Aesthetic Garden piano starlight and stone: The pursuits of my parents Present as my own. Also dogs, and birds. The play of words. *************************** Is there nothing that is mine alone? **************************** Instead of her spaniels a runty pit. Purcell in place of his Hindemith. And perseids more than constellations.
THE BIRD THAT WANTS TO NEST IN MY RAFTER
The bird that wants to nest in my rafter
Has birdlike clarity what it’s after:
The comforts of home. Of course I agree
That water source, sight-line, privacy
All make for quite the nest. The question though
(As I sweep off twigs and it returns
Tirelessly, with energy to burn)
Remains: Which one of us will have to go?
A witty, erudite writer in the mode of James Merrill, he was 92.
********************************
May 26 1969: The Grievance
No one dies. That is all we can say for certain.
Something dies us,
As it lived us. We are lived. And died.
A personal pronoun is superfluous here.
It is simple;
Our grammar of death must be revised.
And we are not reduced to tears, not reduced. The thing
Our tears are for
Extends us: we are widened to the term
Which lies beyond our tears. We are not reduced.
***************************************
***************************************
Fellow Philip Larkin fans might be reminded, on reading this poem, of these lines:
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
***************************************
More tersely, fellow Adam Phillips fans might simply quote this remark:
When people say, “I’m the kind of person who,” my heart always sinks.
Sunrise Rehoboth
Psychedelic ocean and the gulls slate gray
A man prepares his tripod for blastoff
**********************************
Backstage the moon shot through with blue
Bows to the sun and gives way
**********************************
Where’s the pilgrim fellowship chanting in the sand?
The mournful Scottish bagpipe band?
***********************************
This morning all worship comes down to me
Godless, with sacred symphony
***********************************
A Supermarket in California!
*************************
What thoughts I have of you tonight
Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg
As I scan the parking lot
Of the Walmart in Waukegan
**************************
Two strangers in SUVs met
On that fruited plain
They blew each other away
With their Glocks
***************************
As one they shot; as one staggered
Into their SUVs
As one staggered
Into the local emergency room
As one were arrested
**********************
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.
********************************
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. --