Ashes to Asses, Dust to Lust

For Gavin

Don’t misunderstand me, dear. I’m wed
to speculation, for our future is
not carved in stone. If my tight fanny fits
atop your cock, or it buckles, we shall

learn. For breakfast to exist in any form—
a gentle lay at dawn or Bloody Mary
at brunch—we must reserve a seat—at least
have a destination in mind. I have come

home from brunch, to find my house burning,
a smoke choked sky, and, to my astonishment,
laughed, lit a cigarette, happy I was
full and carried a toothbrush in my bag.

When the police allowed me back inside,
I cried a bit—it’s true—my windows smashed,
bed glittering with glass, that day destroyed.
But I was insured for fire. I found

no pearls among my debris, just CDs.
I open cases now—15 years
later—to find dead musicians veiled
in soot. Unplayable discs. These I replace

with new recordings. Life goes on.

A Dog’s Life

For Gavin

I can’t take this anymore—I’m sore—
leave me alone—get out of my head!
I closed my eyes five times today, felt you
knocking wildly against my prostate—as if
my prostate were my heart—spurting soul

each time I came. I licked my fingers to
replenish my insides. I am a husk.
My skin seems alien. I can’t touch myself,
even to wash, without feeling your
hands holding the soap. When standing

before the mirror after swimming, I
squirt moisturizing cream into my palm,
bend over, rub my shins, my knees, my thighs,
my muscles stiffen, like a giant cock
I am stroking in public. My body

must belong to you. I am a dog,
a Victor dog, a werewolf spinning round
in circles to the sound of a new master’s voice.
Whatever crazy music you desire
to hear me howling at the moon, I play.

Good Friday, 2009, A Day of Fermentation

FROM harmony, from heavenly harmony, 

This universal frame began: 

When nature underneath a heap 

Of jarring atoms lay, 

And could not heave her head, 

The tuneful voice was heard from high, 

'Arise, ye more than dead!' 

Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, 

In order to their stations leap, 

And Music's power obey. 

From harmony, from heavenly harmony, 

This universal frame began: 

From harmony to harmony 

Through all the compass of the notes it ran, 

The diapason closing full in Man.

John Dryden, 1687 

Gradus ad Parnassum

I had not planned to take any time off from blogging, but it seems I did. I attribute this to a couple of factors. Exhaustion (I have been very busy at work), poor internet connection in Queens (where I have been living on salmon, sweet potatoes, blood oranges, sex, and string beans with Yasu in Jackson Heights for the past couple of weeks), and a pitiful lack of ideas ( an endemic problem with me).

I returned to Connecticut last night. Today's burden of work is a bit lighter, and I find I have a bit of extra time to jot down a few lines of poetry.

I am going to take a self-consciously different tack toward writing. I have been doing a bit too much mock-epic, narrative, preeing, violent, quasi-cynical crap for a while, and I would like to try something more...mature? adult? nuanced? readable? I am not sure what the appropriate adjective here is. I am open to suggestions (even four letter ones.)

...


The point is: times change, people change, and poetry changes. We must keep up with ourselves, and with the times. I have been in an artistic rut. I have been reading my new collection of Elizabeth Bishop with great delight, and I have been thinking more seriously about finishing that MFA I started at CCNY a number of years ago, so I want to try something a bit more serious in tone. I want to start taking steps toward something larger. A poetic career? Who knows. Let's see how the next few months go.

...

So, here are a few baby steps toward that end. A transformative experience from 1977.


Bing


While I was sitting underneath the table
Whizzing marbles around my fruitcake tin,
Enchanted by the orbit one white marble
Traced in blue, thin slippers padded in.

Dad, did you hear? Ben Crosby's dead.
They just announced it on the radio.
Dropped dead in Spain, while playing golf. They said
A stroke. No—Bing? The radio said so.

My marble whizzed around a few more times
Before it shot off, like a bullet, straight
Across the kitchen as the doorbell chimes.
Must be the paperboy, collecting. He's late—

It's quarter to eight. The slippers shuffle out.
Ma, the neighbors say they've lost a kid!
And thawing stewed rhubarb under the spout,
An apron dipped, Go, hide yourself!

I did.

Orpheus

As a poet, I have often wondered what it must have been like to be Orpheus, the great Greek granddaddy of rhapsodes, bards, and beatniks everywhere. I wonder what kind of a person he was like? Was he as amorous as Ovid, for instance, or more of a family man like Nabokov? Did he dress up and get drunk, like Dylan Thomas, for Halloween? When I picture Orpheus, for some reason, I can never get the picture of Harpo Marx out of my head. To each his own, I guess.

Although anybody beating on a pickle drum in Union Square Station could induce a few felicitous souls already on drugs or disposed toward motion to dance, it takes something extra special, I think, a little bit of latent madness, or maybe malice, to coax a Megalith to move, or a cliff to clap. I have a feeling Orpheus was such a man. I wonder if he and I would have been friends?

An Anthem for Orpheus


Some animals were gathered in a ring
Around a poet, playing with a song;
He sighed and plucked a solitary string,
“It’s music. What could possibly go wrong?”

The lion lying there, beside the lamb,
Drifted off to sleep in the tall grass;
Brooks trickled in, and so did boulders, and
Humanity stood up, as if at Mass.

He handled his equipment with such skill
He held a brief monopoly on sound.
He plucked another string, and then another—til
A mushroom cloud erupted over town.

Some say this was the first experiment
Mixing religion, politics and art.
The town was made of music, not cement:
Construction in cement had yet to start.

Ad Astra

Since it has been miserably cold here in New England, I spent much of this weekend sitting in front of the fireplace, sipping sake, and watching season 1 of Star Trek: Enterprise downloaded from iTunes. Hence the little hiatus from blogging.

I watched some of the series when it originally premiered on UPN. I found it more likable than Voyager or the Next Generation, neither of which I enjoyed all that much, since I found them a bit too preoccupied by the preachiness that seems to infect the future. (I plead ignorance to Deep Space Nine, having only see a handful of episodes of that series). But my schedule being divided precariously between work, the Y, and home to die (rinse and repeat) I was never able to keep up with Enterprise in its original broadcast run.

Being a child of the 20th Century, I have been and always shall be a fan of The Original Series, but it is nice to make some new friends. Watching Star Trek with my dad on our old brown Zenith color console (see above) was one of the seminal memories of my childhood. That TV was a wonderful, solid machine. It must have weighed 9 tons. But like many electronic organisms, it was somewhat fragile on the inside. It had tubes that would glow orange, and occasionally pop, with a fizz of ozone and insualtion, and need to be extracted and tested on the tube tester at Radio Shack, on Payne Avenue. My father liked to fix things for himself: cars, TVs, toasters, even watches. His father, my grandfather, was a jeweler, and he repaired watches for a living, in a little shop on Main Street, in downtown Buffalo, in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. I think this must explain my obsession with prosody--time.


...


And how does any of this relate to poetry? Only tangentially. In one of the episodes of Enterprise, Captain Jonathan Archer shows his Vulcan science officer an astronomy book he read as a child. I had many such books myself, thanks to my Aunt Janet, my father's sister, who always took an interest in my scientific education, and who did something mysterious, related to music, at Moog. Every now and then a microscope, a package of books, or a geology set would appear from Aunt Janet in the mail.

As I was drifting off to sleep on Sunday night, I thought about Johnny Archer's book, and I tried to recall all of the poems about astronomy I had ever read-- but I really couldn't come up with very many. There is this one, this one, this one, and this one. That's all I could think of, off the top of my head.

My favorite astronomical poem is the one called "Mayflies." The last few lines of the piece are a bit clunky, I think, but that word quadrillions in stanza 1 is worth the price of admission--absolutely breathtaking, isn't it?

Before encountering this poem, I had never heard such a number ever mentioned in a poem before, or in a science class, where large numbers (for the sake of convenience) are usually expressed in abstract scientific notation. It is nice to learn that in an advanced, technical society, such as our own, words have not entirely lost their powers of enchantment.

The truly wonderful thing about the word quadrillion, for instance, in the conext of Mr. Wilbur's poem, is that within that word another word, and a whole other world, dances. And this only becomes apparent through the poetry.


Kind of cool, huh?

Nos Morituri

It has been a fairly busy and productive Friday thus far: not only did I remember to pack a pear (in my gym bag) for my 5:00pm snack, but I spent my morning commute comfortably ensconced in an uncrowded train, close to the lavatory, reading the Wikipedia entry on Sir Flinders Petrie.

I am not sure where I first heard the name Flinders Petrie, but it is a name which I have never forgotten. Until this morning, I thought he was the microbiologist the eponymous dish was named after, but it turns out that he really was an Egyptologist of some accomplishment. He seems to be one of the first archaeologists to insist on photographs of his excavations, instead of engravings, or sketches. He is less famous for this:

Upon his death in Jerusalem in 1942, influenced by his interest in science, races and different civilisations, Petrie donated his head to the Royal College of Surgeons of London, so that it could be studied for its high intellectual capacity. His body was interred separately in the Protestant Cemetery on Mt. Zion. However, due to the wartime conditions in the area (then still under threat from Rommel's attacks in the North African campaign, which were not repelled until the Second Battle of El Alamein later that year), his head was delayed in transit from Jerusalem to London. It was thought to have been lost, but according to the comprehensive biography of Petrie by Margaret Drower, it has now been located in London. (Wiki)

...

I suppose I started thinking about Sir Flinders because I ripped a CD of Flanders and Swann songs to my computer while I was sitting on the chaise lounge in my golden kimono this morning, having my second morning coffee. My mind easily bounces from one sonority to another, especially when stimulated by caffeine, and I always like to see where these little lines of inquiry lead.

Though they rarely lead to getting laid, I never wind up at a dead end, nodding off, and waking up disoriented in New Haven. I try to limit my day dreaming to sunny mornings, since Grand Central is my ultimate destination, and it is the last stop on the train.

...

Speaking of stopping, here is a poem I started working on on the N-Train, to Brooklyn, one crisp, caerulean Sunday afternoon in November of 1998, not long after I moved to New York. I wrote all 5 stanzas between 8th Street and DeKalb, but I only solved the problem of the last two lines when I was on the treadmill at the gym last night.

I am not sure if the N-train stops at DeKalb anymore though. There is a note on the MTA NYC Subway map which says it doesn't. This may be an old map, so I can't verify how the N-Train behaves in Brooklyn these days from my own experience. I hardly ever go to Brooklyn anymore. Only to visit my friend Maria. Or to go to BAM.

Next month I am going to see Patrick Stewart in Macbeth at BAM. With Maria.

Life is good.

Nos Morituri
Or, Surprise!

Beset with beasts on every side
The child flourishes with pride
Short sword, trident, leaded nets—
Any toy the Emperor lets
Him choose to prove himself before
The crowd—from slave to senator:
Winning is the only thing
Which matters in the circus ring.

But as the day grinds slowly on—
Away from optimistic dawn
Into the humid afternoon
(Where Ovid made the ladies swoon)
The slaughter comes to a stand still:
No animals are left to kill.
And out of breath, but inclined to jest,
A cocky teenager smirks, Next!

Alas, the Next which now appears,
Only the Vestal Virgin cheers.
An exit opens, like a mouth,
In the Arena, to the South:
Upon the savage sands now stand
Fresh adversaries, with fresh hands,
Holding something—no, not swords—
Exchanging strange, Germanic words.

Failing to keep a grip on his wits,
Our hero hacks, and bites, and kicks
Opponents in the groin and head,
Lamenting that he left his bed
With Daisy for this—Destiny—
Who left him, like an amputee,
To hemorrhage from a tourniquet,
Or turn of phrase, like, Seize the day!

Well, by this time (let’s call it dusk)
Booed abroad, and caked in dust,
His arms about to fall clean off,
The soldier sighs, “I’ve had enough.”
He salutes Caesar, quits the field,
And leaves the audience to yield
Their lives should some barbarian,

Grown bored with games, pick up a gun.

The Idle Brain.

Not much to report today--at least not here, my friends--not here in River City.

The world is surpassingly beautiful. The sun is out. The azaleas are out. There is a white cabbage butterfly hovering over the horseradish patch. And the fiddlehead ferns near the air conditioner have started to unfurl.

A zen-like Zephyr is sprinkling sakura over the flagstones leading from the porch into the backyard. The rusty core of an apple sits on a small plate to immediate right: my passport out of Paradise.

Before the Heavens alter these details beyond recognition (there are thunderstorms in the forecast for Tomorrow), I thought I should try to capture at least the furtive flavor of this moment before the rains arrive. The air is thick with the intoxicating odor of lilac.

Yes, the lilacs, with their deep green, heart-shaped leaves. They have us practically surrounded. Aren’t they lovely? I have just come back into the house from clipping a cluster. They now sit in a crystal vase on the dining room table.

While I was busy with the shears and the bushes out back, I put the finishing touches on a villanelle that rubbed his eyes open yesterday morning. It all began quite innocently enough, as many of my projects do: as a very ordinary, very commonplace hard-on.

While I cannot say what happened to that hard-on over the subsequent 24 hours, I can assure the curious reader that I dedicate this poem to no one’s anatomy in particular, just the glorious, transformative power of Music!


Variations in the Key of C
A Baroque Masterpiece

When I consider the curve of your cock—
In even this mild, mathematical way—
I notice strange images start to knock:

Sticky things, mostly, things made of rock—
A petrified marshmallow showed up today.
He either was stale, or scared by your cock,

So, I sent him away. A while back Bach
Appeared at my door. He started to play
A sort of pipe organ. Bach did not knock.

Nor did his friends. He arrived with a flock
Of cherry-faced cherubs and a golden bidet
With the weirdest fixtures—curved like your cock.

Now, very few stores keep these in stock:
Which is why I thank God for Bach and eBay
Whenever strange men with strange instruments knock...

Speaking of knocking, I think I forgot
To mention something. What I meant to say
Concerned a key, more than it did a cock:
This is for you. No need, you know, to knock.