Sunrise Rehoboth
Psychedelic ocean and the gulls slate gray
A man prepares his tripod for blastoff
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Backstage the moon shot through with blue
Bows to the sun and gives way
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Where’s the pilgrim fellowship chanting in the sand?
The mournful Scottish bagpipe band?
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This morning all worship comes down to me
Godless, with sacred symphony
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A Supermarket in California!
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What thoughts I have of you tonight
Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg
As I scan the parking lot
Of the Walmart in Waukegan
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Two strangers in SUVs met
On that fruited plain
They blew each other away
With their Glocks
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As one they shot; as one staggered
Into their SUVs
As one staggered
Into the local emergency room
As one were arrested
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O Whitman, O Ginsberg! O Walmart Waukegan parking lot!
I stagger beside you, dreaming of the lost America of love
Past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage
David, December, Rehoboth Beach How all occasions do evoke thee My own Lord Hamlet. Here, beside the sea, With only Philly Airport contrails for clouds, I slip on icy boards and say your name aloud, Because everything evokes thee. Those contrails: Your father, who mapped the moon, regaled Me with their chemistry and their meaning. Your Swiss cousin, who never left off keening, Sends text messages about your mysterious life. After all these years I've heard from your wife Who finally wants the books you left with me. And there's my yearly visit to the tomb Of your mad Ophelia. That keeps the ghost in the room. Beyond all these, your famous sister is another thread That keeps delaying your entry into truly dead For every end of year my ritual is to read Her widower's account of how he freed Himself, a little, from the long pain of her dying. When he said the Heart Sutra her soul went flying. "I had a distinct feeling of a kind of expansion Emanating from the furnace into the room And beyond. Something was being released From Eve's body and expanding into space." For me, for your memory, no such amazing grace, No closing mantra, no sense of you unrestless, Over on the other shore, life and deathless. ********************* Clear winter sunset now. Ho! The horizon takes a roseate glow. Pink's the sand where the whitelets flow. Between the two, a table setting silver blue Darkens to gray. Evoking you.
WASH
People are drawn to nothingness Here on the coast at the end of the year The horizon makes itself disappear The banner planes are gone the gulls are gone It's nothingness to which people are drawn The sand is smooth the blue umbrellas went away The noisy white boats that nose up and say Ladies Night at the Bar and Grill are not missed People are drawn to nothingness The lifeguard stands are standing down Calm waves make the only sound Portugal Africa None wonder anymore What lies along the other shore Really all that's left is us Drawn so hard to nothingness Packs of winter scarves and coats Black against the gray of the coast Praising the sacred empty space The misty mystic vacant place People are drawn to nothingness
DECEMBRIST
It's the old annual end-times go-round
When the revolution goes up in flames
And everyone flees to an assisted
Living facility. But not you. Yet.
Checks still go out to the truly needy
Which must mean that you yourself... You're young still
In some senile way and unprepared to
Abandon the ramparts and call the
Revolution ended.
End-time subversiveness
Mainly involves mantras. Surreality
Of Everyday Life remains popular.
A far remove from Here at Senior Sylvan Retreat You Are
Never Alone. Alone is what I want!
Alone I can work out another New Year --
Reckon up lost ground, lost troops, morale issues.
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My basic animal spirits are sound.
Born lucky, raised lucky, lucky in work
And love, I pause in the hallway, steady
My mug of tea, and undergo full-body gratitude.
The room is cold, the words in the books are cold;
And the question of whether we get what we ask for
Is absurd, unanswered by the sound of an unlatched door
Rattling in wind, or the sound of snow on roofs, or glare
Of the winter sun. What we have learned is not what we were told.
I watch the snow, feel for the heartbeat that is not there.
Ancient Medieval Modern The high-speed train site, a substation with an epic switchgear, Also has triple-transformers: Ancient/Medieval/Modern. Roman/Norman/New. Keep digging. Further down, something neolithic will appear. Piling on with every mood swing... Then, years later, turning over Statues, witch-marks, scratch-dial. And now we lay down our own dedicated tracks: Frail rail.
Brodsky Museum, St Petersburg
Circled by Belomorkanal smoke
And, near the Arctic, by fast-cooled chifir tea —
We want these old apartments to evoke
The depth of this, deeper than poetry,
Deeper than your bitter words that spoke
The nothingness of time and history.
That is: The bathroom stink you tried to cloak,
Sharing the bowl with two other families.
The desk display of poets who provoked
You into verse: Auden, Frost… A messy
Desk, a mid-modern aesthetic baroque
Of books and bottles and a cup of tea.
Asleep for years, these dusty rooms stoke
Unembittered hearts — too young for ennui —
Who press against the doorway to soak
In the atmosphere. They pay the entry fee
And immediately want to stroke
The same cracked imperial walls that he
Lived sandwiched between, bitter and broke
But not broken.
And no more turn aside and brood Upon law's bitter cruelty; For cash still rules the Ivy Leagues, And rules the schools almost as good; It rules the fate of our dim babes And all rich dishevelled wandering spawn.
The Denial of Death in Shenandoah National Park
Cold air, barred owls, and the smell of smoke:
Only a little data here, to evoke
The August woods off the balcony.
Woods that always prompt philosophy.
As when I read, in Becker, a phrase like
“Immunity bath,’ meaning cultic rites
That cleanse the cultist of the dread of death
(Page 12) and sometimes even of its sight.
Or anti-vaxers who, with dying breath,
Admit they thought their breath would never end.
“Consciousness of death is the primary
Repression, not sexuality.” Mend
Your dread by bacchanal, or by fairy
Story, and you’ll still get badly scarred.
A death-accepter, say Kierkegaard,
Knows this is merely where the fun begins:
The wisest owls unbarred spin and spin
Out of smoke mythic immortality.
Take, among those I love, N., P., and D.
N. strode in to save Detroit, then broke down
At the vastness of it. P. circles round
The earth’s atrocities, repairing souls.
D., who must perceive the very world, stole
His life through abstraction. Hard led
By dread, N. is struggling, D. dead.
From the balcony again the smell of smoke —
Of our own ashy end an easy token.
YOU LIKE TO THINK THE STARS ARE DRIPPING You like to think the stars are dripping while You sleep. You like to think you'll snap awake And step out on the deck, and in a while, Your eyes ready, clusters will constellate And then start dripping, just over the oak: A weathered black and white Jackson Pollock Whose silvers slap the cosmic curtain. Like to think? No - you're actually certain That when you're not looking the universe Loses its straight face and gets to mugging Peeing its pants giggling and shrugging... Stable? Who said stable? Metastable Maybe and that's only maybe. Unstable Is just as likely. Don't sleep too lightly. --
… a set of thoughts on the British poet laureate’s poem about Prince Philip. As in: It is the responsibility of laureate-induced poems to be forgotten. Compelled into existence by one’s acceptance of a public position, compelled to praise the high-born to a large audience, these are so unlikely to be non-piffle. Yet – as with Philip’s surprisingly moving brief funeral – this particular poem is surprisingly good. I’m not going to argue it’s all that good, but as an example of its type, it’s way better than it should have been.
The tone throughout is non-heroic, casually musing; the poet avoids grandiosity for a man who, while physically imposing and genetically way royal (his DNA was used to verify that remains found in a Russian forest belonged to the slaughtered Romanovs), seems in fact to have had a spartan and self-effacing disposition. The poem will feature little direct reference to Philip; rather, in a series of natural metaphors, it will evoke his wartime generation.
The weather in the window this morning
is snow, unseasonal singular flakes,
a slow winter’s final shiver.
He has died in April, and his singularity as the sovereign’s husband will, as the poem begins, be evoked through the singularity of the unseasonal snow. His long life and long physical decline is nicely captured in a slow winter’s final shiver.
On such an occasion
to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
for a whole generation – that crew whose survival
was always the stuff of minor miracle,
who came ashore in orange-crate coracles,
fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at sea
with flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes.
Unusually self-referential, this official eulogy will ask questions about eulogies for the sort of person Philip was. So marked for life was he by his wartime experience, it makes more sense to remember him in his collective military identity than in his singularity. His funeral ritual (designed by Philip himself) was overwhelmingly a military affair.
Indeed looked at in its entirety, Philip’s survival, much less his longevity, does seem a minor miracle – smuggled out of Greece (in an orange crate!) during the Greco-Turkish War when he was eighteen months old, he went on to “finagle” (to use the poet’s wonderfully non-heroic word) modes of survival under punishing battle conditions.
Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plans
across billiard tables and vehicle bonnets,
regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets were
was everyone’s guess and nobody’s business.
Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they became
both inner core and outer case
in a family heirloom of nesting dolls.
Like evidence of early man their boot-prints stand
in the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders.
There’s a nice subtle evocation here of the soft touchy feely world we’ve become, in which only faint ancient traces of “hardened” boot-prints indicate the bygone, born old (great-grandfathers from birth), men among whom Philip belonged; the patriarchs (this is the poem’s title) who kept their thoughts and feelings to themselves and (in the phrase everyone attaches to Philip) just got on with it.
They were sons of a zodiac out of sync
with the solar year, but turned their minds
to the day’s big science and heavy questions.
To study their hands at rest was to picture maps
showing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemes
of old campaigns and reconnaissance missions.
Last of the great avuncular magicians
they kept their best tricks for the grand finale:
Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely.
Relentlessly and ingeniously pragmatic, men like Philip spent their post-crate lives fashioning further escapes, further solutions to a world always perilously out of sync, until the very veins in their hands became strategic maps of (to use Graham Greene’s title) ways of escape. Their final Houdini maneuver, of course, was the whole slipping the surly bonds of earth thing.
The major oaks in the wood start tuning up
and skies to come will deliver their tributes.
But for now, a cold April’s closing moments
parachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoon
snow is recast as seed heads and thistledown.
The poem concludes with a return to the present, to a continued observation of a singular April day in which enormous sturdy old trees (this one in particular) whistle their elegy, to be joined in time by tears of rain. Enormous sturdy old Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (thus the poet’s thistle-homage – thistle being the Scottish national emblem) has done his final magic trick, leaving a world “recast” for the better by his having been here — winter turns to spring, the world regenerates itself, and the prickly thistle (Philip was notoriously prickly) is now thistledown, the feathery white top of the thistle, which will disperse in the wind and scatter its seeds.
Really, take whatever position you want on patriarchs, royalty, Philip, blahblah – this is on its own terms a more than respectable poem, a clever finagled triumph.
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Found it! The rule for the dead is that they should be forgotten. Ravelstein.
Double, double toil and trouble
Ginsburg was a body double
Rothschild did a fire make
Parkland massacre’s a fake
Spawn of Newt and and scourge of Hogg
Neo-fascist demagogue
Vampire bat with blind-worm’s sting
Not a human but a thing
Ginsburg was a body double
Double, double toil and trouble.
Of course DJT hasn’t written an inaugural letter, to be read by his successor. This is one of many departures from tradition for which DJT will fail to be remembered.
Already a Chicago Tribune writer has tried his hand at a satirical inaugural letter. UD offers a letter in the form of a poem – a poem in which DJT shows remarkable literary culture.
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LETTER TO MY SUCCESSOR, BY DONALD J. TRUMP
They say you’re giving the place a deep clean.
Good call. I wish I could explain how I
Soiled the great gift of the presidency.
Didn’t want to! I swear I didn’t mean
To leave it like this: a moral pigsty.
But of course I know you don’t believe me.
Consider, though, how human beings lean
Toward self-destruction. Don’t believe me? Try
Kafka. Cioran. Freud. Dostoevsky.
From a review of an odd film I’ve seen:
“The film focuses on psycho-bi-
ological forces that make you your own enemy.
The lust for chaos; the lust to demean …
To demean yourself! You self-glorify,
But in a sick way. But only outwardly.
The hunger for colossal failure in
The drive for success; and for death in any
Vigilant and violent hypochondry.”
Raskolnikov skulks away; the final scene
A shabby nothing as I hiss goodbye.
Some day you’ll find a way to pity me.
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UPDATE: He did write a letter after all.
Probably a lot like the one I wrote.