Demonic Serenade

I want to reproduce my poems, with some background and thoughts about them. Most of them fall in the period 1971 to about 1995. I attended Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, from 1971 to 1975; was a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, from 1976 to 1979; was a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea from 1980 to 1982; married and lived on Patterson Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, from 1984 to 1997. The title I gave the collection, Demonic Serenade, suggests the Sirens - beauty that beckons, but to what? Before that, I had called the collection Between Something and Something. This suggests a feeling of emerging, of being in the process of emerging from one world to another but not knowing what either was.

Poems of Dissatisfaction

Worlds in Collision

Let me be drunk all the time!
Let me be carried away
On wagons creaking like frightened swans
Trumpeting my triumphal return.
Let me recount my stories from the wars,
For I have drunk liquor on the planet Mars
Alone on the road under the staggering heavens
And the clashing stars.

This is the earliest poem I have preserved, and I may have written it as early as my last year of high school. It is somewhat adolescent.
"Wagons creaking like frightened swans" is from The Song of Igor's Host. The title is from a popular book by astronomer Immanuel Velikovsky claiming there was once a near collision between Mars and Venus.

Surfeit

Too many onions in the attic.
Too many apples in the orchard.
Too many names in the book.
Too many men over the wall.
Too much bite in the mustard.
Too many bugs under the paper.
Too many thieves in the pen.
Too many mice in the ministry.
Too much cheese in the church.
Too many reverends on the run.
Too many chairs folding.
Too many couples kissing.
Too many socials.
Too many pots for the kettle.
Too much gravy for the ladle.
Too many spoilt cooks in the soup.
Too much traffic in turpentine.
Too many clipped ships
For it rains and it rains and it rains.
For Miss Wells was dynamite.
For Rex died in the pachysandra.

I wrote this at college. Linda Wells was a gorgeous girl from sixth grade, and Rex was our beagle. There is a mood of dissatisfaction, but it is dissatisfaction transcended and seen from outside. The dissatisfaction is transmuted or sublimated into a beautiful object, the poem. Perhaps the collection's title also means this - not evil but ambivalent voices turned (by me) into a serenade. There's a lot of church imagery (including the folding chairs and the socials) because as a preacher's kid, those images came easily to me. The lines beginning with "For" owe something to Christopher Smart's "For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey," which I first read in a collection by Ezra Pound.

The mood continues with a little more vehemence in the following pair:

Monsters Abroad

Monsters abroad!
Fetch me my wings!
Fetch me my barking-hounds!
Monsters abroad!
Watching the sky,
Using the daylight,
Counting the time.
They drool on the grass,
They smash flowers under their soggy feet.
They can't die.

Sunup

Quick sunup
Spews forth eyes
Multiplies images like flies when
Wings beat, legs rub
Piece of dung
Eating, waiting, eating
Cold life in the sun
Buzz, buzz:
Wake up.

And in two short poems, where it takes an ironic turn:

All Aboard

Miles and miles of white cold:
All aboard for Antarctica.

Teatime

The tea is on the table.
The tea is on the table.
The tea is on the table.
The tea is on the table.

I think this latter was written when I lived on Patterson Avenue. It owes something to Zen (which I had studied and practiced in late 1979), the mysticism of simple, physical reality; but it still belongs with these poems of dissatisfaction, for there is a feeling of desperation, of clinging to the simple thing, as if one hoped by repetition to make something, anything, real.

Messiah?

Is he the one,
Dazzling, multicolored, kaleidoscopic,
Laughing at you from his reflecting palace,
Telling you he is a diamond
But displaying his broken edges nonetheless?
Is he the one, madder than a rose,
With his black fan and his pink pose,
With his green satchel and his brass rings
And his photographs of sons of kings?
Is he the one, with his yellow smile,
The disinherited prince, the indolent crocodile,
With his thick smell, his rough chin, and his uninnocent grin?

This was a fellow student of mine at college. He was older than the rest of us, had lectured in Taiwan, and was a published poet and a genius. I was rather in awe of him. By the time I wrote this poem, however, his aura was beginning to fade. He really did have a photograph of a prince whom he claimed to know, who had told him, "You're a diamond in a desert."

A Curse

Yawning French sissies
Hawking pandemonium
In the general vicinity of Alcatraz
Might as well pack up their belongings
And simply drop dead.
Spiteful where the French are concerned,
I can't bear to keep smacking my revolver like this
And blowing my wad on the French,
Damn them -
Singing to ward off devils
This strange song.
No chance of an encore?
Catch ya later.

This poem later in my Patterson Avenue period and is the only poem like it I ever wrote. The words are nonsense. It's just a bit of round abuse for the fun of it. When I wrote "to ward off devils," I was probably thinking of G. I Gurdjieff's story of a train engineer who had to blow the whistle before dawn as he passed a certain village. He knew the inhabitants would curse him for waking them from sleep, so he protected himself by cheerfully cursing them first.

The following conveys the very essence of these poems of dissatisfaction:

Horse Breath

All wishes scuttled In a black dream:
Horse breath,
Lie to me, lie to me,
Sweet-scented thing!

This poem names the feared thing, asks it to lie, and then addresses it by a new name that reinforces the lie one wants it to tell! I was thinking of a black, foaming, fearsome horse, the raw animal. When I read it today, I think I did an injustice to horses.

Poems of Realization

I the Cat

I the Cat
Today ordain my prejudices.
I will take supper in the kitchen.
I will follow a Mouse with my Mind,
For I have discovered Philosophy.
I swallow warm milk:
I am the candle in the bowl!

I wrote this in college. It's the first poem I wrote that really broke through to a vision of unity, in which a new world is glimpsed, and not ironically. All the following poems are like this, and so are separate from the poems of dissatisfaction, though chronologically they overlap.

Korea

Wind-river over my head
Rabbits in bed.
Twilight elf My own self
Between the rice fields,
Between the rice fields.

I wrote this in Korea. Many's the time I tramped a dirt road between fields against a stiff wind in the gloaming.

Young Knight

Pray to the blue sky
Pray to the blue sky
Little horse rider
Little horse rider
Love fiercely
Love fiercely
Because
Because
They knocked out the bottom
They knocked out the bottom
Beauty it was
Beauty it was.

This was written late on Patterson Avenue. Trying death as the bottom of life, one finds it is a false bottom. One knocks it out and finds beneath a well of unfathomable beauty.

Ecstacy

At the slowest season
We gather harsh flowers
And paint the silkworms
In glorious colors
The Sun vibrates:
We prisms in his light
Shake down our feathers
And undress for bed.
We cool our souls
On planes of the sky
And touch the bottom
Where our elbows lie,
Till sleep stuns us
And we lose all the stars,
But our mind keeps counting
Where the feeling was.

I wrote this at the University of Pennsylvania, circa 1977 or 1978. The summer or high noon of life gives way gratefully to the fall or evening. Beyond death, something persists.

Simplicity

Every sword
Cuts a word.
Get a nice child,
Share no broken edge.
Kill the barbaric house
Where rock sticks up,
Revealing no enemie.
Stages of calamity,
Tender your guns!
Misfortune is complex,
The sun burns in a pattern.
Hand carries a sword,
Gives quarter to no wrong word.
Run where the sky runs.

This is a late poem, from the Patterson Avenue period. We don't want words or thoughts to be broken, barbaric, or sticking up. The poet's sword is a creative tool as he seeks to imitate the simplicity of the sky. "Enemie" is supposed to be pronounced with the accent on the last syllable.

Sweet Potato Laughter

Flat feet stamping
Damn dirt road,
Acorn eaters'
Holy ground.
The universe spins on the heels of my shoes.
Every gray stone
Makes a sound:
How do I hear
Sweet potato laughter
Hot in the winter
Under the warm ground?

This is another one from Korea, where sweet potatoes sprinkled with cayenne were roasted outdoors over a fire in the winter. Anticipation of a joyous hot meal is felt as laughter and warmth coming from the potato while it is still in the ground. Acorns were man's diet in Paradise according to Greek mythology.

The following pair belongs to the Patterson Avenue period:

Progress

A stone royalty
Held the face of the mountain
When her lakes brimmed with ice.
Air complained in competing fragrances.
You first
Lifted your violet eyes
Over the glistening green, bearing
Ships, agriculture, etiquette, stringed instruments, explosives.

I could only have written this after I had shaken off my Luddite inclinations and discovered Social Credit, circa 1991 or after. Man comes to us from the past, bearing gifts. "Explosives" is perfectly serious.

Vigilance

The adventurers of the blue cross
Gaze through Arabian telescopes,
Unslept for many a night.
They are loved by
The rising sun's green horses.
Vigilance is rewarded by a wonderful epiphany.

This makes up for my previous unfairness to horses.

Wife

Her soul with mine so closely is entwined
Her heart and mine so much together beat
And life with life so fatefully combined
(One roof, one hearth, one board, one bed, one sheet)!
No voice can be so cruel, no eye so cold,
No hopelessness so hopeless as hers is,
No smile so engaging to behold,
In amorous embrace so sweet no kiss.
No tear can be so sad, no laugh so free
As cavern sixteen deep they echo down
To make a secret music that is she,
The symphony in which I live to drown
And drowning, deep inhale, by waves enswirled,
The heart of her who makes my soul a world.

This was written long after the others, in the year 2000. "Sixteen deep" refers to sixteen years.

The Ravine

Bring back strange bones,
Tramp the rooted trails,
The ravine ever avails.
The ravine is thy path,
Sunlight thy bath,
Water thy work.
The wanderer's foot
Bruiseth no root,
His clothes are of bark.
Radiant wheels
Rut the back field,
With footprints of dark.
Make mountain joy
For each sullen child:
The ravine is thy ark.

There was a poem in this collection called "Ancient Sea," written the same time as "Ecstacy." In reviewing it for this issue, I decided I didn't like it and started rewriting it, resulting in this new poem. Lao Tsu likened the Way to a ravine. "Strange bones" would be fossils. The foot that "bruiseth no root" is from a Chinese folk-song about a magical animal.