ELEPHANT DERVISH

Peter Høeg's latest novel translated into English, The Elephant Keepers' Children takes its departure from other literary mystery/crime novels (in my little stack it belongs with say, Natsuo Kirino's Grotesque, Manuel Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair, and more recently Roberto Bolaño's Woes of the True Policeman) is that it's actually a picaresque meditation on faith, the sources of religious belief, the human impulse before the doctrines of the world, all of which teach inward detachment, prayer, the dark night of the soul, in order to meditate and commune with divinity, whatever that may be. That paradoxical song in which chanting to lose the self will fulfill it.

Narrated by Peter Finø, the youngest of a family of highly precocious and memorable characters, a gangly assortment of misfits--three children and a dog--of a pastor and wife duo who fraudulently find ways to enact miracles, gaining them fame and fortune across their Danish island, and eventually a police record, the novel is the account of a young teen's struggle to listen to and understand the mysterious metaphor of the inner lives of the book's adults. "They're elephant keepers without knowing it," the only daughter, Tilte, says of her parents when the children realize they are con-artists, even if their fraudulent schemes were done with the best intentions: "to sweeten our childhoods and our futures with gold and platinum bars." On the one hand this is the story of a family told from the young teenager's point of view, the reliance the children must have on one another since their parents are neglectful and criminal.  "Tilte and Basker and Hans and I realize that if ever you should hold ambitions of being indulgent toward others, then you must also be able to forgive their elephants," admits narrator about halfway through the novel.

On the other hand, this is a mystery novel, in which the children must track down their missing parents, escaping not only the police, the Bishop, and child services, but also investigating the crime scene: their parents' hidden rooms, forgotten clues like a wood shaving, a cigar wrapper, ending up as stowaways on a yacht by impersonating religious mystics, and as a high class john secure the help of an entrepreneurial prostitute. The parents it turns out have planned to steal the priceless jeweled religious artifacts from an upcoming religious conference, and the children are in pursuit. The myriad of plot twists does the work of a mystery novel, and we find ultimately that that plot thickens, as the parents, in their meticulous planning, the children learn, have stumbled onto a terrorist plot.

The prose itself reads like a comedy, and the precocious quality of the children is at once as unbelievable as it is unforgettable. Høeg's genius is in making what might otherwise be a YA novel into a relevant and moving bildungsroman, and at 498 pages, I wasn't so sure I'd be that interested, as least not as I was for Høeg's last brilliant novel, The Quiet Girl. And yet, I read through the whole thing in two days. Skipped the pool parties and bbq's and fireworks and all the nationalistic madness for this thriller. A thriller that is nothing less than a meditation on human spirituality contemplated by a fourteen year old high school football star:

"I try to refrain from seeking solace in the thought of some miraculous reprieve. I refrain from seeking comfort in the thought that most likely a light will simply go out, or that Jesus will be waiting for me, or Buddha, or whomever else you might imagine stepping forth with a broad smile and an aspirin to say it won't be anywhere near as bad as you think. I refrain from imagining anything at all. The only think I can do is to feel the weight of the farewell none of us can ever avoid. At the very moment I sense that everything will be lost, and hence nothing is worth holding onto, something happens. . . . What happens is that a little gleam of happiness and freedom appears. Nothing else."

Steal it if you can!

. . . . . . .

KNELLS IN THE HALLS

I'm a newcomer to the poetry of Laura Kasischke, and finally picked up a copy of Space, in Chains, her eighth collection (not to mention 6 novels, and two YA novels). What's interesting is the rapid variability of her line, which breaks completely free of neo-formalist constraints yet still seems to retain its music. She's her own thing, completely, and I like that. Sometimes the lines are short, metaphorical meditations, and at other points she's in the middle of a prose passage, all in the same poem. This affords her a great deal of lyrical mobility, and everything seems to be available to her. I caught myself more than once thinking of Dickinson, her daily preoccupations, her private thoughts about the incidents of life, a moment of looking into the garden and what does she have? What else, but a little magnificent song. Knells in the halls, and at the end of one, a fallen vase, a tulip like a limbless doll. A still life, with broken glass and bees.

The first two sections of this three section book I found myself trying hard to navigate new territory. I stumbled, and swam, and swam when I should have hiked, and hiked where I should have swum. I had the distinct feeling I was camping back in the Colorado watershed, and the first few climbs were difficult, but by the third morning I understood how to pace myself, and climb, and stop, and breathe, and I found a lake high in the mountains, and my brother and I lay down on the flat rocks in it and let the door open up inside of us, where the red beating filled each of us in our own separate grave-site, with our eyes closed and the sunlight furiously far off.

By the third section of Kasischke's book I was trying to tear out every page, to hide it, crush it in a pocket and find it to read again, and find that same amazement. Dickinson, and also, strangely, Frederick Seidel. I can't explain it, these mighty twins.

These kinds of sentiments are why I'm writing this blog, and not an essay.

Here's a poem from the book, that I want more of:

The Pleasure Center

It was tucked for us into the hypothalamus. Thank you, our lopped-off heads
rolling all around the earth. Thank you, radio, movies, booze.

And thank you, too, racquetball court, video game, throbbing bass in the car
at the stoplight as it pulls up next to ours.

Little fragment of a magnet.
Shrapnel in the attic.
Child on a bike.
Old woman on her knees beneath a suffering Jesus.
ADULT SUPERSTORE NEXT EXIT!

All of it crammed into a thing the size of a tadpole's eye.
That terrifying tininess. Thrilling, flickering, wet. Space and Time writhing
around in a bit of slippery shining. God decided to stick that in our minds.

And even the miniature golf course on fire.
The fatal dune buggy ride.
The smell of some teenage girl's menthol cigarette.
The whole amusement park, and the cotton candy--that
pink and painful sweetness beside you on the seat of some rollercoaster's silhouette
in the pinwheeling sun as it sets.

We were perfect test subjects for this.
As God is my witness:
I woke one morning when I was seven to find

the most unhappy man I've ever known
laughing in his pajamas. "What

are you laughing about?" I asked him,

and he said, "I don't know."

. . . . . . .

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can!

. . . . . . .

A SHORT STACK: THE GREATEST OF SARCASMS

Here's a list of novels I think belong together:

And they're all related somehow to Kafka's The Trial, or better yet, The Castle:

And from there, to Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terrible, or The White Book:

The Color of Summer, by Reinaldo Arenas
The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares
Pubis Angelical, by Manuel Puig
Our Lady of Flowers, by Jean Genet
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the Edge of the World, by Haruki Murakami

I'm always wondering where are the women on this short list? I'd include of course something by the great Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology, or Pussy King of the Pirates.

Perhaps something by Jeannette Winterson, HD's novels, or Cixous'. . .

In any case, my little stack is for the beautiful nightmare, phantasmagoria and peregrination. The tragicomic novel in which characters parade grotesquely in the face of absurdity.

My most recent addition to the list is Edith Grossman's latest translation (Yale U Press):

The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell, by Carlos Rojas. In it, the famous poet, assassinated by Franco, shot in the back with two bullfighters and a school teacher and buried in an unmarked grave, details his confinement in Hell, a rising spiral of theater rooms, each dead man to his own, alone, to view onstage the scenes of his own life:

"Eternity was the greatest of sarcasms, an illogicality more absurd than perishable life. In this untransferable theater before his trial, he was nothing but a spectator of his past in an endless succession of shades condemned to the same wakefulness."

Death is an eternal wakefulness, and Lorca meets the living version of himself, an old man who refuses the Nobel Prize, and teaches on faculty in Ohio, if only he had fled Granada and not returned. His last day alive plays on the theater, and we witness his telling interpretation of events. "I wanted to write a dream" Rojas writes, and he has. This short, 200 page novel is a dream like a sonata is a dream. In my dream the other night, it was sunlight, and his hand was combing my hair, and he called it The Treehouse Sonata, his favorite. I was mesmerized, and woke up as if it were a memory and not a dream. I hope it's waiting for me in some theater where I can go back again. I hope the feeling of being asleep feels like the marigold.

Lorca was murdered when he was 38. Mendelssohn died at 38. The same age I am now. The number is a strange condemnation, and a consolation, a capacity: "The real injustice is the destiny of men like me, born to be someone and doomed to be no one." Oh Rojas, oh Lorca, oh Alchemy.

Steal it if you can!

. . . . . . .

CRUEL SUMMER

I was excited to find a copy of Luis Negrón's first collection, Mundo Cruel, translated into English by Suzanne Jill Levine, the fantastic biographer and translator of Manuel Puig's, especially considering the short blurb on the back by Antonio Jiménez Morato: "Negrón is perhaps the most intimate and unsuspected heir to Manuel Puig," an assessment I find partially offensive and distracting. This smart collection of short fiction put out by Seven Stories Press looks and feels like a poetry collection--it's a mere 91 pages of fairly large and easily read font, 24 lines to a page, a good 10 to 15 lines shorter than most contemporary books of poetry. Still, it's size is part of its appeal. I love it actually. You can carry it around with you. You can hide it under your pillow for a night.

Jiménez Morato's assessment is bothersome because once you begin to read Negrón's collection, perhaps the only solid similarity between he and Puig is the fact that they're both gay. I'd have to think more about this, but my initial reaction was irritation. The only story in Negrón's that even approaches a stylistic inheritance is an epistolary one, "For Guayama," in which the writer is leaving letters and messages for a friend who owes him money, money he needs to pay to have his dog's fur coat treated so that it can be embalmed and stuffed. Otherwise, the stories are built on the clear voices of its characters who tell them. He might have some debt to Puig there, but I thought more of Reinaldo Arenas' great tragicomedy, The Color of Summer, a scathing depiction of gay life under Castro in which all our homosexual versions are caricatures running around in the flamboyant madness of a persecution from which the only escape is death, or America. It's dark humor is funny and terrifically sad at the same time, everyone, including Arenas, is laughing at the monstrous condition of the world in which identity itself is heroic, and the punishment for difference is extreme suffering. What can we do, but put on our wigs and pull down our pants and give in to the pageantry of our inner lives and laugh loudly in the face of it?

So too, the characters in Negrón's stories are themselves. The whole book is set in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Negrón's hometown, and he does a stunning job of opening the doors to private conversation, private lives, and he transforms the town into a complicated maze of brutality faced with exuberant promiscuity. This is a portrait of the gay life of Santurce, and I'm so grateful for it, mostly because it feels like a portrait of my own gay life here in the states. This is the genius of Negrón's work--he's given voice to the gay kid beaten up at home and at school, voice to his fearful homophobic religious zealot relatives, voice to the gossipy wit-lipped queen, voice to the insecure and overly-quaffed and unloved, voice to the man who's lover dies, voice to the macho father who loves his gay son no matter what. These are touching vignettes, striking for their stark humor and the vulnerability of characters who you both like and dislike at the same time. Take the old gossip of "La Edwin," who can't wait to call every friend he has and tell the story of La Edwin, the closet case, who tries to seduce a straight man and fails:

"He said the part that bothered him most was all that wasted energy. . . You know he talks that way. Waste? Waste? Girl, you don't know what waste is. But, I'm going to tell you. 1985. Seven. Not one, not two. Seven of my best friends including my lover--and no more and no less than 8 months of being in a relationship--all died! Pum, pum, pum! One after the other. That, honey, is what I call a waste. So, girl, stop with all these experiments and nonsense and accept what you are. Queer. Q-U-E-E-R. Your'e a queer. 100%."

As a collection, Negrón's builds quickly and hits its peak with the penultimate story, "The Garden," the story of a man who lives with his lover dying of AIDS and his sister. You'd think with such a morbid topic these stories would be bereft and sentimental, but no, they're filled with sharp portrayals of real people who have to face the real miseries of life with laughter, in love with their own perfections, and he makes a celebratory condition of the monstrosity of our "unacceptable" lifestyles. Negrón isn't afraid of complication, and his portraits illustrate without judgment, giving us depictions often opposing viewpoints without allowing any of them to have complete power over another. In the title story he revels in the juxtaposition of two friends, one vain and insecure, the other melting into this first lover in a public parade kiss.

Mundo Cruel is an excellent read. I'd love to give you a copy. My hopes are that Negrón will continue to write, and to sustain the voices of his stories. If I had a criticism, it might be that the book is prematurely published, it goes down fast if memorably. I can imagine it 400 pages long, a novel comparable to something Puig or Arenas would have written, so that the portrait of Santurce takes on the dimension of the pageant our private lives deserve.

Steal it if you can.
. . . . . . .

ROACH LAMP

My favorite poem by the late Lucille Clifton inhabits the athletics of destruction. She takes a moment from an infested kitchen and couples it with the tyranny of historical despots. Think Hitler's Germany, but also Idi Amin, Mobuto Sese Seko and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Africa, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Balkan massacres of the 90's, or even the murder of over a million Iraqi's since Bush trekked us there. The brilliant thing about Clifton's poem is that it inhabits an animal violence in a domestic setting, and makes our propensity for violence not only reasonable, but justifiable.


cruelty

don't talk to me about cruelty
or what i am capable of.

when i wanted the roaches dead i wanted them dead
and i killed them. i took a broom to their country

and smashed and sliced without warning
without stopping and i smiled all the time i was doing it.

it was a holocaust of roaches, bodies,
parts of bodies, red all over the ground.

i didn't ask their names.
they had no names worth knowing.

now i watch myself whenever i enter a room.
i never know what i might do.


If you've ever had an infestation of ants, or roaches, or termites, you know the panic, the blind fury, the animalistic reply to the moment of defense, that territorial cleansing, that takes place when we feel threatened in what psychologists call our primitive "lizard brain." The feeling is also a dervish. A passion, in the religious sense. It's the same kind of ecstatic annihilation of the senses that happens to St. Teresa of Avila when she has a vision of her breast pierced by a sword. The fury of sexual release, which we spiritualize. Clifton kills her roaches in an ecstasy, she delights in it. Killing is her revelry. Her feast. She is one of the Bacchantes tearing apart the limbs of Pentheus in her intoxicated frenzy. And afterward--her self-awareness is full of awe and disbelief and recognition. The final couplet has a post-coital air of the orgiastic sublime, in which we find ourselves bewildered. That this kind of cruelty is something housed within. We can hardly believe it, that this is the kind of person we are. A blank, emptied self asking, Who am I?

I remembered the poem last month when I read Clarice Lispector's novel The Passion According to G.H., just put back into print by that dynamo of a small press, New Directions (who put out some of my favorite works in translation, recently the short works of Bolaño and Javier Marías' masterful spy trilogy). One always thinks of Kafka when the Roach is mentioned, for his satirical fable of estrangement (though I've always preferred The Trial). Lispector's novel is a much more dangerous novel than Kafka's, and more domestic even than Clifton's poem. G.H., a sculptor, has fired her maid and descends into the bowels of her house, at the end of the long hallway where the maid's room is, to clean it out. There she finds a chalk drawing and sees the outline of her self, an omen, like a police outline of a murdered body on the wall.  When she opens the empty closet, a roach startles her, and she faces it, her totem, wearing a mask. She slowly closes the closet door on it, so that its insides break through in a glassy white paste, and then watches it. The brutality of the act is deliberate. She pauses. Waits. Stares into its face. Her own face is lit by its dying. She tastes it. "My unreachable present is my paradise lost," Lispector writes.

The tragedy of the self is not understandable, though G.H. struggles to make shape of this, her inner life in a peace-less communion with her actions. Her mortal desires. Her humanity challenged by her ferocity. Her passion is her self-awareness--like Nietzsche's superman, she can only test her limits by committing an act of murder. But Lispector's is more intense, because her vulnerability is that much greater--G.H. is hyperbolically sensitive. She is killing a cockroach. The cockroach is her lover, her accuser, and her doppelganger. There's a lot someone can say about gender in the text as well, the white paste she must eat and know, the roach as superior mother, the mask, the whole novel lit by this domestic encounter with a sexually reflective horror, that primitive, prehistoric insect. And G.H.? A woman individually in search of what the poet H.D. called the "fragments of the Eternal Lover":

"The deepest murder, the one that is a way of relating, the way of one being existing the other being, a way of seeing one another and being one another and having one another, murder where there is neither victim nor executioner, but a link of mutual ferocity. My primary struggle for life. 'Lost in the Fiery Hell of a Canyon a Woman Desperately Struggles for Life.'"

Lispector is an intimate genius. Nothing happens in the novel. She literally walks into the room, and finds the roach. And yet in the margins to my book I've written the names of literally dozens of other writers/works she has a dialogue with: Kafka, Kristeva, Nietzsche, Macbeth, DeSade, Bolaño, Cixous, the Kabbalah, Heidegger, Coleridge, Ibsen, the Torah, Hamlet, Dostoevsky, Arenas, Steinbeck, Bret Easton Ellis, Tosca, etc. and so on and on. She is the kind of writer who's privacy is rare, and challenging, and brave, and certain. I'd rather spend my midnights quietly with her than with anyone else. Her murderous lamp.

"I give up and the less I am the more I live, the more I lose my name the more they call me, my only secret mission is my condition, I give up and the less I know the password the more I fulfill the secret, the less I know the more the sweetness of the abyss is my destiny. And so I adore it."

It's nothing if not a difficult read, but wholly worth it. Steal it if you can.

. . . . . .

THE MOONLIGHT IS A BROKEN WINDOW

Last week I read Marjorie Perloff's Frank O'Hara: A Poet Among Painters, a critical study of O'Hara's work in the middle of which I felt unhinged and suddenly able to read a few contemporary poets in a new way, poets like John Ashbery and Sarah Vap. I might call this moment Opening a Broken Door, or

The Moonlight is a Window. My first loves fall into two camps, poets like James Wright and Ai, with a modernist flare for the lyric line, and Jean Valentine, whose lyric is abstract--a meditative consciousness full of oblique reference. Mark Doty's essay "Ghost Sonnets" published in Jean Valentine: This-World Company, part of the University of Michigan's Poets Under Discussion series, sheds some rhetorical light on why so many of her poems have a classical resonance for me; their music is clear if their subject is not.

As ever, there are too many books, and not enough time to read them--much less time to write about them. Just now the California Fall has swept in, something off the coast is washing the leaves of the Chinese Banyan and my windows are open on a half moon outside, the spruce across the street are stabbing the night with a darker, softer, more mellifluous passion, life and death belong to me. They steer and bend forward like great sails. I want to walk. I want to be alone.

Perloff's book-length study explores O'Hara's realism, his relationship with the abstract painters of the 50's and 60's, painters like Motherwell and Jasper Johns and Grace Hartigan and Norman Bluhm and Helen Frankenthaler and Jackson Pollock, placing his approach to the poem in context with Abstract Expressionism and in reaction to Lowell's confessional mode. O'Hara has less in common, I'd say, with Michael Burkard and Sarah Vap and with Jean Valentine, than John Ashbery, though I feel as though reading Perloff's explanation of O'Hara's "Personism" helps me as a reader to approach these other poets, their momentary meditations, the consciousness that moves in their poetry without narrative, their mindfulness.

In the final chapter to the book, Perloff makes a smart comparison, contrasting the metaphysical restraint of Ashbery's sentences to the exclamatory jargon of O'Hara's syntactic ambiguity and phrasing.  How often have I tried to read a whole book of Ashbery's and found myself drowning suddenly in a comical phantasmagoria without a horizon? Reading Perloff's assessment of O'Hara reminds me that life is like that too, a sequence of external experiences. Full of meaning, and meaningless. Today online the new 9 gigapixel zoomable picture of 84 million stars in the milky way, jeweled and clouded with galactic dust. What a silly void, full of such bewilderment, mesmeric and glittering filth. But it's ours. O'Hara is a poet of surfaces. The poem for him is a canvas of action, of contrary tensions in which Time is fluid, and cubist. It happens all at once.

To John Ashbery

I can't believe there's not
another world where we will sit
and read new poems to each other
high on a mountain in the wind.
You can be Tu Fu, I'll be Po Chü-i
and the Monkey's Lady'll be in the moon,
smiling at our ill-fitting heads
as we watch snow settle on a twig.
Or shall we be really gone?  this
is not the grass I saw in my youth!
and if the moon, when it rises
tonight, is empty--a bad sign,
meaning "You go, like the blossoms."

One criticism of O'Hara's collected is that it's full of little useless moments too, and I might make that same claim for some of these other poets--what do we call them? Post-post-modern? Post-confessional? Hybrids? Whatever. "So much depends" on so little, after all. My own work is too sentimental and garish, but I like a violent splash of color, an offense, my little stain.

. . . . . . .

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.

. . . . . . . . .

BELLES LESTRANGE

It's a pale shield that stabs and shakes out of the dark moment of a tree. All the shrubs and armaments open in the rain and shudder. Little kings in the dull monotony of the rain. Limelight on the Glass. The moon is green. From what other galaxy.

I don't know why the rain brings me here. I love the bruised sky. The hysterical vanishing, and from the black streets a kind of dawn. The constellations in the grass are made of broken brittle glasslike mercury.

Listening to songs that sound like the names of flowers: Sweet Louise, Princess of China, The Sun Will Rise. Folksy fingered guitar-strummed stereo-licks. Loud. Roughly Petaled.

Norman Dubie's latest book The Volcano from Copper Canyon. I haven't yet read a review of his recent work that says anything I care to repeat--no one knows how to talk about his work. They talk up his intelligence, his historical gravitas, his visionary detail. What I love about his new book is his sense of fucking humor! The human being lit up by a bit of starlight is monstrously funny. He's intense and playful, and like a monk of something sublime, he knows the instant is to flash and perish, and we flash and perish to know it.

. . . . . . . .

It's November but it feels like Spring.

Poetry is a funny king.

. . . . . . .


"The Song of the Strangelet"

The sailors are proper envoys
to a picnic table, hard-
boiled eggs
rotating in a field of salt--
chrysanthemum petals
like a discharge in the trees
and the abduction in the evening,
whole stadia of magnets
showing teeth. Two swiss
playing basketball
with rifles and cigarettes.
The algorithm in an open field
abducted by a romance of wheelbarrows--
science like all superstition
fondles the grim ignorance
that is chance, chance
of course is the teakettle
waking father by the fire
that could be a particle accelerator
liberating its first ghost,
a machinist extrovert
standing at the end
of a lensing
twelve thousand galaxies in width--
he waves at the youngest of sailors
who shows
him the middling digit of proverb's three,
our very ether
ruptured by it. Who could
eat at Joe's
                  after this?


. . . . . . . .

I stole it, and I liked it

and I liked the secret hold of it

. . . . . . . .

The ragged white roses
grinning wet

and faceless in the growing darkness
have skeletal poses

on the corner of Olive and Fountain Boulevards

. . . . . . .

HARPSPEED

Rain and ache. Today in Southern Cali the storms are in, though it feels like we leapt from fog to fall, with only a few bruisy bright summer days in between.

I've got my love locked down.

Antony and the Johnson's re-make of Beyonce's first solo hit "Crazy in Love" playing on repeat.

Gray, green, black, silver, neon and night. Little lightspeed harp of the rain.

Increasingly seasonless. And old. Honey. The lines, the lines . . .

Thomas Bernhard's my new saint. Reading Extinction, a booklength monologue of an heir who must return to the estate, to a family he hates and who hates him in return with a silent, submariner's loathing. Something about it reminds me of Howard Sturgis' Belchamber, a gorgeous, sad novel about another heir for whom it all falls apart, though that novel is filled with the poetry of a sad gay queer who lingers over every detail as if it were a cologne commercial, all incense and extreme close-ups of hemlines and sneers. It makes me think of Wilde's descriptions in Dorian Gray, they're fast, cinematic, piercing. Bernhard has the movement akin to Banville, without the dense fits of passion. Bernhard's character is a thinker, and a vain egomaniac. Don't trust him.

. . . . . . . . .

THE ETERNAL BLINDFOLD

A bell rings in the middle of Dostoevsky's long story about a husband, a wife, and her lovers. Fast, energetic, moody types--and like Shakespeare, Dostoevsky is obsessed with types, the Suicidal Devil, the Crazy Karamazov, the Lovesick Idiot, and so on--I don't know how I've missed The Eternal Husband before, but I'm glad to find it again. It's a quick read to cover the kaleidoscope of human emotion: laughter and death, sweet admiration, friendship, hope, hate, beautiful lost love, fits of passion in a dream, and all as Mucholsky in his brilliant study of Dostoevsky's life and work asserts, in one of the most focused, and in the author's own words, "harmonic and balanced" structures he's ever been able to control.

It's fast and sweet. Boccherini's Quintet No. 4 in D, the fourth movement, a fandango for guitar and strings. Milos Karadaglic's recent recording. You can drink it in a day.

"The object in life of which he had had such a joyful glimpse had suddenly vanished into everlasting darkness."

Which reminds me of Eduardo C. Corral's poem up at Gwarlingo.

Corral's poem recalls Robert Frost's "Desert Places" in that a speaker looking celestially outward, gazing at the midnight external, finds himself staring into the center of the mortal self, into the center of a human night. Simic, while writing about the work of Jane Kenyon in Orphan Factory has said about the short lyric of 10-20 lines that the proof is in its voice. His assessment of Kenyon reminds me of both Frost and Corral: "the distance to her at times appears infinite, and that is the cause of her meloncholy. . . . Lyric poetry for her, to paraphrase Chekhov, is that illness for which many remedies are prescribed and for which there's no cure."

The locomotive night is falling fast, oh fast, and in Corral's little coffin for cut moonlight the speed of the vision, and the allure of the poem, relies on the malleability of his metaphor. Like the poets of the deep image in the 60's, or as Bly preferred, the psychic image, Corral is invested in visionary description, and seeing the crescent moon through the midnight window becomes wringing out a ghostly dishrag on his face. The human fever is relieved by the cold rag, and the field of white appears. Like in the work of great romantics, sickness is sight. Transgressively, we find the speaker looking into this white, bare kingdom, the inner landscape of bone. He plucks the thorn. The only truth available to a poet in search of beauty is death. The distance the poet finds is not cosmic so much as it is infinitely small and inside. Like Corral, one has to climb into his grave, sit cross-legged and close his eyes to see The White Nothing. In its Emptiness, Nature is the white night of the self. Even the voice has no where to hide. The elliptical pace of the poem is as necessary to its success as the metaphor, the deep image, the psychic transformation, but I can't get it to copy here. The speed of Corral's lines, breaths, and image-making is true of most of what I've seen in his forthcoming Yale prize winning collection, Slow Lightning.

I'm going to steal it.

I think I now I'm moving on to some Beckett, something with ominous constellation.

. . . . . . . .

OUR SIZE OF SORROW

Something somber and triumphant at the same time, something like Respighi's "Nebbie" sung by Pavarotti, who I saw at the Met once begin in a whisper, next to a piano, a lullaby that ended in a death cry, a silence that ended in a splendor, a galaxy-sweating supernova, black and robust and pouring painfully, a golden, wound-colored tenderness, enough for all of us. . .

The inevitable downfall of the ambitious, shrewd, daring, practical Queen Cleopatra, Pharaoh and Goddess Isis, who murdered her brothers and her sister and from whom we inherit the 12 hour day and monthly calendar, the census, our economic practice of using denomination marked monies, patroness of the arts, libraries, languages (having spoken 9 fluently herself), her city famous for its diversity and love of the theater and wit and laughter and dramatic celebrations and lavish Ptolemaic processions, its insurmountable wealth, gold and grain, all eventually taken as spoils and adopted by the Romans who wrote her as the historical villain of the ancient world and whose conquerer named the last month of summer after himself to commemorate his victory over her turncoat manic-depressive Dionysus, giving her children to his ex-wife his sister, August.

History is better than literature. Stacy Schiff's biography is a welcome read. It offers a portrait of a murderous family history, the impressive successes of the girl queen who was married first to Caesar and next to the greatest Roman general of his era, Mark Anthony. She was feared and loathed by the Romans, who were a developing nation of dogs, famous for brutality in war and public restraint, their misogyny apparent in both their philosophy and their politics. Monklike and without splendor. Or money. They needed Egypt, and her downfall was the rise of the western world as we know it. A culture that prizes the celebration of libraries, artistry, pageantry--a rebellion-free reign of education--sounds too good to be true, and it's shocking to imagine an ancient community in which 1/3 of all businesses were owned and run by women, in which women had rights to hold position and even take their ex-husbands to court. The difference between a history driven by the Romans instead of the Egyptian Queen is something like the difference between what anthropologists say is a lost evolutionary line--if we had only evolved from the the peaceful, maternal communities of the Bonobo, instead of from the violently territorial, paternalistic chimp.

What's even more striking in Schiff's book is the final chapter, in which all our particularly American sensibilities are defeated in the Queen's defeat. Her death is humiliating beyond belief. No amount of hard-work, determination, ingenuity or belief can help her. "The Secret" with its insidious message that your life is the outcome of your desires, that your suffering is your own fault, and that success is a result of your good wishes, the faux physics of the "laws of attraction", fails. Great men of our adored history are here painted in mediocrity and deception. Octavian, a lesser warrior than Mark Anthony, Cicero, bitter and grudgeful, Herod, scheming and weak, make a formidable alliance against the foreign lover queen and the sell-out general. Even Mark Anthony is moody and temperamental. Depressed when he is defeated in battle, even suicidal and in silent exile. The one unsung hero is perhaps swift Agrippa, whose January flight through the Mediterranean surprised Mark Anthony and whose arrow landed fatally at the end of that summer, changing history and making Octavian what he is to us now.

Shakespeare's play, I was surprised to find, is actually very accurate. I'm grateful though for Schiff's account, which abstains from making assumptions about Cleopatra's sexual ferocity, or her romantic desires, offering us instead a portrait of someone whose ambition and success were only matched by a terrific, a tragic, an impossible fall:

"She lost a kingdom once, regained it, nearly lost it again, amassed an empire, lost it all. A goddess as a child, a queen at 18, a celebrity soon thereafter, she was an object of speculation and veneration, gossip and legend, even in her own time. At the height of her power she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler. For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the Western world in her hands. She had a child with a married man, three more with another. She died at 39, a generation before the birth of Christ."

Shakespeare's words speak just as magnificently for her death-scene as for her entire life:

"Give me my robe, put on my crown. I have

Immortal longings in me."

5.2.275-6

Steal it.

. . . . . . . .

LOBO

Antonio Lobo Antunez, the Portuguese novelist with that Yaqui witch, my great-great grandmother's last name.

A few years ago I read that Faulknerian account of a drag queen and could barely sleep, it was so lush and panicked, disembodied, ranting, flooding, harsh, sublime.

America feels very far away from this account of a young soldier, furious, phantasmagoric, his re-telling of his days as a medic to a dozen or so prostitutes between and during his desperate nights of making love. The haunted and gruesome Land at the End of the World, which was nicely translated but literally The Asshole of the World. Why is the closest we've come to a novel like this Tim O'Brien's account, his Lt. Cross humping through Vietnam, anatomy and exhaustion, automotonic, the zombie-fevered syntax? Or the gruesome poetics of Owen, the sad sensuality of Komunyaakaa, bodies blown up, dismembered, sacrificed, the gruesome realities and painful lyricism of the young veterans who survive? But nowhere--maybe in Mailer's Naked and the Dead is there something angry, pervasive, maddening, something that changes language and sight too--perhaps in some of Simic's poetry--but where are the recent novels of war weathered soldiers, the furious, wailing, desperate, alive, demanding stories that blame us for our disengagement as a nation, for our myopic obsessions with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and our MTV "reality" fetishes, our hiccuping newsfeeds that hide the bloodandguts truth and spin our politics as if they weren't puppeting us against each other, relying on our sheep psychology to take hold and deflect the fires of dormant emotions and call our inherited moral codes all to inflate the 1%, the egos of the powerful, and deflect our rightful rage at the daily hungers, the daily dead.

"Do you believe in upheavals, great adventures, inner earthquakes, soaring flights of ecstasy? Forget it, my friend, it's nothing but an optical illusion, smoke and mirrors, a mere theatrical trick no more real than cardboard and cellophane of the scenery used to create it or the force of our own desire to give it the appearance of movement."

I gulped the whole thing back like a shot of expresso and my eyes lit up like a night H-bombed to shit.

Then I picked up Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra, and started to read about the incestuous bloody chess game of ancient sibling rivalry. . .

. . . . . . . .

MIDNIGHT GREEN

Bach this morning, and coffee.

The Trondheim Soloists' recording of violin concertos, whose recording of Vivaldi's 4 Seasons with Anne-Sophie Mutter, if you haven't heard it, is to die for.

Marine Layer, mountains deep. As in, all the way to Pasadena, white and gray. My face, peeking out from underneath a car tire. Bleak car.

Cars all crashing through redundantly and far, like the sea. The highways heave.

Then a fly wrecks my coffee like a dead asterisk. Exploded star.

Also with Wallace Stevens' last collection, The Rock, which, the more I read it, reminds me of Frederick Seidel. Unexpected arrows. I haven't sat enough, or stared vacantly enough, or walked enough barefoot over the grass, or got undressed and watched the nervous glitter of the leaves on the Chinese Banyan through the window, or lined up the bones of my dead hummingbird, or just sat at the bottom of the helix-hinging wild of the pool with my eyes closed to say exactly what I mean.

Take "The Green Plant":

Silence is a shape that has passed.

Otu-bre's lion-roses have turned to paper

And the shadows of the trees

Are like wrecked umbrellas.

The effete vocabulary of summer

No longer says anything.

The brown at the bottom of red

The orange far down in yellow,

Are falsifications from a sun

In a mirror, without heat,

In a constant secondariness,

A turning down toward finality--

Except that a green plant glares, as you look

At the legend of the maroon and olive forest,

Glares, outside of the legend, with the barbarous green

Of the harsh reality of which it is part.

I wish I could think of a Seidel poem to read along side of this, because I feel the echo of it everywhere in his Collected, in his declarative end-stopped lines, his qualifications, his prepositional repetitions, juxtaposed with the momentum of that last 3 stanza sentence. . . Stevens predicted something like Seidel's work, if only by writing "the grotesque is not a visitation. It is / Not an apparition but appearance". Seidel appears, and plenty of critics have said how frightfully. He does murder well. He does it so it feels like a beautiful hell. But my favorite of his poems relate a cosmic brutality to some tender vulnerable weakling.

"Midnight"

God begins. The universe will soon.

The intensity of the baseball bat

Meets the ball. Is the fireball

When he speaks and then in the silence

The cobra head rises regally and turns to look at you.

The angel burns through the air.

The flower turns to look.

The cover of the book opens on its own.

You do not want to see what is on this page.

It looks up at you,

Only it is a mirror you are looking into.

The truth is there, and all around the truth fire

Makes a frame.

Listen. An angel. These sounds you hear are his.

A dog is barking in a field.

A car starts in the parking lot on the other side.

The ocean heaves back and forth three blocks away.

The fire in the wood stove eases

The inflamed cast-iron door

Open, steps out in to the room across the freezing floor

To your perfumed bed where as it happens you kneel and pray.

. . . . . . .

STURM UND DRANG

"I've been sacrificing so to strange gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity--fundamentally unchanged after all--to our own. I feel as if my hands were imbrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars--of another faith altogether."

If the first 200 hundred pages were a difficult ascent, like the strain of the roller coaster as it locks and raises inch by inch upward, straining toward that briefest star-like peak, as the eye spills forward and the heart prepares, as the clock is felt and there is time to wonder that you're still there at all, the last 2hundred 70 pages completely fall out from underneath you as the floor imminently blushes, the angle slams, the blackness trembles from that supernal and mortal height--the body falls, and the mind is in flames. You yourself feel that you're a manifestation of the "sacred rage" of Waymarsh. (Or maybe the Adagio from Mendolssohn's Fmajor sonata for violin and piano. I'm obsessed with Anne-Sophie Mutter's 2008 recording this week!)

At the finish of James' The Ambassadors it feels as if everything in the world were at risk, all is lost, and yet nothing happens. It's as if we're creatures made of anticipation and failure, and that's the sad thrill of humanity. The comic dimension of the tragedy of feeling. Like that contemporary, if no less broken, Ophelia-haunted Maria Gostrey, who plays the part of the reader, the attentive inquirer, patient, even omniscient, who like us finds herself, protected as she was, singed now with a desire she's kept secret, perhaps even from herself, and willing, ultimately, inevitably, to reduce herself now for its fulfillment, to give herself to love as if to servitude, whom with, by the end of the novel, we "sigh it at last all comically, all tragically, away", mumbling as much to ourselves in the mirror of self-denial as to the myth of true love, "I can't indeed resist you." And there it is. The uncompromising, sensual Lucretian truth of it.

Steal it if you can.

. . . . . . .

THE HAPPIEST ENEMY

So you wake up, and the light is there, like a bit of Mendelssohn's violin drilling sweetly from the other side of the black leaves in Eminor.

Stevens: "The fiction of the leaves is the icon of the person" but really he wrote: "poem".

This daylight's too concerto.

Started Henry James' The Ambassadors, last night, the first of his last three great novels, before the Dove's Wings and the Gold Bowl, and read until his sentences got so far ahead of me I was spilling into them. The dream came like a chess move and the other player was faceless. I'm somewhere between the winning Chad Newsome and the wiser, more useless, Strether. And then a few lines from Ashbery come again out of the breaking dark:

"Now it's years after that. It

isn't possible to be young anymore.

Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend;

my own shoes have scarred the walk I've taken."

The weather inside is controlled and bleak. It's a delight, really, to be safe here on the other side of the Chinese Banyan and watch the sunlight cut the throat of the street. I don't care how Eliot that is of me. Coffee in exile and basil. I could boil an egg.

I think I'll sit here and YouTube mens synchronized 3M springboard diving in Shanghai instead.

LOVE, WOUNDS and CLOWNS OF WAR: Dunstan Thompson

Lately I've had some time to think about gay relationships and what they mean to me as an adult. How many of us have something like an extended family, a constellation of burning, sustaining friendships that carry us through sickness and happiness and the dark aches and sobrieties, and how often the myth of the "one", the idealized, if strange marriage that straight men and women seem to have a natural trajectory, a pole to which they are drawn to or repulsed by, a kind of moon that is a moon that eludes me. I feel more catholic than ever. Love, as Iris Murdoch philosophized, is the dream of something more than ourselves. Because we are compelled and we never find it. Human destiny, I find myself lost, like a character in Cocteau's White Book, or Reinaldo Arenas' Color of Summer, one of the many failed minstrels of longing and desire, one of the countless broken-hearted clowns on night parade, Picasso's sad version or Hernan Bas' sexy, heroine sheik hooker in the garden with a terrific and absurd belief in love. 

So it is I come to Pleiades Unsung Masters Series: Dunstan Thompson, On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master edited by D.A. Powell and Kevin Prufer.  Dunstan, a young poet in the 1940's and a vet from WWII, published two collections of poetry: Poems (1943) and Lament for the Sleepwalker, The Phoenix in the Desert, a travel book, and one novel, The Dove with the Bough of Olive. According to his ex-lover, he continued to write prolifically, though he never published again. Prufer, in the introduction, writes that Dunstan is "a poet weirdly attuned to the war even as he made moments of it complex, even baroque, beauty and sensuality. Here was a soldier who finds in the war not mere futility or valor, but desire, sensuality, and a kind of horror that is both deeply personal and all-encompassing." 

I feel as though I come to Thompson's early sonnets through the lens of say, Yusef Komunyakaa's meditations on war which are both violent and lush, sensually stunning. Take these lines from “Songs of the Soldier”, for example:

Death is a soldier and afraid

Like you. If he could talk, he’d tell

The world how he was hurt. This sad

Faced, grave eyed, beautiful as steel

 

Young man, his sex a star, has pride

That sharp, unshadowed, surgeon’s light

By which heroes are turned inside

Out, their flamboyant guts put straight

 

Or lopped off. His dripping wounds bleed . . .

 

At the beginning of the poem he writes, “Death blows boys to ribbons.” We couldn’t ask for a better line to describe the eros of Thompson’s strategies. A blowjob is deathlike celebration. Blood and his disrobement. Flesh that is style, and a wound that is surprise.

Here is the first poem of the book:

This Loneliness for You is Like the Wound 

 

This loneliness for you is like the wound

That keeps the soldier patient in his bed,

Smiling to soothe the general on his round

Of visits to the somehow not yet dead; 

Who, after he has pinned a cross above

The bullet-bearing heart, when told that this

Is one who held the hill, bends down to give 

Folly a diffident embarrassed kiss.

But once that medaled moment passes, O,

Disaster, charging on the fever chart,

Wins the last battle, takes the heights, and he

Succumbs before his reinforcements start.

Yet now, when death is not a metaphor,

Who dares to say that love is like the war?

 

 The last 6 lines of this sonnet strike me for their contemporary echo of the AIDS epidemic. For me they have an eerie resonance not of the literal war, the Whitmanian attentions to the patient, but of a more recent consideration of men in love in a time of sickness. Mortality becomes a sobering charge for someone who realizes that the body fails, and its failure is an unpoetic reminder that we are alone.

There's something heightened here about the relationship between battle and health. Death is not a metaphor when it is death. This finality rips us from poetic reverie, the rivers of romantic idyllic intensities. Though Dunstan has his share of them in lines like, “Only the cold phantasmal rose burns out-of-doors. / Inside, the lamps are lit.” and “Too little time / Is left for love. When we come back, what welcome home / will he award our wounded eyes?” Some moments are wrought with beautiful melodrama and are arguably delicious and t00-heady, self-indulgent, as “That, lately lying altar for his ardor, / Uncandled, scandalizes him, afraid he / Has lost his lifetime in a moment’s murder: / He is the sinner who is saint instead”. But Thompson balances them with strikingly contemporary starkness: “the heart is worn / Out among whores and storefronts and the lack of you.” And “swear / Love to the dead. A war means this.”

Though the introduction makes an argument for the innovations of his poetry, one disappointment is that the folio of Thompson’s poetry is short, a mere 42 pages, and 20 pages of that is a late, previously unpublished long poem in sections, a meditation on the Biblical figure Mary Magdalen. Apparently, the reason his 2 collections have not been reprinted is a stipulation by Phillip Trower, Thompson's long-time lover and companion and literary executor, as per the poet's own wishes. The rest of the book is an involved collection of essays, both reflective and critical. Though I'm grateful for having all these voices in a single place, I wish I could get my hands on a xerox of a single collection. There's something sad to me that I can't get the poet in his own version of himself, even if he came to a point in his life where this version embarrassed him. Who can say who we are when we are unfathomable. I also lament the story of his born-again-Christian tendencies, the monastic celibacy he and his partner maintained through his later years when he wrote more “Christian” verse. I’d much rather read his accounts of growing old with someone, and what that must have been like after WWII, instead of his laborious account of a dead saint. I long for the version of himself that could have spoken more deeply to someone like Thom Gunn than Hart Crane.

THE NEW UNREAL OF BEAUTY

"And it is in the middle of the night that we ourselves most resemble those events and those times which can no longer contradict what is said about them or the stories or analyses or speculations of which they are the object, just like the defenceless dead, even more defenceless than when they were alive and over a longer period of time too, for posterity lasts infinitely longer than the few evil days of any one man."

Javier Marìas, Fever and Spear

. . . . . . .

My grandmother lying in her hospital bed is the beginning of her great silence. A cancellation that sees into the faults of her eras, the great poverty of married women in the middle of the last century, fed "shit on a shingle" during the Great Depression, silenced by her parents and sent back to her husband like some smudged Ophelia, scorned by her grandchildren for being unable to become anything else, misunderstood by her daughters and sons, who want always to idolize her with vicious love and blame.

Why does life seem like such a waste, no matter what works are remembered, regretted, wished for, facted into being? Wearily. The hospital bed. The tubes and juices. All of it antiseptic, like a resort. Like being drugged up in an airport.

The last lover in his aphoristic monologue of blissful ego-mania, his infantry: "the most important, beautiful, amazing, wonderful thing is monogamy."

My one raised eye-brow in the dark: "I don't agree." Because I think the mask we wear protects us from the difficulties of our own inherent infamy. The skeptic heart beats because it must, as relentlessly as it must, until the final shocked rest robs us from us. "Lovers are boundaries." "Life is being able to see Contradiction Equals Beauty."

What is "Un-Beauty"?

. . . . . . .

How does a poet write history?

Adrienne Rich: "Amid profiteering language, commoditizing of intimate emotions, and public misery, I want poems that embody--make into flesh--another principle. A complex dialogic, coherent poetry to dissolve both complacency and despair."

I hope I will grow up into stronger poetry. Re-reading Rich's Dream of a Common Language, because I like those love poems that refuse privacy, their brave considerations that admit despair without legitimizing or romanticizing it. Because I want to write something that has a necessary pulse, in letters that travel by newspaper, digital billboard, satellite, graffiti.

Also reading those Floridians, with their maniacal metrics. Especially Michael Hoffmann, whose blend of prescient vernacular, linguistic dexterity, and alliterative humor results in stark presentations of personal incidence and curious elegy. There is something so ash-like about his poetry that nonetheless offers us a generous intellect; facts in his work are graceful precisely because they do not seek to be more than themselves. I love that. I crave that. I fail that.

Max Beckmann, 1915

Nurse, aesthetician and war-artist:

not unpatriotic, not unfeeling.

Calm--excitable. Noted yellow shell-holes,

the pink bones of a village steeple, a heated purple sky.

Bombardments. Tricks of the light. Graphic wounds.

An aviator overflew him in the rose night,

buzzed him, performed for him. Friend or foe? Libellule!

A room of his own in a villa. Kriegsblick.

Medics intellectually stimulating,

one, from Hamburg, familiar with his work.

A commission to decorate the baths

--an Oriental scene, how asinine!--

deserts, palmettos, oases, dead Anzacs, Dardanelles.

A second fresco, of the bath-house personnel.

One thousand male nudes per diem.

A prey to faces. Went for a squinting Cranach.

A man with half a head laughed at his sketches,

recognising his companions. ('He died today.')

'Several hours' tigerish combat, then gave up

the assault'; his description of a sitting.

Some esprit de corps. Marching songs

weirdly soothing, took him out of himself.

Ha, the amusing pretensions of a civilian

trying to commandeer a hotel room.

English prisoners, thirsty mudlarks, plucky, droll.

In the trenches the men had kissed their lives goodbye.

A ricochet, a sniper. In the midst of life.

Crosses plugging foxholes, stabbed into sandbags.

A man with a pistol, head down, intent, hunting rats.

Another, frying spuds on a buddy's grave.

The Flemish clocks told German time.

Sekt and Mosel to wash down the yellow vin de pays.

Dr Bonenfant, with his boozy babyface.

'We poor children.' A commission

to illustrate the army songbook. Invalided out.

(Michael Hoffman, from Corona, Corona)

. . . . . . . .

But while his frenetic brushwork and highly complex, metaphysical iconography have much in common with German Expressionism, Beckmann's paintings never succumbed to the Modernist tendency to render the world abstractly. In his 1938 lecture "On My Painting," Beckmann explained: 'I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.'

. . . . . . . .

The question is not how does a poet write history, but how do we poets make the unreal real.

. . . . . . . .

I COULD BE ILLEGAL

. . . . . . . .

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

. . . . . . .

SB 1070

I.

Dear President Obama,

I write to ask that you take immediate action to (1) defend the people of Arizona and (2) reform immigration policy pursuant to your existing authority as President of the United States.

. . . . . . .

"I do not want the police here, there, Arizona, or anyplace else, pulling people over cuz you look like you should be pulled over."

Tom Tancredo

. . . . . .

Nor can the push of charity or personal force ever be any thing else than the profoundest reason, whether it brings arguments to hand or no. No specification is necessary . . . to add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned, white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much pure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope of it forever. . . .

The proof of the poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

Walt Whitman, Preface to the Leaves of Grass

. . . . . . .

AWP: A JOURNAL OF THE TIMEWARP: 2010

I love AWP.

I love the plane, the sleeplessness, the sea of insecurities. I love the faces swimming out at you as if from the book jackets where they keep. All you famously shimmering minnows. I love your sweet glances and your rash, judgmental disappearances.

I love to smile like a thief.

Apples, oranges, coffees, chocolates, a sweater, 12 new books of poetry.

I don't love your turkey legs, your homelessness, your dry elevation sickness.

I love your blue horse Luis Jimenez.

Your convention center Blue Sex Bear.

I love your superciliously necessary cane, with its silver handle and its sealed blade.

"Everything is so unbearably ridiculous and subjective, because everything contains its opposite: the same people in the same place love each other and cannot stand each other, what was once long-established habit becomes slowly or suddenly unacceptable and inadmissable--it doesn't matter which, that's the least of it, the person who built a home finds himself barred from entering it, the merest contact, a touch so taken for granted it was barely conscious, becomes an affront or an insult and it is as if one had to ask permission to touch oneself, what once gave pleasure or amusement becomes hateful, repellent, accursed and vile, words once longed for could poison the air or provoke nausea, they must on no account be heard, and those spoken a thousand times before are made to seem unimportant (erase, suppress, cancel, better never to have said anything, that is the world's ambition); the reverse is true too: what was once mocked is taken seriously and the person once deemed repugnant is told: 'I was so wrong about you, come here.' 'Sit down here beside me, somehow I just couldn't see you clearly before.' That is why one must always ask for a postponement: 'Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight!' I quoted to myself. Tomorrow you might want me alive, even for only a half an hour, and I won't be there to grant your wish, and your desire will be as nothing. It is nothing, nothing is nothing, the same things, the same actions and the same people are themselves as well as their opposite, today and yesterday, tomorrow, afterwards, long ago. And in between there is only time that takes such pains to dazzle us, which is all it wants and seeks, which is why none of us is to be trusted, we who are still traveling through time, all of us foolish and insubstantial and unfinished, foolish me, insubstantial and unfinished me, no one should trust me either. . . "

Charlegne Place.

Gurl.

I love your Cake-up. Your Crazy. Your slumber party melt down.

Bitch, where my jackpack?

Who's DNA is this dangling on a floss outside my 29th floor window?

"How do you stay sane at this thing? I feel like's it's sucking me dry! I cried through that poem, that standing ovation, it's too much. How do you keep yourself from going crazy?"

I make my billion promises and then I break each one.

I skip as many poetry readings as possible. I walk out of each of 2,729 panels I sit down in.

I give lots and lots of kisses. I talk shit. I text message rudely and incessantly.

I ask Jean Valentine to sign me in a crevice.

I leave a day and a half early and sneak off to Boulder, Colorado, where a mountain boy has promised me raw sugar.

"The sad one doesn't know what to do or how to behave, trying first one thing and then another and then the opposite of each, racking their brains for ways of making themselves interesting again or forgiven even though they don't know what fault it is they've committed, and nothing works because they are already condemned, they try being charming or unpleasant, gentle or surly, indulgent or critical, loving or belligerent, attentive or uncouth, flattering or intimidating, understanding or impenetrable, but the result is confusion and a lot of wasted time."

I waste time, I waste time. With my dear ones, in the middle of the night, first thing in the morning, all afternoon, all my wasted time is laughter, laughter, sushi, cab rides, embraces in the middle of a street because of cancer, because of the romance of not having a working cellphone, because my TCells are normal, because you licked my coat the color of a cherry ludenz, because your skin is Picasso-esque today and you're cracking up, old, bad, long gone, you're on your way out and you're here in my arms, the way the truth is, the same way I'm alone but I'm with you for a minute, too. I'm here for the monumental burning of these scarce islands, for a little fierce face time, to swim near you but not with you, with you but only for this Time as it blurs me from your sight.

Stranger, I don't care, I don't. Not about the sea filled with the frenzy of your reflections.

I'll park my ass in the back of Falling Rock Tap House on Blake street between 19th and 20th.

I'll gossip motherhood and primitive visions and WILLA I will read your story about stealing a car radio when you're ill.

I'll get lost and try to walk back through the black neighborhoods off Colfax, prancing around in my red leather belt and tight 7 Diamond designer jeans, while Gurl gets crazy tryn to pee in a church. Beware all ye slaves that enter here.

I'll hang on to that Oskar for dear life, for dear life, and watch my Self dissolve in the black mirror of my sunglasses as he puts them on and lays his childhood across my cashmered heart.

My press is dead, my beautiful book's press is dead. Long live my only fucking press!

Babyfucker. That's the book I wished but did not steal!

I did steal Fever and Spear by Javier Marias. He might as well be writing about all the refracted blisses of the timewarp of AWP, all the misunderstandings of the unwelcomed, the mindless and chattering self-inflations, the sheer egomaniacal endlessness, the bartalk and the insincerity, the good rough and felt affection, the brief reunions and intentionally missed elevator-encounters, the mask, the flutter, the yearning, the yawn, the flinch and sharp revolt, the spasms and spasms of laughter and true friendship, the straight-forward recognition of those I touched and held, touched and held, their finally palpable visitations, their small leavings, and the quake I felt at having been close to them for a time. Friends and Phantoms. With you. Time that is now fled. Time that is a hesitation now distorted into love. And an irritation that I never will deny.

. . . . . . . .