As I absorbed the adulation
From the smallish multitude
I thought in words
Words that I adjusted as I thought them

This is the peak of my life so far
Careful to add the optimistic qualifier
But the peak represents the inflection point
The moment of inevitable decline

Barzun claimed what we call free verse to be merely prose that does not reach the
Right side of the page
Frost called it tennis without a net
I know they’re right and I blame the times that we live in an unpoetic age
I refer to the period from 1954 to the present
Which our critic-poets would style the apotheosis of decadence
And I have written approvingly of decadence in these pages
And decadence is a moral category
The carnivalization of history in which norms are overturned or at the least relaxed
And what can be the obscure effect of moral morbidity upon aesthetic deliquescence
No doubt some softening would be salutary when culture becomes hidebound and
Ossified
But you can’t justify the unjustifiable
You can’t give reasons for the unreasonable

Condondu pmisti effrent beliosic
I’ll give you decadence

Stevens was still around and Chaplin and Keaton and Lousie Brooks
Memorials of an earlier age true
But Toni Morrison and Dylan and Ginsburg and James Tate and Melnick
Anne Carson a baby in ‘54
The Beatles the Supremes Coltrane Miles and Aretha
Muddy Wolf and Willie
Dr John and Billy Preston
Otis James Brown and the Wicked Pickett
Scorsese and Campion and the Brothers Coen
Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson
Julie Taymor and Rauschenberg Warhol and Jasper Johns
A lot of great poems are lists
I dream of a Borgesian comprehensive list of lists
And dreams are never fully realized alas in the world of causal reality
Horrible beautiful Francis Bacon
Matisse made it to November
I’m still not ready for the later James Baldwin
And Dr King asked when will white liberals ever be ready for the scintillating stars
And Barzun himself nearly a centenarian when he raised his lament
And of course Robert Frost
But then Ezra Pound so there was some putrefaction at the banquet

We seek permission from the greats don’t we
Whitman’s operatic meandering
Dickinson’s slant
But all the persons we know of are human
Every hero some disreputable affiliation

The poets of now with their writing-program credentials
Their university appointments
And universities not exactly bastions of incisive criticism
The chancellor of the University System of Georgia
An arch-Trumpist who stood by the Leader when lots of other rats were jump-
Ing ship
Who ascended to the gubernatorial palace by promising
A referendum on Georgia’s Confederate-spangled banner
A promise he failed to carry out after having achieved his goal
I have a faculty position
But will I survive the next post-tenure review
The next round of show trials

Vladimir Putin has a goal
To return to the halcyon Soviet Empire
All the rest is technical process
Systemic function
Strategy tactics and the will and materiel to carry them out
And the Empire must have its Emperor
Frederick the Great who knew a thing or two about monarchy
Stated that the duties of the prince are two
First self-preservation
And second the extension of territory

The times are always changing
The customs remain the same

That’s the problem isn’t it systems and their goals
And the people who set as their goal to profit from system
To gain the world
And systems collapse and new systems take their place
Poets don’t seek office Václav Havel notwithstanding
And Johann Wolfgang von who never held a witch’s sabbath in the
Halls of Weimar
And the Weimar Republic that gave way to what we dare not say
The unspeakable that must be remembered
And memory grows dimmer unless somebody speaks of it
Technical processes of millions murdered and ballistic missiles
And who used nuclear weapons first

I quite enjoy tennis without net well at any rate badminton
Without a winner
Where there’s only one rule
Keep it moving
A sentiment that would make Alexander Pope cringe
The pope of poet-critics
But Pope didn’t cringe he attacked
But he lisped in numbers and poetry came easy to him
And he scorned the slobs who had to count syllables
And what kind of prose has eleven clauses and nary a period
Poet-critic is redundant or in pedantic parlance a pleonasm
Or more accurately every poet is a critic
But not every critic is
Well you know

A poem is not a goal to be won
You don’t get there by trying real hard
There’s more sense in trying real easy

Are you a thug
Which way do you want me to answer
I’m just trying to get to my car
Why approach me thus with questions

Do I affiliate with thuggery
Not that I know of
I’m not even sure what the word means
Why don’t you explain it to me

Everything’s a judgment call
Is this a neutral encounter
Or a street hassle
Or perhaps a confrontation with madness

And which of us is mad
Why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself
I know myself to be other than
The picture of mental health

I demand facts that I might make a judgment
Who you are
Who I might be
I demand facts

Is it a gambler’s gambit
Or the crux of a dire endgame
Is it an ongoing grinding conflict
What game would you like to play

Ah a quiz
Who are my parents perhaps
Concerning the mother is little question
The father makes the case cloudier

We find ourselves then in a relationship
Which need not have a goal
Or perhaps you have a goal in mind
But you do not tell me

I am not the same as I was
Before you spoke to me
I remember I was headed for my car
Is there something else I should know

In our interplay must be a liturgy
Some gesture some script to follow
Open to improvisation to be sure
Why do you approach me thus with questions

The pine thrusts itself right through the branches
Of the straight slower-growing sweetgum
Deaf to the suit for peace
Bending and striving to achieve the light and winning

Trees do what they do
Fruit kernel pod and tang
They don’t put too much thought into it
They can’t help it if a sweetgum gets in the way

Too fast and too slow for dull-witted perception
One character yoked in conflict with one other one
The serene aggressor the serene victim
No gathering momentum or dissipant entropy

So no we need not pick at the memory
Of the originary primal trauma
No obscure onset no indistinct outcome
No finale no particular overture

No heroes aloft in their fragile balloons
No perpetrators brandishing their arcane munitions
No saints bestowing their tender succor
No busted gamblers cursing their losing hands

No tree of knowledge tree of life
No quick crisis or languid denouement
The pine twists into a question mark
The least bad answer triumphant death

The pine neither demands nor assumes an answer
Straining in patient striving
One dead limb hanging idly
Lichens festooning its powdery skin

The sweetgum does not sue for peace
But exercises a subatomic mutuality
Or subsubatomic or suprauniversal
Careless of the epiphenomena of life and death

The same strive energy that drives the pine
Sameness not to be misconstrued as oneness
Where does that tree begin and end
The miracle of stoma the mystery of root hair

Nothing is separate
There is no one to remain
There are no many to change and pass
All is flux without monads swept in flux

Only the illusion of individuality
Only the illusion of objecthood
Makes no feel like denial
Makes empty feel like deprivation

Only the self-serving narrative of oneself
Only the faulty grammatical dilemma
Of singular and plural
And what is the number of zero

Hail world without things
Life without a self
Life without life
Being without being

It stops with zero no more than with one
Nor rigid needle nor trembling leaf
The sweetgum also pierces the pine
Nor outside nor inside but through and through

Who hears the little fiction of a joke
Recognizes something familiar or unfamiliar
Lurking in one’s own life
Or that of a person unknown

You don’t get to be sixty being a fool
Or all the fools are dead by sixty
But everywhere are seen old fools
And the dead no more foolish than the quick

Some happy few no doubt retain
The brains of a twenty-year-old
But grouchy befuddlement increases
And what word was supposed to go with elegant

Narratives of trauma no longer fashionable
Not even those of entire peoples entire continents
The recipe supposed to be followed in sequence
And insults to the brain well before twenty

So they never have been poems
And their creator no poet
And somebody should now step in and say
But you are a poet

Still to step in
Though no longer graceful nor elegant
No longer working the illusions of grace or elegance
Yet still to perform the chaste minuet

We launder the sheets
And set to work dirtying them again

An angel came to me last night
Who played the role angels classically play
Deliverer of threatening messages
Issued by the Most High
A being of indeterminate gender
Or rather of no gender not having evolved
From earlier vertebrates
And yet its eyes nose mouth feet and hands
Were all in the normal places
Uncannily tall thin yellowish and translucent
The angel wore a trapezoidal caftan
When it spoke I could not make out the words
I checked to see whether my hearing aids were in
They were
How odd I thought for a messenger
To emit unintelligible speech
And why should the Almighty
Need to rely on servants

An old man said I dreamed of an angel
That means I will die soon
But no need for an immortal to disclose
The brevity of life on earth

Four-score years ago a historian gave out
That the loss of structure in works of art
Exposed a culture in decline
If so then these pages effect such exposure

And was Whitman’s America more in decline
Than Baudelaire’s France
He who created alexandrines
Among the vers libre

And what is this structure and where
The millions of heroic couplets
Marching through the neo-classical age
Spoke they of a culture ascendant

But the historian found charm
In mannerist deformities and weightlessness baroque
And Pater too admired a comely decadence
Rigor dissolved in deliquescence

And yet it takes energy to persist
Amid lassitude and enervation
It takes will to take on willingly
The disease of poetry

Imaginary island
Unfamiliar fruits ready to drop into your hand
Strange beasts inclined to servitude
Meteorological conditions that heal wounds instantly
Gushing springs that prolong life indefinitely

Impoverished island
No people unready to comply
No people disinclined to servitude
No people who whether you love them or not
Will suffer and die

Blackbirds stream from my right to my left
From northwest to southeast
So quickly their crimson chevrons scarcely visible
So masterfully do they pass through the leafless tree
As if it were a mist or an idea
And yet a few pause to light momentarily
Only to rejoin the surging multitude
Now great now smaller
But uninterrupted and always in one direction

I cannot stay to witness the spectacle
I have my own compulsions to obey

I stand corrected
You are quite right
To point up my falsity

How reprehensible
To employ an absolute
When the case was merely relative

I hope you will always be here
To catch me in my crimes

A flock of blackbirds on the lawn
It seemed to matter
That it was smaller
Than last year’s horde

The trees unusually fecund
The mounds of acorns
Heaps of helicopters from tulip trees
Seemed to matter

The old poems seemed rehearsals
For a lie I planned to tell
To tell the truth the truth is simple
It’s the telling that’s complicated

I watched a little hawk perch in a tree then dive
To penetrate the low bushes in a lightning attempt
But the mouse or bird made a break for it
Too quick for raptor’s grasp or human sight

For years now I’ve seen more hawks than mockingbirds
Heard more often the high aggressive screech
Than the solemn antic melody
The careful alternation of play and grievance

Mockingbirds sing to ward off rivals
And to call hither their candidates for beloved
Hawks call out I know not why
Though like mockingbirds more often heard than seen

But this hawk sat silent upon the bough
And silent made its attack and made a silent second attempt
But when its quarry twice played away
Twice issued the anguished cry of defeat

And for the mouse or bird that got away
The hawk’s defeat meant no victory but mere reprieve
Nature requires the extremes of withdrawal and attack
The disparate parity of seizures and escapes

And all that lies between and beyond the extremes
The furtive herbivores the patient herbs
Molds that corrupt the dead
And trees that grow from the corruption

And those who traded the hunter’s cry
Traded the hunter’s few wins and many losses
For the risk-reduction though risky enough
Of agriculture and its discontents

I love words
Music
The holy communion of family and friends
The venerable capacity to respond to reasons
The inviolable dignity of persons
Sex
Babies
Slow pensive walking
Expressions of the tragic view of life
Expressions of the comic view of life
Images of dream and nightmare
Baseball and sumo helplessly and to the exclusion of other sports
Expertly prepared food and drink or even less-than expertly prepared
Plants their rhizomes boles and silicaceous exteriors
Seeds their husks helicopter wings and embryonic leaves within
Flowers their power to tempt and delight
Animals their pelts tusks colors bright or muted bodies segmented or continuous
Animals their social organizations lone predatory instincts drive to reproduce
The adaptive decorum of living things
The significant decorum of works of art
My cat Citrus his many faults and talents
Contrails
Clouds
Clear winter skies
Lush summer landscapes
Rain showers in Florida
Salt marsh
Wet places their appearance and aroma
Oily little rainbows in puddles lit by streetlights
Steam arising from the street
Fire its heat light and colors
Fire its ambiguous symbolic value
The symbolic relation of lead and gold
Symbols emblems metaphors analogies maps schemata and the devices of heraldry
Mountain plain and ocean
A child’s reaction to wonders natural and artificial
Fashion in architecture and apparel
Technology despite its expense and risk of harm
The holy remembrance of departed family and friends
The recollection of events joyful sorrowful or full of conflict
Sunset sunrise the course of the sun across the sky
The moon in all its phases
The wealth of stars one night in Virginia
Deserts and dizzying peaks inhospitable to humans
Pictures of places where you dare not set foot
Ancient dwellings monuments paintings and petroglyphs
The art science and history of writing
Knowledge of the miraculous processes of the universe
Knowledge of the miraculous web of life
Knowledge of the miraculous achievement of empathy
The miraculous growth of a child or an adult
The miraculous products of creativity

I love the excrescences of creativity here in these pages
Not good
But truthful

I drove a truck from Oregon to Georgia
I could spare no attention for Columbia’s flow
The Rockies’ majesty meant nothing to me
Except as a challenge for gears and brakes

A bighorn sheep trotted westward
Gone in an instant
And I grieved that I could not stop
To pay my respects

The old bad feelings
Which in my delusion
My wishful groundless hope
I thought I had overcome
Have returned

Too cowardly for pessimism
Too scared for despair
To face a future
In which I and those I love
Will suffer

But chiefly I
In narcissistic self-regard
A comfortable burgher
Counting his wounds
Luxuriating in regret

A liar and a plagiarist
Once I claimed that
Fair trains of imagery rise
But I have no imagination
No ability to produce images

The claim is Wordsworth’s
Word for word and not my own
No imagination
But only strategies
Of compensation

I have no imagination
But I have a great vocabulary
And yet I did not think to employ
The word trains
Much less the word fair

My imagination is auditory
I have told myself
But the sounds are no richer
Than the sights
No rhyme no rhythm no resonance

I fail to recollect emotion in tranquility
Due to a lack of tranquility
So I have protested
When only the throes
Stimulate my composing

A great poet
Finds fit epithet
A phrase of Keats
Even for despair
And seems it rich to die

Why then the compulsion
To compose
To congratulate myself
To simulate greatness
Without the risk of publishing

Discovered after death
Dickinsonlike
Or maybe these postings
Will make a splash
But poems don’t go viral

And how can these lines
Of unpunctuated prose
These pellets
Ever qualify
As a poem

It’s not poetry
It’s just a stupid symptom
Diarrhea or a flow of pus
A defect a stain
It’s snot poetry

Martin Heidegger
Nazi and willing accomplice of murder
Answered The Question Concerning Technology
Which purportedly alienates man
From Being in its primordial pristine purity
Or perhaps now and ever opens the door

Technology
Cattle cars
Zyklon B

For the primal truth must be revealed
Unconcealed by way of concealment
As in defeat you beguiled the victors to conceal
Willingly to shroud your crimes in oblivion
Which now and ever cry out to heaven

V2 Wernher von Braun
Bodies tortured and enslaved
ICBM

I will not take lessons in purity
From vile dead Martin Heidegger

Revved-up cars and long black guns
Too fast too furious

I heard merpeople conversing
But being hard of hearing
I collected only a few scraps
Force of gravity
Unwavering light
Big plants that never move
Sky that always changes
Sky that always stays the same
But never did I hear them mention
Those shadowy oligarchs
The people of the land

Old seafarers never considered
Mermaids in the phylogenetic sense
Never referring to mermen for example
In any of the old accounts
Nobody ever saw the absurdity
Of centaurs with six appendages
Six also for griffins and angels
Though seraphim have many more
Humanoid centipedes with wings upon their backs
Mermaids with only two
To which is added the piscine fluke

I don’t suppose they knew of my eavesdropping
These inexistent monsters
Monsters only in the phylogenetic sense
They did not behave like Frankenstein
Or the Creature from the Black Lagoon
Seizing raping or murdering
Or interacting in any way
With creatures to them merely mythical
Creatures to them worthy of oblivion
While they themselves live
Out there and below the surface

A girl a mod striding always striding
Shakes her shaggy short hairdo
Her blouse billowing above the rigid skirt
Such as Pharaoh might have worn
She turns her head away
From the direction in which she hurries
Toward us spectators
But her eyes a little askance
Seem to seek the past

She is a grown woman
But the custom of the time calls her girl
Not childhood but the apotheosis of youth
When youth exercises its prerogative
Or is depicted commercially to say
See our vibrant bodies’ life
You who are closer to death than we

Without death
Only life’s prolonged distress
With death
Life is no problem

Or perhaps her cornered eyes express dismay
At being so observed
Of being placed so as to be observed
Of being judged for her performance
Maybe she likes the billowing blouse the rigid skirt
Or maybe she is complying with command
And doubtless she’s been paid to pose midstride
And payment or compliance
What’s the difference

Life is a problem
For all who live
Close to death

Oh to devise a line that would soar aloft
On the wings of its own magnificence
And would rise above the gaze of the immortals
Who made the page their Kitty Hawk

Those bastards the artists
Who make it look so easy
Tempting the child to emulate their manner
Ignorant of their discipline

And once in a while the inexplicable
The Mozart or Handel
Tossing off masterpieces
Like a candy bar wrapper

Thank heaven for Keats
Who struggled to find a subject
Who struggled with the techniques
Which his lordly rivals wielded like saber

But then he outwielded them all
Sustained only with a love of beauty love of truth
All the while retaining the marks
Of hardscrabble life and education

And Dickinson another anomaly
No development no apprenticeship
An Athena born fully armed
And one golden monument after another

Perhaps then we should look to Blake
He of the golden cage
The prison of eros and poetry
Driven to reinvent the world

And a drive is no choice
And achievement no gift of chance or pale inertia
Look on their works ye puny and despair
And upon the crushing treadmill trudge blindly on

How do diatoms acquire the silica
With which to construct their glassy walls

How do large mammals avoid infection
From the pathogens in a stagnant waterhole

How do penguin parents recognize the cry
Of their offspring in the multitude

How do grazing animals discern the edible plants
Amid the noxious ones

How do subatomic particles come by their power
Of attraction or repulsion

How does one species exert dominative knowledge
In a world it cannot know or understand

It is said that of that which we cannot speak
We must remain silent
And yet I say of what I cannot say
That I cannot say it

The tender leaf of tulip tree in spring
The same fragile leaf in fall
How my mother invited me to pour the milk
To make the batter

The peculiar slant of light in morning
To one accustomed to staying up all night
The impressive effect of technical prowess
The emptiness of virtuosity

The great cat’s failure in nine out of ten tries
The earthworm’s continued futile striving
The bewildering plenitude of childhood experience
The bewildering proximity of dogged death

I already know too much of the future the past
How winter will pass after it has slowly arrived
How the Lions Club’s barbecue in Birmingham
Upon a Labor Day that will never come again tasted
How the pets will die and have died

Of deaths dauntless or cringing
How after long days of comfort bad days will come
How the routines of satisfaction will pall and fail to satisfy
How the striver will succumb at last
How notwithstanding denial youth will be better than age

Of manic sorrow and composèd joy
Of helplessness in the face of catastrophe
Of self-reliance and narcissistic complacency
Of humanitarian virtue and nihilistic contempt
How the mockingbird prophesied horror and degradation

The orange will still express its acid sweetness
The ocean wave its unique recurrence
The larva its unconquerable appetite
The mountain its imperceptible erosion
The poem its teasing incompleteness

1. The Ideal of Totality

Behold the deep interior trauma
Midway between wound and scar
Healing with imperceptible deliberateness

Why must it always be pain and suffering
Why must it always be trauma
Why never the sweetness of oranges at daybreak

Pleasure however noble flies
But pain persists living and durable
The bosses the teachers whose word was law

Whose word becomes part of oneself
And so express apprentice the whole shebang
The wound the scar and the fleeting sweetness

2. The Fragmentary Ideal

But pleasures too leave their residue
And the greatest of them haunt like trauma
And return unexpectedly

And their sporadic recurrence will not suffice
Nor should anyone demand as much
To resolve the ragged gash

No person is perfect whole or entire
But reliant upon poor humanity
To live tentatively up to the pale hour of death

Senility is a kind of mercy
That blunts the blade and blurs the rose
In memories of memories of memories

3. The Unruly Complication

No mythic fall from primal perfection has occurred
Things did not fall apart upon a day
Nor will they soon coalesce in the brilliant telos

Perennial problem exacerbated
By the times and my own incapacity
Everybody searches for solace for healing

And yet exceptions obtain
So no
You can’t say it all or anything much in these little broken lines

A fragmentary expression of the whole shebang
Or an exhaustive survey of one or two pieces
Fall and the beautiful banal maple