otherwise have been climbing the walls, were able to look closer and closer and even closer at a projected image of this chair over a period of 45 minutes without losing their concentration. A visual literacy educator from the Museum of Modern Art showed me this could happen. Her name was Susanna Rubin. I hope I’m spelling her name right. Susanna led the same middle school students in an exercise looking at Matisse’s “Red Studio” for over two hours (broken up over three days). They looked closer and closer and never wavered in their interest. The special education students from a “self-contained” classroom were included in this exercise and saw things no one else noticed. Their interest never wavered either. The students had been learning poetry genres all year, so I persuaded Susanna to have the students gather the language they had been using and draw on the resulting “word bank” to write poems in the genre of their choice. One student wrote this one in a haiku format, which I memorized because I found it so astounding:

This red bowl full of
exotic bones is time’s
experiment with nature.

Just ponder that one for a while. I feel certain that Charles Darwin would approve of it.

HARD ROCKS

The boxy lady with the royal crown latch on her purse –
she casts her eyes aside.

The stocky guy in the black hat and jacket –
he blinks and examines the landscape of the floor.

The dude in the Yankee cap and raincoat –
he buries his gaze in the Daily News.

You and the Planets, Their Role in Your Destiny –
that’s the book the dapper fellow beside me concentrates upon.

Between peeks at the passengers,
my own eyes trail along the blue line of my words.

All of us work hard to avoid the preacher
who purses his lips and thumbs a grimy bible.

“Sayeth the lord…truth and light…times of depression…
sayeth the lord…sayeth the lord…sayeth the lord….”

His mantra rises and falls like the soft waves
that lap against the adamant rocks of nearby Prospect Park Lake

until the dark woman in a saffron sari wafts by,
a bright flag fluttering through the subway doors toward the open air.

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This one could have easily been included in the list poem section. Making categories that work to perfection is a fool’s errand. Just look at the shifting and shuffling of the categories defining what it is to be a hominin or a hominid among the paleoanthroplogists these days. Which of those ancestors whose bones we occasionally find, or whose scratchings on a shell or stone, belong to our line of evolution? And what about the hanky panky between h. sapiens and h. neanderthalensis, or between h. sapiens and h. sapiens denisova, or between h. sapiens denisova and h. neanderthalensis? Farther back, what about the dna swapping between species, including viruses, bacteria and our earlier lines? Horizontal gene transfer, or, less politely put, “infective heredity.” When it comes to evolution of language, I guess it would be horizontal meme swapping. I think I need to reel this in. We’re only talking about the difficulty categorizing poems.

When I taught a college course on creative writing, I tried to do this for my students.

There were the:

Beats
Projectivists
Confessionalists
Earth Mothers and Fathers
Formalists
Jazz Poets
Language Poets
Magic Realists
Neo-Colonialists
Poets of Sex/Gender/Politics

Spoken Word and Performance Poets. And I will tell you, knowing writers in many if not all of these camps, dalliances aplenty went on among them, intellectually and carnally. And, as I’m sure must have been the case between sapiens, neanderthalensians and denisovans, plenty of snooking along with the nooking. My advice, if that is what you are here for, is to know about the camps in case they open new doors but not to pay them too much mind – if you get the difference. To my way of thinking, the goal should be to liberate your spirit, expand your thinking, generate hope, not to get drawn into a food fight.

One other note on “Hard Rocks” and the way poetry might work as craft. Poetry gives you an excuse to play with language, to sense it and savor it like one might a top chef’s hors d’oeuvre. I personally enjoy the jazz of internal rhymes and the openness of the sound of “o” and the finger-snapping click of consonants, the way line breaks can snap you to attention and find new meaning in a phrase. It’s a kind of miracle to me that we have evolved to mingle the meaning and the music in such complex and symphonic ways. Sometimes when I’m immersed in the language of a poem, I feel like I’m the lucky guest at a gala celebrating the complexity of creation itself.

Maybe that’s just me, though. When I was a young adolescent, in junior high school, we had a guest preacher at my family’s house of worship, University Presbyterian Church, which was located across the street from a serene lake in Baton Rouge, right outside the gates of the Spanish moss-draped Louisiana State University campus. As I write this, I’m having a clear memory of the spanking white pulpit, the smooth wooden pews, the quiet hallways that smelled a certain clean and refreshing way. The speaker – and I have no recollection of who he was or why he was speaking – made a comment that the most beautiful sound in the English language was made by the words “cellar door.” It’s my impression that the rest of the congregation that morning listened to the whole sermon and took away the doctrinal message. The idea of the words “cellar door” being the most beautiful in the language was what stuck with me. “What? You’ve got to be kidding!” was my first reaction, but the idea has gnawed on me for the rest of my life. Could this be true? How do you define beauty in language? Who decided this? What made this particular combination of words the most beautiful? Cellar door. Palme d’or. Hors d’oeuvre. …through the subway doors toward the open air. The upshot? I started paying attention, closer and closer and closer, to the nuances of language rather than the subtleties of the gospel. Language became my gospel, as it were. Little did that guest preacher know how far he was leading one member of the flock astray from the path to Christian prosperity, into this life of aesthetic penury.

THE HERON AND THE CRANE

Dance Educators. Ballet. Tap. Jazz.
MBE. Mail Boxes, Etc. Chinatown.
Open Chinese Food. 297-1403.

The woman walking into the frame
has folds of fat hanging this way and that.
She lurches from stressed foot
to stressed foot, just as this poem
lurches from mall signs to person to thought.

Now that the heavy woman
in black and white has pulled her
car from the lot, I see the arm of the crane
reads Gloede Neon Signs (845) 471-4366.

And parked this side of the crane
a white utility truck, bestride it a cherry
picker, with GNS on the cab door.
Within the company design are circles
with crosshairs.

What do they aim for at GNS?
Where do they get their sense of purpose?

The workers atop the crane
are busy measuring and cutting,
cutting and drilling, and bolting.

They are unaware that a heron glides
overhead expending no visible effort.

I have just had a dream shattered,
but can see the connection between
the name crane and the name heron.

I don’t think the heron, the idea with
feathers here, goes to school to
learn to tap, though it dances with its
mate in the springtime.

I don’t think it mails letters.
It carries its message within itself,
makes deliveries as it sees fit.

It dials no telephone
numbers, but does make remarkable
calls: quok, quark, kuck, skyow, skewk,
oong-ka choon – oong-ka choonk,
frahnk…depending on the species.

I myself don’t feel much like skyowing
right now, but wouldn’t mind gliding
away from the perverse geometry of
this one spot’s cage of beams and rivets.

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Waiting in a car in a parking lot in upstate New York after negotiating a decision that didn’t go my way, I had the sensation of a dream shattered. It affected the way I saw what was going around me, giving everything I noticed heightened symbolic value. I was interested in tracking what I saw – as I saw it – to see how the symbolic value emerged, making its emergence part of the experience of the poem. I believe that poetry alters the way we see the world around us, and the world around us alters our poetry – often in the moment. This poem invites you less to interpret my world than to see it as a model for interpreting your own. Try it next time you’re disappointed instead of wallowing in self-pity. The research seems to show that writing can have a bit of therapeutic value, but why does it have to sound like the whining of an adolescent? For a good example of a “confessional” poet who does this, check out Anne Sexton’s “The Room of My Life.” It uses a list structure as she evokes the objects in her room. Here are couple of lines that pop out to me:

the forty-eight keys of the typewriter,
each an eyeball that is never shut,
the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,
the black chair a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,

While I think I can safely assume that Sexton’s poetry changed her view of her room and vice versa, I don’t know enough to claim that Anne Sexton’s poetry was therapeutic for her as it was for me. Maybe so. Maybe it staved her suicide off for a spell. Maybe the opposite. The research I’ve seen says that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder sufferers shouldn’t keep returning to memories of their trauma, the “flashbulb memories” that resulted from a horrible incident. Instead, they should replace those memories with others, giving the distressing ones a decent burial so to speak. I wonder if there is difference in the workings of time between my use of surroundings and Anne Sexton’s. I used my listing of what was around me to escape to another world, flying away on the wings of that heron in my imagination…or at least considering the possibility that this could happen. For Sexton, she might have been tunneling back instead of moving forward. Pure speculation. But there’s a User’s Warning here when it comes to poetry: the heat of it can warm you or burn you. Make no mistake. I advocate letting it light the way forward.

HYPOTHESES

Stop. Hold on.
If you focus hard enough,
you might be able to flatten
yourself like a flounder
and slip through the shallow stretches
as well as these deeper
passes of the riverbed.
That’s what I’ve heard,
at any rate, from people
who appear to know.

They claim that
if you stay awake
it may be possible
to crash against the rocks,
scatter into a spray of drops,
and regather yourself
in smoother currents.

I’ve even heard them say
that if you can collect yourself
to be patient enough
and abide with the ones
you love, you can
flow past the dams
and rejoin the sea.

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Interesting coincidence that this poem should follow the musings on Anne Sexton, who seemed tragically unable to regather herself in smoother currents. I have always been attracted to the Buddhist idea of the individual mind, a tributary, flowing toward the shared ocean of consciousness. Just the notion of it makes me feel better. Embedded in the idea is the concept of home, and that we can return home through our practice, be that practice meditation, poetry, bird-watching, ceramic art, dish washing, whatever. What is our home, anyway? How do we get back if we’re away from home? How do we stay there if we find it? How do we keep the home a place of rest, and not nightmares? It’s obviously not as easy as a commute on the train back from the office, or carrying a tiny house in the shape of a snail shell on your back. Just ask Odysseus. Or, maybe, Sexton.

Another question about home: when do we leave and when do we stay? I was working in a troubled Bronx high school a few years ago where the Ninth Grade English class was reading Karen Hess’s novel Out of the Dust and the same students were studying the Dust Bowl in their Social Studies class. The driving questions of the unit were, “When do you stay, when do you go?” The Dust Bowl made these questions especially poignant. Students were supposed to write argumentative essays responding to the questions, applying them to different scenarios relevant to them after studying how the characters in the novel dealt with them. Most of the students were into the project, but one boy was continually disengaged from the work. Not misbehaving, just sitting there daydreaming. Then one day I saw him working feverishly. I asked him why he was working now, and not before. “I saw that movie with the dust cloud hitting people’s houses in Social Studies class,” he said. “Well, why did that make a difference?” “Because my mother was in the World Trade Center on 9/11. She got out before the buildings fell, and had to escape from a cloud like that. She’s had breathing problems ever since, so we’re wondering whether to leave New York to a place she can breathe easier. But this is our home now. We immigrated from DR, but we like it here and want to stay.” He lived in the projects nearby. They didn’t know exactly where they could go.

On a craft note here: my first draft simply had the images, not the narrator’s instruction to a headlong advisee. But the images seemed pat. By making the presentation hypothetical, hope and doubt mixed in equal measure, I felt I could get a worthwhile metaphor across while escaping the trap of becoming didactic. I’m not sure I succeeded, but that’s part of the deal in this art and also I suspect in life, the living with uncertainty. Wait, have I said this before? Probably. I’m not certain, ha ha.

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING.
BE SUSPICIOUS OF ANYTHING UNATTENDED.
warns the panel at the end of the car

on the downtown Number Three.
Across the aisle I see the slenderest of
passengers, with henna-colored strands

of hair, high cheekbones, and fine
brown eyes. She wears a black
leather jacket that must be the size two

envied by so many ever so slightly
larger cosmopolitan women.
And the jeans are tight on her slender legs.

I see that she is discreetly suspicious
of what I had hoped to be a more
glancing notation of her features, but

she presses on, opening and reading
and closing and opening again and
reading some more her textbook titled

Art, where from a page bursts a picture
of the naked fat-packed Paleolithic oolitic
limestone Woman from Willendorf.

The other thing I see on the Number
Three that must be reported to
the employees of the MTA are the

sharp points of the passenger’s narrow
black shoes, which are blemished by
scuff marks colored a disconcerting white.

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No point in interpreting this one. No dark drama in it. I was there. My eyes were open. The sign was there. The passenger was there to be sketched via sidelong glances. The reporting is accurate. After the trip, I enjoyed reacquainting myself with the so-called Woman from Willendorf. I respect how poetry can keep the names of things alive, as it can moments lived so richly you’re at home in them.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW ME

If you want to know me,
don’t look at me. All you’ll see there
is some dried up hide stretched
over porous old bones.

No, if you want to know me,
get behind my eyes
and put in front of them
a pair of binoculars.

Learn how to adjust the focus,
learn how to hold the weight steady,
learn how to throw your vision
into the distance, catch birds in flight,
peer through the dense and trembling leaves,
survey the horizon.

You really won’t know me at all
until you’ve lofted yourself
into the body of a harrier quartering the fields,
steadily hovering, one square yard at a time,
as it searches for voles.

Until you’ve found the kinglet in the foliage.

Until you’ve spotted the sharpie,
the golden eagle, the osprey and the broadwing
growing from dots over the Amish farms
into pumping riders of the thermals south.

Don’t even talk to me,
if you want to know me,
until you’ve traveled to see
the symphonic flocks
of snow geese obliterating the sky
at Brigantine and at Reelfoot Lake.

Have you been to Jamaica Bay
to watch the skimmers teach knife skills,
gliding an inch from the surface of the bay
as they slice the water with their beaks?
Have you seen how they manage the scope
and sequence of their surgical wingbeats?
If not, then it’s hopeless.
You’ll never get to know me.

Forget the anxiety, the clumsiness,
the intellect and the compassion,
the anger and the ambition,
the sordid history and the mangled ego –
just get behind my eyes, go
around to the hills,
the streams and the shorelines.

Magnify the birds.
Then you’ll have half a chance
of knowing who I am.

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This was a workshop exercise that I wrote alongside the teachers I was coaching in a workshop. I’m not sure if I would have generated it unless I’d been teaching. Teaching has enriched my creative life in unexpected ways, which, until recently, I have been loath to admit, as if there were something shameful in having to make a living inspiring others with the work of still others, being a conduit of ideas, so to speak. Where did all this ego, all this denial and delusion come from? Wish I had someone to blame, but it’s no matter now. The model for the exercise was a poem by the Mozambican poet Noemia de Sousa. The poem is written from the point of view of the continent of Africa. I took the prompt more personally. I’ve always admired those who would speak for their country, or their generation, or their people. Maybe because of the self-effacing ethos of my middle class WASP background, I’ve never felt I could be truthful or authentic venturing to represent experiences other than my own. If you have mastered this territory, beloved colleagues, take my hand, walk me through it. Show me the way. You probably won’t get me far, though, if Whitman couldn’t do it. It honestly does seem like something of a miracle that individuals can channel whole cultures.

The device of this poem did have the sense of inflating my own sense of myself, though, adopting, as I did a defiant alter ego. I like how poems offer you opportunities, like fiction does, to play around with alternative moods, identities, self-images. Even if you’re not going to dress up like Statue of Liberty, you can take some costumes out of that trunk in the attic and play with some new points of view.

IMAGES

These may be images:
the shattering of a windowpane,
the pummeling of a red church by the rain,
a troop of monkeys drowning in their tears,
a flock of robins feasting on worms,
the last trace of red departing the sky in the evening,
the consumption of oranges by the seconds as they tick,
a bowl of steaming soup for lunch,
conspirators in blue jeans spinning nickels
on scarred pine tables in a bar of a Saturday night,
a childhood cat’s eye nestling roundly in the adult sock drawer,
a mountaintop transcending the horizon in the distance.
They may be images, but they do not cohere,
and none contain the picture I seek: of you.

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I wrote the first 12 lines of this one a long time ago, never recorded the date. All I wanted to do was to jot down images that came to my imagination. A kind of Rorshach test of the mind, I suppose. But more interesting to me, it was a record, a snapshot of what my imagination would produce on some undated day in some decade long past. A linguistic fossil. There was no intent to make the images cohere, and I didn’t see any at the time. The lack of connection defined a negative space for me, and I thought that was interesting. But then I picked it up some time later, how long after I’m not sure – I didn’t record that date either – and noticed that the lines were connected, renga-like, in subtle ways, which was also interesting. I was psychoanalyzing this person from the past, who was no longer myself. As the first draft looked like it was tending toward the 14 lines of a sonnet, I decided to push the poem two lines farther and see if that produced anything worthwhile. The jury is out on that. Was the first version better? The second? Was either worthwhile? Now looking back I’m wondering even who the “you” was. I think it was you, the reader. Maybe it was my wife Elizabeth? Maybe it was my daughter? Maybe it was God? I’m going to have to see a professional shrink to figure that one out.

I may not know what was behind the images, the connection between the images, or the final lines, but I do know that going back to a piece of writing like this after a spell of time does weird things to your episodic memory, twisting and turning it this way and that, opening gaps that can’t be filled with anything resembling a fact or a real event, which of course doesn’t prevent you from further exercising your imagination and filling those gaps anyway. Anything to make a pattern. Anything to make meaning, a lack of meaning – any meaning at all – being almost impossible to tolerate. At least in my experience, and I think there’s plenty of research to show I’m pretty much normal in that regard. We know this by contrast with people like the remarkable “H.M.”, whose experimental bilateral medial temporal lobectomy calmed his epilepsy but prevented him from forming new memories. He would probably remember the occasion of writing a list of images like mine better than me if it occurred before his operation, but wouldn’t remember revising, if the revision occurred after it. Writing is a marker of time, like inscriptions on a tombstone. The stone erodes, but you can go etch the words in again if you get there in time. Which didn’t happen with good old King Ozymandias, but has happened with Shelley’s poem because of people like my high school English teacher Mrs. Church, who made sure the words were kept alive, even if only in the shallow grooves of the brain of a teenager in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, sometime during the 1965-1966 school year.

Abraham Lincoln had some interesting words on writing and time:

Writing – the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye – is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception of it – great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions.

The dead I’m conversing with in “Images” is my own self of past times, I suppose. And in writing these words, I reckon I’m writing to my future self. We’ll see if I live long enough to ever get back to them. Maybe the ghost of Mrs. Church is reading them even as I write them, rocking back and forth on her heels, hacking and hockering from her smoker’s cough. I think she would give me some level of approval. She was the one who got me in trouble with my mother. Knowing I’d been hereditarily infected by writers like Dostoevsky, she recommended I read Camus’ The Stranger, which I did, with penurious enthusiasm. Then I wrote my senior thesis on the book. I was running behind schedule with my work, so my mother, bless her soul, volunteered to type it. I went back to see how she was doing and she was crying. “Mother died today, or was it yesterday.” Those were the very words I used to hook my readers, just as had Camus. A good Christian, Mom didn’t see the existentialist point of it all. She took it personally. I’m sorry, Mom. And I forgive you, both, Mr. Camus and Mrs. Church. You didn’t intend harm, only to enlighten readers. That some darkness was caused by the light reinforces my earlier theme, perhaps, and connects that theme to this one under discussion: the recursive ballet between memory and time.

IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE

Encased in our skin
we blink our eyelids
and the world’s
invited in,
or shut out.

Others nearby,
also sensitive
to the light,
wash their eyes
in rhythm as well.

With our
stroboscopic vision
we define
the atmosphere
between each other.

It’s a mutual zone
and we’re
communally aware,
no matter what
our politics.

This shared arena
extends far
but not infinitely far,
beyond
our range of view.

It’s a limited space,
the one
we live in together,
sharing air,
sharing light.

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Thinking of Lincoln’s claim that writing connects us across all distances not only of time, but of space, I guess I’m inadvertently arguing with him here. In the cosmological scheme of things, humans only take up a minute amount of space – within which we of course think we are the most important things in the Big Room. At his time, the space occupied by humans must have seemed much larger than it does to us now, not only because of what we know of the expanding universe, but because of the time it took to cross distances with a written letter or a delivered book. Whatever the perceived size of the space, we don’t have much choice but to share it, hard as that may be. Sigh.

I’m seeing now that this poem defies my instinct against saying any truths that go beyond the pale of my experience. But trying to frame it some other way seems false too. Ach! Nothing is ever perfect. Consistency is the devil. Maybe features of genre let me off the hook: the epigram, the reflective quality of the ghazal. I drafted it on the subway, which has to be one of most congenial human spaces on the planet given how so many people of so many ethnic and religious backgrounds, political inclinations, and states of sanity might occupy it any given moment without murdering each other. They sit in the cars blinking their eyes getting where they need to go with, from a mathematical perspective, astoundingly few insults to the body or spirit. This is an educated guess. I hope you’ll let me know it there’s any research out there back up my hypothesis.

INSTINCT

A woman I know who raised children
of her own once told me how amazed
she was to think, when she looked

around at people on the street, that
each person walking there had been
brought up for so many years at

such great cost of human effort.
Thinking of that today as I look
around the city I compare

our expenditure to the expenditure
of the snake, the fish, the bird, the insect
when the pivotal question emerges:
.
What is it about the way we not only
nurture our own but breed and engineer
every other organism? What

illumination comes from distilling
our practice of the world purely into
a focus on the energy of nurture?

It seems like a liquor, a liquor of instinct
that’s made the planet drunk – I’ve surely
had a deep enough draft of it myself.

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Let’s back up for a minute and take a look at energy. Take our species’ ego out of the equation. Look at how all of the energy (or most of it anyway) that drives life originates with the sun. That solar energy expended over time drives evolution. Our species over the last few million years refined the way the energy was expended: Through the last six million years, our hominin line split with the chimps and the bonobos. Sailed past the two dozen or so extinct species of hominin they’re discovering in paleoanthroplogical circles. (Doubtless leaving rivers of exterminating blood in the wake.) Our legs grew longer. Our arms and fingers shrank. Shapes shifted this way and that from evolutionary pressures. The volume of our brains expanded to three times the size of our ape ancestors’, soaking up 12 percent of our energy every day. Our neurons began to work differently, increasing our cognitive abilities. Nearly every aspect of our biology changed to metabolize faster, do more work, consuming ever more energy at every step. We started to make bigger babies and reproduce more often compared with our primate brethren. We channeled about 50 percent more calories into reproduction than our closest hominin kin. We lived longer, investing more energy in the maintenance and repair of our bodies. We became more physically active. We invested vastly more energy in child rearing to support all of this energy-consuming complexity. The complexity became incomprehensibly more social, political, technological, to the point a woman could look around at the hundreds of people out and about on the sidewalks of the city and make a comment about the energy needed to keep us each thriving. We are drunk on the liquor of this energy. We’re having an orgasm on it. It’s a blow-out party on a planetary scale. No judgment here, for just a second, even if our ids are going to wipe us out in the not too distant future if I’ve got my math right. What a spectacle it is, when you see it excressing like fireworks!

These were the emotions I was having when I wrote the poem. I am grateful, looking back, for that strategy of writing three-line stanzas (tercets) in a free and loose way, not worrying about the syllable counts. If I hadn’t had that cadenced container, I wouldn’t have known how to channel the feelings, and wouldn’t have had much incentive to refine the language.

By the way I thank Herman Pontzer for condensing the information about energy and human evolution for me, in his article “Alternative Energy: physiological evolution in the human lineage,” which was published in the September, 2018 issue of Natural History magazine. The research and the writing behind it put even more STP in my amazement. The work it took over so many years to get to these simple facts that say so much at a meta-evolutionary level. The complexity of the universe reflecting on itself, creating even more complexity. Fireworks blooming within fireworks.

I’m exhausted…keeling over onto my couch for a nap, thank you, and you’re welcome to do the same.

INVITE THE CAT IN

When the lean cat
with white paws
that prowls
from house to house
and purveys
its fearsome message
with the softest of miaous
visits your front door
and purrs to think how stiff
it’s raised the hairs
on the back of your neck
invite it in and feed it
then send it on its way
with its belly full.

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This one started as an incident in a dream. I don’t know how it wandered out of the bag I made for dream-based poems (elsewhere in this website), but here it is. It was a precursor to some far more terrifying encounters with tigers that occurred later, and which can be found among the dream poems. I’d like to say that this poem is closer to the innocence end of Blake’s continuum between innocence and experience, with the later tiger poems closer to the experience end. I’d like to say this because the more I age, the more terrifying I find raw personal experience and human nature in general to be. But the fact is, nightmares have haunted me from the beginning of memory. And still do. Just ask my wife, who occasionally gets bruised when I’m kicking away demons at night.

So “Invite the Cat In” started as a dream, I scratched it down and then it shaped itself into this little statement of advice. I would normally keep from giving anyone advice, but the poem seemed to want to live that way once born. It seemed like changing its nature would be a mutilation. And lots of humble poets, from Mother Teresa (“Do It Anyway”) to Jonathan Swift (“Advice to the Grub Street Verse-Writers”), have stooped to giving advice, so I guess I have permission.

How do we negotiate fear? That’s what the poem makes me think about, re-reading it today. Fears come to our door every day to be fed. What is fear? Do we conquer it? Dispel it? I don’t think so. At least not for me. Just as soon as, in some manic mood, I’m feeling invulnerable, some dread will give me the deadly terrors again. I’m appreciating how Blake aspired (and tried to inspire us to aspire) to fuse the polar opposites of innocence and experience, beauty and ferocity, which would confer enlightenment upon us. Still working on that. Check back in a year or so from now. I will be investigating whether anyone ever wholly transcends fear. Do the Zen masters have it under control? Does the Dalai Lama? If they don’t, what does elicit a fight, flight or freeze response for them? Seems like no matter your spiritual attainment, you’d have a hard time overcoming that wiring in the lizard brain that cues us to react to danger. And isn’t anxiety a necessary driver of change and discovery? Do you have to be sociopathic to never experience fear? Yes, in a year I will definitely have the answers.

Thinking of the deeper history of the image of the cat, I’m suspecting that the cat in the dream was based on the memory of a cat we had when I was a youngster, maybe 10 or 11 years old. Her name was Snowfoot. She was solid black except for her white paws. She was allowed in and out of the house at will. One day, in our driveway under the basketball hoop that kept me sane throughout my adolescence, she was attacked and killed by a pack of marauding dogs. The image of her being tossed and torn by them, though actually only imagined once I heard what happened to her, is one that seems real to this day. Originally I described the cat in the poem as “the black cat with white paws,” because that depicted Snowfoot, and the cat in the dream was black. But putting this anthology together, I am thinking that, innocuous as the idea may have been for me, the image of a black cat stalking the neighborhood raises unintended mournful issues in our racist culture. The word “lean” serves even better, I think. Make lemonade.

So something real exists. And becomes a memory. And the memory becomes a dream. And the dream is recorded to remain in memory. Then it becomes a poem. And the poem wriggles its way into the public eye, adapting to the culture. And who knows where it goes from here, which house it will meow at next, or what its fate will be among the violent beasts that he who made the lamb also made.

THE LAKE IN PROSPECT PARK

Sitting on a broken bench by the lake in Prospect Park
near Wollman Rink the day after Thanksgiving, watching
the gallinules, the ruddy ducks, the mallards, having
conversations with strangers, pondering
how people feed the geese – their different styles.

One clucks as he scatters the crumbs, and the geese follow.
Another later tries tearing pieces from a hard roll but
runs afraid when the goose closes in. “Why are you chasing
me?” she shrieks, “When I’m trying to feed you!” Why
are you chasing me when I’m trying to feed you?

We hear the question often enough from the pulpits of the land.
It’s a pointer to the core of ignorance. And the landscape
of earthy tones and sunny glitter on the wavelets of the lake
is also disturbed by the gory red and white vision
of a Coca-Cola delivery truck, whose fumes cloud the troubled air.

Lifting my binoculars to my eyeglasses I look out
over the water, isolate my field of view to the distant
raft of northern shovelers and think about how they keep
their minds on the business of paddling and dabbling,
with a penchant for oblivion to the drama on the shore.

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At the time of writing this poem, I read in a New York Review of Books article (“The Passionate Egoist,” by Michael Wood, p 56-59 – I forgot to write the other bibliographic info) reviewing Malcolm Lowry’s “The Voyage That Never Ends: Fictions, Poems, Fragments, Letters” the following statement, speaking of Malcolm and Margerie Lowry’s approach writing: “They write endless descriptions, often very beautiful, and sometimes just give themselves instructions: ‘describe sunlight.’ The method is not a method, only a hope, and the reverse of much modern writing: stay as close to reality as you can, let it dictate its terms to you, find the finest language you can for it, and perhaps it will give up its secret.” I wasn’t consciously looking for the secret in this scene by the lake, but I do like that idea that if we stop and become present in the moment in a place, that convergence of time and space will have a secret to share. But maybe you have to tease the secret out through a clever conversation with the scene, like a detective’s conversation with a suspect. So if you want my advice, stop now and then to have a heart-to-heart with the places you may find yourself. For me, in the case of “The Lake in Prospect Park,” the secret was in the behavior of the shovelers. I think they had been reading this quote from Zora Neale Hurston: “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul or lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all….I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” The ducks weren’t weeping at anything. They were just busy taking care of their business.

By the way, if you’ve never read Lowry’s Under the Volcano, give it a go when you’re ready for an adventure in depression. It is the bible of that state, terrifying and beautiful at once. I wonder if Blake would see the awful unity in it.

THE LAST PAGE

One sheet of paper,
the last in the world,
and no computer screens.

The typewriters
have all died.

And only one pen left,
with sufficient ink
to fill the page.

What would you write?
How would you write it?
Would you take your time?

What I would do
I do here now,
on this page, with this pen.

I write what comes to mind
as soon as it comes to mind
and I celebrate that I have a mind.

If I don’t bury the page
when it’s done,
time will bury it for me.

Time will bury in the sand
all evidence of
every one of my thoughts.

Let memory fade.

I’ll sit on the beach
and stare out with relief
at the rising sea.

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I said I’d never write a poem about writing poetry, but here I went and did just that. You can make compacts with yourself and then break them like New Year’s resolutions to give up chocolate. A higher law kicked into effect. You might call it the Law of the Golden Thread, which we have earlier discussed, dear explorers. To me it’s almost sacred, the letting go of restrictions on the mind. Not that you’ll produce the next Odyssey. But you will end up somewhere you didn’t expect, maybe a place worth memorializing, maybe a place to dedicate some craft to, to make some decisions about.

I had originally had some different phrasing in this poem, and a last verse paragraph that read:

This is a relief,
and plenty enough for me.

But transferring the poem from my files to the website, that last line seemed like a wasabi fart at the end of a high-end sushi dinner, so I took it out except for the word relief, which I transferred up. And I threw in the word rising, which captured this weird feeling I sometimes have, that, Gaia-like, the Earth, in the fullness of time, is going to settle the issue of human over-indulgence with its customary ineluctable patience, bringing a measure of peace to the planet. Of course this is a romantic view, given that if there is even one microbe left after the deluge (and of course there will be quintillions of quintillions remaining), the struggle for existence, red in tooth and claw, will just keep on going until the heat death of the universe and probably start up all over again in some other universe if it hasn’t already.

I could really use that quiet moment on the beach about now, by the way. Let me check my Skymiles to see if I can afford to fly to one.

LOVE

Do you find love?
Do you make it?

Can you bake good love
from bad flour?

This is alchemy.
Love must be alchemy, then,

because my lover says,
“It was a long time ago”

when I ask how she feels
about my old misdeeds.

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I wrote this poem 17 years into my marriage. I have not committed any betrayals throughout, which is one of the main reasons I’m relatively sane to this day, but I feel remorse for the misdeeds I did commit in the years between the onset of what I think could reasonably be classified as an energetic case of male human musth and when Elizabeth and I connected and redeemed each other. I give a lot of thought to my actions from those earlier years. I categorize them and reckon with them. I analyze them for their causes and effects. Factors in the mix include my WASP upbringing with its predictable repression, Oediapal complexes, and a smidgen of parentalizing thrown in. My Louisiana setting promoted a culture of Confederate chivalry with its associated racism and sexism – every year Robert E. Lee High school announcing who was to be General Robert E. Lee and His Lady, General Stonewall Jackson and His Lady, General P.G.T. Beauregard and His Lady, who would preside in uniform over not a prom, but a cotillion. General rules and expectations existed, but the idea of guidance didn’t light up any of the adult brains around me, so by the time I was in college and the era of sex, drugs, rock and roll hit, I became, maybe true to the Nordic heritage in my background, a social berserker.

Once Elizabeth and I found each other, we started a decades-long process of repair and, ultimately, redemption from the perfidies of those demented earlier times. For years, trying to craft my way into some perspective on the demons that had driven me to madness, I worked on a novel that never worked – or at least that readers never understood. It sits on my shelf even today, violent and surreal, like a nest of fossilized pterodactyl eggs that will, thankfully, never hatch. The irony here and now, after all of the flailing in the net of my incomprehension, is that this simple poem called “Love” captures all that needs to be said, after the apologies where I can express them, in terms of art.

Craft idea? If someone says something that takes you deep into redemption and gratitude, don’t forget it. Write it down. Memorialize it. When you get older and your memory gets cheesy, you will find it and it will snap you into focus all over again.

MADONNA AND CHILD WITH SAINTS

Sitting in the European Paintings gallery
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Eleanor
reading The Bad Beginning episode
of A Series of Unfortunate Events

in front of a fifteen foot frame holding
a twelve foot painting by Girolamo dai Libri
of the Madonna and Child with Saints,
wherein a laurel tree admired by Vasari

sprouts up behind the magical woman
with the womb of gold and her anatomically
correct child, who she holds up for all to see.
The expression on her face is tranquilly

certain that she really is the mother
of one special kid, as my mom might have said
about any of her children. (Though my
first name is Christopher I am not the Christ

nor was she the Madonna, except in that
we are all so—the message to take home
from these wishful Italians.) Beside the wondrous
Resurrection Laurel is a dead tree inhabited

by a peacock, suggesting immortality.
In the background rise the hills and towns
with castles beneath the clouds.
In the foreground stand the various angels

and modest saints with downcast eyes
and one pompous and richly garbed priest.
One saint holds a green book.
The other holds a pair of tongs

with handcuffs on the prongs—
the essence of impurity. Transcended?
I sense the sadomasochistic impulse
and can’t help but notice the sinister wheel

on the rocks at Catherine’s feet
with its shark fin shaped blades
sticking out from all around.
One figure next to the priest

is a pregnant woman in extravagant
green gown and red robes draped in folds
over the bulging mound of her belly.
I have irreverent thoughts about the role

of the priest in her compromised condition.
The light pervades the gallery space
and I feel Eleanor’s back against mine
as she continues to read sitting with crossed legs.

We’d been trying to get here for hours,
waiting in lines at the entrance, the coat check,
admissions, the cafeteria, the bathroom
and the elevator. The Girolamo dai Libri

(and why shouldn’t Elly read here?)
is nearly five hundred years old.
How many visitors will remember it
well enough tonight to dream of it?

As long as my child retains the feel
of my back somewhere in her unconscious
mind? And will she somehow, in her way,
pass the impression on to her children?

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Mammalia are a class characterized by their neocortices, hair, three middle ear bones, and mammary glands. With one or two exceptions, species of mammals thrive on touch, especially in the early years. Without touch, they suffer like those Romanian orphans who were so severely deprived of attention and affection, or like kittens who grow up psychotic from lack of motherly licks as they nurse. This touching goes deep, not only into the deepest learning of the individuals, but into the traits that allow the species to survive, reproduce, evolve. That’s the memory I’m thinking of, with Elly’s back pressed against mine. No religious symbol or cultural artifact will outlast that inherited psychological need. That’s what I’m reminded of rereading this poem. There was a metaphorical Madonna cradling her infant the day the first mammal evolved in the Cenozoic age, some little tree shrew snagging insects on a fern, dreaming ahead to the day its descendants would defy nature and become a virgin mother on a painting in the Met.

Picking up on that last point, I mentioned the tree shrew’s dream in conversation over dinner with Elizabeth, who, as you remember, was party to redeeming me from the perfidies of my demented earlier years. Elizabeth felt strongly that it couldn’t have been the one tree shrew, but all the tree shrews to whom we owe our evolution were dreaming this in a scandentian version of Jung’s collective unconscious. You can see from this remark why I am so delighted to have been married to Elizabeth for 27 years as of this writing. On a side note, tree shrews are closely related to primates and have a higher brain to body mass ratio than any other mammal, including humans. Are we maybe an example of devolution from the tree shrew? Hmmm…something to think about.

One more side note: Elizabeth and I know from personal experience the effects of a lack of motherly attention on kittens. Our friends David Hardy and Stephanie Rudolph had bought a house upstate with a barn on the property. One day driving up to their house, they found a mother cat dead on the road, and discovered her two-day old kittens in the barn. They tried to save the kittens, but all died except for one, which was named Sparky and retained her name even after we discovered she was female rather than male. David and Stephanie had to do some traveling and we took Sparky for a while, then wound up adopting her. Sparky never accepted human petting. Indeed, she would lurk behind furniture to pounce on Elizabeth’s calves to scratch and bite her. I can’t explain why she did this to Elizabeth and not to me. If anyone out there has a theory, please write and let me know why Sparky preferred to take out her aggressions on Elizabeth. Was it a female rivalry? We once had to take Sparky into the vet, where they kept her in a small cage with a sign that said, “Use Gloves”. One of the vets there advised us that the only way to stop Sparky (also variously known as “The Sparkplug”, “Sparkopuss”, and “The Sparkster”) from her aggressive proclivities would be to get a young male orange cat (“a dog in drag,” the vet explained) who would tame her down. That is how we came by a cat named Aldo, after Aldo Leopold. Aldo, a sweet tempered cat with humans, did his job well. He ambushed Sparky from chair arms and let her know where she stood in the pecking order. She stopped her attacks on Elizabeth but remained psychotic the rest of her life. I’m not sure if there is an atavistic lesson to be drawn about male dominance in all of this. Again, someone please elucidate.

As for the poem, the moment writing it felt honest to me. I liked how shaping the ideas into loose quatrains kept me in the rhythm of it without forcing me into saying something I didn’t want to say. To shape the poem’s lines into iambic pentameters or some other more perfect syllabic structure would be to ruin its flow, I think. I don’t know if I’m deluded. I often am. But I’m comfortable with this resolution.

MATRIX

The phoebe on the deck rail
has clamped an inchworm in its mouth
for half an hour now. It chirps

almost exactly on the second,
keeping asynchronous time with
its bobbing tail. It moves now

to perch with its twig-like legs
on the branches of a dried plant
in the vase on the metal stand

by the door, then flits back
to the rail. How long has it been
since I’ve tuned in to the habits

of birds? Showing steady patience,
this one periodically adjusts
the wriggling chartreuse sausage

along the length of its beak.
Scattered evenly around me
on the deck, ants explore their

territories, finding here and there
a morsel worth carrying back
to the colony. In the lily-covered

pond beyond the deck, a wealth
(these days) of frogs maintains
its territorial spacing by ritual

burps, croaks, and twangs.
The swish of vulcanized rubber
wheels on the asphalt beyond

a stand of trees tells me my place
in the scale and balance of the
human scheme. A force holds

us all apart, the way dark energy
keeps the stars from crashing
in on each other. By focusing on

the seeming empty spaces, I
feel its pressure and remember
at last what motivates all of us

who are living and who reproduce.
I go inside the house and watch back
out through the screen door as

the phoebe wastes no time
delivering breakfast to the chicks
in the nest hidden in the eaves.

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Homo sapiens is a doltish and stupid iteration of mamalia, if I am a representative specimen. Why couldn’t I tell my presence on the porch was the reason the Phoebe wasn’t delivering lunch to her hatchlings? Why can’t we as a species sense the role we’re playing in the living world around us? At least I eventually took note of the bird, the caterpillar, the nest. Sometimes I just want to shout out the front window of our apartment overlooking Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, where, when fire trucks, ambulances and police cars aren’t howling by, motorcycle clubs pound the air with their souped up cylinders, “Hey people, just stop. Stop walking. Stop driving. Stop talking. For fuck’s sake sit still. Notice what’s around you. How are you blocking the flow of life nearby, fools? Pay attention. Get out of the way!”

BTW, don’t you think it’s interesting that even though she had a caterpillar in her beak, the Phoebe was able to chirp to her chicks and let them know food was on the way? That’s an interesting adaptation we share with Sayornis phoebe: we can both talk with our mouths full.

MEMORY FAILS

What was it?
What was it

that was so profound
on my stroll through

the campus at twilight?
The clouds a regatta

of sailboats, the stars
between the sails…

I can’t remember.
It made a deep

impression, life-affirming,
metaphysical, as healing

as enlightenment. I guess
I had to have been there.

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Okay, I know that last sentence is a little cute, one step too clever. But this phenomenon of having a surprise insight then forgetting what caused it is kinda interesting, don’t you think, seers? We’ve talked above about how details and images fade but emotional impressions and touch sensations may linger on like light in those green phosphorescent stars on the ceilings of children’s bedrooms. (“The slower time scales of the re-emission are associated with ‘forbidden’ energy state transitions in quantum mechanics.” That’s what Wikipedia has to say about it.) Something sinks below isolated perceptual memory and forms a new link in the chain that holds our identity together. The force that forged the link ebbs away but the link stays and we are changed without being able to put our finger on the reason for the change. I find the idea weirdly comforting, like I don’t have to answer that multiple choice question on the history test about the when the Magna Carta was signed, or even who signed it. I just have to know I’m probably not going to prison for writing this paragraph because of it. Two heroes come to mind: Mr. Whitman, who, in “When I Heard the Learned Astronomer”, got sick of hearing facts and figures in the lecture hall and went outside to have a look at the stars. And Mr. Thoreau, who, according to my friend Lewis Hyde, celebrated memory gaps, lacunae that somehow liberated the mind from being chained to the dock, so it could sail forth on adventures upon the open waters. I’m filling in with my metaphor here because I can’t find Lew’s book on Thoreau where he talked about this. Am I making this up? I’m going to have to go find that book. I looked for it everywhere in the house three times. I can just picture it. Where did I leave it? I’m losing my mind! Oh well, it doesn’t matter. The idea’s there, at least for now.

One other quick nod here, to the writer Lydia Davis, who I once escorted around some New York City schools. She has a book of stories called Almost No Memory. One of them, called “The Thirteenth Woman”, which describes a person who exists but doesn’t exist, who seems defined by an emotion she doesn’t feel. Eerie. And then too my friend Larry Shainberg, with his clever book Memories of Amnesia.

I have to circle back here a minute. I don’t want to give the impression I have no respect for astronomers. My great uncle the physicist and astronomer Ira Bowen (Uncle Ike) worked at Mount Wilson observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains in Pasadena, then became the first director of Mount Palomar observatory. At Mount Wilson, the speed of light was measured and Edwin Hubble formulated Hubble’s Law, which helped explain the red shift that lets us know that the universe is ever expanding with its raisins (the galaxies) getting farther and farther away in space (the dough in the loaf of raisin bread.) When I was a 10-year-old boy visiting relatives in Los Angeles, Uncle Ike took my siblings and myself on rides in a bucket lift to view images through the telescope. Fifty years later, I celebrated my 60th birthday at Mount Wilson, where I spent the night with family and friends looking at stars and planets through the historic telescope. I think Whitman would have enjoyed sensing what I sensed on these expeditions, a direct connection with sources of light, centers of gravity in the heavens.

Doing a little extra research on Uncle Ike, I just discovered he disproved the notion that an element called “Nebulum” existed, and I quote Wikipedia: “Bowen was able to calculate the forbidden transitions of doubly ionized oxygen to be exactly where the lines had been found. The low probability for collisions in the nebula made it impossible for the oxygen to get from the excited state to the ground state and so the forbidden transitions were the main path for the relaxation. Bowen published his findings in 1927 and concluded that nebulium was not really a chemical element.” Wow! The forbidden transitions were the main path for the relaxation! That’s some pretty erotic language, and I think Whitman can agree that while the stats may be boring, the discoveries are worth celebrating. I’m for finding a fertile space to mate the romance with the science, and for bringing the Blakes and the Bacons along for the fireworks.

Okay, one other family story connected to all of this. Albert Einstein was a visiting professor at Cal Tech in the early 1930s, during which time he unsurprisingly made sojourns to Mount Wilson to have a peek at the operations there, and pat physicists on the back for measuring the speed of light (which he had a fair stake in, it goes without saying). My great aunt Inga Howard was secretary to Cal Tech President Robert A. Millikan. She was assigned to escort Einstein to the philharmonic and generally look after his welfare. He wrote her a note on a photo of himself that said what an amiable, loveable, reliable and steadfast person she was. He addressed the note to “Mrs. Howard” but then had to sloppily write over the “Mrs.” and change it to “Miss” because she wasn’t married. Indeed, she was a lesbian who sometimes brought her controversial “friend” to family gatherings. No one in my clan ever admitted this until my truthsaying Aunt Betty spilled the beans two generations after the fact. Memories and their effects aren’t confined to individuals, are they? Neural networks of meanings cross from families into communities and cultures. Facts may or may not re-emerge, but meanings light up our bedrooms like those kids’ glowing green stars at night.

Quick craft note: Isn’t it a miracle, the way line breaks can help you pounce on words and phrases and bring them home to the dwelling of the poem? This is useful in found poems as well. Let’s make one here:

THE MAIN PATH

The low
probability for collisions
in the nebula made it
impossible for the oxygen
to get from the
excited state to the ground
state and so
the forbidden transitions
were the main
path for the relaxation.

Hey, let’s go for two of them, on this theme of what is forbidden:

FORBIDDEN ENERGY

The slower time
scales of the re-emission
are associated with
‘forbidden’ energy
state transitions in
quantum mechanics.

Not sure about the value of these “poems” but every time I made a choice on where to break the line, I went into an excited state, with heightened awareness of the nature of a word or phrase. I experienced dozens of little associations, too numerous to mention here, but including police depriving street vendors of their oxygen, the way the government forbids transitions of various kinds, and the way my Aunt Inga participated in forbidden sexual practices, her path to relaxation. This emerging theme of what is forbidden in the physical and the social worlds… hmmm… maybe a list poem on that one of these days?

MICROBES

Dude swept
the darkest ocean
and discovered
six million new kinds
of microbial DNA
today, said
we know one percent
about what
there is to know
about those
fancy little helices.
Made me feel
like an oyster cracker
on a soup
of amino acids.
I walk through the park,
who knows how many
billions of microbes
beneath each step.
The open fields,
flag-tailed dogs
using space
like rockets
use the stratosphere,
nary a thought
of meiosis
on their minds.

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I wrote this poem early in the Spring of 2008. It’s primarily an appreciation of life energy, I suppose. By coincidence, ten years later, this summer (2018), Elizabeth and were traveling across the country listening to Ed Yong’s book on microbes entitled I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. I feel kin to Mr. Yong because he shares my heroes Walt “I Contain Multitudes” Whitman and Charles “A Grander View of Life” Darwin. I also appreciate how his book is transitioning our view of microbes from critters that are forbidden to embrace (nuke the evil little bastards), to ones that we are encouraged to embrace (we’d be nowhere without these little beauties). Let’s understand it, let’s embrace it, let’s celebrate life energy wherever we find it – before we wipe it all out. As the song, sung by counselors from Guy Lombardo to The Specials to those stoned rasta hillbillies on the album “Wingless Angels,” goes: Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think!

As far as the lines on this poem, I broke them so that it would run along quickly, cascade unimpeded from idea to idea, like a dog running through a park, except where I broke up phrases to keep the pace from becoming sing-song. Let that racing dog stop to sniff a tantalizing odor along the way, unleashed, no chain to jerk him back, no aroma forbidden, no sooner sniffed than forgotten, but stored in some kind of canine sense library for the life of the animal and maybe the lives of its pups and the pups of those pups…

MIND OVER MEAT

Waves of steam waft over
this bowl of chicken

and assorted vegetables
bathed in black bean sauce.

Mind over meat.
I must not stop or I die.

(I must not die or I stop.)
When does an event begin

or end? Calculus is only
a pale reflection of reality.

Reality has no limit in it.
There is a most definite

crossing of the border
as the will loses its

power and the word its
definition—but when?

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Theories of time and space alternately give me a headache and inspire me with wonder. Time born with the Big Bang? Just a human experience, irrelevant to physical phenomena at an atomic level? Ultimately an expression of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Something only meaningful in relation to space and gravity? What’s in my mind here is the idea that it is, “an infinitely divisible linear continuum, and not quantized (i.e. composed of discrete and indivisible units).” (Link) But there will be a moment when “I” (whatever that is) is here and another one later, after my fingernails have stopped growing as I decay in the grave perhaps, when “I” am no longer here. These thoughts are like the steam from the bowl of chicken and vegetables, themselves dissipating into some dimension without a clear edge. Which is where the calculus comes in, the idea of limits, and the way they cheat at establishing the border of things. The steam wafts away, but where’s the border? The food is transient. The mind and the meat are both transient. But it’s hard to find the border when one thing ends and another begins. Yet it happens. These are the kinds of thoughts you can have when you’ve been reading math in books like David Berlinski’s A Tour of the Calculus and eating in a Chinese restaurant. Might as well write them down, play them out to see if any savory music might arise to please the senses. That’s what I appreciated about Berlinski’s descriptions of the calculus. Here are a couple of passages to be consumed like a warm bowl of tasty soup:

…the simple act of moving continuously from one place to another on the surface of the earth has a rich but hidden structure, one that requires an act of meditative mathematical attention before its essence is revealed.
But if a derivative of a real-valued function is the mathematician’s answer to the question how fast, it is also the answer to an apparently different question, one dealing with curves and curvature and soft voluptuous shapes; in moving from one question to the other, the mathematician passes from a hard-edged utilitarian world to one that is brush-soft…and one of the enormous pleasures of the calculus, indeed, of mathematics, is the permanent possibility of seeing or sensing just behind an otherwise familiar façade the lineaments of an entirely different, infinitely more enticing world, the two worlds, the familiar and the fabulous, both under the control of the same system of mathematical ideas.

So there is a system of mathematical ideas controlling the evaporation of the steam, the passing of the seconds, my personal movement of here to not here. Cold-blooded. Wondrous. And, for the time being (ha ha), liberating in that contemplating the idea – paying attention – like one might ponder a koan, one is lifted from anxieties about whether one’s retirement account will last until one’s interment account.

MINERAL DESIGNS

Standing to take a fresh look at the breakers
in August at Newport Beach, California,
noticing how they build, propelled by distant storms

and the pull of the gravity of the moon,
how the volume of the water swells
as it finds less of the yielding further liquid

and more of the rising resistant sand
I’m noticing how the wave becomes a cylinder
with black walls turning turquoise, then blue,

and stirs in the streaks of sand before
becoming the sizzling foam patterned like archipelagoes.
Undertow and overthrow, regular, through the millennia.

This particular August the Caspian terns have no leisure
to decide whether the waves are too big,
or the tide too strong:

to live they have to dive in.
They don’t have the leisure, but I do,
to notice the nuances of the line where the water ends

and the sand begins.
It’s a line that shifts on the surface and penetrates below the surface,
becoming a descending plane,

where the seemingly infinite depths of the water become finite
and disappear altogether,
turning over responsibility for the occupation of the space

to the now seemingly numberless fine hard grains of silica
which, under enough heat, would not boil like water,
but would fuse together into glass,

only resembling water in color and form.
While many forms of life may have adapted to the habitat of the sand,
they originated in the sea…or so it seems to me

after contemplating the life histories of creatures like the lobefin,
whose primitive lungs promoted its evolution into the frog.
Lobefin, frog, tern, human being, temporary species all —

evolution guaranteeing devolution —
we are no more fixed than the fluctuating line between sea and sand.
Even the particles that make up our bodies,

the raw ores that realize our genetic designs,
may not be so fixed,
given the heat cycles of the universe that create and destroy the elements.

For today, though, for this species, for this individual, with this identity,
to pour my mother’s ashes from a paper cup into the water
and watch them mix with the suds of the surf,

the little breakers, fractals of the larger breakers,
gives me a sense of a cycle being complete,
life from the water taking on the substance of the sand,

returning that substance to the sea.

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When was this, the summer we scattered Mom’s ashes into the sea? Aunt Betty was still alive. My brother and I mixed our Mother’s ashes then distributed them into cups like chefs making muffins, for members of the family to pour into the waves at sunset. I don’t care. I’m going to mention evolution in a poem if I want to. I’m going to fashion the lines after the advancing and receding waves if I want to. I’m going to set up a sentimental moment. I’m going to let the moment live in me poetically, physically, mathematically, geologically. I’m going to do this. That’s about it. Do it as well if you like, survivors. It is not forbidden.

MY LUNGS

The lungs of my daughter in the night,
with perfect rhythm breathing…

The lungs of my mother in a plight,
with terrible chemicals seething…

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I didn’t realize, until putting this web site together, that this poem would follow the prior poem, taking us backward in time. It was the year my mother had lung cancer. The year she died. Her 79th birthday had taken place on 9/11/01. My daughter Elly had been in kindergarten three blocks away and was taken out of the school by Elizabeth, who had lingered at the entrance of the school talking until the conversation was interrupted by the planes screaming in overhead. Mom died on 9/20. Sometime along in there, these lines emerged. Sometimes a few lines, a rhyme…might do a job well enough.

ON THE JOB TRAINING

What kind of creature am I, to exploit others so?
A needy one I suppose, a boy deprived of guidance.

I likewise rob my child of what she needs.
Why shouldn’t I help her draw a pair of shoes for homework?

I didn’t know in that instant how to sketch the footwear of love.
It’s on-the-job training for me, to do what’s right.

On the job training is the hardest kind, unkindness the cruelest part.
“How does a man become good?” is the afterthought that haunts me.

The query arises several times a day when I’m awake.
When I’m asleep, my dreams pitch ahead unconcerned.

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Here once again I employed the meditative structure of the ghazal. Why does that form keep cropping up for me? Years ago I was working on a special project on writing in mathematics. In the process I was privileged to meet a mathematician who had recently retired from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies: Hassler Whitney. According to Wikipedia, “He was one of the founders of singularity theory, and did foundational work in manifolds, embeddings, immersions, characteristic classes, and geometric integration theory.” (Manifolds, embeddings and immersions…just had to repeat those conceptually erotic words.) I ran into him at a conference on mathematics and writing, held at the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. He had become involved in educational problems, with a passion for removing math anxiety, especially at the elementary level, by having students relate the math content to their own lives. Here’s a guy who can prove theorems about the “matroids” of graphs, and even has one named after himself: “Whitney’s 2-Isomorphism Theorem,” and now he’s walking around schools handing out coins to kindergartners so they can buy the lollipops he’s loaded into his coat pocket. At any rate, we’re in a session about the uses of writing to learn math and he says, “Yes, it’s very important to pause frequently and reflect.” Maybe that’s what this form of poetry does, put reflective pauses in. It’s as if there were invisible lines between the stanzas, which you write with your own spontaneous thoughts before you move along.

Basho wrote this last poem before he died of a stomach illness:

Sick on a journey –
over parched fields
dreams wander on.

That poem is echoed in the last line of mine.

A further dimension of this reflection is occurring to me. At that conference where Hassler Whitney and I spoke, I am recalling that everyone was very busy talking about complex ideas. Everyone was energetically conferring to push the field forward as quickly as possible on some imaginary timeline. When Whitney made his quiet comment, there was not much of a pause before everyone rushed headlong into the next idea. Here’s a longer pause now in honor of an old sage’s ignored comment, and in honor of Basho as well: [ ]

POINT OF VIEW

From up here
it’s hard to tell
if I’m staring
at the top of a dome
or down a deep hole.

I don’t have
enough perspective
from my singular
point of view.

From whence
does it emanate,
this limit to my vision?
A lofty, or a lowly,
spot in space?

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This image actually comes from a dream, but I don’t include it among the dream poems because I converted the image into a symbol for a philosophical dilemma. It no longer describes a dreamscape that invites an irrational response, but illustrates a metaphysical position: are we seeing the zenith when we think we’re seeing the nadir – and vice versa? And is it our good or our ill fortune to be limited in our perspective? The questions themselves are koan-like, as they present themselves to me. It is as if an internal teacher (externally named Escher?) were presenting me with the kinds of thought-problems that help me escape from fixed ideas and perspectives. Craft note number umpteen: I’m having some aesthetic anxiety about the archaic construction: “From whence…” Isn’t that the kind of fancy language a nerdy high school student would trot out to impress an English teacher? Does the internal rhyme with “emanate” make up for that? Is it even a problem? What was I thinking back in the day I wrote the poem I’m not sure how many years ago? If this poem is a fossil, and the phrasing is a fossil within a fossil, is this usage justified? I’m going to go with yes, as if it mattered.

POWER NAP

This evening, a piano concerto
penetrates my five-minute dreams.
Where does the miraculous

coordination of the fingers come from?
When I was young, I used to
admire the agility of animals,

how perfect they were compared to us:
spider webs, gibbon leaps, the travel of terns.
Now, head back on the sofa cushion,

the notes rearranging my pliant neurons
second by tonal second,
I think we may be equally evolved.

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Stop and trace the development of your ideas sometime, historians. You might see how unfixed they turn out to be, an evolutionary process in the biome of your brain. When Bertrand Russell did this in his 1944 memoir The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell he identified a turning point:

A great event in my life, at the age of eleven, was the beginning of Euclid, which was still the accepted textbook of geometry. When I had got over my disappointment in finding that he began with axioms, which had to be accepted without proof, I found great delight in him. Throughout the rest of my boyhood, mathematics absorbed a very large part of my interest. This interest was complex: partly mere pleasure in discovering that I possessed a certain kind of skill, partly delight in the power of deductive reasoning, partly the restfulness of mathematical certainty; but more than any of these (while I was still a boy) the belief that nature operates according to mathematical laws, and that human actions, like planetary motions, could be calculated if we had sufficient skill.

I guess a turning point for me, comparable to Russell’s light bulb moment when he began to believe that nature operated according to mathematical laws, was when the idea of evolution seeped into my brain. I can’t peg the date, but I can identify the sensation, a heady mix of relief, freedom, and wonder. Relief from the stress on my sense of reasoning that religious faith had imposed. Freedom from fixed ideas, and from having to sort in my mind all the different kinds of organisms when I confronted them on my walks in the woods. Wonder that time would play with chemistry and physics to produce life on this planet in so many psychedelic forms, one of those forms being myself, a member of my species, yes, but unique. Maybe I carried a gene that had mutated when struck by one of the cosmic rays my Uncle Ike had studied in a previous generation. Maybe that gene was itself a hidden turning point to the development of a species beyond sapiens. Not necessarily a more complex or wondrous one. Think of how cave crickets lost their color, blind mole rats their sense of vision, snakes the digits that provide their reptilian cousins claws. Yes, I might very well be the u-turn from evolution to devolution! Who was to know? Just to understand I, and all of life (even inorganic matter, when you think of it) around me was part of a process, an emergent phenomenon was a jolt. In his book Chaos James Gleick quoted a physicist named Leo Kadanoff:

It’s an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that’s happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. It’s startling every time it occurs. One is surprised that a construct of one’s own mind can actually be realized in the honest-to-goodness world out there. A great shock, and a great, great joy.

Coincidentally, the same day I uploaded “Power Nap” into this project, I decided to celebrate by taking The Origin of Species into the botanic garden to finish reading it. I had used sections from it on many occasions in my educational work but never read the length of it before. It was a spectacular cool Fall day with clear blue skies and a light breeze that made the leaves dance and the flocks of blue jays and robins fly hither and yon with nervous energy. I sat down on a bench with my binoculars at the ready and read the last section of the conclusion, which is a literary parallel to the end of Ode to Joy. I was interrupted when a kestrel pulled up to hover over some bushes nearby, or a bright yellow goldfinch flew directly overhead against the infinitude of the heavens, but I finished it with tears in my eyes. (I am a stupidly romantic and emotional individual when I’m not transcending all of life’s vicissitudes with zen perfection or fighting off the terrible plight of the planet with pretenses of cynicism.) Here’s how it ends, I have to quote:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

I was feeling the awe I suspect all sensitive humans feel when contemplating with open hearts their creation stories, scientific or religious. I stood up from my bench and continued my walk through the garden, stopping to admire the palm warblers, who were feeding and bobbing their tales in the recently mown grass, the hermit thrushes who were wondering when their evolution had diverged from the robins nearby, a nuthatch who was deploying his tree bark-grasping skills in desperate search of a few hapless insects.

I was thrilled to have spotted a yellow-rumped warbler on a twig at eye-height about 15 feet away when I was accosted by a fellow who could have strolled off a hay meadow during Darwin’s time. He had a rough beard, wore a peasant’s cap and a dusty ill-fitting jacket. He asked me what I had been seeing and I started to tell him about the kestrel when he interrupted and asked with a glint in his eye if I had spotted any hairy-chested nut-scratchers or red-rumped dowagers. I was busy to trying to picture these species when my new friend tapped me comfortingly on my forearm and walked away. As I wrote to my friends David Hardy and Stephanie Rudolph later that evening, “How does evolution account for a guy like that?”

In my poems I find I am often trapped in a formality and precision of language that seems, well, unpoetic. I hear my Republican father in that language, with his engineer’s meticulous, plodding syntax. I’ve always wanted to be a much hipper writer, who writes in snappy street talk. But I can’t seem to fit into the identity of a person who would write like that. I am thinking maybe I should just accept this heritage. My progenitor, didn’t invent that way of organizing thinking, and I can’t escape it. When I allow myself to see the issue through this lens of process, of natural selection, of “modification by descent” as Darwin would put it, I see something similar in grandeur to evolution. I don’t recall ever speaking with my father about Darwin’s concept and I don’t think he would have been moved by it. He would probably have seen life’s complexity as a simple issue of design, giving God the credit, but not feeling like participating in any controversies. But that same man, descendent of English immigrants, shares his linguistic roots with the scholars from the Church of England who translated the Bible into English, and thus with Shakespeare, and even Darwin himself. (And, I would like to add, Martin Luther King, Jr.) It’s another source of liberation, my personal quest, to see that I should just accept, even embrace, my linguistic roots if I can’t cut them away.

REALITY WAVES

We are different people
with different people.

The bending of light by
massive objects in space

is nothing next to the warp
of individuals pulling each

other into the fields of
their reality waves.

I am always impressed
that anyone could act

on the premise that
some kind of objectivity

hovers out there ethereally
in absolute time and

absolute space like a
ruler keeping us straight.

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So many want that ruler, but it just isn’t there in a straight way. It twists and turns and stretches and compresses and ties itself in knots and unties itself in what I guess you could use fancy words to describe. Emergent. Stochastic. Always complex. Of course a black hole exerts more force than that petite high school girl who blinded you with her starlight before lowering the dark curtain on your universe when you were 15. But your proximity to the girl makes the force greater to you. You could compare this to the “discounting” that happens psychologically when, say, you take the lesser reward because it’s immediate and not the greater reward because it’s offered at a farther distance in time. The building you’re closer to, though only three stories tall, is much more impressive than the six story one several blocks away that you can’t see, imagine, or believe in.

It would be interesting to do a comprehensive study of the forces personalities exert on each other. Create a taxonomy of them. They would range, if you want to compare them to stars, from the little brown dwarfs to the massive supernovae. What are those dual star systems called, when two stars circle each other for billions of years at a time? That would be like two people of equal gravity falling in with each other, to create a wonderful partnership or maybe a folie-a-deux. A shy fellow doesn’t go around focusing the energy of entire movements like a demagogue like Hitler or a liberator like Gandhi, but to the girl sitting next to him at Hopper’s diner, he may be the entire world. And there are different time signatures of this force. Emily Dickinson was too reticent to emerge from her house to meet Emerson, who she read and admired, when he came to Amherst to visit her cousin. So you would assume, back in her day, that her energy would dissolve entropically into the future heat death of the universe completely unnoticed. But look at the pull Dickinson exerts through the centuries like that little bird of hope she described in her plain-clothed poem.

I don’t know if others are as chameleon-like as I am when it comes to being different with different people. And becoming different with the same people as time passes with new fluctuations of the force field. I bet, therapists, that you can’t name an emotion I haven’t felt in the company of people, that hasn’t been caused by those people’s proximity. Maybe that’s why I’m so exhausted half the time? Too many feelings, too often changing, too much of the time. Just thinking about it makes me want to take a nap, or have a swim, or take a walk alone in the botanic garden to massage my psyche with the force fields of the flowers, the insects and the birds. (People – can’t live with em, can’t live without em, ha ha.)

I wish I had been the one to think about how we warp each other’s reality in these psychological (and measurably electro-magnetic?) force fields, but it was my friend Stokes Howell who passed along the idea of people warping each other – in those terms, and I haven’t forgotten it. When we both lived in tiny walk-up apartments in Manhattan’s East Village, we often played basketball or pool together. We sometimes confided in each other. We orbited the same luminaries. We always exerted a gentle pull on each other, if you want to look at our friendship in terms of “reality waves.” I should call Stokes up. We haven’t spoken in a while. Our orbits have disengaged, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be looped back together.

So we bend each other’s light. I hope my poem is taken as a protest against fundamentalists, dictators, malignant narcissists and ego-maniacs of all stripes. But I equally hope that it leads to thinking of the dervishy dance among human beings that is beautiful in its spinning and circling and shifting. Is it too short and plain to have effects like that? Probably so, but I don’t know. Time will tell. It’s worth writing in the safety of my personal sanctuary all the same.

REBIRTH

Today I died
a chemical death

and was chemically
reborn,

but never saw a white light
or Jesus Christ

with his halo,
only the flyspecked

backlit,
urine-colored plastic hung

over the hallways
in the New York

University Medical Center.
Only the New York

University Medical Center
and the multicultural

angels that inhabit
the realm:

Josephine, Cecilia,
Sharon, Steve,

Mr. McNutt,
and others

whose names I was
unable to gather

as I was rolled
from room to room,

gurney to gurney,
in quest of

a painless needle
and the healthy throat

a man needs
to sing his journey.

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It’s impossible to capture in a poem the physical sensations and the emotional convictions that come with some experiences. All you can do is sing the song with whatever words and tones you can muster. In this case, it’s a simple song, wholly inadequate, but nevertheless pleasing to me and maybe useful as a way for others with similar experiences to feel honored in the recognition. Maybe too it’s a record of what can happen to someone at a time, in a place, recognizing the names of the people who keep your life intact during that fleeting moment. What if you kept track of all of these helpful people in all of the situations you encounter in a lifetime? It would be biblical, each one a begetting of your next self in the next moment only to be begot again in subsequent moments. And of course you do your own begetting, midwifing the moments of others just as they midwife your moments.

If you write a poem like this, you might have such sensations. But there are perils as well in keeping a poem like this in your files and digging it up to let it operate on your memory again. A zombie. A trigger. A scissor that snips the twine on a Pandora’s box of recollections. Should I try to shove the memories back into their crypt and shut it tight again? Help me, friends. I’m reliving the time I was an aide at Arlington and the boy named Outlaw showed me the oysterish evidence atop a glass cabinet of another aide having forced a blow job. I’m reliving the search for my increasingly mentally ill sister Caroline, who had gone on one of her fugues. She had been last seen at her nurse’s station in a hospital in Baton Rouge. I set out on a hopeless and symbolic stroll along the highway picking up pieces of trash discarded through car windows as if they would transmute into breadcrumbs that would guide me to her wherever she was out there in the wind. The treks through the halls of hospitals where friends and parents would pass away. And more. And more. What do you do when the demons thus fly at you? Suggestions, please.

Could this mean we (a) shouldn’t write poems like this? (b) shouldn’t reread the poems if we do? (c) should only reread the poems in padded cells? (d) should cling to the one item left in this carton from the Hades of our past: hope? Okay, I pick “d”. Did I get the answer right? This is a bear of a course, this Writing 101 squared. Wish I could skip it. Wish you could skip it. But it seems to be required, some guy named Godot on the Board of Regents having made it so. So those of us who have been afflicted by this terriblue just have to cram, pull the all nighters and head to class with our Number 2 pencils.

RED COMPOSITION

Across the street
from this parking lot in Yonkers,
a red tree. A maple, maybe?
Too much distance between us to tell,
and I’m too serene relaxing in my car to go see.

What gets me about it
is the way the beckoning leaves
begin black at the bottom in the shade
before rising in a speckled transition
to the solid hue of the back
of a shiny New York water bug.

Above the bug, luminescent garnets.

Now my eyes wake up to the cherry
lollipop of a van at the curb.

Hungry for red now, they find
the coral paint on the fence and porch rails.

The brake light lenses at the rear
of the silver car in the driveway.

The orange basketball hoop tilted distressingly
backward just beyond the car.

Barely visible in the back yard,
the ghostly maroon double of the first maple.

Next door the bursting
hot lipstick pink of the azalea bush,
as healthy as anything I’ve seen
this particular incarnation.

This is it,
the complete scarlet composition
that fell into place of its own volition
here on a green and white block.

And no wealthy collectors to buy it at auction
I’m thinking, triumphant, having
pulled one over on the bloated art market…

…when the mockingbird glides by,
inscribing sine waves in the muggy air
with its rowing wings, the red not on,
but in the animal, waiting for release.

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Given some instruction in the discipline of seeing, the eye, transparent but with a mind of its own, given a moment or two in any place, will compose its own paintings. As much drama can happen in random incident as happens in a Greek tragedy, in my eye’s world. Can you compare catharsis with meditation and transcendence? What is their relationship? The first is a purging and renewing workout for the emotions. The latter refreshes those feelings in a revelatory visual. Renewal…yes, that’s the thread: they can be compared.

A classroom story: I was working in a middle school in Chelsea, New York, that was populated in equal proportions by the offspring of upper class liberal west-siders and of families from the nearby projects. I stood in the back of a room of a sixth grade English teacher. A group of about eight students from a “self-contained” special education class was parked in the room alongside the mainstream students to participate in a visual literacy exercise being conducted by an educator from the Museum of Modern Art. She had projected, in all its subtle hues, a photograph of Matisse’s painting “Red Studio.” Her method was simple to the point of absurdity: she simply asked students to say what they saw. When they said what they saw, she indicated the item in the painting with a long stick. This resulted in all seeing what that one student saw. I noticed that the special-ed students, who normally demonstrated their displeasure with the brutal confinement of the American classroom in unruly word and action (un-self-contained, if you will), were rapt. And they saw things no-one else noticed, the hidden treasures of the painting.

Susanna Rubin, who was conducting the exercise, continued asking students what they saw, and getting a steady stream of responses, for one full period of about 45 minutes. The next day: same painting, same students, same process for another 45 minutes, the only variation being the occasional follow-up question, as she pointed to a particular part of the canvas, “Looking closer in this area what else do you see?” That was it. Just seeing and seeing and seeing and saying what you saw. She came back for a third day, and was about to pick up where she left off: same painting, more seeing. I was going out of my mind at this point: The students had said so many words and none recorded. Having achieved a master’s ability to live in the moment without any need to hold onto it, this didn’t bother Susanna at all. Even so, she gave me permission to write student language on a nearby white board as they continued for another period to say what they saw in the painting. The students had been studying poetry genres all year, so when Susanna was done I worked with their teacher to have them write poems in forms of their choice. Ekphrastic poems, I suppose. One student chose to write his version of a haiku:

This red bowl full of
exotic bones is time’s
experiment with nature.

I memorized the poem on the spot and have remembered it since, for, oh, twenty years. Rereading my poem “Red Composition,” I guess you could say it is an ekphrastic poem as well. As for the mockingbird in the poem, I am thinking it is a perfect example of a bowl full of exotic bones, an exquisite outcome of time’s experiment with nature. I am also thinking, fellow predators, of how our eyes, set on the same plane in our faces, are constantly on the hunt for red, picking it up if it’s there, imagining it if not.

And here is red in the eyes of the astronomers:

RED SHIFT

The universe expands,
every galaxy flying away,
the farthest the fastest,
pushed by the darkness
toward the speed of light,
each sending to our eyes
a backtracking package
of wavy particles, gift-wrapped
in a ribbon, colored red.

We know this now, but
we didn’t always know it.
We’ve come to know over
our notion of time.
Some say it’s a miracle,
a mystical sign, maybe
a blessing, maybe a curse
of that odd creature called god.

But do the galaxies know
that we know? I don’t think so.
I say our lonely knowing
is beyond enough
for the radiating ends of the day.

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You may remember, linear readers, the tales I told of my astrophysicist Uncle Ike, how he took my family on tours of Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar observatories. It was at Mount Wilson that Edwin Hubble first detected the red shift of the galaxies and deduced the increasing rate of expansion of the universe. This blew up any notion of the cosmological constant, or of any stable containing structure for the stars, the quasars, the clouds of gas that swirl around beyond the sky in so many curious ways. I think of Einstein giving up on his constant in the face of this news. How his quest for the unified field theory was an attempt to recover predictability from the throwing of dice by a God he didn’t believe would do so. I think of the human need for security and certainty, how it crops up over and over in religious conviction. My own fascination is with not knowing, with the idea of uncertainty. I take the evidence for what it is, but feel no need to explain beyond what the evidence suggests. On the contrary, I have a kind of romance with the not knowing. That might be as dangerous as the romance with knowing, of course. Who knows?

I find thoughts streaming along this path, a golden thread if you will, of world views being shattered, and the way this can darken or enlighten our minds. Zen teacher Kyudo Nakagawa made a remark in one of his teishos to the effect of “Even nuclear war, not good or bad….” I think he was just trying to get us to detach ourselves from our favorite shibboleths so we could be free in our spirits. That’s the way I let it work on my imagination, anyway. He wasn’t saying, especially as a Japanese citizen who’d been around for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that nuclear attacks were acceptable. At least I don’t think he was. From Kyudo I am rowing my boat down the stream of consciousness to thoughts of the atomic bomb test, called “Trinity”, that took place in New Mexico in July of 1945, which led our friend Robert Oppenheimer to afterward quote Vishnu, from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Which takes me to the Balinese notion of the trinity of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. From there I hit the eddying idea that every instant the entire universe is being created and destroyed so that in the next instant the same cycle can roll over. Why is it so liberating to entertain this idea? It connects me back to the idea of the Dedekind Cut: snip! We’ve escaped the Buddhist wheel of birth and death. We found a way off the roaring brakeless express train of time that is heading toward nothing good.

All very good for the imagination, but what about the stories of our feelings, what about my sister Caroline, who I have mentioned, who was an Air Force nurse stationed at Alamogordo in the 1980s, not far from the Trinity test site at White Sands. She was living alone in a mobile home that had taken shallow root in the barren soil of the area. I visited her there. She had pictures of the family on her couch and there was no-where for me to sit. She was steadily becoming more and more dissociated from reality, there in the middle of the desert not far from where atoms were split so dramatically. Her mental illness was getting worse and worse, but my family didn’t understand it. Psychology was an idea of the world they couldn’t comprehend. Eventually, Caroline disappeared into another desert near Prescott Arizona, never to be seen again – another example of the shattering of a world view. We do not know what happened to her. The liberating conceptions of detachment, of the escape from dualism that causes misunderstanding and pain, of the universe in a state of constant creation and destruction – they don’t ease the sorrow I feel for Caroline. But I am working on it. I am working on it mainly with the idea that, hey, just feel that sorrow. You can’t not feel the sorrow, so the attachment here is to the idea you can somehow escape your feelings.

I’m not sure I contain multitudes, but I’m contradicting myself here along this golden thread: The path to freedom is to snip time and make your escape. No, the path to freedom is to embrace time and row gently down the stream. Light is particle. Light is a wave. I like Pepsi, I like Coke. Whole language is the way to go, no it’s phonics. Cats, dogs, apples, oranges. This is so hilarious! It’s the most lamentable thing you ever heard…

RHYMES

At the movies a wild show.
Tunneling into the unconscious we go.

I’ve been hanging around a child too long
and rhyming too much.

“Phonemic awareness” they call it.
What kinds of words are these?

The intellect moves in where
the heart would by nature meet the tongue.

The cat by the doorway licks its fur.
The bird by the moon wings its way home.

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This was just a whimsical freewrite at first. I had no intention of making it a poem. The freewrite got more serious, going to the nature of language – what happens to it when you get silly, or when the intellect moves in and sucks the heart from the words. In the end, images triumphed, especially in their juxtaposition. To me, anyway. So this poem is really the record of an experience of finding my way to an image. The same way you travel in your car down some loud, polluted highway festooned with stupid billboards only to wind up in a marsh full of wildlife, snow geese planing in at sunset by the thousands, their cries drowning out everything human. That image in the brain lifting your spirits out of the profane for an instant or two.

RUBBER DUCKIES

Within the last couple of days I’ve
lucked upon the following concurrences:
reading in a student evaluation of my

teaching that I have no backbone. And
driving up I-95 at night through Connecticut
to a showcase on progressive educational

practices, the radio blaring a patriotic country
and western song that declares because
of the black eye we got on 9/11,

we should go kick some Muslim ass.
(“That’s the way we are in the U.S.A.”)
Both ideas are floating on the surface

of my mind like egg-yolk yellow rubber duckies
in a bathtub, bobbing up and down agreeably
with the waves I send out as I pat the water

with my synaptic fingers. Having no backbone
makes it impossible to sit upright
when I meditate. I shimmy like Plastic Man.

Having no spine also makes it hard to
kick people. I flop at the waist as I try
to swing my foot wearing a leaden red,

white and blue eel skin cowboy boot.
Now another little duck is paddling
into the picture, directly from the pages

of the New York Review of Books:
the words Neuronal Correlate of Consciousness.
What do we know about what happens

in the neurons when you see something like,
say, a duck, or hear something like, say,
the quack of a duck, and form an image,

or the sensation of sound in your brain?
We can snap shots of the electric charges
in the gray pudding, but how does it all work?

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Have you ever read W.B. Yeats’ “Long-Legged Fly”? In it Yeats reminds us of what it took to preserve civilization, beauty and art: silence. Caesar, if interrupted in his tent as he contemplated his campaigns against the Barbarians, would not have succeeded in preserving the glory that was Rome. Helen, if interrupted in her innocent, solitary amusements, would not have presented the face that toppled Troy. Michael Angelo, if children had been let into the Sistine Chapel, would not have been able to paint the image of Adam that has inspired us through the centuries (and, he suggests, given pubescent girls an idea of what erotic adventures lay ahead.) How do Caesar’s, Helen’s, and Michael Angelo’s minds work when allowed the quiet to think? Like a long-legged fly. “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream, his mind moves upon silence.” That’s the image that comes to my mind going back to my poem, when my synaptic fingers pat the surface of the water that is consciousness. There is no comparing the two poems in terms of structure, intent, or quality, but they do hold this one point in common: that consciousness is like water. It flows and shifts its shape according to its contexts.

I grew up in the home of an engineer and a home maker who didn’t once, in my memory, mention Caesar, Helen, or Michael Angelo. It is as if silence had not prevailed in those critical moments of civilization and their influences had never taken effect. What took effect for my parents were the scientific revolution that made possible, in its wake, the production of gasoline and the protestant evolution of Christianity, which offered us the putatively safe emotional refuge of the Presbyterian church. Neither engines nor religion satisfied me by the time I had reached college age. I needed other answers to the questions I had about the nature of being and of consciousness. On my own, writing in a five-by-eight-inch artist’s sketchbook with a hard black cover, I developed a notion I naively called “equi-reality”. I suppose this was some kind of intuitive grasping at a notion of samsara, where the cycle of death and rebirth, with all the attendant suffering and delusion, is basically an illusion. I wanted to escape my own adolescent growing pains and thought, well, this can’t be all there is, can it? By the time I wrote the poem, I had achieved one higher level of understanding, when it came to taking the sting out of life’s assaults on serenity. This understanding gave my imagination the freedom it needed to make a cartoon out of absurd events, to include ideas that came to me in the stream of consciousness, and to channel them into something resembling a poem.

Craft Ponderings: From an aesthetic perspective (let’s say you’re the editor of a literary magazine), do the more prosaic sentences in this production really belong? Does every thread have to dazzle? What’s the trade-off if you weave some informational lines into the fabric? I have a hard time letting these questions worry me because of the trance I go into as I play with the texture of the prose snaking its way through the warp and woof of the stanzas. My wife is a student of literary theory. I’m going to ask her where the line gets drawn between the experience of the writer and that of the reader. What responsibilities do each have? And the judges who decide whether a work is included in a publication or not. Who do they resemble more, Pope Leo X, who sold indulgences to get you through Jerusalem’s gate? Or Luther, who ripped the gate right off the post? Are these even the right questions?

I’m not hanging around for this debate. Something urgent spurs me on…

SEEDS

Seeds drift outside the window
among the green leaves of the trees,
the sound waves of the speech patterns

of the birds and those of the pistons
in the engines of the aircraft overhead.
Seeds like helicopters, or parachutes

or down, designed to make landings
closer or father away, with the idea
of propagation teasing their thoughtless minds.

This germinal effusion in the air
reminds me of the way some fish spawn
by ejecting spermatozoa abroad

in the currents, counting on the probability
that a viable amount of reproduction
will happily happen. And then we have

the mammalian style of delivering gene
to gene – hidden by encasing flesh but
crossing boundaries nonetheless,

driving minds to bewilderment
and distraction, all our inventions and
constructions a way to organize

the shame, and the seeds hardly caring.

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I was resting alone between consulting activities in the teacher’s lunchroom at Lincoln High School in Yonkers in the early 2000s when I saw these seeds drifting by. They could have been poplar , or willows, but I’m guessing they were dandelion fluffs. Dandelion seeds are designed in a way that has scientists looking at them as models for the design of drones. Why do we have to turn everything into something useful? And almost always invasive. Wait, that’s what the dandelions are doing! Isn’t it the dandelion’s nature to design through evolutionary processes an innovative method of propagating itself, sending its seeds hundreds of miles, sometimes across the waters of oceans to take root on volcanic islands…to invade them. Life’s nature is innovate and invade. So why am I passing so much pessimistic judgment on my own species? (Aside from the fact that we’re wiping out ecosystems across the globe at an exponential pace.) As Darwin put it, expounding the concept of natural selection in his magnum opus:

In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind – never to forget that every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life; that the heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or the old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals. Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of species will almost instantaneously increase to any amount. The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force.

Okay, there’s the great bearded guru of nature’s ways, the prototypical “Mr. Natural”, product of the Industrial Revolution, comparing the striving of living things to wedges being struck with great force. Hard to see those little dandelion seeds as steel wedges trying to drive out the competition in the struggle for dominance, but the comparison’s not that far off. They are essentially porous parachutes, 90% empty space, with bristles that act together to create a vortex above the seeds to keep them aloft – the better to quietly drive a reproductive wedge into far volcanic islands, nearby pastures, and the lawns of Yonkers.
And our seeds, our mammalian seeds, getting produced in the factories of our gonads before commuting across boundaries where, continuously hidden from sight, they unite with the eggs that keep us going through millennia.

The idea of shame there. I’m not wanting to fall into the trap of explaining everything humans do in the language of evolutionary theory, but I think I can make the case that shame helps us stay in the lanes socially in ways that maximize reproductive success. William Sloane Wilson, in Darwin’s Cathedral makes the argument that human organizations such as religious groups perform like organisms in their adaptation, reproduction and evolution of beneficial traits. Shame being one of those traits, if you think about it. Adam and Eve eating that Pink Lady from the tree of knowledge, noticing each other’s nakedness, grabbing for a nearby fig leaf, giving birth to the fashion industry along with the capacity to build the smokestacks and factories that Blake labeled “dark satanic mills. “All of the arts they changed into the arts of death.” Shameful.

Reproductively successful. For how long? The width of an eyelash in the grand scope of time.
Here we are back again, swimming in the wonderment of time, just like those wandering innocently insidious dandelion seeds swimming in the wonderment of the breezes outside Lincoln High School in Yonkers. Ponder them close enough and they “won’t tell no lies.” They will “make you wise” if you pay enough attention (and listen to the Rolling Stones closely enough.)

THE SENSES

The clarity
of the distant
bangs on metal.

The hollow sound
of the wind
through the vacant

spaces of the landscape
defined by burgeoning
trees and tall buildings.

The roar
of that jet overhead,
doing its sinister business.

We see deeply
when we listen hard.
The senses merge

into a hollow
crystal ball that,
pierced, vanishes.

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This one I wrote in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in the early 2000s as well. The first draft ended with additional sounds like cellphones and asked what all this jazzy noisy stuff was good for. I cut that out. Then I noticed allusions to 9/11, which had been a day of trauma for my family, the missiles striking but three blocks from my daughter Elly’s school. That’s the way it goes. I can’t help it. It would be nice if one or two people didn’t interpret it that way, because the senses do vanish in the pierced crystal ball even in the absence of evil. For me this brings up a point about poetry. Does a poem have its own identity – derived from some muse-engendered DNA – that it goes beyond the will of the poet? I don’t mind operating as if this were the case. I doubt we can operate otherwise.

On this business of the senses, I’m solidifying my fealty to Aristotle and the empiricists: “Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.” (To make my intensely frazzled high school Latin teacher Miss Nichols proud, I’ll pick this up from Aquinas’ De Veritate: Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu.) It became known as the peripatetic axiom. Wikipedia tells me that Aquinas adopted this principle from the Peripatetic School of Greek Philosophy. God could be proved by reasoning from sense data. Throw in some samadhic thinking and we’re looping back to Emerson’s transparent eyeball, along with Whitman’s exhortation to keep walking. Solvitur ambulando. I didn’t love you then, Miss Nichols, but I love you now.

And the students I work with love you too, though they will never see you or know your name. I told a story about Susanna Rubin and the students who lost themselves in Matisse’s “Red Studio” for several hours. But there are many more students as well who found their way to some kind of revelation through the awakening of their senses in classrooms. The stories are too numerous to tell, involving dives into every kind of image from Earth Science Regents Examination reference tables to pictures of abused, filthy children standing dazed by infernal looms during the Industrial Revolution. But I will tell one. I was working high school in Brooklyn that served students with emotional disabilities. Some were shy to the point of invisibility. Others were volatile and violent, cycling in and out of prison settings and psychiatric facilities. In a classroom that specialized in serving the latter group, there was a group of boys that gave the beefy deans routine exercise when they had to be restrained. Fights broke out constantly. One day I talked the social studies teacher into letting me try a visual literacy exercise with them. The boys were calm at the beginning of class, which allowed me to get the exercise started effectively. They were in a unit on the Age of Exploration. A map was handy, which showed the routes taken by the various explorers: Magellan, Columbus, Cook, etc.. On the map were images of the resources ready to be snatched up by the explorers: gold, spices, slaves. There were colored arrows, pictures of ships, portraits of the explorers in their exotic duds. Just looking at this, noting what was seen, kept us exploring for the bulk of the period. Whenever a student saw something, I pointed at it with a pencil, and the student was thus recognized, affirmed. Every item seen made the seer more important, more needed by the rest of us.

My contention is that we ask students to analyze before they have a chance to see, so they fail to make any meaning of what they’re looking at. They are flying blind in the foggy skies of academia, getting frustrated enough to explode, or retreat into a self-induced coma. Why do we do this? I’ll tell you why: time. We’re in a big hurry to cram our young full of knowledge before they have a chance to look around at the world. We are force feeding them like geese for foie gras. Slow down, everybody. One step at a time. Take a look at what’s around you where you are, for chrissakes!

Something I hadn’t thought about before retelling this story. The students in the class were all, one way or another, descendants of those exploited most by the mercantile (imperialist) countries who had done the exploring in the age of exploration. That was a point unmade at the time, and I’m almost 100% sure they had no idea of the connection. I wonder if it would have made a difference. I wonder how much of their crazed behavior derived from their ancestral experience. (Were these children at that margin of the group that couldn’t, for whatever reason, repress the anger?) I wonder how much, if at all, they could see that I was a member of that invading tribe. And how much that difference that would have made. Probably none. Nothing is ever so black and white. Invader and invaded (doubtless themselves invaders in some way) interact and both are transformed, for better or worse. Fluidity in gene and culture.

SOME OF THE DEAD

Some of the dead lie listless
on the concrete.

Some float downstream in the muddy river,
clustering on occasion in the eddies.

Some of the dead form stacks,
thrown willy-nilly atop each other in the ditches.

Some lie face down gripping the earth,
having forgotten
which direction the living gaze
when gripped by hope.

Some of the dead rest face up,
broken cups, spilling the sky onto the earth.

Some of the dead tremble
among the spears of grass,
blown there by chance.

Some lie crushed where they slipped beneath the boot,
flattened in fear and grief.

Look up and you can see
some of the dead clinging to their families.
They refuse to believe the news
that they’ve passed on.

Many of the dead fall together
in rain, in wind, in storm.

A few are torn from the branches alone
before their time,
thrown to pirouette in the air before they fall.

All of the dead were young once.
They stole photons from the sun.
Now they dream their dry
fragments into the breeze.

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On this theme of stopping to look around, seeing something, finding more of that something as if a theme were guiding one’s seeing, this happened to me in December of 2005 outside Southside High School in Rockville Centre, Long Island, as I rested in my car before going into the building for a day of work in the classrooms. I began just writing about the posture of the falling and fallen oak leaves. Now reading the poem, and tweaking it to raise the impact of this or that line, I am taken back to that day and time and recreating the scene in memory. The picture is gauzy. I don’t know how many of the details are imagined. There are a chain-link fence, a football field, a sprawling pin oak looming over the black asphalt of the staff parking lot. The roofs of suburban homes visible over a hedge. A blue sky that allowed the rising sun to lend the spiky lobes of the leaves more dramatic shadows, and a heightened sense of poignancy as they adopted their poses.

I don’t know why it should be that I take comfort in having this verbal artifact to help me cue up a memory. Am I like one of those leaves, which seem to be fruitlessly clinging to the past, to hope, to life, when all is forsaken? Maybe, but I find the process haunting, mysterious, savory.

Realists would reject this anthropomorphizing of the leaves. And I get that for all the right reasons. But the metaphor exerted too much force on my imagination to resist. The images of the leaves evoked the Rwandan Massacre that had occurred over a decade before, making another fold in the mnemonic accordion of the years. Was the memory of the images from far away Africa in fading era a premonition of what is to come here? It doesn’t seem impossible these days, these days being the last of the year 2018. Time and space, contracted, my mind lodged in one of the transparent folds.

STOLEN MOMENT

The cubes of the brick school building
float behind me in memory.

The asphalt path leads me through
the barren snowy yard toward the parking lot.

In the distance the ack ack
of a machine pounds the concrete.

The crows (I’ve seen them
all over Yonkers) caw.

The bony fingers of the winter trees wave
at me in the chilly breeze.

The dried goldenrod shivers where the asphalt meets the fence
that keeps me from trespassing upon the white canvas of the soccer field.

But what I really notice as I try to focus on the present
within me and on the space around me are the cars.

I think of the pressing, the pounding and the tinkering,
all the fingers at work to make each of these mineral beasts come to be.

Each one a fire dragon, a speed demon,
a rolling house of jokes and tears.

Some still sport beards of ice. Some wear white
yarmulkes of snow, celebrating Yahweh.

So slick their surfaces of paint and glass.

For now they are at rest, and even the jackhammer
as I write this line has opted for silence.

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I wrote “Stolen Moment” fourteen years before this current revisiting, which comes at a time of wonderment about evolution. As a consequence, on this visit with this text, I’m seeing the cars as beetles, with their durable shells. Beetles first appeared on the scene 300 million years ago to become, according to some, the most successful group of animals in history. Hardly a habitat on the planet goes without them. It’s their ability to adapt that has enabled them to spread into every nook and cranny of the globe, adapt at every stage of their lives: egg, larva, pupa, adult. They are geniuses at protecting their eggs from predation and extreme environmental conditions. Case in point: female aquatic water scavenger beetles “protect their eggs in silken shelters…sometimes released as elaborate floating structures with silken chimneys or sails.” (“The Beetles: History, Habits and Habitats” by Stephen A. Marshall, Natural History Magazine, November, 2018). Other beetles protect their eggs with “scatoshells.” You can imagine how that works. Toxic chemicals solve the problem for some beetle eggs. One species of firefly appropriates toxic poisons from the males of other firefly species, by eating them.

Beetles are amazing at every stage, but the one I’m thinking of here is the adult stage, where they spend their lives encased in armor. A palmetto beetle can hang onto a leaf in the face of a pull equivalent to 148 times its body mass – comparable to a human withstanding a pull of 23,000 pounds. They manage this by “retracting their appendages under the tortoise-like shell, then actively clamping on to the palmetto leaf surface with tens of thousands of tiny, oily forked bristles on their feet.” (Marshall) Rolling into a ball for defense is a strategy used by many beetles, including the rolypolys I poked into performance in the moist, fecund underbellies of rotting logs in Louisiana when I was a kid.

So here I am on New Year’s day in Brooklyn in 2019 thinking about those cars, the armor we spend so much of our lives in, in Yonkers, comparing them to beetles, wondering how long cars will last. As long as beetles? Unlikely. What was that article I read so long ago about the mathematics of existence? Things will last about as long as they have already lasted, within certain scales of magnitude. Cars in their current combustion engine form have been around roughly 100 years, so they can be expected to be around for another 100 or so. Beetles, they’ve been around for 300 million years and thus can be expected to beat cars at the race of longevity by many orders of magnitude. My poem has been around for 14 years and thus will probably erase itself around the time I project I’ll pass away (in an optimistic scenario.)

My memory of that moment in Yonkers. Is it time-bound? When you steal a moment like that, does that provide you a link to the infinite somehow? It feels like it, both in the original experience and in the remembering. What do you think, fellow wanderers in the snow? Write and let me know. Where are the snows of yesteryear? Melted or with us forever in some way?

SUNRISE HIGHWAY

I can feel alive on the Sunrise Highway
if I put the right music on

and pay attention to the stoplights,
with their inner glow.

I can wake up to the detail
in the chaos around me:

other cars also stopping
with the glint in their windows,

gas stations with the air
dancing above the pumps,

electric lines slicing the clouds
into sagging rhomboids.

I can wake up to the way
my speed slows as the speed

of the train on the elevated track
nearby quickens

and the silhouettes of the passengers
pull away farther, faster,

toward the event horizon
in the distance on Long Island.

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Another poem about cars!

This process of penning poems at odd moments, then forgetting about them for years, then unearthing them again, works like a time capsule. Who were you? What was the world like? Those are the questions that get answered. You rediscover your past self and in the process reshape your present self.

Wouldn’t it be interesting this applied not to myself (such as as a self may be), but to the planet as well? If there were actually a “wide-bosomed” Gaia who wrote the earth the way we write poems? (In the beginning was the word…) The fossil record is her collection of works, which she sends paleontologists (a branch of the evolution of the life they research) to dig up. In the rediscovery of her past productions, she reshapes the productions of the present, only to have them become the past productions of future presents.

As for the cars, it’s hard to over stress how important they have become to us. Instead of just criticizing ourselves for this, I wonder: can they be seen as a natural feature of our own evolution, the way the shells of beetles can be seen for them? Certainly the ability to build cars can be seen as such a feature. They aren’t a direct outgrowth of our bodies, just as the bower of a bower bird is not a physical trait but the expression of a trait. So I suppose that settles it, but as a writer of poems, I allowed to be the image: we are the guts, the cars are our exoskeletons. We are integrated. I am my car and my car is me. At least while I’m making a beer run or escaping the city for the hills.

These are the liberating things you’re allowed to do if you opt to write poems: leave facts behind – intact, it’s important to remember – so you can take your flights of fancy.

Let’s take a little side-trip, fellow pilots of the imagination. Let’s take a closer look at the effect of motorized transportation on our understanding of the physical world. Would we have the theory of relativity without trains? And not long after the advent of that breakthrough theory, Proust’s excitement at the motorcar’s effect on his sense of time and space when he travels the landscape of the seacoast with Albertine. Einstein’s / Proust’s new awareness of time and space and the combustion engine: coincidence? No way. And Picasso in the mix with his crazy faces: portraits of figures turning in space, frozen in time. All part of that spacy era.

My sensations on Sunrise Highway a century or so later feel just as fresh as Einstein’s, as if had discovered the theory myself. Adding to my sensations the exponential rate of technological progress between then, when it seemed the world was speeding by at unimaginable rates, and now, when we’re hitting the limits of the calculus of change…I am exhilarated and terrified by the not knowing. Where the vortex will take us next. How much faster over faster can we go? Are we accelerating into the light, the dark? The gray?

Whew! I need to go for a walk and look at a cloud, listen to a bird. Let’s pick up the conversation later, wherever later is.

TRAVELS WITH HENRY

It wasn’t until we explored Africa together
in our boat that Stanley and I found ourselves.
Our hair on fire from the killings,
we shunned King Leopold,
talked pleasantries about the holidays,
listened with sympathy
to the cries coming from the shore:
“Meat! Meat!”

Someone has to risk ridicule and yell fire.
Someone has to be alert to the last breaths of the dying,
take the initiative and quiet the friendly voices
that massage the doomed in their last moments.
“It’s time now. Let’s stop talking
and close the door.”

Must I have a heavy heart
in the face of my memories?
Can I even afford the luxury to rest,
given the sound of the harridans
screaming from the wings?

Stanley and I roamed the Earth for years
looking for a home.
We fought in the Civil War together,
propped each other up
as we mastered the art of desertion.

This is my discovery:
that if your family rejects you,
you can find comfort among strangers.
When your heart’s been drained
by empowered and dimwitted people,
you can find a companion
and traverse the byways.
Surely someone’s arms are open out there
in the unknown lands.

My advice is to stay in tune with the idea,
if not the feeling,
that all is not even relative,
but simply there,
in whatever form it chooses to take.

Notice, for instance, the sunset
under the clouds and beyond the buildings,
which especially, of all the other stimuli this evening,
draws my attention as the colors fade to black.
Why stay attached?
What eyes would be there
to cry if the landscape
melted into the sun?

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I don’t have any recollection of having written this poem, which I composed in 2007, six years after my mother died. I guess I was feeling the weight of the memory of her death when I wrote the lines about closing the door. According to my notes, I had just read an article about Stanley in the New York Review of Books, how he made the life of an adventurer, even mercenary, out of the rejection from his family. “Always searching for some kind of acceptance, I suppose. I think it must change your standards when acceptance comes hard.” That’s what I wrote then. Now I’m re-reading this poem when it turns out to be eerily useful to me.

The details would be boring unless I turned them into a comic opera, but here’s the gist: I recently responded to a sense of duty that descended upon me like the angel Gabriel, but turned out to be a turkey vulture ready to peck at my guts. The group I felt the calling to work with found my ideas threatening and responded with tantrums. Elizabeth, who knows me and my demons very well, identified the parties involved as embodiments of my brother and my father, who to this day, as ghosts tormenting the ghost of my childhood self, have limbic power over me. (As adults, my brother, my father and I found our way to loving equilibrium, but one never really leaves behind somewhere in the Matryoshka doll layers that are our selves those earlier vulnerable entities.) During this ridiculous time of recent torment, reading the poem, especially the lines about finding a companion to traverse the byways, I found comfort. I was able to transcend the immediate situation and live in a psychic environment of higher truths.

So consider this, hesitant writers: poems have their uses. What you write today may serve you tomorrow in a time of need, so jot it down, shape it up, preserve it somewhere. Archibald MacLeish famously wrote that a poem should not mean, but be, and I used to agree wholeheartedly because of the passion of my English teacher Mrs. Church, which inspired belief. Now I think differently. I believe differently. I’m more aligned with William Carlos Williams who, in his poem “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower,” (which was, in its own way, the tool that accomplished his redemption) asserts:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Elaborating for a moment on this theme of the usefulness of poetry, it was my pleasure to work for a spell of time as a consultant for The Academy of American Poets. I traveled from school to school and conference to conference with Charles Flowers and Carol Conroy. My job was to help teachers fit poetry into their curricula. Charles’ job was to represent the Academy. Carol’s job was to inspire teachers with the power of poetry. Carol was a big proponent of the usefulness of poetry, especially when it was “learned by heart” (as opposed to memorized.) She carried poems around in her heart the way a carpenter carries screwdrivers, hammers and saws around in a tool box. She told the story of her dying mother needing to hear poetry for comfort from her suffering, and being able to recite the poems on the spot.

Recently I was having dinner with a friend in our building, Jeff Schneider, who told the story of reading Mark Twain to his father as his father similarly suffered, which somehow soothed him.

The poems of my own and the excerpts of other poets’ work is soothing me even now as I write this. I guess they could be compared to medicine. For you empiricists out there who must have some kind of proof, I don’t have any handy. Maybe you could do us both a favor and find out if any research has been done on this. I know that the act of writing has been proven therapeutic by researchers. Surely the reading of poetry has as well. Why else has it endured so long? Will it outlast cell phones? Why should they be set against each other? On my deathbed, maybe Elizabeth will dial up a recording of the right person reading the right poem for the moment, and I will cross the river Styx on a wave of syllables in iambic pentameter. But I’d rather go like my mother, with the poetry of the voices of the folks I love around me chatting about this and that. That’s probably going to be poetry enough for me, if I’m lucky enough to die on a bed with family and friends around instead of getting hit by a city bus.

That was a pretty satisfying tangent, and probably plenty for the purposes of the day, but I’d like to take one more if you have the stamina: on the topic of forgetting. I forgot I had written this poem. That was unintentional. But what about intentional forgetting? I was in a class of 7th Graders recently who were studying the Vietnam War when it came out that I had been a protestor against that war. Surprisingly to me, the students found that interesting. Now I wasn’t just the ghost of an adult in the room, but a living elder with a history that might be worth a story or two. I have volunteered to be interviewed by the students so that they can feel the connections through time that plausibly make human life a bit more interesting than the lives of, say, slugs or jellyfish. When I left the school, however, it occurred to me that I had never gone to Washington to see the Vietnam Memorial on the mall. Similarly, I have never gone to see the 911 Memorial right here in New York City. Why am I avoiding these edifices to memory? Why is my heart sick when I ponder the idea of visiting those sites? Why am I so interested in the perceptions and even possibly the wisdom of the present moment over excursions into past times? I feel as though I’m one step ahead of the devil on this one. If I am going to remember anything about painful past times, please let it be the poem.

What about the craft of “Travels with Henry”? It is a fucking mess. First I’m writing from the point of view of Livingstone, as if he were writing a memoir or something. Then I’m taking the pedantic point of view of some kind of sage. Then I’m just being myself, asking crazy questions about harridans. Who are the harridans? I have no idea. Then back to the memoir idea. Then I kind of blend Livingstone with myself on the theme of family rejection. Then I don’t know who’s talking, maybe Myself as Livingstone again. Then I seem to be myself altogether, having a moment of revelation. Yes, a mess. More like a song lyric, maybe. You know how some songs roll along without any reason by plenty of rhyme and no one complains.

Is there something wrong with the poem? Probably, but I don’t care. It is what it is, and it’s useful. (There, I managed to diplomatically side with MacLeish and Williams in the same sentence.)

A USEFUL WAY TO THINK

On the subway with a moment to think
I’m thinking it’s useful sometimes
to break out of the way of seeing
that binds us in our skin.

It’s useful, I think, to look across
the broad spectrum of a phenomenon.
For instance to think not of your own desire
but of all the flesh of all the species

that share the sensation of pleasure
(love? blessed loss of self?) at contact.
Break it down to the cells in common,
all the nerves in skin connected now,

all the lights in all the brains illuminating
that one original act we all share.
For instance also to think of breathing –
the world of life one ballooning struggle

for oxygen. How we swim in a sea of it,
trade each and every molecule. (I read
somewhere that each breath we breathe
contains amounts exhaled by Caesar

and by extension the dinosaurs and diatoms.)
For instance also to think of anger,
the chemical fires in the neurons flashing
hither and yon across the genera

for who knows how many reasons –
to think when you’re angry you’re part
of the great ocean of magnificent emotion
striving to find an object of hate.

Inner, outer – forget the direction the force
might take, just see it for this moment
as the common conflagration it is.
Sex, breath, anger—mere beginnings

in this exercise. The tears of the world
a constant quantity. That’s the idea.
It’s hard to think this way but useful,
as the skin is an awfully lonely place to be in.

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The coincidence! The coincidence! How could it be that a poem about the usefulness of thinking poetically should follow a screed on the usefulness of poetry – with no planning. This sends me down a pathway that I’d like to call concordance. If Karl Jung can have his notion of synchronicity, I have permission to own concordance. It’s mathematical more than mystical, because the odds of coincidence are strong enough – or so I suspect. Especially in the small universe of the themes one finds oneself hitting on in one’s aesthetic explorations.

Concordance, my definition: when ideas line up in a meaningful and resonant way without any conscious intention.

This poem is concordant on two levels: how it hits by chance on the theme of the usefulness of poetry and how it revisits the idea of the subway being a microcosm of the larger human world. Fellow inward observers, take a look at what happens when you write and write and write some more: the outlines of yourself (and by extension all selves?) become more visible.

For whatever that’s worth.

And I do think it’s worth something. At a minimum, you can take delight in surprising yourself: “Oh, I didn’t know that was such a big deal in my life.” It’s like we’re humping around a backpack that we finally take off and look into. All that weight, now we see what it’s made of. The stopping to see lightens the load, at least for a minute. I think it was Diane Ackerman who wrote a piece for the New York Book Review that I clipped out at the time but can’t find anymore, about the hidden themes in our writing. You don’t know they are there until you’ve put the words on the page. Even then, they may hide until someone else finds them and points them out to you.

Looking for the Diane Ackerman clip, I ran across another I had saved, from the New York Times Op-Ed Page of Sunday, January 1, 2006. This one was by the evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson, and was called, “Why I’m Happy I Evolved.” In her article, she celebrates our place as humans among the hundreds of millions of other species. She mentions how the chimpanzee genome had recently been completely sequenced, and asks, “What would they make of this news, I wonder?” and goes on:

Perhaps they would resent the genetic evidence that they are related to us. Or perhaps they would, as I do, revel in being part of the immensity of nature and a product of evolution, the same process that gave rise to dinosaurs, bread molds and myriad organisms too wacky to invent.

Another example of concordance? For sure. In your wanderings, the harmonies emerge if you listen for them.

There’s a nod to Beckett here, too, who seemed to have a pretty good idea of the universal in human nature. I hope he doesn’t mind, from the grave, my quoting him. I consider it an homage. Beckett has figured in my life in numerous important ways. I acted in his plays in college. We both wrote plays for my actor friend David Warrilow. The theater company I consorted with for many years, Mabou Mines, was constantly adapting his work. I am barely able to contain the gumbo of emotions I’m feeling now, thinking of all the events and relationships that occurred, evolved and devolved with the image of Beckett’s craggy face overlooking them like the icon of some kind of secular saint. Someday I’ll use Beckett as the unifying thread in a memoir…maybe. The odds are hard to calculate on that one. I don’t know if I could stand the strain on the timbers of my psyche. So, speaking of concordance, here we are returned to that motif of living in the moment…to prevent the past overtaking us like that starving tiger that haunts my dreams and as a consequence my poetry from time to time.

THE WOMAN ARRANGES A PLACE

The woman who lost her five-year-old son
when he was kidnapped on the street –
he vanished like a cloud, he was

the window broken and the jewel-box
empty – he is the wound that never heals –
this petite woman who is verging on old

age now moves all the loaded shelves and
boxes in the school library by herself. She
presses her back to them and shoves with

her feet. She wrestles them like bears. She
won’t accept a hand but for me she makes
a special place, pushes a desk to a cozy corner –

voila, my home. Does she know? Has
someone who knows I have a missing loved
one too told her about the pit into which I

have like her peered? This is the fact: she
would make a home for anybody needing
a place to sit, and rest, and gather together

the threads of thought that might be
vanishing loose over the horizon.

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I was working with the woman in this poem at a middle school many years ago. I only knew her first name for a while. Then, to make a personal phone call, she offered a tiny room where she maintained her private office. I looked around and saw the pictures and put two and two together. Her way was to help, cajole, comfort. Her grown son came upstairs to pitch in sometimes. I got the idea the family all worked hard to make the world okay after it had been made so manifestly not okay. The loss in my family of my mentally ill sister Caroline through an unexplained disappearance made me feel a certain kinship with this person, though it would have felt crass to mention my different loss to her. This poem presented itself out of my experience in the library with her. It’s an example of the kind of poem I earlier might not have allowed myself to write, because of my need to identify myself with a school of artists to which I never completely belonged in the first place. Identifying with a school has its benefits. Not identifying with any given school has the greater benefits for me. All poetic schools can teach you something, even if the lesson is to run, run, run!

Taking a tangent, and I thank you, wanderers, for your tolerance of that, I will share something that happened in a high school just this week, maybe 15 years after writing “The Woman Arranges a Place,” which adds depth to my understanding of the realities I intended to capture in the poem. It was during a workshop that my friend Tony Pitsakis shared a passage of freewriting written by one of his students, a Russian immigrant who had been in the country two years and whose grammar was still choppy. It was a response to a poem called “And the Ghosts” by Graham Foust. The student’s writing included many noteworthy sentences, but here’s the one that grabbed me by the tie and made me listen:

The ghosts could also symbolize the memories as something that disappeared from reality and has a tendency to fade away with time but still makes us the people who we are in the present.

The student’s understanding of ghosts prompted me to see in a new light my experience of all my lost memories, those of people, those of painful events, those of grotesque impulses, those of sublime impulses, those of pleasurable events, those of lost places, those of lost language, those of lost inspirations. Everything we have lost in our lives and the lives that came before us makes us who we are, if not in our disconnected neurons then in some other kind of reality I don’t know how to define. (But which Whitman tried to in “Unnamed Lands”.) As we speed like lightning through the moments of present time, the ghosts wait patiently in a dimension beyond time, the way I visualize it. They wait for us to stop time, to meditate, to soothe them, and let them know they belong, each and every one, in the gardens of our dreams.

Wow, I never knew I would write that turn of phrase!

But it gets me to thinking of how these ghosts do turn up in dreams routinely, if not as actual figures, then as sensations, or the echoes of sensations. Just last night, so many people and ideas and places and sensations and wishes and regrets turned up in my dreams it would take me a year to write them all. I’m going to write a few later this afternoon, including the one that had me kicking my wife’s shins in bed, thinking I was kicking away the attack of an animal. Maybe the dreams will become poems, and maybe, who knows, the poems will become dreams.

My outro from this labyrinthine reflection will be Li Po’s poem “Chuang Tzu and the Butterfly”, my own tweak of a translation I found online:

In his dream, Chuang Tzu became a butterfly,
but the butterfly became Chuang Tzu when he woke up.
Insect or man – which was real?
Who could ever peg the end of endless change?
The water that flows into the deeps of a distant sea
returns soon enough to the shallows of a nearby stream.
The farmer picking melons outside the green gate of the city
was once the Prince of the East Hill.
So it goes when it comes to fame and fortune.
You know it, yet you strive, you strive — why so?

THE WORSHIP OF YOUTH

Speaking with the young people so
tanned, athletic and groomed—

looking at these shapely specimens—
I find I am enthusiastic and polite.

I find I get vicarious and self-effacing.
I find I apologize for my aging self.

Why do I worship youth so much?
I come to the verge of surrendering

all of my years developing
a mature and educated sensibility

to the fashion ads in the magazines.
Happily, though, I have found the strength

(so far) to stop, reflect, and project
my weakness into the watery world

of frog spawn and the dank dens of
the mole rat, through which we all passed

on our way here.

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I wrote this after conferences with my students in creative writing program at Columbia. I keep thinking the lines leading up to the frog spawn and mole rat are way too prosaic, unstudied, unpolished. But when I go to revise them, they insist on staying unrevised. They are unrepentant, incorrigible, irredeemable. They should be sent to prison, or reform school, but once they got out they would be recidivist. I picture a professorial windbag standing at a podium droning on about his boring personal experiences, having become entitled by his position and enabled by his underlings. Until he has a kind of seizure. The floor cracks open under him and he falls through evolutionary time and across the branching space of species to consort with creatures who resemble those in our own genetic past.

Evolutionists still scratch their heads over the evolutionary rationale for beauty. Is it runaway adaptation that can actually endanger survival? A sign of health and fitness to accommodate sexual selection? Completely non-utilitarian ornamentation to stir the spirits and please the senses of creatures merely because those spirits and senses can be stirred and stimulated? All of the above? None of them? One thing is for sure: it fades in individuals. I look at myself in the mirror now and see nothing of my youthful self. My young students look at themselves in the mirror and see nothing of their future decrepit visages. (Or so I suspect.) Tibetans feed their dead to the vultures. Zen Buddhists encourage you to picture your face before you were born. Can we really transcend time? That may be the most economic way to phrase the quest that is my writing of poetry. It is a way to feed the vultures.

Thus ends this section of my work, which comprises the poems I had vetted and collected through a stretch of time in my life. It is a movement in the larger work. A closed set, contrasting with the set that will open without closure elsewhere in the project. I look forward to meeting you there, aficionados, where we will make a break from the fractal to the stochastic, from a closed to an open system, from processes that comfort the concrete to those that gladden the global-minded…if I’m blessed with enough skill on my part and attention on yours, both of which are unlikely in the extreme but not impossible. I think it was Emily Dickinson who said, “I dwell in possibility.” I join her in that house, and the door is open for you as well.