It’s raining. It’s pouring. And the old man
Is out of bed. It’s 4:15 A.M.
—Old, etiolated, left so un-majestic…
(But not snoring, no.)
*
It is raining, though, rain that Thomas Merton[i]
Once described as a festival, though he
Was up late himself that night, in a dark
Wood, a Coleman lantern to shed some light,
(On what?)
Pretending to have found the God of light—
As if the God-Who-Is-Something -You-Come-
To-Know is anything other than you-
Yourself-dressed-up-in-old-pajama-pants
—some ‘thing’, some ‘self’.
What an odd thing it is to feel your body
And self in silent crying, an affair of neurons.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so. And of course it won’t
Keep raining forever, not this downpour—
Which Merton knows quite well.
There are, he points out, always a few people
who are in the woods at night, in the rain
(because if not the world would have ended)
and I am one of them—such a
Peaceful rain storm in the mountains! So nice
A man to keep the world in business while
Us city folk are turning one by one
Into a ‘crash’ of rhinoceros. (My, but
The collective noun seems apropos here.)
A crash, then, dense with inebriate illusion,
These boys are not fooling around. Remember
Ionesco’s play[ii]? Circa 1959,
What they called the ‘Theater of the Absurd’?
People turning into rhinos? Some kind
Of metaphor? Of course, these days to be
Absurd Ionesco’d have to write a play
Called ‘Manatee’. Even then, your average
Rhinoceros would storm out of the theater,
(They do that, you know), insulted, amazed…
‘Why, the very idea…’

*

What an odd sensation it is to feel
The body and the soul alert and not
(Be able to)
Study that sentence, set with a mason’s skill,
Even as the slowness, unsteadiness
Prevails: an order of parataxis,
Maybe, set just as stones are set—or so
Old Uncle Olds[iii] thinks—set by the ocean:
Transformed into a manatee, floating
In the tidal basins, gravity as
The glue. He came, he saw, he cried out in
The night, not this silent night or silent
Passage, but some night written as asylum—
For it is still raining, is it not? And
Our objective is still solitude, the holy
Solitude Thomas Merton found sitting
And festive in the mountains of Kentucky,
And surely all things will connect, at least
By being wet, at least tonight, at last.
(Here it is.)
Thomas Merton, who is reading
Philoxenos, a Syrian who had fun
In the Sixth Century, and has his thoughts
About being alone abetted by
Philoxenos even though he, Philo, was
Alone in a desert and was alone
With a different self—and it doesn’t rain
So much, the waves don’t crash, and there are no
Manatees, no Syrian sea, just the sun
And the two selves, real (ha!) and conditioned
(Ah ha!) to flop around on the deck with—
The one, he (Merton, Philo, Uncle Olds,
Even me, take your pick) was born with, and
The one we  all will die with, had his thoughts
(The same antecedents, but choose ‘Merton’
If you want to say sane) in that cabin
About the rain¸ the self, society
The state of our silent grace, the state
Of sanity left in the world—lots of things—
But, strictly speaking, gave no thought at all
To the rhinoceros, ‘rhinoceros’
Being a metaphor—right?—and one we
Agree, because of its stale nature, might
Better be replaced with ‘manatee’.
(Okay, but…)
It does at least preserve the absurdity
We think Ionesco had in mind, though he,
Ionesco, wrote a play about conformity
In a modern totalitarian
Context—what’s rational, reasonable,
Logical, etcetera, all defined
By machinations of…
(…Oh, stop, please stop…)
…the machinations of, well, Capital.
Let’s face it, call it money, moolah, lucre,
Filthy lucre, boodle, clams, dinero,
Kale, lettuce, lolly, sheckles, loot;  call it
Simoleons, dough, cabbage, wampum, bread—
And how’s that for parataxis, eh?—it,
Um, Money, Das Kapital, does remain
At the source of Ionesco’s fearful play
And not absurdity. Thomas Merton:
In order to experience yourself
you have to suppress the awareness of
Your contingency, your state of radical need.
This you do by creating an awareness
of yourself as someone who has no needs
that he cannot immediately fulfill.
Thomas Merton: The time will come when they
Will sell you even your rain.

*

My Uncle Olds could talk all day about
This thing he called the ‘glass segue’.
Smooth, he’d say. Like music, like
A transmission, so fluid…
Just like the meshing of gears…
And he’d smile his sly smile, drag out
The syllables—the gla-ass seg-way—and give
You a definition by example:
For example, you’re sitting with him, mister,
You’re in the Courthouse Bar, he’s just bought you
A scotch or a beer or something, what you’re
Drinking; it’s not going to be crystal
What the hell he’s talking about, not crystal clear
At all…the glass segue this, the glass
Segue that…the rain is the glass segue,
The fucking sunshine is the glass segue,
The stars in the night sky, the traffic on
The thruway, the beer you’re drinking. Look,
See how it pours, as if it had a choice,
You see, it’s the glass segue. Throw the beer
Right in his face, and he’ll laugh at the glass
Segue. Olds Papadopoulos, the glass
Segue in person. It gets annoying.
And always with the ‘the’, it’s never ‘a’ glass—
The definite article, the big time—
Like it was one big thing he knew about,
And you, in your graceless innocence, did not.
It was like he knew all the rhetoric
That ran the universe—knows it all in
Reverse, certainly knows it better than
You do, backwards and forwards, dude.
So go and have another beer,
(Mr. Savoir-faire)
Tip a jar to the glass segue itself…

*
Or is it to ‘himself’? The spider smiles—
(My inhuman segue to this segment)
For, as we introduce our mystery guest,
‘The glass segue’ does gain some cogency,
A kind of metaphor for the whole show,
—As good as any other—and suppose
Our Uncle Olds, in the role we all play,
I mean the role of Everyman, if he
Was composing a kind of poetry,
A poetry of poem and person—think
How Wallace Stevens uses the word ‘poem’,
Or how the atheist could use the word
‘God’— ‘God’ for Good, or ‘god’ for all the gods—
A summation of all that’s good, or one
Good summary of all that is—and one
That frees up ‘grace’ too, fixes it for
Its fight with gravity and its fight with
Gravitas—right now it’s fighting that—
Suppose the glass segue could carry that
Much weight—think here of Philip Larkin’s use
Of glass in High Windows, or Ortega
y Gasset’s ideas[iv], his imaginings:
Imagine we are looking at a garden
through a window… As the goal of
vision towards which we direct our glance
is the garden, we do not see the pane of glass
and our gaze passes through it. The clearer
the glass, the less we see it… We can ignore
the garden, and, by retracting our focus,
let it rest on the window-pane… [T]o see
the garden and to see the window pane
are two incompatible operations:
the one excludes the other and they each
require a different focus….
Okay, we’re looking at a garden—know
A thinker by his examples—Ortega’s
Garden, and Merton’s rainy hermit’s hut—
It’s pretty nice up there in all that dew and moss.
My Uncle chose a claustrophobic bar
So he could walk home nights still stewed and swearing,
Sweating his way past closed mom-and-pop
Stationary-convenience-candy stores,
Past the all-night laundromat where he
got his ass mugged one night.  It seems the glass
May not be clean at all, or it may be
Not flat; it may be convex or concave—
Hey, it may be a prism or rose colored,
Or, think about this, suppose it’s a mirror…
It almost has to have some reflection,
Wouldn’t be glass without our reflection
In it,  now, would it? There, look closely
There’s Uncle Olds standing in his bathrobe,
In his basement, playing with the fuse box,
—the fool knows nothing about electricity—
He’s still alive, still conscious, still waiting
For our guest to arrive…And no, it’s not
Godot, not to worry, but will it be
Ivan IIyich, say, or Polonius,
Or maybe Jay Gatsby or, I don’t know,
Ethan Frome—remember Ethan Frome?—you
Most likely read it in middle school—
(anyway, it)
Was hard to say who Uncle Olds would want
To wake from literary enchantment…
Until Polonius knocked at the door.
Who knew this was Olds’ favorite speech? Listen:
Either for tragedy, comedy,
history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,
scene individable, or poem unlimited—
An interesting epitaph, yes?
The dead Olds, via some papers found in
His desk, asked to have these specific words
Engraved on his tombstone. It took so long
For him to die—lying, just the slightest
Of movements for two hundred twenty seven
Quiet days—after he grabbed those live wires…
I was nineteen when this went down.
My mother sent me over to his place
When he didn’t show up for supper
(As per usual).
What an odd thing to have all that power
—Spiritual, physical, moral, electrical—
Overloading, overflowing in your
Inebriated, isolated, tragical-
Comical-historical-pastoral,
Impossible poem unlimited,
Prohibited, rhetorical.
Constantine ‘Olds’ Papadopoulos
1915 – 1969.
Rest in Peace, Uncle.

[ii] Rhinoceros

[iii] My uncle Constantine ‘Olds’ Papadopoulos, following a massive stroke, spent the last months of his life in a deep coma. Yes, he drove an Oldsmobile Cutlass.

[iv] In The Dehumanization of Art.

Surely mankind’s greatest invention is the sentence.

—John Banville

Since Aristophanes and Socrates

Are talking poetry—with the gods’ blessing—

With a whisper about a parchment—call

It a ‘sur-fact’, a secret, or maybe

A surface—just a simple white canvas,

Really, a talented tabula rasa,

A prime mover—prima facie—the desert.

Say poetry is like that too, just before—

Before the spacial silence like

—like, it’s like the desert—

And then when rain begins—a kind of Brain

Rain—it draws the oil up, surfaces it,

So it’s slick, the mind is, his daemon. Still…

*

The lamps are lit, so Socrates can see

That Aristophanes is pouring his

Particular oil into open ears,

Into everyone’s evening ears and eyes.

And Aristophanes goes for the joke too.

He farts. Real funny. He farts and pretends

It’s a hiccup out the wrong end. Stand on

Your head, why don’t you, Aristophanes?

…For its Aristophanes

Who is about to give an encomium

To Eros. Too sophisticated

To offer praise for a dead god, he

Will spin a tale of sun and earth and moon,

Of round bodies and moieties in search

Of themselves—this same Aristophanes

Is stinking up the stage right now…

*

So Socrates can smile and finally laugh.

It is as if he’s finally free, and in

This freedom he can sense that since

The gods can’t be persons, Eros must be

A shorthand for something else, for Eros,

Made of many minds, cannot not exist—

At least not this Artifice of Eros,

As plain as parchment, bright white and wet when

It rains. So Aristophanes, his oil,

So Socrates, his solitude, together

In encomium—in formation

Of the god, the goddess of love, the two.

*

But Aristophanes is puzzled by

These two fold tales. When death is not surpassed,

The momentary and the monumental

Remain. Repeat: When death is not surpassed,

The momentary and the monumental

Remain. Thus, the Eros-of-Now remains;

The Eros-of-Eternity…yes, yes,

By definition, if He or She exists

At all—like math, like the Good, like Beauty—

Something always is there—but poetry

Forced in our mouths, minds—both behemoth,

Beyond our beliefs, shivering beneath

The skin, a half-truth in a no-truth world,

And puny innocence so fragile that

The fragrance of a grape might destroy it

—a single grape, mind you, forced on you…

*

Or so it seems. For Aristophanes,

Most musts must reside inside of mustard seeds…

Say that twice.

But things are that simple sometimes.

As he enters Agathon’s pavilion,

He wonders what ethics has to do with

Beauty. It’s seeds. There’s your answer—

For ethics are like seeds to beauty,

Like grapes that lead to wine,

Like grapes that lead to raisins.

*

But poetry is forced into our mouths

And minds, too—like the wine and like those raisins—

For the Beautiful should reign in both—

So Socrates stops—again—still outside

The bright confines of Agathon’s party,

Still part of an immense colloquy,

Contra the sun, and rain, contra the dry

Parched earth, all stacked as one, all stacked

Against his passage from stillness, from Eros

And love, all stacked against his desire

And lack of desire…

*

But we can stop too, and look at ourselves

As Socrates—like Socrates—and see

Him like a progression of the sun

Against the setting of the sun, the psalms

Of innocence versus the songs

Experience sings—grape, rain, wine, raisin,

Reason—the sun’s sunlight tempered by earth’s

Seasons, its rotation around the sun,

Its shadow of air, water from the sky,

—amazing suspense: gravity with grace—

And brought to final fruition in that grape,

That grain, that pod, the fruit and seeds, the grass

Grown and sheltered amid the rocks

And trees— enough to keep the gods in harness,

Enough to keep the fires burning, sending

The sun back to the sun, enough to keep

Both Socrates and Alcibiades,

Who will join us later, suspended in

The poetry we all will someday write…

*

Will write someday, that is, on the dry skin,

On the parchment that is at last preserved.

1.

Say frost kills flowers, kills

The roots, freezes the stem, stamen, stills all

The heliotropic dancing that a stop

Action camera might show, and so much more,

So that you can trace each petal,

As if it were an everyday flower,

As common as sunflowers are, ancient

As sunlight surely must be in descant

And song—frozen in flowers hence, hence the

Solemnity—the sun’s solemnity.

And hence our first thesis: that man is, as

It were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.

Essays, The first series. Self Reliance.

Waldo Emerson, who further notes—

The eye was placed where one ray should fall,

That it might testify of that particular ray.

Indeed. That piercing light, en passant,

Is parsed to model consciousness. You know,

The spectrum focused in the glass, the light

Starts to disperse, grows dim, exits,

Continues to exist… Ho hum… gets old.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. 

And there is no excuse. Photosynthesis

Be damned as tiny blades take snips of sun

—That piercing light!—

Before the night comes back, as it always does,

To freeze the planet’s plants, its flowering.

Prisoners then to light the conscious mind.

2.

Our second theses is not a thesis

At all. Just a walk on a beach, really,

A play of sunshine, picnic in the park,

A plum in place of the pumpkin—

Because, yes, it’s Halloween! A ghost

May come; for it’s a ghost’s right;

But more likely it’ll be a kid dressed up

To look like Michael Jackson, or come-as-

You-are in fishnet stockings, say, fairy wings,

And a non-aleatory assortment

Of masks—spooky, scary, appassionato—

A tricky walk too along a narrow stretch

Of sand, but a cool place for a beach parade.

Last year I went as a surf board; this year

I’m William Butler Yeats, in a white suit

And a white hat, horned-rimmed glasses, a book

Of poetry, some mystic symbols…

Too cool for words.

The judges guess I’m an owl, a wise

Old owl. Okay. Hoot, mon. An Irish owl,

Fitted, fluted, fated for the night’s fete.

3.

First, two ideas: God will not have his work

Made manifest by cowards—and—Infancy

Conforms to nobody. Second, we decide

It’s sand. First, we sit at the ocean’s edge,

Metaphor of small creation and

Renewal, a big sea of tiny processes:

Land’s edge, breathes this: large rocks turning to sand,

Also a kind of renewal. So sand.

Second, we still live in a haunted house,

And peer out scared into the darkness,

Inexplicable despite Helios,

His chariot, the sound that words make scratched

In sand as, one, the tide snubs them, and two,

The seas seize them, transitory words in

Perdurable sand. So sand wins. Again.

Let’s have a show of hands. Who thinks that God’s

Intensions are made manifest by cowards?

One, two, three hands shoot up. We may have had

Too much to drink…

Besides, one, I’m getting cold; and, two…

Well, it’s true anyway,

That thing about infancy. That Emerson said.

Too true.

(Montauk, New York)

1

There is much death in the water:

The wax figures are drifting near the beach,

Jellyfish-like, chrysalis-like armor;

Unknown in number and nearly

Transparent in the tidal surf; the so called

Vestigial tentacles should be

Reclassified as potential weapons—

For there is too much death in the water:

Large fish, the costal seal population,

Land mammals, goats and dogs, are floating in

The surf; a humanoid figure, grey in

The sand, of giant-like proportions

Has washed ashore, five miles north of the town.

Either he is dead or unconscious. We

Estimate 16 feet in length. Perspective

Is, however, difficult to establish;

To land would be foolish, though satisfying…

Please note a parallel with the story

The Drowned Giant by one J.G. Ballard.

Quote: On the morning after the storm

The body of a drowned giant

Was washed ashore on the beach

Five miles to the north north west of the city.

This could be visionary, for an odd

Approximation exists: the ship wreck

Took place four miles north of the city.

The giant must have been aboard. Question:

Was he killed by the sea, drowned and

Carried ashore, or did he forge his way

To land, only to lie exhausted in

The shallow pools? Debate on this issue

Remains inconclusive. There has been movement,

But we cannot remain here after sunset

To track the changes in the tides. Those damn tides.

Question: is this fiction salient at all?

Transmission will cease here: Over.

(Noise Jar)

There is too much death in the ocean.

2

Does this sound crazy? A saliency

Taken to an insanity? Friends, I

Have read and re-read Jim Ballard’s so-called

‘Fiction’ a hundred times, a thousand times,

And I have one thing to say here:

— Big Fish Eat Little Fish—

Yes, if you’re thinking Pieter Brueghel,

His painting and his parable, go

Ahead and shout it: It’s an image!

Imagine! Yes, my friend Ballard purloined

The Brueghel image to create

A modern mystery play! Ecce! Behold:

Another Lilliputian fantasy,

Another Leviathan in his kingdom…

Fair enough! But stop for a moment,

And take your place inside the frame. Try it,

Come on, become that giant fish,

It won’t hurt—much. Take hold of the

Declining consciousness; feel the old wounds

Of an old world as new light, new sound, and yes,

As new noise grips the new world. The greatness of

An image can be found in its refusal to

Accept the relative.  It takes a stand

In majesty. Its philosophy is

Philosophy—where philosophy is

(Noise Jar)

Porous—where it breathes, and changes, slithers—

Where it appears as a dead god on the beach,

A dead giant about to regain his soul…

That is my answer. That is my stand.

Philosophy in the bulrushes.

3

First of all, I can do his voice. Here, listen:

(Noise Jar)

Shit. This is crazy. He’s listening at

The wall right now, listening to hear…

The Parafin… the Parafin!

He’s trying to hear them as

They turn us into cabbage heads

Or something—giant ears…

I told you this would happen, all this

Nonsense on the radio, a giant with an

Army of little…what? Little noise machines?

It’s crazy, it really is…

4

How’s that?

It sounds just like Mr-Sane-Mr-Safe,

Doesn’t it? Thinks I’m listening to

The neighbors fart, while the walls quake;

Thinks calling them a ‘noise machine’,

Or labeling them the ‘Parafins’,

—Or for that matter ‘Equilibrium

Disturbers’—will halt the auditory

Reinterpretation of the world, this

Time’s Great Instauration.  But

They all think that, don’t they? Think you can sing

To curb the noise, can shout to end the yelling.

Jus t stop your ears, my man, and the Parafins

Disappear … yeah, disappear… from sight

But not from mind, right? Let’s face it

We were taught by the world to see.  Can we let

A similar world inform our ears? We’ll see.

We’ll hear. We’ll go forward. (Noise Jar) Won’t we?

5

Well, I guess I was about the first to know.

This new place, it’s like a theater, it’s like

The old amusement parks we had when we

Were growing up, like Palisades Park, like

A Disneyland, but smaller, and not

For kids. Definitely not for kids. It’s

More like a science fiction thing

For the old folks. You sit in booths around

An artificial lake—‘Lake Listen’, they

Call it—and you ‘hear’ the water, you ‘hear’

The sky, you ‘hear’ the Parafins as they…

—they thrash—

You ‘hear’ the fucking grass grow—

You know that thing from George Eliot? About

The other side of silence?

They call

It ‘Evolutionary Heaven’. It’s

All sound. You go on sound trips, you go

On sound vacations…

(Noise Jar)

…Trips, excursions the mind creates. You don’t

See, you don’t really think, you sit and stay

Immobile and…

I guess they keep you here

Forever, until you die, for your own good,

Until you stop hearing the sounds, until

The Noise Jar breaks for good, I guess.

I guess that’s it…

There is too much death in the water.

I just hope there’s no heaven.

Suppose we crown our symphony,

Hecate’s Symphony—‘On the

Genuine In Art’—with some

Old growth sour apples, grandma

Style. Suppose we pronounce the day dead

At dawn, kaput, finis, finished.

Rain all day, my friends, a wash out.

Suppose we market some saliva soap,

—Eh?—sell it as ‘The French Kiss’,

Salubrious Soft Skin—and then,

Suppose we issue a solemn nihil obstat:

Fat Fannies Permitted on Fair Grounds—

Only. That should keep the church ladies

Satisfied. And then suppose we spark

A tryst between you and me—

Not for Eros this time, and not for love

Of God—or for the love of Pete—

For Christ sakes—in fact it’s not

For anything, simple or solemn.

Simply put and solemnly said,

Suppose we propose a nihil obstat

Of and for everything… everything

Under the big top, that is. Thus:

“What is death in the circus?

That depends on if it is spring.

Then, if elephants are there,

mon pere, we are not completely lost.”

*

Suppose we do all the above, will we

Hear the songs as Hecate sings them,

—do we have a shot at that?—

—some sort of a fair statement?—

Something that’s real, you know, the genuine,

Something to grapple… unto thy soul

With hoops of steel—eh?—

*

In the next booth is Ann Carson. Here

To promote her assay in The Glass Essay—

The story line: The man she hoped

Had caught her thrust she has named ‘Law’,

And it seems she learned all she knows

About love from this guy…

…My love, she quotes, resembles

The eternal rocks beneath—

A source of little visible delight,

But necessary…

Give it a wink, for it seems she learned all

She knows in one fool-fucked-up-flash-

Of-non-ecstasy-fucking—and love,

It seems has necessities. Listen—

Thrusting, she says, my little burning

Red backside like a baboon

At a man who no longer cherished me—

Love’s Necessities…

My, what a nice phrase!

Suggest we bottle that, and sell

It with the soap. Love’s Necessities,

And The French Kiss, ou la la,

A stocking stuffer, in thrusting red…

*

It’s not sober, is it? Love’s excess.

We think it’s genuine, then find

Ourselves trapped alone with

Baboons in sedimentary rock.

For Ann Carson it’s myopic:

It is as if we have been lowered

Into an atmosphere of glass.

Sure, if transformation, vitreous

Or vital—oh, but slower and the light

Is different here—could provide us

With the proper vision, a vision

That might make some—some—of the prayed for

Metamorphosis visible

As rifts in rock, as visible

As flowers left to sting the eyes…

*

But I promised you a symphony,

Some real music, ‘genuine’,

Is the word I used.  Let’s go

To Hecate’s Pavilion for

A late lunch, my treat, so get what

You want. There’s corn dogs, barbequed

Chicken, pasta vazool, and real

Atonal music—grapple your hooks

In that, my friend—improvised right on

The spot by the ‘Earthquake Dirt Band’,

Music right off the Richter Scale—

The great tectonic plates, magma,

The epicenter just below our feet,

The ultimate metamorphosis

Of what cannot be burned, buried,

Or destroyed. Today’s the Fair’s last day.

All the ribbons have been awarded

—a guy named Koch took first place in

Poetry (pronounced ‘coke’, so

I guess it’s a natural),

And Ann got the red—so, a hearty

Congratulations to one and all.

Next year the theme is volcanoes.

Hecate promises a real one

Right here on the fair grounds.

Just keep in mind the metamorphic

Properties of the earth…and, hey,

Finish up your chicken before you go.

She hates leftovers.

This thought from George Santayana:

If a short passage is poetical because it is pregnant with suggestion of a few things, which stretches our attention and makes us rapt and serious, how much more poetical ought a vision which was pregnant with all we care for? Focus a little experience, give some scope and depth to your feeling, and it grows imaginative; give it more scope and more depth, focus all experience within it, make it a philosopher’s vision of the world and it will grow imaginative in a superlative degree, and be supremely poetical. The difficulty, after having the experience to symbolize, lies only in having the imagination to hold and suspend it in thought; and further to give this thought such verbal expression that others may be able to decipher, and to be stirred by it as by the wind of suggestion sweeping the whole forest of their memories.

A vision which is pregnant with all we care for…

1.

Those ratty kids. Those names they put him through—

Like Little Boy, and Tiny Alpha Man,

Like Dog Head, like Krakatoa—my son,

He’s a volcano? They’re comparing him

To a volcano?—well, he saw it through,

And I guess he did see the explosion…

But you don’t know what you look like,

Do you?—or how tall you are, or big…

2.

…Until those photographs came out in Life—

With captions like:  A Giant, The Pictures

He Paints, Prometheus.  A cover story,

His body, log-like, gaunt. The whole country

Saw them. The world.  And it hurt him too, I saw

It in his eyes. He’d thought it was to be

About his painting, not a ghost story,

Not a freaky giant.  These days they’re famous,

These pictures, taken by a famous photographer,

But at the time, we didn’t know that or care

About it. This woman comes out, sits on

The porch with her camera, and takes

A few ‘shots’ of Harvey, and the next thing

You know, he’s in Life. Harvey was serious

About his painting. He had a few shows

Before he died.  He even sold a few portraits.

Harvey was seven foot three inches tall,

A giant man, with a six year olds’ thoughts

And mind. Even so, even as a kid,

He knew about Prometheus, he knew

A god lived in his soul, the ghost of a god…

Imagine that.

3.

Now I am become death the destroyer

Of worlds—for Prometheus also lived

In Little Boy—a very deep flame—for

Prometheus knew the universe at base

Was fire, that Little Boy was the fruition

And friend of fire…

And if f it seems stupid to think

Of modern physics in terms of a six

Year old…

Well, truth is, he was this giant with

His interior turmoil, with his pictures

Like ghosts stolen from the sun…ghosts

Stolen from the sun. Think about it,

How he did that—an amazing technique,

This self that lacked a proper self, or so

They thought. Heliochromic  thievery.

A kind of parallax process, a print

Of sight via sunshine via desert

And emptiness. Well, its dawn now.

The energy will surge across the mesa….

Can Harvey come out to play?

5.

Now, Franz Kafka’s take on Prometheus—

You know, the whole thing with the eagle,

The rock, his liver every day clawed out,

And every night, like fucking clockwork, it

Grows back for yet another day, Jesus,

One more day of feeding pâté to the birds—

Anyway, Mister Kafka’s thinking here

Is finally geologic. There remains

The inexplicable mass of rock,

He says, the substratum of truth, which fire

Cannot touch.  Prometheus it seems

Cannot reveal Prometheus. It will

Take Little Boy to show the world Truth,

It’s substratum and all: For those who are

Awake there is one common universe.

And it remains common despite the sleepers,

Despite those people who hid Little Boy,

Or think he’s unknown to us. Imagine! Unknown

To the Voyeurs in the Substratum! Hell

Itself is not unknown! Capitalize

‘Voyeur’! Capitalize ‘Substratum’!

Capitalize ‘Unknown’! You go ahead,

Take your armor, take your troops.

Capitalize ‘Troops’!

Capitalize ‘The World’!

We will still exist, you know, and not just

In the ‘substratum’…

6,

Now Lucifer was not dead . . . . or if he was I am his

sorrowful terrible heir;

I have been wronged . . . . I am oppressed . . . . I hate

him that oppresses me,

I will either destroy him, or he shall release me.

Damn him! how he does defile me,

How he informs against my brother and sister and takes pay

for their blood,

How he laughs when I look down the bend after the

steamboat that carries away my woman.

Now the vast dusk bulk that is the whale’s bulk . . . . it

seems mine,

Warily, sportsman! though I lie so sleepy and sluggish, my

tap is death.

7.

His first friend is ‘End Friend’. His crude scrawl spells

‘Fiend’ but we know he means friend because

He says ‘friend’. A second try, though, says ‘Ed’,

‘Ed Friend’, and it is so true to something

He knows, he rips the first to shreds and burns

It in the yard, burns ‘to the sun’, he says.

We don’t know where he got the matches or

The kerosene, but by the time Old Uncle

William smelled the smoke, it was too late.

Between the two of them they damn near burned

The barn and chicken coop down to the ground.

Ed Friend, huh? You see, there’s nobody out here

With a college education, or time to know

About art and all that, but he was real,

Ed Friend, eerie and real, not one of those

Crude things with thick splashes of paint like he

Used to do. This was different. Refined

And careful, the skin looked like it was real,

The eyes looked right at you, cat’s eyes. They said

The Holy Spirit painted it, but shit,

What’s that explain? My brother, you could watch,

Did it with a cheap box of paints we got

From Sears Robuck. His second friend was called

Tyson Mars, and folks started saying it was

The devil doing the painting—but Tyson

Was Harvey’s friend, his ‘pigment friend’ is what

He said. The sun’s pigment friend…

Hours, days, careful weeks

Of putting paint on the canvas. I watched.

It wasn’t the devil or the Holy Spirit

In the room there. I watched. There was no one

There. I don’t know if even Harvey was there.

The ghost was on the canvas.

1.

It has to be something like this. ‘A’

(He has no name as yet) is telling this

Preposterous lie to the womenfolk.

It’s also a proprietary lie,

Which means, although he senses disbelief,

He does not know the truth as yet, just lies—

But you’ve already guessed this part, right?—

Maybe he can’t, maybe he doesn’t even want

To know the truth—still, standing there, too late

To change his mind, he makes a bad decision

And tells the story like it was Collier

Who was lying, not ‘A’—Collier, the foil,

Collier, the character. To wit:

2.

Collier is sitting on the dais, and yeah,

He’s got a knife on his person, but no,

He’s not planning anything violent, no

Sic semper tyrannis, dude. So, don’t knock it.

The ground quakes—you’re surprised?—a drum roll, please:

Collier as critic, Collier as poéte maudit,

Collier as character. Collier the liar,

Collier, about to shout that thing about

Tyrants—but of course he must mean

The tyranny of words, or narrative,

Or simple story, or mind-in-the-world,

—Or all of them—because that is what

He wants to kill. ‘A’ is just the front man,

The stand-in for Articulation,

He knows that… but the sun is in his eyes,

There’s tension in the way he walks, a passion

We don’t understand, something alien

About his soul. Deep down, he’s not like us.

Intrigued by truth, interrogated by the gods,

Drunk on some nectar neglected by ourselves—

That is Collier. Collier, the killer, the crime.

3.

This proxy ego, emergent as Hell,

Thus gives its name to the imagination.

Call it Collier who saw both sides, Collier,

Fake philosopher, phony nihilist

Prophet, Collier who strode across the stage…

I saw it, it’s true. With these two eyes.

‘A’ in a splash of blood. Dead before we knew it.

Nothing to be done. The rest is silence.

(Okay, time out. A question for the crowd:

Who do you think could be saying all this?

Collier suggests we talk to Epimenides;

Art says his voice remains…beyond death.

What do you think? Care to vote? Raise your hands?)

But wait, wait, Collier cannot be dead….

For the future will emerge from this lone act,

You’ll see, the future tense, the future mythos,

The mythos that there is a future. To wit:

He will be dead someday… He has to be.

All things die. The syllogism is simple.

Too simple, you say? Okay, fair enough.

But Collier is alive right now.

Alive!

I know it.

He’s alive.

1.

Suppose two monks are searching for a river, for

A certain bridge. Suppose they think this bridge

Is magical, that it will change the water

Into salt—transform the river into salt-like tears—

And thereby let the monks enter the sacred lands

That lie ‘beyond horizons’. Just suppose this.

2.

Of course, they have adventures on the way.

Some stuff right out of Harryhausen—like a fire

Exhaling dragon, two two-headed vipers, and

Arachnids carrying poison spears that spin

Webs out of burning sulfur…Then they cry:

Childe Roland to the dark tower came!

3.

Because they do come to a river, and…

It’s wide and calm and shallow. No big deal.

Why, they could wade across right here,

Be done with it, the quest complete, a piece

Of cake. The monks are puzzled. This is too easy.

Not part of the quest topos. And no bridge.

4.

They stand and wait. A woman all in white

Is wading out. She beckons for the monks

To cross: rainbows and butterflies appear.

One monk thinks: This must be it. Perfecto!

A bounteous land. Don’t complicate. It’s good.

That is one of the virgins greeting us, for sure.

5.

The other thinks, this surely is a trap.

For one, she’s far too pretty—she reminds

The monk of Raquel Welch, that caveman flick,

B. C. something or other—and we’re missing

The point. We have to use the bridge. We need

The salt. The issue is the salt, a world of salt.

6.

Where nothing’s stable. Think of the effort just

To crawl through the white, blizzard-like arcades,

Your skin white, chaffed Giacometti-blue

And bruised. Pure salt supports nothing that lives.

This is an ancient metaphor, one monk

Points out. The pillar of salt. A consciousness.

7.

Of ruin. Of salt tears souring the land.

This quest topos is one of sorrow—both

Our monks are clear as crystal here: selfish

Satisfactions are what caused this.  ‘Mind’

And ‘mine’, you see, the self as shell, a salt

Mine. Turn the world into this? That bridge…

8.

For they do find the bridge. Somewhere there is

A bridge they call the Bridge of Sighs, could this

Be it? One monk starts the Childe Roland thing

Again…but shush, it’s scary here. This bridge,

It seems alive. Remember Heidegger:

The bridge gathers the earth around the stream.

9.

…and mortals keep in mind the vaulting bridge…

Or they forget that they too seek it out,

Are striving always to surmount the unsound

And common in themselves, to bring themselves

Before what the divinities bring: that

The common gathering remains the final one.

10.

Alberto Giacometti painted rivers,

Or would have if he’d lived, or would have if

He’d seen those churning waters with his bronze

Sculptures standing, etiolated and submerged,

In struggle beneath the breath of the bridge,

That vault that gathers rivers into seas.

11.

The salt seas.  All the waters, rain and rivers

Even the ice and snow, lakes, reservoirs

Will change to ‘tears of salt’: the bridge might be

The vault of the heavens, the monks, the stars,

The moon, the planets—and they cross each night—

Why movement is perfected in stasis.

12.

Why the two monks are statues on the bridge;

Why Giacometti sculptures en passant

Can battle rivers; why the mortals keep

The bridge in mind; why the quest topos

Fits a veil of longing over what cannot

Be longed for; why poetry lives in words.

1.

I don’t know, you just can’t beat a good parade—

And John Philip Sousa, either.  Either

The Colonel Bogey March, or Stars and Stripes

Forever—or—do both! A row of drums,

A row of trumpets, fifes and flutes, my fav

The glockenspiel, the cymbals, saxophones,

Sousaphones, of course. Then—then—the Mayor’s car,

The fire department, police cars, girl scouts,

Boy Scouts, the K of C—fucking A—even the

4 H Club wants in!  Still, it’s a strange, strange

Prolegomenon to silence, this parade.

Like, it could be an ancient battle of

The bands, like that Charles Ives’ thing where

These two bands march along Main Street, you know,

And pass each other playing all the tunes

They can imagine…and imagine they do it

Every day, music for everybody,

24/ 7. Some imagination, right?

But silence used to speak louder than that.

Turn off the lights, my dear. It’s time for bed.

The music of the spheres is greater still.

2.

…than simple sound, like it used to pretend

To be Sousa. But tonight we will speak

Of gentleness—really no choice—the eye’s

Plain version is a thing apart, the vulgate

Of experience—for that’s Charles Ives

Alone out there in the Commons, standing

Rigid with the cold, intent on that

Dark sculpture Saint-Gaudens built to honor

The men of the 54^th Massachusetts,

A kind of death mask for the union dead.

Yes, unimpeachable, the eye—and plain:

For veterans still alive and living out

Their lives in Oddfellows homes, some tied

In chairs to prevent aimless wandering:

The vulgate of experience—sure—and

A mind of song, too—for old Civil War

Ditties, for The Girl I Left Behind Me,

For Barbara Allen, you name it, a whole

Universe of crashing symbols which these days

Have to be ironic—sure—but surely this is

The special gift Mr. Ives brings to the world:

To take the irony out, leave the music,

And leave a gentle rain to fall on minds

That are more awash with death and friends…

3.

So—it’s a poem that the poem, and the painting of

The poem, the sculpture of the poem—its music—

Unique, must win for The Poem to win. The Poem

Beyond, that is, its genesis, thus.

Stuff that, sir.

Regurgitate that, sir.

Santayana would be proud, sir—

Thus, the poet whose name will bear no

Common inflection, Wallace Stevens, late

Again, thus cuts across the great Commons.

Aesthetic winds must muss his hair. Must win,

That is, must trump the form, just read Pater.

(He means that thing about all arts aspire

Continuously—continuously—to a

Condition of music.) But you could say

All arts condition music too, fructify

And feed music—they must. Thus: Take this bronze…

He stops, no longer late. The soldiers must

Be marching to some tune, some drum beating

Somewhere. It’s only silence now. Licentious

Demons! A gathering in the grass, a gathering of

The solitary: a sculptor did that,

—You ask—an art without a sound to share?

Sure, we could sing, or try to whistle, but

That genesis? The poem must win for the

Music to win. He stops, aghast: for freedom

To win, democracy… A ghost will rise

Above the field, this common field, they do

It every day. All the ghosts will rise. The war, sir,

The war between the mind and sky, sir.

Construct a syllogism…sir.  To win.

4.

Shaw, sir, Sir Robert Shaw, sir, reporting

For duty. Just in from Charleston, sir…

My God, he’s nervous, sweating, standing here,

A sometime sentinel, a silent soldier—

Who happens to be shitting in his shorts right now.

It was Charleston, wasn’t it? It seems

So long ago…that death thing…so…so fast…

He’s not a raw recruit, you know. He was

To lead those men, the Negros, lead and master,

Command them. And now, a tribunal? Shit.

…And had he really just called himself

Sir Robert Shaw? Well, smiles, a whole table

Of smiles. Very good,’ Sir’ Robert. I think

I shall restrict myself to ‘Colonel’ Shaw’,

Your last official writ—on earth—you know…

Avuncular smiles around the table. This

Will not be bad, he thought. They understood…

5.

They understood shit, is what they did.

Watch this ‘avuncular’ grin grow a great head

And start barking—like a dog, a frightened dog—

A growl of strange commands. Dogs bark

To sound so big and fierce, so brave—Aw, there’s

A good little pouchie—and because they’re scared

Themselves. Should Sir Robert stand his ground?

Should he ask for something more to the point?

Something clear and linear, a story he

Can understand? His life has been a series

Of reprimands—dogs bite as well as bark—

And that music—it’s Charles Ives isn’t it?—

It’s beyond death, this thing, a song: The thing

About the afterlife, it should be, sir,

Eternity—is that the word? It should

Be timeless contemplation, a formal

Final silence, adoration, skill

Where skill was lacking, in divinity…

He settles for a simple, timid question:

Am I to be punished, sir?

(I bleed the same color of blood they do.

I cry in pain. I eat, I sleep. I miss

My children. I miss a quiet summer’s walk.

I miss my youth, my wife, my dogs, the sun,

The snow, the grapes growing ripe, Gramp on

The porch, I miss the smell of the leaves burning,

I miss the music, the crows on the roof,

Roosters, swimming, getting stupid drunk.

I miss too much. Too much music.  This ought

To be the punishment. Too much music.

The sweets of life deplete the source of life.

O, I could prophesy…)

6.

Go ahead sir, say it all:

O, I could prophesy,

But that the earthy and cold hand of death

Lies on my tongue: no, Percy, thou art dust

And food for—

For worms, Sir Robert.

There, you have an answer.

7.

I hear a song beginning up the hill, a march.

Must be the high school band, tuning up.

A crowd has gathered. There’s distant music,

A band is coming cross the bridge. They must

Be volunteers, or soldiers on parade.

Look at those bright, new uniforms! I think

We’ll let poor Robert Shaw, so brave and fierce,

Return to ground with his dead memories,

Demons inside his head. I smell the sea.

The wind whips up the flags. John Sousa is

In town. Colonel  Bogey ‘s coming down

The pike. So go ahead, strike up the band—

The kids are out of step, for sure, the drums

Are way too loud, the trumpets bleat, those fifes—

My God! This is a racket on parade!

It’s like a merry-go-round gone mad…

Still, go ahead and get yourself a pair

Of cymbals, and I’ll do glockenspiel.

A battle of the bands! I knew it.

You can’t have too much music!

You can’t have too much music!