Remembrance happens but we must remember
It’s not just rewindplayback
Think of it that way and it’s just degradation
It’s really more like rebuilding the buried city
The great fragments of stone scattered randomly
The connective wooden members having disappeared completely
Majestic dome fallen through the floor
The colored tiles long past delivering
Image of bird or dolphin or lovers entwined
Which is why old home movies seem gritty documentaries
Of unfamiliar social aggregates in distant geographies
And remembering a second time
Means allowing the temple the houses grand and minor
The shops and thoroughfares and premises of artisanry
Again to decompose and again to reconstruct them
And each successive reconstruction begets
A form ever more diverse from that of the original metropolis
Ever more sketchy schematic and stylized than any predecessor
An alchemy of novel configurations neither accurate nor inaccurate
For the mind will supply the lost details or generate them
In the superb guesswork of lively simulacrum
And we might regret the inevitable distortion that follows
Or celebrate in our pride the artifact ever new
Cubist impressionist abstract expressionist

Little boy in battle fatigues
Hurls himself to the ground
Having taken or eluded
Imaginary machine gun fire
Played out in muted tones

Bob the Committed and I cannot
Live up to that single-issue voter’s impatient waiting
The fleet surmise of maladjustment in the progeny say
Or the ad hoc committee for the observation of sundries
I didn’t mean to slip in that pretty slough of extras
But once the genie’s out then commences the automatic mazurka
Like numerous other toothy orators or their replicant surrogates
Stout carols about the shortages
Brief missives teeming with options
The open-ended narrative of victory and conquest
The shackles of alternatives
The awesome plenitude of the big-box store
The notes and queries of sneaky racoons and ‘possums
Investigating the darkling realms of elusive success
Deploying the materiel of Google Translate and viral rumor
While the tumid vessel slumbers sideways in the canal
The NDA applies even in the case of apocalyptic revelation

But we lack an idiom or maybe it’s aborning
To bring into its precious body
The epic paradigm of competing agendas
The word known to everyone to address
The coalition of the vaguely willing
Enlisted to construct the astronomical ziggurat
Which toppling completes the confusion of the tongues
Another hod carrier lost
Another gangly crane suspended

Somatic cells insist upon action
From systems afar remote
One way to conceptualize
The advent of hunger horniness or pain
The interval of a wistful minor second shifts downward
Its customary position atop the tetrachord
A young celebrated artist Billie Eileish say or Janelle Monáe
Adorned with a harlequin mask and wooden toy sword
Relinquishes from time to time the customary popular tone
To adopt a more declamatory style fit to evoke a heroic age
So shaken as we are so wan with care
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant
Rebel and usurper Henry would-be military dictator
Constantly harried as such guys are
By others who would rebel and usurp
Never really spoke like this
Nobody spontaneously erupts in blank verse
Certainly not verse of such exquisite precision
Such tender flexibility
Wordsworth’s proclamations to the contrary notwithstanding
Memory is an act of artifice
A reconstruction of a reconstruction ad infinitum
And by nature art must have its materials
Travel far enough or merely long enough
Even in some desultory Brownian motion
And you will reach the indistinguishable frontier
A concept not a feature
That famous dangerous liminal state
More situation than state
More inclination than situation
That seemingly voluntary semitone
Despite the raging of the mob
Who deny the obvious fact that there are limits
Though granted limits often consist of looming or covert indistinctness
Does Henry sincerely express his exhaustion and fear
Or does he cynically employ rhetoric as an instrument of use
Warfare by other means sub rosa tactics of command and control
The wonder of drama that never explains
He expresses the truth perhaps without knowing it
His sadness his depletion no doubt his feeling of guilt
And what does a fictional character know
Albeit a character drawn from history
And declamation has fallen from favor as fakey rant
But how else to manifest reality but in fakes and fictions
The made-up marvelry of wist and word
Reality that is that transcends the outward and the in
An assailant on high can effect much harm
As can boots on the ground
As can a virus invading an unready immune system
But woe to the innocent predator that does not feed its young
And wrath is squandered against the tremblor and the whirlwind
And woe to the traveler engrossed in a podcast
Who approaches at speed the pileup on the foggy interstate
Who never intended an inattentiveness
But hear the keening of the pipes
Witness the weeping of the hero
Who at last has acknowledged the truth
That he could do no other
The best of intentions or the worst
The sad song that tells the world
Amid all this one great woe
All this insuperable ignorance
All this implacable need
That somebody understands

So I was saying to my old buddy Aristotle the other day
I think you’re kind of missing the boat there Stot
Nobody seems to remember that we fought a big war
Well our fathers did and they supposedly won
But a lot of them didn’t come back
And there’s been skirmishes pretty much once a week since then
And you have think about well I guess you don’t have to
But think about the other side
A bunch of dead and they lost their country
And then the plague happened
Happened here and it happened there and where’s your victory
Nobody seems to remember this stuff
And you’re supposed be looking down at the earth
Not like Plato with his finger pointing up to the Forms
But you you look around and you see motion
And you see virtues and spontaneous generation
And don’t you see that people have forgotten their feet and hands
That like three years ago everybody was in a panic
And thousands died
Well I hope your great Alexander’s going to fix everything right up
He does look good on a horse

I posed for that picture long ago
That’s me the little boy with goat legs
See how stout and taut the rope is
With which I drag the head of a deer
The pale blood pooling behind it

The little dog with mitten paws barks vigorously at me
Its back is not up but I feel the hostility
Toward my shameful appearance my shameful essence
The grownups some horned and furred or sleepy and fat
Seem to be having a jolly time

This wreath of tiny white flowers on my head
My red mantle like that of the god himself
As if to say what a dear little faunlet
But parted lips and cornered eyes turned toward you
Say somebody get me out of here

Some relative of mine waves the haunch
But below his furry legs are human feet
And I just have these little hooves
I have a boy’s intelligence
But my mind is contaminated with goat

He never had to learn these arcane tools
The patient farmer of long ago
Beyond the hundreds of devices
Carefully curated over generations
The lore of their meticulous use
Beyond shovel hayrake bag basket bin moldboard and share
The accoutrements for the beast that pulls the plow
The implements for reaping and threshing
The apparatus for building and razing
The lore of cottage industry pottery textile and childrearing
Instruments of the homeliest ancientest sort
But the wisps of metal etched into maps of circuitry
The armatures of artificial energy the stubborn polymers
Bore no emphasis nor held no sway
When the barley ripened and the chickens browsed

We embarked upon an irreversible progress
Like a king in a small kingdom
Encompassed within its hostile frontiers
We traverse the narrow countryside
Upon both the recent and the obsolete roads
We tune to the familiar radio station
That emits as-yet unfamiliar programming
The music and the scenery impose novel responsibilities
That may or may not comport
With the norms that church and school inculcated
In the days of local television and the exclusivity of gasoline
Of domestic animals and household appliances large and small

We discovered new efficiencies new sources of power
We effected a revolution in transportation and communication
Conscripts complied with the command to serve
Other served with more complete volition
And all obeyed the mandates of traffic light and turn signal
Of income tax and compulsory education
Or suffered retribution when they demurred
We are freer now we deign to imagine
Now that we flout with impunity these old morose compulsions
Or have we replaced them perhaps
With compulsions more diffuse if more variable
The expensive intoxicant the garish consumer product
The aggressive vehicle the garment aggrandizing a brand
The antagonistic haircut announcing an alliance
And all vociferate their respective tribal shibboleth

Death death to our adversaries
Let them suffer whom we have designated as beneath our remark
The foreign the ugly the weak the abnormal the secretive the impure
Who threaten us with their peculiarity
Who betray us with their lust for survival
Who victimize us with their mutterings of peace and justice
Let them bathe in tears themselves their families and their compatriots
Who do not fulfill our expectations of them
Death to those who do not espouse the doctrine of our superiority
For we are the best ones according to the criteria
That we ourselves have established
We defend our ancient rights with merciless assault
To lay waste all we survey even our own possessions
As overt demonstration and gentle persuasion
And none are safe until our demands are met
And even then they will be subject to our decree

Who are these coming to the retail establishment
What apartment complexes and single-family homes
Are emptied of these eager shoppers holiday happy
Toward what shelves and display units are they tending
Will they park their cars in the broiling lot
And unfold their strollers in the pitiless sun
Will they read labels and compare prices
Or are they simply seizing the opportunity to visit the emporium
Museum of vendables shrine to the commodities
Before it vanishes in the reeking fumes of about-to-be

And for all the expertise that sustained him into adulthood
The farmer died of a disease now curable
And never enjoyed the benefits of compulsory education
And therefore never knew the world beyond his acre
But the thought never arose that he might want to know
When the barley mysteriously failed to ripen
And the chickens fell before the wholly recognizable fox
And let us who are ignorant forgive the ignorance around us

The crown of eight stars
Bright at gentle sunset to shine recedes
But at such a demure pace
As to permit the grateful falsehood
That something in the universe persists

That child with caprine leglings and flowery diadem
Who drags the venison head
Murmurs the opposite tale
That all all proceeds in mere flux
That all is swept away

And who stitches these rival truths
Would not profess to understand their unity
Or to render them unto the cincted manner
But only to effect the slender mantle
Red against the deepening blue

Something prevents your carrying to completion
That procedure that in theory should be quite easy
Some viscosity in the atmosphere
Some unlucky combination in the texture of volition
Drags down the devout pursuit of a goal
A spot of mustard on your shirt front
Awakens sirens bells klaxons pulsing tones in minor thirds
The thoroughgoing panoply of blame
Waving flags flashing yellow lights and the hoisting of placards
Inscribed with a twelve-step program
Step seven
A dab of detergent on a damp rag
But you hesitate or rather take action
With an uncannily deficient celerity
You momentarily indict the usual suspect anxiety
Imagining some aversion to the watery halo
But the very convenience of this provision
Vitiates its credibility
And you are impaled upon the dilemma’s feisty prongs

O for a clarifying agent ranging cheerfully abroad
Touching with its magical fingertips
Upon the manifold variety of things
Delicious repugnant or ephemeral
O for some benevolent power to relieve the turgor
The objects are clouded obscured by occult substances
Presumed events on distant continents
Impose their butterfly repercussions apparently
The landmarks the points of reference recede and seem to decline
Venice is sinking and Manhattan descending
Beneath the hubristic weight of thousands of intentions
Spoken and unspoken aspirational or invidious
The wayward highways the inscrutable lines etched upon the globe
Of transport of cargo of passengers
The denials the evasions the effacements
Of space time and activity
The ever-mounting catalog of remaining tasks
You turn the corner and suddenly behold a mass movement
A vast assemblage of stasis

Evbleb sartor
Cagret tms sroa dimind
Slaysion muild gars
Tansmot
Sobsmot

They move down the entrance ramp along the emergency lane
To the traffic light where the exit meets the overpass
We cannot see their pleading gestures
Nor hear the demand for redress
Of a grievance so strong it has withstood the heave of death
And even if we could see or hear them
We still could not understand the burden of their entreaties
We do not know you O Spirits we would say
Impatient of their impertinence
We have not seen into your private lives
Nor can we estimate what purple intrigues
Have branded themselves thus upon your consciousness
But despite our protestations we do know them
And we have intuited their presences
As familiar as the reflections in stagnant gutters
In the public places and in the places emptied out by neglect
As familiar as walking into a strand of spider’s web
That clings invisibly to our eyes
We have heard in the darker chambers of our ears
Their despondent sentences their desolate orations
We have tasted the bitterness of their indictments
Of nameless injustices that persisted throughout their lives
That linger now that they are dead
Of maladies deprivations and above all injuries
Likely invisible even in life
We have read their regretful sonnets
On the labels of tiny thrownaway liquor bottles
In the colorful fonts of fast food wrappers
Sodden with rainwater beside the darkened road
We are startled but not surprised
And we feel a little thrill of superstition
When they insensible but insistent
Accost us at the traffic light
And require that we confess our resemblance to them
Forgive us our recognition O Spirits
As we forgive you who recognize us

Everybody harbors naïve ideas
About objects and their extent
That an object is an object
That extends no farther than it does
But measles grits bowels exists only as plurals
And we love the commas and the semicolons
Delimiters that don’t exist in nature
Various openings defined by the geometry of negative space
The stoma the vagina the eye
Especially those interior spaces
Those mental objects memories wishes responsibilities
The tulip tree with its straight columnar bole
Which I view now only with my intellectual spy glass
Its outlandish box-shaped leaves
Its cones cousins of magnolia cones
In turn cousins of pine cones
Its leafy greeny flowers streaked with gold
Shaped like tulips and in turn like verres de vin
And what of those stomata
Does the tree begin with their molecular edge
Or perhaps with the tubular extensions of the root hairs
The tree breathes the very air I breathe
And drinks in the nutrients that nourish me

In my dream the alarm clock sings
Love love love love love love love

I was afraid of airplanes when they flew overhead
During the summer of 1962
The missiles of October had not yet been deployed
I knew that America was at war with the powers of darkness
Who trained ungodly weapons on our beautiful land and its people
And I had learned at Our Lady of Sorrows
To duck and cover under my sinfully messy desk
Despite the manifest evidence of the black and white footage
That showed a house blown like dandelion in the vengeful wind
I should have realized the futility of evasion
What I did realize was that I was scared
Of Piper Cub and Boeing 707
Which wanted to drop so I thought an atom bomb
And so I would run into the house

I should have realized that we lived
In the most segregated city in America
I don’t suppose I knew what segregation is
I should have known but my reasoning powers
Were rudimentary at best
And have they improved all that much
I asked my parents why a drinking fountain labeled Colored
Was mounted next to one labeled White
At Parisian’s downtown
But I don’t remember the answer
I used to ride my bike up to Ray’s house
To play with him superheroes on the brick barbecue
I once picked up a cigarette butt from the gutter
And brought it up to my mouth
Ray said ooh a nigger smoked that
You’re a nigger he chanted several times
Like I’d caught some vile disease from the recognizably filthy refuse
I don’t recall any resultant breach in our relationship
But I knew that I had been bullied
I think I knew the meaning of a bully’s word

We lived in Birmingham
Because my father was a scientist at a research institution there
Who would achieve some measure of fame apparently
Receiving letters from around the world
For his work on life-saving medicines
He had a black scrapbook that we saw on rare occasions
Dad thinner than now having drinks with a pretty woman
Not my mother
A yellowed newspaper clipping with a photo
Of an aircraft carrier billowing smoke
I didn’t know until I had kids of my own
That my father had been torn apart his face mostly
Behind an anti-aircraft gun on the deck of the Saratoga
The kamikaze keeps coming even after you’ve killed the pilot
And when it strikes the flight deck the flames and the shrapnel fly
I’m poor at putting two and two together
The messy desk and the shredded house
The cigarette butt and the drinking fountains
The yellowed clipping and the facial scars
Not noticeable to me I knew no other
But the reconstruction must have been masterful

I’ve had traumas in my life but nothing like that
Now that he’s gone I wonder how he escaped
Being eaten alive by post-traumatic stress
But he claimed and I must believe him
That after the war he wanted nothing but to build a life
To forget about politics and foreign affairs
So he and my mother also a navy veteran
Took Uncle Sam up on the offer of education
My mother by consensus the stronger in science
The story was that she had carried him
Through the labs and the math in junior college
Though he was said to be gifted in language
So when the time came to matriculate
At the state university
And to enter into the state of matrimony
My mother had babies and suppressed her dream
Of becoming that rarity a woman scientist

Her childhood had been an ordeal of grinding poverty
On the northern shore of Lake Okeechobee
During the worst of the great depression
Wild country that left her with scars of her own
The screech of the panther
Made her phobic of cats her life long
She hid she said from her numerous siblings
By climbing a tree to read books of science there
Left home and finished high school in a bigger town
Well in a town
She hadn’t lived in a town
Jumped at the chance to rivet aircraft wings at Curtiss-Wright
And served as corpsman in the big hospital
At coastal California that received the wounded from the Pacific theater
Not my father
And once her children were in school
She went back to college and earned a degree
In medical technology and worked in that field for decades
But I always had the feeling
That a talented women remained in the shadow
Of her husband

When I finished high school
America was again at war
My father had not resisted or resented America’s command
To fight the Japanese
Who had wounded the navy
In which he had already enlisted
And sad to say he endorsed the war’s horrid end
Like most of those with his experience
The nuclear option that made me fear commercial aviation
We don’t make inventions without using them apparently
And thus when I registered for the draft
I did so with trepidation like others of my age
For America had on this occasion not been attacked
But had instead intervened in at most a civil war
And the cold war had evolved into a proxy war
And the nuclear threat continuously loomed
But when my turn arrived a lottery had been instituted
And I had the shameful good luck
To score a number that spared my call-up
I attended two of the great rock festivals
And in my hometown coliseum heard the like of
Led Zeppelin and James Brown

And
After 1961 it was all Ray Charles
After 1962 it was all Johnny Cash
After 1963 it was all R&B and sweet soul music
Whole stables not just labels Motown Atlantic Stax
After 1964 it was all the Beatles
After 1965 it was all the Stones
In 1966 I got a Gibson acoustic like Johnny Cash
After 1967 it was all Jimi Hendrix
In 1968 it was totally weird and I was just starting high school
In 1969 I got a Wurlizter piano like Ray Charles
In 1970 I played in fish camps and enlisted mens’ clubs
And in 1971 CYO Knights of Columbus fratty boys and sorority girls
And in 1972 I got a Gibson SG like Clapton Townshend and Santana
And after 1973 it was all a rush a mostly-pleasant multicolored blur

And
Contraception was if not readily available
Then certainly with little trouble getatable
But we didn’t bother and relied on more primitive methods
And the Beloved and I became sexually active far too young
But we survived the experience and enjoyed ourselves quite a lot
Though we have found some awkwardness in more recent times
Explaining responsibility to our adolescent children
And anybody into music especially Black music
Got into pot as I did years before beer
Although the taste for alcohol grew and grew and grew

And
I never lost my childish fears
But on the contrary my anxiety grew
As I became aware that the future was a responsibility
That I was inadequate to bear
And the disillusionment that lots of folks didn’t particularly get off on music
That on the contrary they cared about control victory and suck-cess
And I saw through the porthole of my yellow submarine
A world submerged in violence hatred and selfishness
A culture that cared about winning about profit about consumption
An America where the president could be gunned down in a car
Where beautiful people old and young could be gunned down day after day
And high and dry and here we are as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night

America potentate of folly
Empire of extremes
Sybaritic spaceflight hobbyists
Hungry children nodding off during Zoom class
Missile silos long guns hand guns and Bowie knives
Arming the populace many times over
Methane coal gasoline and plastics
Atoms for peace and physics for war
Romance of bloodshed
Theater of meretricious wealth
Technology of alienation and baleful fantasy
Apotheosis of meanness and greed
Boundless hypocrisy of religion and command
Heedless depletion of humanity and nature
Lust for power celebration of enslavement
Shameless defilement of the oracle of freedom
Crushing the life out of the man on the street
Impaling with lead a woman at bedtime
A reality of false images screaming for attention
Promise forsaken
Decency forsworn

And yet
And yet
My father wrote poems in advanced old age
And in similar age my mother gave me a squib of cookie dough
Though I long had kids of my own
And good music never dies
A good movie a good meal with family and friends never dies
Truth justice peace and love never die not completely
And though harried and wounded insulted and robbed
Glorious nature never dies
Birdsongs radiant flowers rising clouds pregnant with rain
This too is reality my skeptical friend
Horror irrefutably abounds
There is no restitution possible for the crimes of millenia
Though we might take steps for repair
The kamikaze pilot died that very day
Mere seconds before he wounded my father grievously
And set the ship ablaze that never sank
And no rescue for those below deck
And was it he
Spirit of the wind
It wasn’t only he
He did what he believed hateful falsehood
Was right
Obeying the unquestioned mandate of his culture
And let us ceaselessly question the mandates of this culture of America
For no day has gone by without some horrific violation of personal dignity
Some horrible mistake
And yet
The eternal glow of a child’s fear and sorrow and delight
For children too experience these extravagances
Bird flower cloud moon wind rain and star
Mountain river refreshing forest teeming saltmarsh
America does not own them but drinks in their beneficence
The Beloved her tender immortal kiss

When some occurrences increase in frequency
And others diminish
More independent of thought and preference
But more dependent upon younger hands

The lush ambiguous spring advances
Bird and flower make their subtle alterations
Or unobtrusively depart
The barred owl impatient cries at midday

Formulae pilfered from that site secure and triply impregnable
Take on the mellow glow of untroubled dispatches
Three no four boxes in front of the referenced restaurant
Distributing announcements gratis of articles for sale
Promotions of upcoming or already accomplished events
Notifications of opportunities for civic engagement

The comedy club next-next-next door looks downcast at noon
Or rather completely inexpressive as one anesthetized
Windowless
Its massive wooden door sealed behind great deadbolts
Only two newsboxes instead of three or four
A slogan emblazoned above promising mirthful diversion

These establishments have each earned a certain number of evaluative tokens
Since certain persons have weighed them in the balance and made judgments
Lackadaisical or eager as the case may be favorably disposed or unfavorably
You could try to employ your own unsavory downloads to hoist a mean opinion
You could drop the preconceptual bomb remotely from a safe distance
Has anybody ever been in one place at one time

They style themselves social critics
Who proffer rote sophistication in apparel cosmetics and decor
As anciently did dancing master milliner deviser of coiffures
All strut like fey aristocrats evincing an otherworldly worldliness
Patch on cheek pinch of snuff tiny sword by side
Translated immaterially to prefabricated fantasy land

Nor are the pirates absent the blackguards the lacy gunslingers
The ostentatious flouters of dour conventionality
Wearers of the uniform of nonconformity the petticoats the eerie belts
Inventors so they claim of strange sensations unknown modes of being
But might it not well be the case that others have trodden these paths before
Your undiscovered country long inhabited like your evident fancy dress

Who doesn’t enjoy a dream of flight
Or yearn secretly to witness miracles of appearance and disappearance
The exercise of uncanny powers impossible knowledge
The mystery of instantaneousness
Unless perhaps you’re the one on the ground
Gazing upward at the fall and across to the fiery terrestrial crash

The car in front of you at the red light
Does not react to the green
Still not reacting
Still not reacting
And off they go flights of angels
To sing you to your rest

If you’re skeptical about the indefinite articles
Hidden up in the wheel wells
There’s no reason to think the worst my precious pudding
That a child has been caught in there
That some nefarious instrument is lurking
Behind the theatrical scrim the renditions of bark and foliage

Patriots scoundrel-refugees pirate-advertisers pimply typists
Like to whip up enthusiasm feel the god writhing within you
Working the crowd to get down on their knees
Peer beneath aisle row and seat number
Expecting to detect the supernatural adversary
Slick slimy scaly horned or beribboned

Tickets are distributed for a nominal fee
All are invited to watch as the heretics accrue their comeuppance
Look go ahead and hoist the crossover up on the rack
It’s really take my word better to look for brakes than bombs
Or you can proscribe the owner’s manual obscene with explicit cutaways
Join the spectators wild-eyed or squinty at the torch-and-pitchfork party

I will be pleased said the neighbor to the stranger
On whatever path you park it on
Beside the gabled convent where the kids
Were taught their lessons or pretended to be
Behind the bike shop refuge of competitors laggards and go-getters
Small business but not enslaved by supply and demand
Or before the ancient tavern where the motorcycles filed
Pabst Blue Ribbon pickled eggs a jukebox pinball and darts
Or the more ancient cemetery haunt of lovers and bereaved
Or down this very cul-de-sac where all is second nature
No secrets among the settled the restless and the calm
The neighbor thinks all this but says aloud about a third of it
And not in so many words
They call her the Mayor of Lighthouse Cove Lane
That once was fresh and new
Not a lane it contains no cove no lighthouse
No more mayor than dowager duchess
It does have a vaguely trapezoidal boxlike sign

Weird passages out at the main drag
The camera that reads the license plates
The modern temptation flattery in the information age
But the asphalt keeps crumbling
Something there is that doesn’t love a street
Like ticking of an entropic catalog
Green plants push up amid the concrete
At the razed and fenced-in Qwik-e-Mart
A few dissenting voices are raised
As the streetlights flicker to life
The critiques of the crickets the peepers the katydids
The low harumph of the transformer
A firefly just one makes its halfhearted signal
You should develop your observational powers
Learn to interpret the katydid’s ka-zicca-zeir
The tractor-trailer’s frurr
The whippoorwill’s mewl
There is no whippoorwill its cry a lost cause
A classical sunset just a memory
No moon on this side of the calendar
The spongy weather feels different somehow
People make an effort to be nice
It’s weird that they make an effort

Is some upheaval about to erupt
Not an occasion for anxiety or even mild unease one supposes
The guest advises rolling with the punches
But no punches have been thrown
On the contrary all anybody has heard are tranquil murmurs
Zazzing interjections from the fauna
But maybe you’re not paying attention
Maybe you’re just lulled into listlessness
By the close resemblance of Hyundais Fords and Chrysler products
Crossovers from where to where
There is no gabled convent never was
There’s a church with its parochial school out on the street
The nuns live on the premises or maybe there are no nuns
You used to see them in the department store and at the baseball game
It used to be just a street but now it’s a main thoroughfare
With periodic traffic lights and four lanes
Five if you count the turn lane
Most of the countenances are turning inward anyway
As the dusk sidles toward the intersection

Our primitive wish for immortality
Storied Odysseus saw Achilles
As ruler in the Empire of Shades
But the Phthian hero
Scoffing rejected the compliment
Of him who blinded the Cyclops

He’d rather break down corrugated he said
On the loading dock at Walmart
Punch a clock
Than lord it over these ineffectual wisps
Ontologically extant but discontent
Unwilling to slough off the habits of a prince
When he had long since gained the guerdon he craved
Achiever of deathless glory

Great Alexander knew that hunger
To sow the observance of his name by force
Fame an insistent showtune
An earworm in the form of a sword
Place his name on the library
I will force you to remember
Julius Caesar in a pinned-up sheet
Taking his cuts at the middle school
Napoleon posing in the insane asylum

A thing of beauty is a joy forever
And who wouldn’t love to append one’s name
To have it stuck on there by force of law

A bunch of stupid nominalists
That if the name persists post res
The one who once bore it never dies

Recognition acknowledgement remembrance knowledge
Nobody knows very much at all
Beethoven jutting his lower lip and curly-haired
Laboring under disabilities physical and psychological
Is dead
And what does anybody know of him
Who will explain the deathless replicable Ninth

Fame come here to me young lady
What have you to say for yourself
Having contaminated my mind with the error
That the people I know are nobody
The precious beautiful fragmentary ones are nobody
That if nobody knows me
I’m nobody

That the ombudsman the public advocate
Should be remunerated for their effort
Does not deny its usefulness however doubtful of effect
Augmenting the mounds of moldy soap
Intoning ambiguous chords on the Walmart guitar lacking the high E
Which once a child besmeared with processed cheese
Conveying the recyclables to God knows where
Puttering and delving in the cooperative garden
Eggplant tomatoes avatars of deadly nightshade

Today do we commemorate the Confederate dead and the fallen Federals
The fanatics blown up in the basement by their own unfinished bomb
The committed to a cause who bring a couple dozen along for the suicide
The handlers of joysticks raining death upon cities
When their own command center happens to be targeted
That the public servants teachers medical officers elected officials
Are preselected and approved does not deny their necessity
The towhee too seeks tactical advantage
With its chip-a-turrrr

All those well-known works I love
That pall for many with familiarity
I can’t get tired of Satisfaction
Those stalwart fuzzy first five notes
And lyrics that bite on consumer capitalism
If you can make them out
You don’t hear Jagger sound that note much any more once he’d gotten rich
And I Want to Hold Your Hand
Perfect from stem to stern
But I especially love George’s bay-ong
Tell you something cha cha cha bay-ong
How do they come up with that shit
I think about that all the time with Ringo
Right before the chorus in Help
Super quick unison on the snare and the floor tom
Ta ta ta ta ta ta ta
How does he come up with it

I admit that some things I thought I’d love forever do pall
I used to melt at the English horn in the New World Symphony
When I hear it now it’s kind of meh
I was so crazy about Dr Seuss
I could read it all by myself
But now it’s just been superceded its disagreeableness exposed
And Sesame Street on HBO and in big-box stores
How I loved it with my young children
Now cruelly parodies its radical beginnings
Charlie was scared of the Count
But loved Forgetful Jones whom he called Hee-Ha
But this is a case in which the work has changed
And I retain affection for the earlier avatar
Similarly the Teletubbies have declined
With their immigration to streaming

William Shakespeare firmly remains
Possibly not the most white nor even the most male
But really most sincerely dead like the witch of the east
Nobody else mingles comedy and tragedy with such aplomb
Famously in Hamlet of course and Romeo and Juliette
A great play and a mediocre one respectively
A mixture less noted perhaps but certainly evident in Henry IV Part 1
Anarchy amid rigid determinism
And really who does blank verse better
Voicing characters of impossible range
Who better dramatic poetry
Shakespeare’s very unevenness proves a strength
Upon request I’ll divulge the must-see and the skip
Ten sonnets and half a dozen plays

Jane Austen has the opposite problem
With everything she wrote of such high caliber
That nothing stands out
So you could read all six novels
Or content yourself like me with Emma
Peace friends
Pride and Prejudice is not bad or inferior by a whit
Go for both if your life is long enough
They themselves are not that long

Every decade or so the itch comes upon me
To reread The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks
Doctor Faustus and Joseph and His Brothers
I even revisited Royal Highness the other day
Though general opinion is correct that that one is slighter
And surely you can spare an afternoon for Death in Venice

Prokofiev did a good job with Romeo and Juliette
But go for the 1st Symphony

Some great artists are just too prolific
So you gravitate to more or less arbitrary favorites
And you can’t expect them to dwell in perpetual heights
How about sixty poems of William Wordsworth
Too bad he wrote six hundred
The Prelude has its moments
But don’t read all fourteen books
Or all of any one of them
What do you expect for something fragmentary over forty years
Really Tintern Abbey does the trick
But quite a few sonnets
And the Lucy poems and the Immortality Ode
Just read the first four strophes of that one
Nutting I Wandered Lonely The Solitary Reaper
Surprised by Joy achingly sad the death of a child
Westminster Bridge I learned the gimmick of a list
You can prospect all you want
Or get someone to help you find the nuggets
Surprised by Joy is buried in a collection
That treats the rituals and doctrines of the Church of England
I’m just lucky somebody told me about it
I’ve enjoyed every note of Haydn I’ve ever heard
But a hundred and four symphonies
Come on
But 94 still surprises
Bach is great what I can understand of it
The St. Matthew Passion has fits of gorgeousness
But when we enter hour three of
I’m in a coma
Give me the catchy pop tunes the Brandenburg Concertos
Nine poems by John Keats five by STC
Pope and Swift great and great
Gulliver a bit rocky in passages
But Swift’s tetrameters are justified by Celia Shits alone
Rape of the Lock and the first epistle of An Essay on Man
But you can have the Dunciad
I get bitterness but I can’t do boring
Heroic couplets hijacked the eighteenth century
But Pope did ‘em best
So skip all the rest
Gray’s Elegy is quatrains and beautiful most of it
That Paradise Lost is too long is no fresh cut
Hopping back to the seventeenth
And of course the puritanism is noisome
But Milton really was of the devil’s party
Or at least of the Italocentric Aeneaphile renaissance
I’ll ride with him any day in hideous ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition
Which reminds me to remember that
Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Are world heritage treasures especially with their proper illuminations
The prophetic books of Blake not so much
Aphex Twin Brian Eno David Bowie
Even the redoubtable Beatles themselves
All perpetual dwellers in the heights
All too greatly productive to be digested
Or rather
I play favorites unabashedly
Always the hoariest numbers

I can’t speak of literature in translation
Though I make an exception for Thomas Mann
Similarly I love Indian music
But Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan figure inordinately
I know just enough French to appreciate Baudelaire
But Rimbaud leaves me cold
And Mallarmé is over my head
Ditto almost all of Goethe
And Voltaire and Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust are much too much
You have to admit at least The Metamorphosis and the Hunger Artist
And you can’t exclude The Trial
A taste of opera in Italian is okay
A little Verdi a little Pucchini
Bohème not Butterfly
Afro-cuban I’ll eat up all day
But I can’t identify the greats

Literally a warhorse is a mount tough enough to survive a battle
In figurative terms a warhorse is a cultural artifact
That survives irrespective of its possibly modest quality
The word suggests that the piece
Should likely be put out to pasture
And I grew up in the age of the Top 40
At least 37 of which were inevitably dreck
Although the Cracker Jack prize might be number 39 at the bottom of the box
And you never heard anything that wasn’t already a hit
In some consequential market
So on any given week three or four entries seemed to my jejune consciousness
Pretty good
Even memorable
I could never visit the Louvre
But picture books enshrined the Great Masters
My mother and I enjoyed the Jacksonville Symphony
Not among the world’s most prestigious
But one time we heard Copland conduct the Lincoln Portrait
With John Caradeen reading
And at Christmas once Great Melodies of Classical Music appeared
To be played on a kiddie phonograph
Of course the concept is worthy of critique
But I call Great that which induces joy
A received opinion in most cases I admit
But on occasion a celebrated piece will disappoint
While something elaborately discarded will please
And collective creativity always comes up with a new synthesis
And Newsweek and Life featured the current sensation
Jackson Pollock or deathless Picasso
The New Rock emerging from the Summer of Love
So hell yeah I like me some Jefferson Airplane
Some Big Brother and the Holding Company
Some Andy Warhol some Hogarth and Cruikshank
Get Offa My Cloud Paperback Writer Light My Fire
Ooh Break on Through to the Other Side
The Temps and the Tops
Junior Strauss and the Peer Gynt Suite

I am well aware of the arrogance of one
Who presumes to recommend and disparage
When I say it appeals or not
I tell you more about myself than about the work
And you shouldn’t care about me I don’t suppose
But I will say that when I recommend
I have discovered there
And probably it’s been discovered many times before
Some value that others are likely to see if they give a try
And in rare cases though not unprecedented
I diagnose some heinous flaw that disqualifies a work
From sympathetic consideration
But generally I recognize that life is short
Oscar Wilde wrote four famous comedies all worthy of a glance
Wilde never fails to entertain
Even in the put-on decadence of tragic Salome
Or is Herod really the tragic one
But there’s a reason The Importance of Being Earnest
Is performed around the world
By troupes that do not muster the accents of English patricians
Most of the world of life art and physics I do not comprehend
The slender sliver that I feel confident to grasp
Was vouchsafed to me in my youth my childhood
There obtains more gap than presence in the current essay
There is a difference however between deficiency and defect
I do not scorn what I do not know
And many rightly know and love that of which I am oblivious
And with art you must cultivate a partiality for pleasure
The Mikado makes light of truly nasty beliefs
But come now
Tit Willow
Three Little Maids

The jazz greats are consistently and exuberantly unreservedly great
So much so you feel guilty for every tune you’ve missed
Louis Armstrong of course
Duke Ellington duh
Prez and Diz and Lady Day
Bird and ‘Trane and Monk the ineffable Sphere and bad bad Miles Davis
Basey Django Wayne Shorter Cannonball Herbie Hancock Ella Fitzgerald Jimmy Smith
Joe Zawinul Jan Hammer Tony Williams Lenny White Chick Correa Billy Cobham
Ron Carter Ray Brown Major Holley Charles Mingus
Jack DeJohnette Philly Joe Jones Gene Krupa Steve Gadd Art Blakey
Airto Moreira Milt Jackson
Roy Eldridge Woody Shaw Fats Navarro
Cootie Williams Artie Shaw Johnny Dodds
I know that a multitude have eluded my scrutiny or my recognition here
And that I limited in my understanding have given them short shrift
Oscar Peterson who owed a lot to Art Tatum
Sarah Vaughan remember her
And now I feel guilty for starting a list I can never hope to finish
I guess I’ll make a lame disclaimer
A portion of infinity
Sidney Bechet the tensest quickest most righteous vibrato
Charlie Christian Joe Pass John McLaughlin
And blues and funk and sweet soul music
As if there were a boundary line in the spacetime continuum
Mothership Connection Got My Mojo Working Cold Sweat
Anything by Al Green
Gah they crowd upon me with their importunities
The Godfather of Soul the Hardest Working Man in Show Business
Sonny Boy Wolf Muddy John Lee Hooker Booker T and Cropper
Tina Turner was an immensely exciting performer
All around singing and dancing
I loved her superfit backup singers
What Tina did with the microphone in Gimme Shelter excited me
Aretha The Supremes all of Stax and Motown and Atlantic
Smokey Robinson Marvin Gaye Michael Jackson Quincy Jones
Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles
Wicked Pickett and Lonesome Otis
Mood Indigo Potato Head Blues The Thrill Is Gone Caravan
Dust My Broom Rollin’ and Tumblin’ If the River Was Whiskey
Stones in My Passway Hellhound on My Trail
Ma Rainey Bessie Smith Big Mama Thornton Etta James
Rufus and Kool and the Gang and The Ohio Players and The Gap Band
Mississippi Fred and Mississippi John and Memphis Gus and Memphis Minnie
Memphis Slim and Slim Harpo
Professor Longhair and Dr John the Gris Gris Man Alain Toussaint The Meters
Luke Jordan Cocaine Blues
And Dick Justice’s cover is a bit of all right
Along with his rendering of Henry Lee
And almost everything else in the Harry Smith Anthology
The Carter Family Buell Kazee Uncle Dave Macon
Sliding a bit off topic now
The continuum is slippery
But many of the immortals listed herein
Appear in that Folkways noble compilation
The Masked Marvel Cannon’s Jug Stompers
I say almost so full disclosure
Nelstone’s Hawaiians sound winsome indeed
But they’re virulent racists sad to say
It’s a shame when assholes contaminate our fun
So let’s quickly give a cleansing listen to
Blind Willie McTell Blind Lemon Jefferson Blind Arthur Blake
Ray Charles
Robert Johnson in a hotel in Dallas
And the Moses and Elijah Charlie Patton
And seven or eight other hundred dozen
The little nightclub in Anytown USA
The ensemble at the college before the basketball game
And I just want to express my boundless gratitude
Beam me up Scotty I’m in a hell of heaven

I don’t care for show tunes
But Singing in the Rain The Wizard of Oz 42nd Street
So blessedly clever
The film score to Lawrence of Arabia
And the film itself is pretty great too though not without its flaws
Would it have killed you David Lean to put a woman in there
The ululating multitude don’t really tick the box
I guess he tried to make amends with Zhivago and his sappy Lara
Imagine Vertigo Psycho or Taxi Driver without Bernard Herrmann
Bugs Bunny without Carl Stalling

I could name a hundred one-hit wonders
And one-hit wonders are great
And as Joseph says in one of Mann’s best novels
Often dismissed as too lengthy
Once you’ve been acquainted with the Most High
Why bother with lesser gods
Who needs a second record from Shocking Blue or even the Box Tops
? and the Mysterians is only one song but that a good one
You can flip back and forth between the Trashmen and the Rivingtons
Misirlou Dick probably had other hits
But this one is perfect starts fast and speeds up
Some artists should have quit while they were ahead
Sequels suck as a rigorous rule
Woolly Bully way better than Little Red Riding Hood
Time of the Season pretty great but no She’s Not There

Mystery Train would be a classic even if Elvis hadn’t sung it
But with Scotty Moore and the boys at Sun it’s hard to beat

Within You Without You is an extraordinary case
The dialogue between the massive London Symphony and a little Indian band
A little girl and her neighbor Totoro

Those better informed than I have denounced Bitches Brew
But I was ready to be transformed in 1970

I must leave myself time and space and thou Dear Reader
For those just short of the pinnacle of greatness
And need I remind you what a majestic height that is
The Doors the Kinks The New York Dolls Jefferson Airplane
The Hollies The Byrds The Who Pink Floyd The Pixies
The Björk-PJ Harvey-Nick Cave wrinkle
The J Geils band were so fresh when
They were slicked-back nasty lads from Boston
Kurt Weill Claude Debussy
The charming sardonic and enigmatic Satie
The German Requiem but really just one section well the opening’s also great
Dark Side might nudge Floyd into the first rank
Outstanding musicianship studio technique lyrical excellence
Jeff Beck belongs here too
At his best with Jan Hammer or George Martin
But Over Under Sideways Down sounds like a shehnai
Played through a Telecaster
And the Bolero is pretty great penned by Jimmy Page
But John Paul Jones was the only genius in Led Zep
And how many groups have even one
Go for Four Sticks
He composer of the strings in She’s a Rainbow
The Velvet Underground let truth be told
And the early works of Andy Warhol
Especially his images of naked death
Transformer is a classic
Collaboration of Reed Bowie and Ronson
Brian Wilson is pretty great
But all I want is Don’t Worry Baby
Daft Punk paid homage to Wilson
But all I want is Around the World

It’s always a disillusionment to discover
For the umpteenth time that a great artist is human
All too human
Take Nietzsche for example
A lyrical philosopher if such a thing is possible
But not a model of coherence
Indeed madness peeps through the curtains of his greatest works
Yeats’s attraction to the overman
Led him to wish for a fascist aristocracy
And his politics were not his sole eccentricity
Best poetic diction though in modern times
And you could fill a hall of fame with the busts
Of great minds ravaged by syphilis
Schubert Manet Baudelaire
Perhaps even the miraculous Oscar Wilde
Who gave his genius to his life and his life for his genius
Of whom bee tee dubs just read The Importance of Being Earnest
We can accept that artists are on the verge
Many of them of cracking up or past the verge
With their drugs alcohol and garden variety crazies
Like everybody else really
Nevermind is a monument of magnificence
And Lithium best of all early specific for clinical depression
But you don’t have to do like Bird to play like Bird
‘Cause you can never play like Bird
And Kubla Khan occurred despite and not because of the laudanum
Gene Vincent burnt to a cinder
Poor diamond Syd giggling in the hall
Sly Stone had a problem showing up
Hemingway Fitzgerald Dorothy Parker
The standard bearers of generations lost beat or grunge
The suicides the abusers and the abused
Ike Turner was a hell of a blues guitar player
It’s a shame though when the author’s defects
Make up the theme of the work
I love me some Wagner
But ever were works of such towering grandeur
Devised by such a shithead

Some artists attain a consistently impossibly high standard
But one title will stand apart
Disraeli Gears Fear of Music Kid A
Hendrix worked the opposite trick
Three out of four titles he more or less completed kill outright
He did have a little sophomore slump though
But jaysus what can you say about Hendrix
The octaves on Third Stone the pathos of Wind Cries Mary
The orchestral expansion of Dylan’s Watchtower the apocalyptic sorrow
Psychedelic music generally expresses exquisite melancholy
Hear the sadness in Strawberry Fields
Which might have made Sgt. Pepper exceed a single disc
Double albums were all the rage for a while
Generally not worth the bulk
But preeminent exceptions obtain
The White Album a bit sad four solo albums some rather slim
Not innocent of longueurs
But Electric Ladyland Exile on Main St
Both highest points of highest points
The Stones created five unchallenged classic albums
Under the tutelage of Jimmy Miller
Add classics after
Some Girls
And before
Their Satanic Majesties Request denigrated at first
But justified by 2000 Light Years from Home alone
Add twenty or twenty-five songs from before albums became a thing and after
What To Do in every category guitar backing vocals lyrics drums
Charley I’m speechless and demolished with grief months years later
We Love You Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows Please Go Home
Jumping Jack Flash Honky Tonk Women warhorses par excellence
Stu and Nicky Hopkins and sweet crazy Brian
Bill Wyman underrated but 19th Nervous Breakdown
And the bass in Satisfaction yet another of its glories
Mick Taylor’s solo on Winter slide on You Got To Move and all over Exile
The coda jam to end all jams of Can You Hear Me Knocking
Sway badass in every respect
Bobby Keys stately Texas maniac
Merry Clayton got one shot and scored
Billy Preston I Got the Blues indisputably the best organ solo
Who saved Let It Be
Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone but it isn’t
Don’t be put off by the lumbering behemoth of the Stones onstage today
Keith can still shake you with a touch
The opening act in 1972 Stevie Wonder and Superstitious
So Talking Book that’s the one
Innervisions that’s the one
Fulfillingness’ First Finale that’s the one
I’ve had a good life and can die happy
Luxuriating in such plenitude
That’s what great art does for you
And if you can have only one Beatles album
Go with Abbey Road
But then Revolver

I can take a homeopathic dose of Grateful Dead
Especially if we’re in 1967 or 1969 or 1973

Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard had far better bands
Than most of the rock acts I’ve commended here

I lie awake at night fantasizing
That Jimi Hendrix has joined Parliament Funkadelic

Ann Carson I can’t even tell you what she’s doing
David Melnick was there ever a more sweet-tempered pcoet

I love when one great
Pays tribute to another
Mahavishnu Miles

Two pictures by Titian two or three by Turner
Leonardo Michelangelo Raphael are chelonianly impressive
But how lovable are they really
Admiring them feels like a duty
Velazquez tailor-made for the Foucauldian taste
But as usual the artist far outstrips the commentator
Hard to find a Rembrandt that doesn’t knock you out
Hans and Franz Holbein and Hals
Vermeer perhaps a little more praiseworthy than moving
Constable the healing power of nature in art
Francis Bacon had quite a few but Three Figures stands apart
Duchamp but primarily as groundwork for Jasper Johns consistently great
The latter a kind of Jane Austen of twentieth-century painting
As is John Ashbery of twentieth-century poetry
Who made it strong well into the twenty-first
Another sweet-tempered giant
Dip in anywhere
And his disciple James Tate
Browse leisurely his Selected
Bob Dylan has his ups and downs
Like way way down for a decade or two
But oh lord way way up
Desolation Row and all of Highway 61
Mississippi and about forty others that you tend to forget about
Oh yeah he wrote that and everybody either covered or copied
Jeez I mean Flatt and Scruggs did I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
A big tipoff when the songs in the Top 40 started mentioning clowns
Mozart always irresistible but six late symphonies
Three or four of the operas
All you need
Well you need the Requiem and whoever finished it did a fine job
And you can’t be a decent human being
If a Little Night Music doesn’t make you smile
Magical Vivaldi always a feast of melody
But stick to the concertos for mandolin
Odd-numbered symphonies of Beethoven plus the sixth minus the first
But here the warhorse theory shows its weakness
String quartets piano trios sonatas which of them do you plan to lose
And how about Schubert and his six hundred songs
If a tenth of them are as good as Der Lindenbaum or Erlkönig
And go to the Tate in London and try to decide what’s smokable

I like the hardboiled popular stuff
George Smiley Bernie Gunther
Starting to like Jackson Lamb
The works of Dashiell Hammett always
But Raymond Chandler doesn’t do it for me
The Godfather the French Connection the car chase in Bullitt
Apocalypse Now but not Heart of Darkness or well maybe
Aguirre the Wrath of God
Most of Scorcese
Most of the Coens
Thank goodness for Marge Gunderson
Or absolutely everybody would be a dope
Who’s not a hapless victim
A Clockwork Orange if that doesn’t stretch the point
A wicked score by Wendy Carlos
Assisted by Purcell and Elgar and Rossini and Ludwig Van
The movie not the book or well maybe
Try to refrain from the glossary

Aristotle despite his stout reputation is a wimp
Plato despite resistance has a lot going for him
And a lot harder than people think
Socrates is the greatest ever but you have to go through Plato
I read Euthyphro and the Apology every few months or mean to

I can listen to contemporary classical music if it has a pulse
Like Nixon in China
Atonality I just don’t get
Unless maybe you’re just supposed to go with it and don’t worry about the method
I can appreciate but my understanding is limited
But with artworks as with persons those I love I love indeed
A line I cribbed from Coleridge whom you just want to mother
Ghosts of Versailles mixes in some tonality and some Turkish
The undeniable beauty of a golden bird
Way back to Stravinsky three great ballets
A few delicate piano pieces
But then he turned serial
Back further to Tchaikovsky best in the pathetic mood
But please
No cannon in the concert hall
No imperial anthems
The tunes in the Nutcracker but really they really are really very familiar
The nineteenth century was the age of the giants
Berlioz with his innumerable timpani
Novels you didn’t get many of to the pound
People praise Middlemarch but give me Silas Marner any day
David Copperfield is the one you want from Dickens
Tale of Two Cities is shorter but Dickens shouldn’t do historical
It doesn’t matter where you open Whitman
It’s going to be lovely and we need Whitman’s loveliness
It doesn’t matter where you open Dickinson among her what thousand-and-a-half
It’s going to be shocking and buddy we need her kind of shock
Poe’s tales but not the poems
Okay Annabel Lee’s okay but stay away from the bird on the bust
Moby Dick is great on any page but damn they add up fast
Bartleby is much more to the point
And Byronic heroes stink up the joint
Heathcliff Rochester Ahab Byron himself
Just act like grownups will you guys
But Byron rhymed bodices and Odysseys so that’s okay
Too bad it was on like page ten of the longest poem ever
And Jane Eyre is awesome regardless
And the first half of Wuthering Heights
And Frankenstein in the early version
War and Peace is solid but go for Anna and her sister Emma Bovary
One novel each and you know which one
By Morrison Pynchon Bellow Baldwin Vonnegut Heller Woolf Rushdie Nabokov
Ulysses is great if you can get Richard Ellmann to teach it to you

And speaking of the Odyssey
Don’t read the Iliad
And the story of Dido is okay but it’s a straight shot to fascism
Pious Aeneas virility the pathway to submissive virtue
Doesn’t matter who you screw so long as you do your duty
And Oedipus is amazing but a lot like the Eden story
We’re congenitally fucked
Well wait a minute
The scene where Priam comes to to Achilles’ tent should move you
You cold-hearted bastard
And Hector’s parting from Andromache
And we know what’s going to happen to the kid
The Divine Comedy is just gross sorry
An impressive achievement
Like making Westminster Abbey out of pretzels
But with more juicy skull chewing for all eternity
Italian lit of the renaissance is okay but see literature in translation above
You can read the Canterbury Tales in Middle English
If you ignore the great vowel shift
But don’t bother with anything except
The General Prologue and the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
And the sweet story of Chanticleer and Pertelote

Does the fact that I like popular stuff make me a bad person
The Waltz King was more a collaborator in the Vichy sense
Than a servant to the insanely wealthy Viennese
A well-compensated enabler
Ah but Tales of the Vienna Wood
Vibrato on the zither

Much mischief flows from misapprehension
Of the meaning of representation
The problem stems from the variable usage of the prefix re
Which sometimes means again but sometimes means back
We give schoolchildren the former construal
The latter requires some evolution of thought apparently
If you reread this poem you will read it again
But if you return to it tomorrow you do not turn again
You turn back
Similarly retracting is not drawing or pulling again
But drawing back
Like that flap of chest tissue during my heart surgery
A magnolia with three boles and a few plump ivory flowers
Is present to me now right outside my open window
I represent it to you in language now
But language cannot make the tree present again
Anywhere or anywhen else than now in the near back yard
My representation is thus a reference
I attempt with my words to carry your consciousness back
To this thing that you have never seen nor never will
This magnolia flowered and triple-boled

Don’t debate within yourself
The primacy of the general or the particular for example
Don’t torment yourself with the error of taxonomy as destiny
Which came first streets or 1st Street
The answer is obvious but trivial
Unadjudicated debates are pointless
And sequence overrated
Don’t subject yourself to victory and defeat
The subfamilies of the Lepidoptera legitimately concern the entomologist
Let us you and I love the monarch and the fritillary
Whether or not we know them by name

The gutters continue to accumulate the seepage from the days of rain
A dog briefly liberated from domesticity warily and joyfully romps
Rules govern every event except not
And who designates an event
And who discriminates an object
A dog is obviously conscious
Seepage apparently less so
But it’s an artificial contrivance of the human mind
The mosquito larvae know to touch the surface and dive
A madman types decrees on a Royal upright
Demanding the destruction of a civilization as currently constituted
That permits the nose-picking of a three-year-old

Invasive species poorly maintained infrastructure
The unanswerable dictates of priests and kings
Children people of all ages infected wounded by neglect
An economic system founded upon consumption of the irreplaceable
Horrific violence perpetrated in the cause of insane ideology
A million persons displaced in Sudan because former allies quarrel over power
A culture an empire a global dominion of special weapons and tactics
We have little power to defend against these atrocities
But we can refrain from effecting them within our narrow sphere
We can show the world through our actions that good is real

In the name of all that is good
Love yourself that you might love others

I hate to see you suffer dear friend
Events are overwhelming
And you feel your contribution is meager
But your worth is not contingent upon your contribution
Not contingent upon your management of affairs
Not a function of this or that quality
And you contribute a lot in any case
You mean a lot to me

I am by no means a model of probity
But I am benevolently inclined as I know you to be
Partial to the good
We know little and self-control is limited
But we help each other when we can
A bird ornamented with red just perched outside my window and departed
That damned dog is still snuffling around my yard
I think its having a good time

See a way of wagging the hand
So that only the ring finger waggles
A ring or its absence implies no significance here
It’s only a way of identifying which finger
And see a different way of shaking a hand
So that the index snaps against the thumb and middle finger
And note again shaking a hand
Not shaking hands by way of greeting or agreement
And not snapping fingers
As keeping time with Marvin Gaye or Nina Simone
And of course you can keep time with any musical artist
And not just these magnificent two
Just representatives of the whole masterful company
And with middle finger no hostile intent
Though the opposable quality of the thumb might relate
But one finger striking two that cleave together
But confusingly cleave could mean to separate or divide

A schoolchild says How many fingers am I holding up
And you say Five
And the kid says Wrong
One of them is a thumb

We imagine that we can bring the world to order
By focusing the eye
And somehow we involve the focusing of the tongue
Synecdoche of the entire vocal apparatus
The entire conceivable lexicon
To match the entirely separate sensory apparatus
Of which eye is but a representative
In order to disaggregate the significant
From the welter of chaos on the periphery
But doesn’t welter already mean chaos
And wouldn’t it be better to register significance
Before the aggregation
But the world I guess constantly or already aggregates
We come upon an aggregate or composite world
And something is significant only in relation to something else
That which is significant stands out
We make it stand out
And stand a metaphor

I wrote this poem when I was 18 years old
And 68
At 18 never a weed whacker had I heard nor seen
Nor at 68 have I forgotten
What functioning gonads are

I’m supposed to be looking for an object
That might no longer exist
The very definition perhaps of a fool’s errand
For matter is neither created nor destroyed
But the object might well have transitioned into the realm of the unavailable
Where it will abide as good as inexistent
And when will I know in fine that I haven’t found it
I always haven’t found it yet
And in any case a frustrating task
The more imposing after years of insult to the body to the brain
But of course the brain is part of the body
But a special part we say
Where matter is transmuted into abstraction
But the liver too is special and performs its function
Many functions in point of fact
Some of them transmutative
The thyroid the pituitary the gonads
All functional as hell
Broadcasting their messages of command and control
Encrypted in the hormones
And I’m distracted by welter and stand and thumb
The object is not one thing but two
My pair of spectacles is not two things but one
I found the object but my relief at its recovery
Never matched my grief at its mislaying

But it was never matter to begin with
Not so far as we can tell
And why suppose that matter comes first
And what is the significance of sequence anyway
The brain imposes factitious order
On a welter or whatever of sensation

What does a fly see with its compound eye
So exquisitely reactive
A pace of life measured in milliseconds
A lifespan of what a month
Human time humans who measure out the moon
Karl Shapiro called a fly a hideous little bat
He was one of those great realist poets
Shapiro not the fly
Those poets who could and did contrive
A concrete-to-concrete metaphor
A manner mock-grandiloquent that is to say
A tone slightly satirical that is to say
Bitterly and doubtless justifiably pissed off
Who witnessed the horror at mid-century

What do you see and what is it called

The cephalopod’s eye they say
Is as precise as that of a human
More precise perhaps given the cuttlefish’s visual display
That is to say display for visual delectation
And eye again a synecdoche
And what of its molluscan cousin the garden snail
With its sensitive retractable horns
So called by their resemblance to the accessories of antelope or cow
Synecdoches
Lots of other creatures have horns
Corniferous may we say
No we may not
For that word means of or producing chert
But lots of creatures do have horns
Semblant in their relation to the head
And not necessarily in their retractability or its absence
We don’t call the spikes on the stegosaurus-tail horns
But see what ceratopsians have atop their eyes
And do snails have heads
Their stomachs are their feet
Or so we say anatomy be damned
And what about our fellow vertebrate the lamprey
What does it see while socketed
To walleye catfish or sturgeon
Synecdoches
And I can’t imagine that the fish are too pleased with the experience
Of fast-appended lamprey

Remember that time a guy walked a tightrope
Between the Twin Towers
And you picture the Twin Towers to yourself
And think of something entirely other
Than a guy on a tightrope

See the photoreceptive eyespot apparatus
On flagellated algae
Synec uh well you know
Functional for steering toward photosynthesis
Evolutionary descendant of the chromatophore
The eyespot not the algae

A hired man or maybe self-employed
Operates a weed whacker
With a effing two-stroke engine
You see what I did with the article there
Highlighting the bowdlerism
I say Hiya
He says Hey
We both bob our heads a little at the neck and smile
Look
A hawk’s feather blown aside
One edge supplied with barbules
The other fluttering free
And from the feather will ye know the hawk
I pick the feather up and hold it
Between my thumb and my middle finger
And look

As no one can precisely say when day gives way to night
Though clearly a distinction might be made
So artifice and nature remain distinct
And as lovers revelers singers of matins and vespers love most
The passing threshold times of dawn and dusk
When the world is neither this nor that but all contraries met
So great beauty dwells in those things
That partake both of intellect and flesh
And thus in dreams which check the promptings of the will
We mighty playwrights be and cunning shows contrive
So rightly spake the sage of Weimar dreamer of the Faust
And thus the costumed flowers the pollinators beguile
And thus the little birds triumph with potency of song
And falling rain advises with the force of sapient speech
And though but rare to see Aurora Borealis’ enchanted curtains
Reveal and not conceal the theatrical celestial stage
And promise and deliver an Odyssey in space
From which vantage earth appears
A floor of carpets and mosaics curiously wrought
And especially those forests that give way imperceptibly
To grassland where first humans walked
And deathless sing we day and night
With our forbears in the trees

The house sets off on its nightly course
Relinquishes its servant duties
Relaxes its responsiveness to beck and call
And eases into autonomy
No mechanisms to manage
Nor devices to maintain but such as those
That pertain mainly to the interior
The air the darkness
And to a lesser extent the exterior

A breeze enacts procession through a half-opened window
A streetlight genuflects through a gap in the curtains
It will keep up the good work
Until the fullness of the morning
And up and down the neighborhood
The region reverberates not unpleasantly
The barred owl calls in lengthy intervals
Who-oo-oo cooks who cooks for you rrrrr
In lengthier intervals the railroad tracks clatter
The engine sounds its diminished chord
A dog intones and then is silent
Thrusting motions emanate from the highway
The frictioning tires the whine of shifting gears
Trucks hauling manufactured goods the finished and the partial
Emit rough gutturals from their elevated exhaust pipes
Hedonists fast and furious in their Dodges and Camaros
Make bets or raise hell for the hell of it

People elsewhere watch TV
Eat snacks make love
Check in with their social media
But here the house conducts itself as a house
Practicing the tranquility of customary night
Tomorrow the negotium begins again
But here tonight beloved let us rest