Ed Taylor: “Misocainea”

(“Misocainea”—from the Greek: hatred of anything new)

And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies, till they some of them burned their wings and fell down.

Diary of Samuel Pepys, September 2, 1666, the day of the Great Fire of London

            The cat’s diet, coffee and butterflies.  Now the animal startles at her heartbeats.  On the porch the quartet watches the cat knot.  They drink tea and whiskey.  They practice, knitting bands of static.  They call it friendship, wear it like protection. 

            Things get trapped and stuck.  Sun rattles into its hole.  Bingo.  Beach Boys on the radio, fading.  Car wheels like roulette.  The quartet bets and keeps playing, while it gets blurry outside.  Taking no chances, the music gets sinister.  Loud.  No one hears the wire tightening.  The four loosen their collars.

Sure on this shining night

Of star-made shadows round

Kindness must watch for me

This side the ground

The late year lies down the north,

All is headed, all is health

High summer holds the earth,

Hearts all whole

Sure on this shining night

I weep for wonder

Wandr’ing far alone

Of shadows on the stars.

- James Agee, “Description of Elysium” from Permit Me Voyage

There is something about cathedral building that men like, Henry said, this has often been noticed.  And the first thing you know it’s Dedication Day and the whole state is there, it seems like, with long lines of little girls carrying bouquets of mistflowers and the Elks Honor Guard presenting arms with M-16s sent back in pieces from Nam and reassembled for domestic use, and the band is playing the Albinoni Adagio in G Minor which is the saddest piece of music ever written by mortal man and the light is streaming through the guaranteed stained-glass windows and the awe is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

- Donald Barthelme, Perpetua

The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn't have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing.

- Donald Harington

If you must clean your Grolier Bible, we should advise ordinary soap and water.  Put a teaspoonful of soda in a pint of warm water and use a soapy sponge.  I think you will find this will remove the dirt and you can then polish it with a little lanolin.


-Frank Doel, via Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

Ray Succre: "Into the Strange"

No breath, no break, no plank of time,

those thieves running wet in no wild

are ice shod, and there is only the rumoring damp.

Have you but slow wilderness, a trickler,

in forever infanthood, nursing reprobate matters?

Or tasting you in nips with the faintest hunger,

has no Sun yet come here to eat you?

Into the strange, hive-bound and stark,

there is but the tip of a human finger,

itself a silent key to itself,

past circuits, fish, and folds of any one, grit world,

a staggering lawn of ticking and yonder.

I have put my box, my towel, and my tooth all in one corner for now, in a neat pile.  I am trying to separate all the parts of my life, one per wall until all four walls are covered with the scribble of it.  There is not even toothpaste left now, and it has become apparent to me that the difference between being and not being at all may be as small as half a peach.

- Lydia Millet, My Happy Life

Angela Woodward: "Removal"

How’s this for a situation? Let’s remove one small chunk from the universe. Once we removed patience, and you know the result. Peter murdered his father, his mother and his younger brother, an almost immediate reaction, in fact carried out with the axe he had in his hand as I was passing. Of course we put patience back immediately, and watched it spread out through the whole village, the cleared woods, the tussocky fields, the shacks at the outskirts. An entire cathedral rose up. It seemed to us made out of toothpicks, ultimate grandeur and design, yet spare, cheap, we could see through it, rotate it to any angle, peer up into this life now restored to what had been lost. Justice locked its bolts. Each man, woman, uncle, vagrant, held a numbered ticket placing them in the correct order and relation to each other. The momentary undoing had bound things up again with renewed spirit. With such gentleness wives knelt in the cow barn; how tenderly they carried the milk bucket back to the kitchen.

Easy, too, to take away just one family member. You know what happens when the wife walks out, or the daughter dies. All the remaining family interactions creak along on unraveling strings, each smile garlanded with the kind of dust that clumps up behind the china cabinet. Greeting the son’s teacher becomes an elaborate scripted pantomime. The teacher wonders, “Should I shake her hand? Touch her shoulder? Say ‘I’m so sorry’?” so that the simplest conversation pleats out into a thousand wrinkles of possible other sentiments that would be purer, cleaner. The astringent bareness of the diningroom table with only three place settings makes the walls wider, voices softer. Each day rolls out, an inadequate bandage, muffled linen.

This afternoon it was my car that failed to appear from the lot behind the Sears, seemed never to have existed, left no trace. Where I expected to see its blue, salt-grimed behind, someone else’s car, beige, rounded, equally dirty but in a less charitable way, flashed its buttocks at me. One aisle over, the identical spot but further out, yet another strange backside confronted me. The other direction too, only foreigners, heads down, ignored me utterly. I clutched the keys in my pocket. Only half an hour ago I’d pulled them out of the ignition, slammed the door, clicked the orange button that promised my swift return. An empty slot would have been reassuring. But everywhere unbroken lines of cars shivered in the wind. They all kept their backs to me, and did not look up at the sound of my boots cutting through the slush. “You left us,” they muttered. “You never cared for us.” “How could I?” I said. “You’re not mine. It’s only my car I want.” “Selfish,” they said, one after another, and they refused to help me.

Then the words stopped.  A new noise penetrated the room, the drawn-out rattle of wheels along the road.  Everyone thought of the world outside, which the talk and the light had made them forget.  The man and the family ceased to be two distinct creatures; between them a purblind, sluggish spirit came into being and moved toward the door to meet the diligence as it stopped.


-Jules Romains, The Death of a Nobody

Bill Tremblay: "A Square In Valencia"; illustration, "The Child and Mother", 1936, by David Siqueiros

A lorry lumbers through rubble-filled streets

and from under the tarp comes voices of men singing:

           

            There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama

            It’s a place that we all know so well,

            for ‘tis there that we wasted our manhood

            and most of our old age as well.

Truck brakes scream to a stop at a cobblestone plaza,

shops, second-story flats, bombed out library

with chunks of broken concrete, timbers like twisted straw.

Book pages wiffle in the breeze.

                                                Ruins silent as new ghosts

wandering Hell. Modesto and David jump down, others meet

wives, mothers, with smile-kissing chatter.

Through the crowd a five-year-old girl carries

her baby sister piggy-back, winding sheet sling

             faces dirty, eyes

darting, expecting who knows what bullets, lightning

from a sky of flying black crucifixes. The older girl holds out

her hand passing among people who slowly vanish             

like battlefield smoke.

                        David sits on a church’s exhausted steps

sketching on a map’s back the child-mother in colored pencils.

Modesto smokes a cigarette watching the picture appear

stroke by stroke out of nothing on white paper, the baby

bundled as her older sister was taught by her mother

before bombs blew her into red mist …

           

two girls, bulging needful cells, arms, pipes with knuckles,

modeled in a reddish light, hair streaked with war dirt,

the baby’s nose, cheeks,

                                    brown eyes snapped

rightward to a noise her sister-mother also fears,

a rent in her shirt the shape of a red chili

as she steps barefoot

            hoping for some fresh garbage,

child-mother and baby       and the piles of the dead

and what’s left, songs of suspicion traveling

down infinitely shredded nerves, their cheeks swollen

as their bellies swell, bricks rust red and behind them

            the ghost of a horse.

Note: The piece above is from Bill Tremblay’s book in process, “FIRE WITH FIRE: The Passion of David Siqueiros,” and the “event” in the poem takes place during the Spanish Civil War.  Bill is looking for other magazines to publish some of the approximately 25 poems that make up the book.

In a limpidity of silences

Speaks what is unanswerable

And is answered.

In a limpidity of silences

The laurelled heads turn

Away from death

And away from life and all

Other trivial little dissolutions.

In a limpidity of silences

Sleep the laurelled heads.

-Kenneth Patchen, from Limpidity of Silences  

Happy Birthday, Kanneth Patchen

"Tiempo y Silencio"

Una casa en el cielo

Un jardin en el mar

Una alondra en tu pecho

Un volver a empezar

Un deseo de estrellas

Un latir de gorrion

Una isla en tu cama

Una puesta de sol

Tiempo y silencio

Gritos y cantos

Cielos y besos

Voz y quebranto

Nacer en tu risa

Crecer en tu llanto

Vivir en tu espalda

Morir en tus brazos

(written for Pedro Guerra by Luis Pastor, heard performed by Cesaria Evora of Cape Verde)

I met him

We were thick

We said good-bye

on The Passing Years

River

-Lorine Niedecker, Museum

According to popular sources, we have only 740 days, 21 hours and some minutes and seconds in which to meet anyone again.

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa: “Notational poem ii”

where

i flew over the limits earlier imposed

i woke up in an unfamiliar language,

the one of my birth

afflicted by invisible testicles and shade

exiled i could only go to the hospital

to watch nurses walk stiffly in circles

tho the mortgage was still due and

a fragrance attacked me

as the bomb fused with earlier warnings of anti-pastoral saga

land became as unrecognizable as faces so

i tried to position myself behind the bomb where I knew

i could disappear because perception dissipates

wherever deception captures error

and incessantly recharges

                                      your arm dead on my arm

…

a few tragic assumptions: we felt safe,

meaning we saw the world as dangerous.

We would prevail or conquer, meaning

we saw homage as love.

-Louise Gluck, Rain in Summer

Tree Riesener: "Searching the Ruins of the Rainbow for the Angel Who Announces the End of Time"

Poem VII from the poetry suite poems for the end of time

- for Oliver Messaien, his Quartet for the End of Time)

given the momentous nature of events

the announcement is clearly overdue

we must find the angel

it is imperative that we find the angel

yet we are afraid to state our intention aloud

is that the angel peering suspiciously

through a tear in the red-white-and-blue rainbow

draped around her like a broken-promise shawl

or is it that one walking gingerly

over the fragments of glittering cathedral windows

where the rainbow fell and crashed

in the flood-and-corpse-soaked ruins

or is it that one whose name is

91-year-old-man-dead-in-a-wheelchair

holding a paper with his name in cold fingers

whose wife coaxed away to live a little longer

looks back at him like a weeping mother

dragged away from a blanket-wrapped child

left along the trail in an unmarked grave

until death do us part she whispered

we only said until death do us part

shhhhh 

listen

perhaps someone held the angel down in the flood

shall we dive into the flaming water

what is that fire 

is it the burning bush

or is it sunlight

bouncing off

submerged pools of urine pus and blood

shall we take off our shoes and dive in

look for the angel

breathe into her mouth

feel for a pulse

shake the great sodden watersoaked wings

so she can breathe

or should we walk away

and leave her there

if there is no angel to make the announcement

perhaps the world will not end

If we wrap barbed wire around the angel’s neck

attach it to a cement block

leave her in the deepest blackest part of the flood

perhaps another day will come

we will go to work complain

and watch the news on television.

but it would be dreadful if the end came upon us

without enough time for confession for final kisses

better to wake the angel

wake damn you wake damn you wake

It's the birthday of Rainer Maria Rilke.  According to popular sources, we have only 747 days, some hours, several minutes and a few seconds left in which to enjoy his work.

AE Reiff: "The Ship of The World"

There is no gate inside Yeats’ mouth

When fairyland pops and earth opens up.

Do not see landscapes, measure maps.

Branching visions lie in Dante’s pic.

Everyone likes to ride the sky,

but be spiritually aware.

Eat the ticket.

No camera measures interiors though.

So we rely on Dante more.

Maybe we'll get Blake to skate

the new Pismith, Orc mutations.

 Down to the Waist / Up to the Feet!

Infernal stairs decline a giant race.

 Perplexed as children eat Saturn,

I seen it  pass.

Somewhere the stairs go up where Saturn ate,

But society eats earth down river!

Quench obesity! Giants bulge equator!

The epic world is closer than we know.

Scale an inch to the worlds below.

Munch a mountain, drain a quaff,

poem seepage deep enough.

We have a counterpart in Homer

And pariah Jonah is an owner.

That bubble about a metaphor

In the little world of toxins great

works round from Jonah down to fish.

Save the ship lest everybody drown!

Jonah in the belly is The Ship of the World!

Before he's cast on South Beach late,

throw this outcast into space.

Put on him sins, tie his hands to save

and drive him to the deep beyond.

They never before sent sin to space.

We make a ship a horse or mule,

Too soon will talk of dinosaur.

In this wilderness new invented,

buried before the age began in earth and sea,

this metaphor about a giant metaphor

 prepares reality.




*

John Cullen Apotheosis, by AE Reiff