PINA MORTE

All summer, where have I been.

Amnesia of mediocrity. The walk again and again and again into a wall.

Then, school ends. I have a week off before I fall. To sleep. Read. Steal books. Touch my garden, pot fuschia, kalanchoe, kingshade. Reality as if it were a dream. The moon of a skating rink in the deep center of an abandoned mansion. The dead slump of a woman rolled into the darkening shawl of her blood--like the prey of a spider sleeping now in its raw cocoon. Dark glittering and cold. Half-eaten moon blurring over the sea. Night mist. Ghost mist.

Reading old news. Summer news.

Pina Bausch is dead.

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

I saw Pina Bausch twice. Once ten years ago, in a performance of "Carnations". Then last year at UCLA in a performance of "Ten Chi".

"Carnations": dogs, men, and women:

Color, speech, and repetition:

Is the flower a grave.

Is Form the Burden.

And the threat of the body: Helene Cixous:

"a given love merits a given death":: Kazuko Shiraishi:

"a leap is already / a tragedy".

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

Come on, honey--if you've got a demonside, let's dance.

. . . . . . .

SUMMER DUBIE AND THE STORMS OF TWILIGHT

It's after one and I can't sleep. I think it's the insomniac shellacked moonlight across the dark harp strings of the sea. I feel roped to the mast like one of Odysseus' crew. Stormed by blackness, rain, and the nightsong of a siren.

Pulled off my shelf Norman Dubie's The Insomniac Liar of Topo, and I don't know if he's my rope or my mad heart's need.

. . . . . ,

At Sunset

Fucking get back. I have cut

the white paper gasket

out of the apple. Yes,

it's a seed packet

like the wife's whalebone jacket

ruling the fat lamps of the Orient.

The faint straight lace of it,

sounds.

Ashes and wormwood

in a brand drawer.

The horses' testicles tossed

into straw for the cats.

Was it not mad John Clare--

that night, and it mad, last night Clare saying

it was a sound

going off in his head. A mainmast snapping.

The man standing next to you hears it.

Suddenly you're naked running through pasturage

like a woman's hair.

. . . . . ,

Dubie has this masterful phrasing that delivers a Frostlike alliterative richness to each sentence. His locomotion is matched by an unapologetic Victorian gothic sensibility, one marked by romantic visitations of a preoccupation for foreign exotic ware and a cinematic quality not unlike say late Francis Ford Coppola, Youth without Youth, imagery palimpsested over idea, as the camera pulls back upon the larger landscape of a larger historical scene. Small things carress their demons in his shadow. A remarkable intensity of the music makes his poems ever more intimate. He has Scarlatti's jealous intensity against the inevitable failures.

His eye is on the dream of history; History, like the dream inside each sleeper wakes.

History

like the linkage of the human nights of many strange and fragment visions.

. . . . . ,

The Tantric Master, Lord Marpa, Twice Dreamt of the Prophet, William Blake

The great translator thought

he had suffered the sleep of a cloudless day

in a boat of skins

on a cold and black inland sea.

Elohim, the eye of minor periphery

broke bread with him on the moonlit water.

He washed his beard and hair

and said your daughters are now stepping from furnaces.

But if we wake

by their drying looms

with a mountain of salt between me and them,

then the diarist wife

has taken these margins of yellowing shoreline

from us.

London sleeps with its cousins and sisters all winter

while naked surgeons cross through the city

bearing torches. . . well, citizens,

this is the cult of worms

who by physical inches of devotion are measuring a churchyard.

The owls forming a morbidly obese question

from Ovid.

The Word is always out weeping in the evening

refusing the hot custards, stealing

from sick and defenseless travelers.

The last Republic is out too, burning on the horizon.

Phoenician men sitting on the purple rocks

mending their nets, chewing

on roots, laugh

and then walk out across the water.

They've been doing it for centuries,

that is,-- mending their nets with laughter.

. . . . . ,

Dubie believes in ghosts, particle physics, quantum radioed spirituality. One gets a dizzy, wine-ful feeling when reading his poems. They are hallucinatory, and you don't seem to wake from them so easily. Suddenly daylight has dreamlike proportions, and personal history wormholes forward backward into the lives of artists, politicians, and other nameless lovers. Brutal, gorgeous, and playful with accident. I love these poems for their adjectives, their Shakespearean descriptions, and for their sonnetto echo.

. . . . . ,

Winter Rains off Pointe Du Hoc

The wind is a failure of forms

a calamity of content--it is

cutting the white peaks from great

green waves

making cold abbreviations of salt

that are the pith eyes on ghosts.

Across the cliffs

in the fields above the water

martyred dead rest in some soft

tropic of wind, some tropic of the hidden variable

that pierces sinew, neck,

or the helmet. The suits

praise his valor, the gunnery sergeant Nash

from Missoula, Montana, who says,

the bear nests up in the wind

with a smile of margarine,

has courage, and

the bear is my friend--

when the bear stumbles,

you ba-bas must understand,

the bear dies large

not like a pigeon at a Legionnaires convention.

. . . . . ,

My favorite poetry always brings me back to Lear. Lear and Odysseus.

Dubie is a kind of hybrid hero, Cause and Care of my solitude, my own heart's ruin.

He visits me tonight with mean wild storms.

. . . . . ,

SUMMER WITH AN OILY DARK

This summer: school is not a childhood moon

California is dead cash

AKA shoot me now shoot me up my eyes

Night is a white drip

My war is thirsty

. . . . . .

"The Dull Flame of Desire (Modeselektor Remix for Girls)" Bjork

"I'm In LA Trick" LMFAO

"Angel" Madonna

"Friend of Mine" Lily Allen

"Crazy In Love" Antony & the Johnsons

. . . . . .

"As of Monday, Aug 3, 2009, at least 4,330 members of the U.S. military had died in the Iraq war since it begain March 2003, according to an Associated Press count."

Documented Iraqi Civilian Deaths: 92,519 - 101,006:

"Monday 3 August: 14 dead

Anbar

Saqlawiya: suicide bomber kills 5.

Babil

Iskandariya: car bomb kills 1.

Hilla: bombs kill 6.

Ninewa

Mosul: 2 killed in separate incidents."

. . . . . .

"I'm rockin' Vans / I'm in the sand / I got a rebel&vodka upin my han- / D!"

. . . . . .

Somewhere in my head is an essay that reads like an essay and not a schizolisting.

Still got a current for Fellner's idea that a good political poem should do certain things.

Still got a midnight like a white bat on my neck.

Somewhere I'm more than my blood's advertisement.

. . . . . .

A book I love: Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa.

A plant: Kingshade: bloodleaf before it's shot: that sootpurple, morbid cabbage

A dream: my grandmother dies but first she sews her pills into her pillow, and some buttons, and a gold cross, and some shapes the living cannot see but the dreamer can say thank you.

weepy falsetto: "your touch / got me looking so crazy right now / your look / your look"

. . . . .

"When our hands caress bullets & grenades,

or linger on the turrets & luminous wings

of reconnaissance planes , we leave glimpses

of ourselves on the polished hardness.

We surrender skin, hair, sweat, & fingerprints.

The assembly lines hum to our touch,

& the grinding wheel records our laments

& laughter into the bright metal.

I touch your face, your breasts, the flower

holding a world in focus. We give ourselves

to each other, letting the workday slide

away. Afterwards, lying there facing the sky,

I touch the crescent-shaped war wound. Yes,

the oldest prayer is still in my fingertips."

K's book is not so much a book against war, as it is a consideration of the warsome impulse.

His contemplation of the duality between murder and love is matched with kaleidoscopic flexibility by a muscular practice of poetic form. In three sections:

a sequence of (mostly) Petrarchan sonnets in which a historical or mythical war story as octet (Cain&Abel, Odysseus&Penelope, warriors counted by Homer and nameless tribal hunters) is mirrored by a sestet that contemplates erotic love as combat.

a sequence of more standard free verse poems that meditate on wartime implements in history (The Helmet, The Catapult, Grenade, Warhorses, Surge), Art (Guernica, The Clay Army, The Panorama, The Warlord's Garden) and Wartime places (The Hague, Twin Towers, Clouds, The Crying Hill)

a sequence of tiered couplets "Autobiography of My Alter Ego" in the voice of a bartender vet that illustrates with imagination and pinache the life of a soldier who murders, loves with desperation, loses everything, and must face the history of shame, prayer, loneliness, nationalism, hunger, and the frankly delectable brutality of his own experience.

The book is itself a sequence of variations on the theme of war in which Komunyakaa flexes his muscles, strikes with imagistic fervor, syntactical precocity, and with a direct, meaningful voice that both wonders that our human capacities for war and love are archetypal, inescapable, and violently beautiful.

"HEAVY METAL SOLILOQUY

After a nightlong white-hot hellfire

of blue steel, we rolled into Baghdad,

plugged into government-issued earphones,

hearing hard rock. The drum machines

& revved-up guitars roared in our heads.

All their gods were crawling on all fours.

Those bloated replicas of horned beetles

drew us to targets, as if they could breathe

& think. The turrets rotated 360 degrees.

The infrared scopes could see through stone.

There were mounds of silver in the oily dark.

Our helmets were the only shape of the world.

Lightning was inside our titanium tanks,

& the music was almost holy, even if blood

was now leaking form our eardrums.

We were moving to a predestined score

as bodies slumped under the bright heft

& weight of thunderous falling sky.

Locked in, shielded off from desert sand

& equatorial eyes, I was inside a womb,

a carmine world, caught in a limbo,

my finger on the trigger, getting ready to die,

getting ready to be born."

William Logan finds K's book overly sentimental, but I find his review of it rushed and insensitive. Who else is writing such viper-ed lyrics, with consideration for the line and a sensual rendering that takes the current wartime predicament seriously? Here, Bullet is well-reviewed and popular, but I don't understand the virtual invisibility of Komunyakaa's timely and more mature voice on the subject.

"Ah. Abu Ghraib.

Guantanamo. Lord,

if the dead could show us

where the secret graves are

we'd walk with bowed heads

along the Mason Dixon Line

till we're in a dusty prison yard

in Angola or Waycross,

or we're near the Perfume River

or outside Ramadi. You see,

the maps & grids flow together

till light equals darkness:

an eye, a nose, an ear, a mouth

telling a forbidden story,

saying, Sir, here's the skin

growing over a wound,

& this is flesh interrogating a stone."

. . . . . .

The dead body is a witness what

do the living see summers of

eucalyptus coastlines burning nightly

green soot in their mouths

bright shroud

skin

flag for my living

I'm addicted to the thought of your

absence color

of a sunset passing into ash

. . . . . . .