October
2005 Demonic SerenadeI
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.
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