Subject matter matters
Might I not therefore renounce the renunciation
That has seduced me into the untruth
That I am bad

Gluttony sloth
Disgusting evasion for fear of detection
Violence of unchecked passion and deceit and deadly pride
The sybaritic privilege of unrestrained ennui

I move uncertainly
I move self-consciously afraid of error
Bump the jamb as I pass
Drop the object in my grasp

Fear a self-fulfillment
Though Sensei Splinter advised
That courage is not the absence of fear
But the mastery of it

Granted no shame in fear
But the failure to master it
Is a failure pure and simple
And failure is shameful

Once I dreamed I knew the solution
To the problem of self-control
But if I knew it I’ve forgotten
How to make will the master of will

We speak of performing an action
As one might perform the cello part
As one might perform the role
Of a hero who moves decisively

Whether to perform is not a choice
No shilly-shallying or preferring not to
One performs well or badly
Or somewhere in the ambiguous middle

Actors hit their mark
Cellists control the bow and the fingerboard
Those who walk and carry things
Control their motions and their thoughts

But I have harbored evil thoughts
Thought the worst of those who love me
Wished that harm might be visited upon
Those offensive whom I’ve never met

And upon those I know not excluding myself
For I was taught that within me is a soul
An auditorium full of sins that remain seated
And a scanty faction of grace that heads for the lobby

If I could remove the bad
Soul surgery metaphysical demolition
Obtain the absurdity of absolution
But what’s done is done

And what if one is truly fundamentally
Congenitally and irreparably
Firmly and irretrievably
Intrinsically bad

Or bad fifty-one percent
Some good qualities sure
But inextricably involved
Hopelessly contaminated

I’m not as bad as all that
I know I’m not that bad
So why the unforgiving urge
To insist the contrary

What’s the metric
What instrument detects
What operation calculates
The proportion of depravity

An erroneous line of thought
Perfection a fiction
An abstract machinic construct
An immaculate conceptualization

I am not Hamlet not Prufrock not Bartleby
Healthy enough in body I can what I can
I can talk of Michelangelo
Strut the mold of form

So many addictions overcome
Or at least driven into remission
Save this one maybe the last
The indulgence in hatred of oneself

The irises overblown and drooping fade
Creepers invade the azaleas
Unease settles in the suburb
The nature of nature condemned to artifice

But I’ve heard a mermaid sing in made-up song
I’ve heard the blues walking like a man
The owl its welcome cry
The baby’s urgent announcement

What do I want
To punish or to recover
Or to grow and flourish and doubtless perish
In the inextricable soil

Who never fails has never attempted
Knowledge and ignorance inseparable
And ignorance infinitely the larger share
Partial success a well-manured acre

The iris petals fade and fall but the rhizome does not die
The azaleas will bloom again next year
My flowers of evil will cease
And I will persist in ambiguous motions

You don’t deserve to see the sunset
You just see it
To have breakfast a pair of shoes and a place to lay your head
To hear the laughter of a child
To express yourself in words paint or a self-made bass boat
Plagsmir nelt spar zt pragsmil
Woflexiins terpst niy spar wavezun
To play the piano the computer keyboard or the sewing machine
To do nothing as if that were possible
To enjoy the thrilling comingling of bodies
To feel gratitude that the sun has risen
To hear the polyphony of birds
Those you can identify by song and those you can’t
On the last day of April
To see at last a honeybee

Stupid stupid Harold Bloom
Too goddam smart to leave me room

I’m in the uppermost decile probably
I imagine I could make a 91
A cheerful high school teacher
Or a charismatic salesman
Or a waiter with an entertainer’s flair
All honorable professions
But I set my sights higher
Conceited contemptuous asshole

A therapist once suggested
That I should refrain from calling myself nasty names
But it’s a reasonable reaction
For one raised to believe
That misdeeds should be punished
And who is to declare sentence
For secret crimes

I never read books until puberty
And then only the ones that stimulated my imagination
Science fiction mostly
Space ships and alien creatures
That I could play in my head like movies

I did like Jane Eyre
Probably because of the madwoman in the attic
I was fascinated by insanity
Bosch’s hell in the Time-Life picture book The Mind

I was well into adulthood
Before I ever learned to read a poem
I had written a song or two
For my teenage rock band
But there too my development was delayed

The current outpouring commenced
When I was 60
Turns out that mental illness and alcoholism
Are not the blushful Hippocrene
They’re cracked up to be

At 30 I embarked
Oldest in my class
Upon a serious study of literature
I was not inspired
But only intimidated
Not so much by the poems
As by the social pressure
To achieve in the art of criticism
For which I have little aptitude

And then I learn
From Professor Bloom’s book
That the poets themselves
Were the greatest critics
And I guess the sequence
Kind of jumbled in my addled mind
That I could become a poet
Without first learning to criticize

And worse
Without learning to write poems

Spontaneous overflow don’t you know
As if blank verse came spontaneously
To anybody other than William Wordsworth
Yeah yeah Milton was his covering angel
Poets are horrible liars
But they lie so mellifluously

Not intimidated
But despairing

I committed long ago
Well about 2015
To the proposition that it’s better
To be no poet than to be a bad poet
And yet I continue to write
Is it a poet’s lie or a coward’s
To say that I can’t help myself

Because when I write
The lines don’t go all the way to the right side of the page

And so I chose theft outright over silence
An overt admission of defeat
So why don’t I take my pen and go home

Despair is the one emotional posture
Forbidden to the poet
Of the American Gnostic school
Thanks Professor Harold Bloom
Anxiety is okay because unavoidable
In the Age of Anxiety
And guilt is great as the fount
Of the sickly but in some circles admired
Confessional mode

But despair is silent
And I feel guilty for breaking the silence
And I fear discovery
Like a guilty thing surprised

You don’t fear the future if there is none
No blank verse is better than bad blank verse
If only I could commit to despair

This work of fiction is for and from Jason

I pray the Lord her soul to keep
I pray for miracle to make me weep

I know the facts
I know that she is dead my infant child
I know that I loved her before she died
But I can’t for the life of me say what that means

The missing limbs on my left side
Site of constant pain
The deaf ear site of constant ringing
Why can’t I feel the pain of her loss

I know the facts
I know that the father is supposed to grieve
I have a great vocabulary
I know what grief means
But I don’t feel it

I know what traumatic brain injury is
I know that it has taken away my feelings
Along with some of the words in my immense vocabulary
Most of which remain on the tip of my tongue

I know that I’m to blame
They tell me it wasn’t I who ran the red light
But maybe they’re just trying to make me feel better
I wish they’d make me feel worse
Why don’t they understand
I don’t feel either way

I feel no guilt
I know that I am guilty
I was the one who put her in the car
Nestled in the shell of plastic
I was the one along with my former beloved
Who brought her into a universe of death

I know that no Almighty God
Could have allowed this death or any death
Does God feel guilt
How about sharing

Don’t tell me about her immortal soul
Baby soul drooling and gibbering
Squawking like a pterodactyl

I am no father
I tell myself
Maybe a regrettable state of affairs
But lots of guys aren’t fathers

I sin in envy seeing others insane with rage
Envy is sin not feeling
I just want what others have
I want a suffering more than physical
I want a life in my plastic shell

How unseemly
How gauche
Is that the word
Gauche
How gauche then
An unfeeling father

A Colt revolver showed
The Nineteenth Century’s machinic look
Even Dirty Harry’s Magnum
Displayed a brutal Seventies elegance

Today’s handguns exhibit
All the aesthetic qualities
Of a TV remote face-down
Or a switched-off phone

Say yes to meat to sugar to salty snacks
To drugs you have to ask your doctor for
To the fitness device nobody needs
Replete with video images

See the soldiers in their black armor
Going from house to house
See the public thoroughfare
Site of deadly games in blacked-out cars

See the culture of Death Almighty
Steering brains toward universal death
The little girls dancing in perfect synchrony
The Law to Like the regimented song

The neighborhood cats
Give obeisance
To Ancient Orange

I dreamed
The flower screamed
When I plucked it from the soil

Carpenter bees browse among the azaleas
Here and there a butterfly
But none of the beloved honey bees
Their numbers tragically diminished

The carpenter bees drill holes in our porches
No use-value no luscious honey
Their bodies plump and ungainly
But they have their beauty too

See one plunge deep into the petals
Wagging its rotund posterior
Hind legs swollen with the whitish pollen
Treasure for the tribe

And like every living thing
How apt how elegant
How far different from that of human contrivance
Which must please if it please the mind

How beautiful is one bristling black or yellow hair
It can’t be seen except in aggregate
Or with the supplement of optical apparatus
All in nature each is all

And nature not ideally efficient
The vestigial organs
The imperfect births
And yet for all this nature ever strives

The black beauty grinds it out
Petal by patient petal
Grain by grateful grain
Animal and plant in mutual striving

How beautiful is Oedipus’
Raking the broach across his eyes
This too requires aggregation
The drama does not begin with catastrophe

Before must come anagnorisis
Without which the self-mutilation
Is mere atrocity
But with which is the possibility of decorum

Not perfect efficiency
But wondrous decorum
As the bee’s round rump
Matches its humdrum task

And the bee fits in beautifully
With flower and sky
And river and field and ocean
And the richness of out-of-reach stars

You can see it at a glance
Not so the tragic hero
Who must guide us through the journey
From ignorance to knowledge which is sorrow

We must participate or there’s no play
Audience must take the arduous journey
While nature fits its puzzle pieces
With miraculous facility

But what matter if beauty be
Arduous or immediate
We see the striving of the setting sun
Of the hero and the carpenter

We see what remains and what departed
The king’s untempered pride
The soft flower’s embrace
The absence of the honey bee

Why are most of the memories
In my thousand-year repository
The sad ones the anxious and the angry ones

Bliss I remember as a fact
I was blissful several times
But torment is perceptually present

Driven upward on the scalding whirlwind
The agony of suspension
The inevitable fall

I feel my hackles rise
The tingling weakness at the back of my knees
The growing onset of nightmare

My hands a million miles away
My limbs ineffectual
Being pulled by mechanisms

But it’s only memory
The nightmare I really lived
The terror learned in my body

The cresting regret
The admission of defeat
The shame of cowardice

No angel to perform the annunciation
No bard no tale of mythic origin
No sphinx screaming into the darkness

Settembrini’s cold September
A Mediterranean shivering on the brink of Davos
Norkay might’ve had a suggestion
But he never got the byline

The rendering plant cascades into the saltmarsh
The burrowing worms carouse in the windfall
Or shall we say waterfall
Or shall we say fatfall

But the little copepods can’t cope
With the bounteous boon
More adept at particulate matter
Than at semi-emulsified globules

Boileau would have hated that
Semi-emulsified
But simultaneous beauty and truth
Is a tough act to swallow

The Encyclopedia of Suffering
Never completed scarcely begun
Knowledge unstoppable
Goes without saying

The obviously obvious glut of sorrow
The arcane allusion
The pictures in the media
The secret silent injury

Or is it just that one breath
Cannot accommodate
Both the genetic behavior of low places
And the hyper-cognitive high

Little Hans must go down
Go down and die
In the trenches of war
Dug out to evade the lofty projectiles

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