THE ETERNAL GRATITUDE

December, blazing and jovial--It's my season

and I spend my walks in the evenings staring obsessively at Jupiter early in the east, by midnight pulling its blue kiln toward the south. Waxing moon, thin and mean, growing farther and fuller the deeper into this first week we pursue. I can't help reciting Frost to myself, "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars--on stars where no human race is." And though I'm obsessed with that beautiful sad lunatic John Clare, re-reading his descriptions of leaves, frosts, bees, thrush, autumn walks "Into the nothingness of scorn and noise / Into the living sea of waking dreams" mostly because I feel as he does

in that late asylum poem: "I am the self-consumer of my woes, / They rise and vanish in oblivious host" I am also reciting a funnier Auden version to myself and to my little bat-faced dog as the Santa Anas pour a new chill through our nights in Southern Cali, "Admirer as I think I am / Of stars that do not give a damn:

          Were all stars to disappear or die,
          I should learn to look at an empty sky
          And feel its total dark sublime"

Auden makes me laugh as much as Frost makes me lonely, sleepy, agonistic, bruised.

I wish I was funnier on the page, but it's all so serious. What a reaper with this ridiculous grim! So much meandering broken moody recitation, I think it's the moon. I think it's Jupiter in my sights. I used to live in a second floor loft in Arizona, with windows open in every direction on the desert, night-ripe, thicketed with a sea-like blackness. I painted the walls an inner avocado--it had a golden quality, that antique green--and I littered it with silver bronze and Mexican painted crucifixes. All night I could mark the constellations, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter as they drew close threatening to poison themselves into the moonlight dissolve, and then retreat, flinching, pulling, struggling away on their separately entranced halcyon trajectories. The waves were furious and small. I lay awake, I lay awake, and stared to all that outer phenomena.

I've been thinking about hatred. Hatred as clarity. Hatred as insight. The criminal as heroic philosopher. Flannery O'Connor's Misfit, or the boy murderer in Simenon's Dirty Snow, two distinctly different kinds of villains, but who achieve a kind of brutal understanding of the world. I'm thinking of an episode of This American Life in which child rapists and murderers play Hamlet in prison, and the kinds of incredible insights they lend to these roles, insights that are nearly impossible to distinguish or to reconcile with the despicable violences of which they are admittedly guilty. How is it that good men are terrifically incapable of goodness. No pleasure but meanness? Perhaps it's the mirror

that is most true: men terrifically incapable of goodness are good men too. No meanness but pleasure.

We are alive between the aster and the star.

I'm thinking of my recent obsession with Thomas Bernhard, whose long monologues as novels remind me of Javier Marias' in that they proceed in a kind of real time, in which a whole novel happens in the course of a single night, and the internal monologues of a single character illustrate the many digressions of a mind at dis-ease. Except that Bernhard's characteristic tone is straightforward loathing, not faced with mystery so much as disdain, contempt for the unforgivable privileged masquerade of social mediocrity. What's amazing is that his characters, if you can stomach a whole novel filled with personal disgust, pay off in the most striking ways. The final sentences of Extinction, for example, are so stunning for the simple justice that so much hatred allows his character to mete, even at his personal expense.

More than reading Gottfried Benn or Thomas Mann, maybe only as much as reading Hamburger's translations of Celan, reading Bernhard makes me want to learn German. To speak it like a sex talk. Here's a long passage from Bernhard's Woodcutters translated by David McLintock: I've been opening the book almost daily lately, re-reading it aloud to myself, and then, almost as if in prayer, simply the one word over and over, negligence: 

"And I told myself that this year alone, which was not a very long time, I had attended the funerals of five of my friends. They're all dying off one after the other, I thought, most of them by taking their own lives. They rush out of a coffeehouse in a state of sudden agitation, and are run over in the street, or else they hang themselves, or suffer a fatal stroke. When we're over fifty we're constantly going to funerals, I thought. People who were born in the country go back to the country to kill themselves, I thought. They choose to commit suicide in their parents' home, I thought. All of them, without exception, are basically sick. If they don't kill themselves they die of some illness that they've brought through their own negligence. I repeated the word negligence to myself several times; I kept on repeating the word--it was as if the word gave me pleasure as I sat in the wing-chair--until the people in the music room noticed, and when I saw them all looking in my direction I stopped repeating it. They were all friends of mine thirty years ago, I thought, and I could no longer understand why. For a time we go in the same direction as other people, then one day we wake up and turn our backs on them. I turned my back on these people--they didn't turn their backs on me, I thought. We attach ourselves to certain people, then suddenly we hate them and let them go. We run after them for years, begging for their affection, I thought, and when once we have their affection we no longer want it. We flee from them and they catch up with us and seize hold of us, and we submit to them and all their dictates, I thought, surrendering to them until we either die or break loose. We flee from them and they catch up with us and crush us to death. We run after them and implore them to accept us, and they accept us and do us to death. Or else we avoid them from the beginning and succeed avoiding them all our lives, I thought. Or we walk into their trap and suffocate. Or we escape from them and start running them down, slandering them and spreading lies about them, I thought, in order to save ourselves, slandering them whenever we can in order to save ourselves, running away from them for dear life and accusing them everywhere of having us on their consciences. Or they escape from us and slander and accuse us, spreading every possible lie about us in order to save themselves, I thought. We think our lives are finished, and then we chance to meet them and they rescue us, but we are not grateful to them for rescuing us: on the contrary we curse them and hate them for rescuing us, and we pursue them all our lives with the hatred we feel toward them for having rescued us. Or else we try to curry favor with them and they push us away, and so we avenge ourselves by slandering them, running them down wherever we can and pursuing them to their graves with our hatred. Or they help us back on our feet at the crucial moment and we hate them for it, just as they hate us when we help them back on their feet, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. We do them a favor and then think we are entitled to their eternal gratitude, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. For years we are on terms of friendship with them, then suddenly we no longer are, and we don't know why. We love them so fervently that we become positively lovesick, and they reject us and hate us for our love, I thought. We're nothing and they make something of us, and we hate them for it. We come from nowhere, as people say, and they perhaps make a genius of us, and we never forgive them for it, just as if they'd made a dangerous criminal out of us, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. We take everything they have to give us, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and we punish them with a life sentence of contempt and hatred. We owe everything to them and never forgive them for the fact we owe everything to them, I thought. We think we have rights when we have no rights of any kind, I thought. No one has any rights, I thought. There's nothing but injustice in the world, I thought. Human beings are unjust, and injustice prevails everywhere--that's the truth, I thought. Injustice is all we have to hand, I thought."




. . . . . . . . 

CALACAS NEGRAS, FLORES BLANCAS

Early November's a good month for painting your guitar like a bullfighter's suit of lights, black as the night sky littered with constellations. Throw in a few beheaded marigolds, a human heart pierced with a sword, a white rose laughing like a skull's head, and a rooster scratching a bit of fire into the dirt. Throw in a paletero like a blonde christ with wet wounds in his hands.  Throw in the virgin wearing her headress of knives and bare tits and opened arms. You could be painting the velvet interior of my cousin's lowrider Impala, or the tattoo across his back. Let's write it in Old English, Vivir Mata.

Something about the new cold taste in the air. My Day of the Dead. And here comes Lila Downs' weeping singing in the lower register about a bolt of lightning that withdraws like a lover's betrayal:


quiero a dios a ti te pagen / con una traicion igual 


para cuando t'emborraches / tu sepas lo que's llorar


songs on days like this have taught me / sorrow in revenge is true

love, or maybe it's all the badgood / telenovelas of my childhood.

. . . . . . .

"Who knew chopped bone could sing?"

It's a perfect day to re-read Rigoberto Gonzalez' new book of poems from Four Way Books: Black Blossoms. His interests remain romantic and grotesque, the fable that is not so much elegy as it is the song of the flowering undead visitations of memory, memory that rises "like lavendar, the fierce blossoming of beauty and mortality."

I still have my zombie fetish left-over from October, in case you couldn't tell.

The first thing you'll notice about this book is how carefully crafted it is. Each poem asserts a rhetorical force in its chosen form: poems of strict stanzas in tercets or couplets or quatrains. Also the recurrence of the sonnet. I can't help but remember Frost's complaint that free verse is like playing tennis without a net and Gonzalez' web here is built into the book itself. In four sections and 62 pages it's a focused read that offers the reader space to really appreciate the work. The third section is a single long poem, "Vespertine", and I love the weight of it there on its own, this elegy for a dead friend whose memory returns to the author while he's driving: "simple mercies / love silence though the engine / has its own sordid tale".  The "tale" is of utmost importance to this poet, who never misses a chance to remember real experience into a kind of Grimm's fireside fable. But Gonzalez's fables are not tales of morality. They appear and revel in that horizon in which Eternal Enemies, as Adam Zagajewski has called them,  get married. Love and Time play dead together.

It's the locomotion of Gonzalez' imagination in these poems that's so attractive, the dead have new lives spilling out of his enjambments, and they come back with all of the gruesome wreckage of their bodies, hopes, demons, their sense of humor, their lusts and dreams. The first section is a gathering of dramatic monologues or ekphrastic poems, the second a sequence of sonnets "Frida's Wound" and the final section a sequence of "Mortician" poems, a character reminiscent of say, Komunyakaa's Thorn Merchant, or  Vasko Popa's The Little Box or Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito.  What we find in each poem is the fact of Gonzalez' imagination peeling outward in re-creation. Metaphor in his poems is a doorway to the life of a fable, and the black flower is an inverted meditation on death as life. Death, Gonzalez reminds us, is something the living do.

. . . . . . . .

Flor de Fuego, Flor de Muerte


            Los Angeles

            Cempoalxochitl. Marigold. Flower,
the scent of cold knuckle delights you, as does

            the answer to death's riddles:
What's the girth of the hermit tongue once it retreats

            into the throat and settles like a teabag?
What complaints do feet make when they tire of pointing

            up and fold flat like a fan of poker cards?
Where do the dead hide the humor of the ass crack

            when the buttocks unstring their fat?
When you sprung into the earth, all other colors coughed

            and gave you the gift of sick-bed
sullenness and the contagious texture of tragedy:

            Once there was a widow who exchanged
her heart for your head, but you outgrew her body,

            protruding from her chest like an unsightly tumor.
Despite that she carried you, cradling you in her hand

             during mass, a solace in the memory
of her husband's scrotum. If she heard a hymn

             in your petals it was the sound
of trousers unzipping. If she could name the smell inside

             the folds of your corolla,
she kept the word wet against her tongue. The widow

             held you tighter then. So you stung her
palm in protest and then crumbled when she flung you

             like a shooting star--
all awesome arc and damned glory of evisceration.

             To pay her back you pierced the shivering
heart she balanced on your stem. You loved her

             all over again because she turned
yellow with death, because she was like you,

             something dry to come undone
in pieces in the pitted ground. Flor de muerto, flor de fuego,

             you humble down life
to the last ember. Even the phoenix tired of sewing

             its bird bones together
and couldn't outlive you, oh mortality muse, oh end.


                                                                               for Maythee Rojas

. . . . . . . . .

I've got the book under my pillow like ripped starlight under a stone.

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can.

. . . . . . . . .

STOLEN SHALLOWS

Solitude and twilight on the late shores. Cold blaze

of the waves' steady visitations. Footstep, hint of moonlight

into the soft dark sand: fist, or halo.

If I leave something white there, if I stand

my body against the night's three darknesses, ocean,

wind, and black calm . . . what

will I call this hour? Of my flesh broken

against the fleshless machinations the always resonant

flooding of time? Storm. Sickness. Waste. Belief. My frail

small human breath in the loud and emptied, emptying, gleam.

The night-flooding mind. Milkweed.

. . . . . .

I come inside and read Carl Phillips and know what it is to face that boundary between mind and world, the sensual boundary where sex and prayer collide. Speak Low, his latest book, in unafraid of the difficulty of describing human emotion, human mind. Our predicament, they seem to insist, whether it is love or history, is a metaphysical one. That is, it is faced with an understanding of abstraction hinged to experience. Plato thought that what exists lay beyond experience, but these poems use nature as a kind of relative explanation, a pathetic fallacy which helps us to try and understand our human considerations of time, love, history, faith. What I love most about Phillips is his unapologetic use of abstraction as a way to consider human experience--he uses a language most poets (perhaps schooled in the standard "show don't tell" arena of MFA programs) avoid for the most part altogether.

Patterns are of particular significance to this book: the physics of light, water, shadow, as well as the movement of animals, birds, and how the human mind might observe or interpret them. His poems have this almost archaic quality that allude to historical moments and intellectual movements of the Enlightenment at once. They are wrought, moreover, in a way that describes what is most familiar to us, though private, intimate, and even erotic: this, for example, is from the poem "Rubicon", a political point of no return, a river Caesar crossed illegally in 49 B.C., devoting himself to war against the senate, and also a game in which the loser's points are tallied for the winner:

. . . that moment in intimacy

when sorrow, fear and anger cross in unison the same face,

when at first can seem almost

a form of pleasure, a mistake as

easy, presumably, as it's forgiven."

History and philosophy here take on a life in the face of the beloved in the most alluring and attentive way. The more I read Phillips' poems, the more dissatisfied I am with a poetry of narrative(?) description. There is a weight to these lyrics that demands a secondary attention, our experience of the abstract world of emotion. How is it we've interpreted not just what we've seen in the world, but what we've felt?

. . . . . . .

Beautiful Dreamer

And when the punishment becomes, itself a pleasure?

When there's no night that goes unpunished? The larger

veins show like map work, as in Here winds a river,

here a road in summer, the heat staggering up from it

the way always, at triumph's outermost, less chromatic

edges, some sorrow staggers. Parts where the mud,

though the rains are history now, refuses still to

heal over. Parts

Untranslatable. Parts where, for the whole

stretches, vegetation sort of strangling sort of makeshift

sheltering the forest floor. To the face, at the mouth

especially, that mix of skepticism, joy, and panic reminiscent

of slaves set free too suddenly. Too soon. --Which way's

the right way? New hunger by new hunger? Spitting

on weakness? Raising a fist to it? The falling mouth falls

farther. Opens. It says, I was the Blue King. I led the dance.

. . . . . .

Eliot, in his 1929 essay, "The Metaphysical Poets" makes a distinction between the Romantics and their 17th century predecessors:

"it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."

This is precisely what I love about Phillips: his thought is his experience. Symbolic, or fragmentary, the world takes place in his poem, and his speaker feels them. He does not fail, even if he does not explicate, the many disparate parts of his knowledge and identity.

I'm not a critic, I'm a commentarist--I read so that my inner life can save me from the brutal ugliness of this outer one. I write here about what I love, in a shameless way that a real critic has good reason to berate. A real critic may say something about Phillips' abstraction in that it goes too far for an average reader, that it obfuscates issues of identity, gender, race, class, all of those realms of experience we hold so specific and dear in this age. But when I read him, I feel that his poems teach me to read in a silence I had not before considered, a silence like prayer, a kind of devotion to an inner life I crave. I think if you read closely enough, you'll find these identities: the historical self and the fantasist: the poet and the philosopher: desired god and beloved flesh: all are given semblance. Yes, they are difficult to learn to read, especially, I think, for a novice reader, but they are deeply necessary in that they refuse to simplify the complexity in which the human mind renders itself.

Much more can be made of the comparisons between Phillips and Donne, nowhere perhaps more evident than in Phillips' collection The Rest of Love, in which the lover becomes a god of leather, commandment, relentless conditional belief. But this later collection seems more allusive to spiritual hymnals. Its tone is one of sad reminiscence for a spiritual freedom: to love? To understand death? To be free of bodily suffering? I'm not sure, exactly, perhaps all three. I do know that the joy of these poems comes from the middle of a pain, an isolation, that is basic, something Frost might have written about, inherent, too human, often unspoken for.

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can!

. . . . . .

Landfall

From here, I can see that ritual is but a form of

routine charged with mystery, and the mystery is faith--

whatever, by now, that might be. Twilight. The usual

eyeful of stars appearing, looking the way stars at first

always do: locked; stable.

My friend, to whom

sadness had once felt almost too familiar--Step into it,

he used to say, stare up and out from it--tells me now

he misses it. He wants to know does that mean

he's happy?

In the dark, he turns to me. The silences

rise to either side of us: silence of intimacy when

estranged from risk; of risk itself when there's no one

to take it--nobody willing to; silence, by which the dead

can be told more easily apart from the merely broken . . .

. . . . . . .

A KIND OF LISTENING SEEMS TO BE ANSWERING HIS SIGHT

. . . . .

When I think of narrative poetry, I think of poets whose style is intimately bound to the manner in which the "I" of the poem is consciously directing our sight, thereby directing our insight. The action of the speaker, we trust, will direct us through a movement in language that at some point will become inward, orphic, will achieve that satisfying flight into pre-verbal irony--well, what Dickinson says about the pleasure that makes a "body so cold no fire can ever warm" it--and this environment of the poem is bound to the speaker's conscious choices. In other words: A movement of the eyes across the bare world translates into a movement of poetic insight.

Think Robert Frost's "Desert Places" where stanza by stanza we're looking with the speaker, outward at the "night falling fast, oh fast," downward at the blankness of "benighted snow," upward into "empty spaces / between stars--on stars where no human race is", blackward, and finally inward "so much nearer home." This is true in some of the poets I greatly adore, say Dobyns, Gluck, Stern, Ai, Clifton, Doty--in their work there is a voice driving the poem through the physical/historical world, which--by the end of the poem--results in a corresponding intuitive arc.

In Frost is a model that perhaps contemporary poetry hasn't forgotten:

"Desert Places"

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs,
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

. . . . .

I'm trying to articulate this because I want to make a distinction in the poetry of Ralph Angel, whose consciousness in a poem is not one of action at all. In the way that the sensual elements themselves seemed to call forth an imaginitive consciousness in Elizabeth Bishop's work (a poet very much of the Eye, and one whose poems very much direct us), Angel too is summoned by the synesthesia of a few human worlds at once. Consider just the first lines of his new collection:

Whoever has a quiet mind

up on the roof the season turned the bath towels purple.

Quiet is the demolition.

Mind is how we filter and understand the sensual details of being. Mind is what we make of all the sensory information radioed to us from the Quiet. Between Mind and Quiet--that's where we exist. In the noise of body, and commerce, and community, where Angel's work captures incident and emotion. Captures, reflects, antennaes, recieves. These verbs enact Angel. His poems are like filters of experience from the mindside, as it focuses, listens, waits for, messages, tunes in to the mystery of wonder. Think Whitman: "I loafe and invite my soul".

Friends and Strangers, Angel's consciousness is a kind of invitation in the poem, that in the end snags moods. The thing about this guy's work is his exploration of complicated emotions that at times cross themselves out, leaving us with an attention to the mystery of chance and combination: "That / that the future is ashes / and a kiss on the cheek. This cup /of coffee goes down like chocolate. A footbridge / the eye leaves among cliffsides / of steam. // There is no shame / in failure. No lost, / or blue unfurling courtyard." These are poems of things coming together, and failing to collapse into a single clean aphorism. Surprisingly, this makes for very rewarding poetry. A poetry both vulnerable and curious. A poetry of the air, if one is at prayer. Our wonder, answerless, is wonderful.

. . . . .

"Sampling"

I'm standing still on 10th Street. I'm not the only one.
. . . . .Buildings rise like foliage and human touch.

And so shall dig this cigarette as my last, and rattle trains, and
. . . . .rot the fences of the gardens of my body--

or without the harmony of speaking here the many sounds
. . . . .and rhythms that sound a lot like anger

when anger's silent, like a painting, though in the stillness of the
. . . . .paint itself the painter nods or waves or asks for help.

I'm not the only one. The pharmacy's untitled. The stars are
. . . . .there at night. In this humidity

the forlorn singing of the insects clings to anything nailed
. . . . .down. A whole bag of things I'm working

through, some set things that I know, like words I know that
. . . . .mean "from one place to another," the word that means

"to carry." I'm standing still on 10th street. I'm not the only
. . . . .one. The dark tastes of salt and oranges. Its eyes

wander round and round. I am its thousand windows. I think
. . . . .about the future and the sea. And stay.
.