You have felt it too I think beloved
Felt resisted and rebelled
Rose up in indignation and rebelled
Sick of it all the indignity
Of mask posture and stilted performance
Let the world return to its first state
Let it reform resolve into rock fire and water

Never was it the case that rock does rock
Always was it that rock shows rock
As fire shows fire and water water
And we have known rock fire and water
For never was it the case that we have not known them
And yet when we have been apart I have said
My beloved does love me

We do not know you and I nor need to know
The rockiness of rock nor fiery fire watery water
But never have we not known that rock must have extent
That water must settle into currents
Though hidden in strata or in the wave-encrusted depths
That rock shows rock obviates commentary
The regularities of hiding and showing

Perhaps a world of being props the ornate grimace
A fire that shines within the flame
Perhaps all are doomed to suffer
The stern procedures of the will
Not least perhaps the will to dis-cover
To find a cadence lofty to express
The beloved loves

Supreme is not a word I would hasten in these bad days to use
But from Stevens’s superlative a small step back might clarify
For among fictions poetry is highly if not the most capacious

The question is not which among the fictions is supreme
But rather why is fiction so damned important
We don’t speak of the supreme pocket lint or oil change

The answer is our schemata
That set the stage for experiencing something new
So hear while you can the poetry of a saxophone
See the poetry in a lizard’s bobbing head

I admit it
I like Shakespeare and Keats
I also like marijuana
And cocaine
But that’s too dangerous for anybody to mess with
I gave up drinking
After forty years of snoring and puking
So what I like and what I approve of
Are two different things

On the whole however
My attitude toward Will and John
Is approbatory
Their personalities are part of it
To the limited extent we know them
Shakespeare the dramatic poet
Worked in an era long before the time
When Keats’s frenemy Byron
Made self-exposure fashionable

Keats worked around to freeing himself
From the hegemonic I
Even trying his hand at blank verse epic
He wrote maybe two hundred poems
In his short life
Of which only ten or so
Are world-historically significant
Which is a hell of a lot more
Than most poets can claim

Shakespeare’s plays require triage
A dozen of them are negligible
Comedies that must have had currency once
Ranters that confuse bloodbath for tragedy
Another dozen are as we say
Significant for the world
Though in one of the best Macbeth
The Bard had a helping hand
The middle third are interesting but unlovely

Weed I can go a year without
Cocaine and booze are gone for good I hope
The great thing about poetry
Is that you can carry it through secret passages
Especially now when
So shaken as we are so wan with care
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards
But on the viewless wings of poesy

I did not like the dog’s licking my face
When I was three
She’s kissing you the elders said
But I knew a kiss from a lick
And I wondered what other lies were current

It’s hard to count your blessings
When they’ve driven nails into your hands and feet

And that thief on the other cross
How does he make me feel any better

The song of the katydid does not suffice
To enlist it among the animals I love
I do not love hyenas warthogs or lampreys
Though I respect their existence

Magnificent tigers and tame-refusing zebras are okay
But I love the whales with their songs
The songs of red-wing’d blackbirds
A conversation with my cat Citrus

I do not love a cicada
Though the sculptural token of its emergence delights
I do not love shit bile or trailing or running phlegm
Inherent though they are in life

I do not love capable but unreasoning humans
And I myself lapse grievously from time to time
But I love the smell of baby’s scalp
Enhanced permissibly with shampoo

The radiating utility lines
The green branch of a red oak
Contrails the fresh and the dissipating
Amid the wisps of cirrus
A white moon greater than the half
The color of contrails
Serene and reassuring

I’m ready to die you say
To preserve my sacred right
To bear war’s indiscriminate scythe
Means more to you than life
Pure loving devotion to death
Pure loving loving devotion to death
Pure loving loving devotion to death
Pure loving devotion

Who else do you propose
To take the death trip with you
Everyone prepare to die for this man’s right
Every man every woman every child
Pure loving devotion &c

Your band of brothers sure
But also those you disapprove
The wrong complexion wrong hair texture
Outlandish clothes wrong shape of eyes
Pure loving devotion &c

Only you get to regulate
The death squad the militia
Put women in their place
The camps for all the rest
Pure loving devotion &c

Your bullshit cult religion
You don’t even understand
Animal totems wolf and coiled snake
Devouring the holy lamb
Pure loving devotion &c

You’re a liar and a hypocrite
A pervert and a bully
A coward behind regalia gang and gun
Too scared to put it where it matters
Pure loving devotion &c

A Nazi doesn’t need an ID card
A Klansman needs no sheet
Just need to be a true believer
Strength in numbers boys 40%
Pure loving devotion &c

You may say I’m a demon
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us

She jumped from the seventh story
Aimed well and hit the dumpster
She didn’t want to hurt anybody else with her fall
But she did hurt other people
She had two daughters
Just old enough to demand explanations
And an ex-husband who caused a lot of pain
Two years later he killed himself
Deliberately or not
Driving into the trees at a hundred and ten

What conclusions should we draw
What good are anger or blame
What should we say to those two little girls
Why do we even think that saying will help
We don’t have the strength to do the right thing
Not when we are most sorely tested
It’s like somebody else controls us
We know there must be alternatives
But we can’t bring ourselves to take them

A small monkey with a broken jaw
Pressed a turned-out hand to its eye

We who live today seem to lurch from crisis to crisis
Playing at one getting bored and switching
Or singing a roundelay with several verses
Guns racism sexual violence poverty public ill-health
International relations tyranny foreign and domestic

It’s not that our attention span is limited
Though that no doubt is true
It’s that the outrages never end did I mention environmental catastrophe
And we can’t pay attention to all of them all the time
The brain cannot accomplish such massive multitasking

Probably ‘twas ever thus
But we had neither the transportation nor the communication
To know about it
And anyway our hands are full and overfull
With the lives that we can barely hold on to

Mortality
Pleasure

That’s when you know you’ve got it bad
The entertainments the exaltations
The lewd low desires the gratification of which
Once gave pleasure
Have lost their savor
And in their place
The trudge of tedium
The drudge of menial details

The amusements of youth and childhood pall
Their mechanisms exposed
Cartoons for sugary breakfasts
The movies TV shows and pop songs
For the media conglomerates’ unheard-of wealth
The medium a business model
The artist a factory’s efficient supervisor

They’re signing up passengers
For pleasure cruises in high earth orbit
This is what passes for culture and society
This is not the aesthete’s comely decadence

Poetry costs almost nothing
Pen and paper
Or typescript in the cloud

Has art ever flourished only for its own sake
That’s the value of it
But not the source nor the destination
Interests other than the permanent and true
And the Temple of Delight an archeological dig
Beauty buried beneath the detritus of the campaign
The forgotten soldiers of Thermopylae

Surely they must have been wrong about suffering
Once or twice the old Masters
Surely a perfect batting average can’t be
The signal criterion for mastery
The year’s pageantry always awakens
Suffering a perennial feature of the scene
Failure bitter loss the harsh oblivion of unsignificance
The road always winds past the contagious hospital
The other side of the heroic stadium
The quiz show cheater always declaims
That he flew too high on borrowed wings
The swift runner tamer of horses
Might never come back from his ruptured Achilles
And if the tableau seems grand or stately
Or perfectly proportioned
Behind and out of sight in the tunnel or the bullpen
Shrewd Brueghel or arch-clever Daedalus
Devises builds and directs
The rough and fragile spectacle

Attempting egress with the parcel through Checkpoint Charlie
Green bags of tea or bags of green tea
The query from the customs inspector
Caustic diamonds too torrid for the touch
Painfully pungent what is the source of this sauce
Every schoolchild can recite the standard narrative
The animal propulsion
The saming technology
The paragons alabaster and remote

Some of the patients had to endure challenges to their veracity
The symptoms of proven etiology in rumor and misprision
The deliberately malformed perceptions
As blindness from the rich white light
Phantom limbs phantom endocrines
The invisible stick for the hoodwinked dog to fetch

But seriously
From where do these hostile cadences emanate
Okay maybe not across the primal Checkpoint Charlie in Germany
It could have been France or Venezuela
Or planet Xksxor with its denizens the terrifying Plogs
Their belligerence suspiciously unanimous
Conceal the parcel priceless and menacing
Convey it past the Argus-eyed douanier

Hit pause on the rainy songs
The sunset is not fabulous
Any more if it ever was
Though supplemental perhaps to the magnetic compass
The stars give little guidance in love business or marriage

In the blast furnaces of Bessemer
Only a memory now
In the old lamplighter’s sentimental rounds
The woods of California and Australia
The paleolithic Anthropocene
Only fire persists that like a wave
Constitutes not an object but a configuration

Adjourn the age of experiment and of discovery
Exult in the agony of the torturing flames
To purge the lingering amniotic wetness
Disperse the audiences for entertainments and political speeches
Hit pause on the cold and earthy songs of death
Blow off the inspiriting ditties of the air the helpful airy spirits
Let remain only poetry only fire

To cherish the fine old maladies

Pardon me I was distracted by thing things
I am a rather elderly man
Said Melville’s put-upon businessman
I too have not yet reached the most advanced stages
Went deaf in one ear can’t tell what direction
The moon still comes and goes
The garbage gets collected most Mondays

The drugs recreational and medicinal
What about morning coffee not something done for fun
Can’t start the day without it
I do enjoy the taste but labor under a dependency
Since before I can remember
I smelled the percolator

Specific objects specific events
An old guy about my age now
Strolling on a lawn beset with wild flowers
Sang an old song called Violet
When he forgot the words
Made an ostentatiously abrupt transition
Oh whoops exaggerated pucker and heaving chest
Began whistling the tune funny as hell
I call it to mind when I need a laugh

Things that happened forty years ago
But I can’t remember my password
My sons and daughters tell me you have to use
Some software gizmo so that you
Don’t have to remember your password
Obsolete now probably
I tell myself I remember the important things
But that’s not really true
The specific objects the specific events
Lying on the floor stacking blocks
Making the wooden train go around

Of course I remember the weddings the funerals
The serious illnesses the terrifying injuries
But that hike up a mountain I remember it happened
But everything specific is gone
Come to think of it I drank from a stream
And some smartass passerby on the trail said
Hope you enjoy your bear shit
That party at a coworker’s house apartment
I don’t remember
The visits to doctors teachers
The hours of revelry I was too high to enjoy

Spending a moment on a favorite activity
You can’t well I can’t write well about tranquility
Something demands commentary
Something demands some regularizing
Some missing piece some conflict
I make an ugly face I fear when I play the guitar
But I can’t see my face can’t control it try to forget it
And just play the damned guitar

Brisker than the Haribo
Racier than the raciest cola
Catch a fleeting glimpse
Of the cultural phenomenon

I prayed for madness and the madness came
And now I pray for madness to depart
Having indulged in cognizant superstition
In periods of stress the flights of birds
The magic of numbers twelve plus five

And I have chastised myself and worse for insults
To the body to the brain
Knowing full well that brain is body
But I was a materialist a crass instrumentalist
Knowing full well that birds fly for their own purposes

The division of I and myself was a primal error
Perhaps unavoidable and therefore not reprehensible
Perhaps universal or at least typical I don’t know
But I arrogated unto I the voice of command
The voice of control punishment and criminal proceeding

Long have I known that the tyrant must be quelled
But revolutions are bad
I can’t amputate a part of myself
And thus I propose to enter into negotiation
To render the theatre of battle as a play

Whereas wisdom learns from the past and plans for the future
Let us not waste our time debating the status of time
Whether it is an illusion whether or not it exists
Certainly let us not adopt the unreasonable attitudes
Of debilitating regret or paralyzing anxiety

Whereas each person must make decisions
And make them in the absence of omniscience
Let us apprise ourselves to the greatest extent possible
Of the facts relevant to the case
Remembering always that the world is infinitely interesting

Whereas in our limited knowledge and our weak perceptions
We make each decision in a moment of time
Let us prepare ourselves in each instance
To give an account to state reasons
And let us assess that account with patience and compassion

Whereas our knowledge and perceptions are ineluctably distorted
By desires long-standing harmful habits and unreliable memory
Let us not regard the errors that follow like ducklings their mother
With punitive intent for how is it just
To repay suffering with more suffering

Whereas many of life’s proceedings occur automatically
Let us cultivate those habits and routines that conduce
To reasonable and productive actions
Remembering always those principles that make things go best
Never confusing spontaneity with thoughtless impulse

Whereas each person is unique and valuable
And therefore worthy of respect
A worthiness expressed in the word and concept of dignity
Let us commit to acting according to this reasonable principle
Not forgetting that I am a person myself

Whereas everything we do takes place in a social context
Let us seek to engage with and not to isolate ourselves from
The wisdom of saints and sages of friends and loved ones
For our actions affect others who should have some say
And empathy is more-than instrumentally significant

Whereas dialogue epitomizes not only theatre
But also social interactions and the chorus of voices
That make up personality
Let us resolve to play our part and many indispensable parts
Regarding truly each part as a locus of manifold complexity

Therefore let us assert the nullity obsolescence
And unavailability of the role known variously
As Tyrant Controller Portable-Dictator Emperor
Super-ego Mini-Sovereign Overlord Judge-and-Jury
Final-Authority Absolute-Monarch Head-Cheese and Boss
Substituting instead Coach Consultant Producer-Director
Pathfinder or Master of the Revels

Performing a role differs from performing other tasks
And requires something more than following instructions
Macbeth falls dead for obeying too much
And while I have ceded too much to the issuer of commands
The play goes on even as I exit the stage

She spoke movingly of strange calamity and of her prophetic dream
Prophetic in the sense not of prediction but of a special enlightenment
Anciently ascribed to God but now to uncanny inspiration
That renders intelligible the world and its horrors

Famous devotee of form she was schooled in the immemorial craft
She mastered as well as anyone alive the fearsome curriculum
But fame or reverence come not to the one at the head of the class
Accolades accrue to the maker of beauty the herald of truth

A true poet and of the Devil’s party knowing or unknowing
Self-possessed confident and civil
Wielding legitimate credentials
Expressing truth despite her radiant thriving

Avoiding apparently the threat of deadly pride
For what is good for the poet might not be good for the world
Maintaining in due proportion her notable accomplishments
In what really matters to render pain into beauty

Illumination no doubt requires procedure
But from obscurity of the life or of the work
Beauty and truth may sometimes arise
As freedom requires the most arduous discipline

Accomplished fingers begin to play
–W. B. Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli”

Yeats was okay with social disparity
The artist here a serving-man
Roughly of a piece with plum or cherry-branch
Sweetening the task of climbing to the heights
Providing genteel accompaniment
Adding décor to the work of aristocracy

Heaney was great with one-syllable words
Slub and rump and a tobacco plug
Milton wrote English as if it were his second language
A guilty person is nocent
A river wanders with mazy error
Homicide serves as an epithet

Verbal terra incognita exerts an irresistible attraction
I am drawn to little-known words I can’t help it
And to display these arcane specimens I know is affectation
But then poetry is affectation innit
It’s not as if poems are natural objects
Waiting to be discovered

And so we need an agricultural not a geographical metaphor
And although agriculture was a catastrophe
Voyages of discovery were worse
Nevertheless writing like other skills requires cultivation
And a collection is sometimes called a garland of flowers
To be found not in a colony but in a garden

Prelapsarian Adam feared his cropland too fecund
And hence proposed marital separation
Rappaccini’s horticulture proved fatal at the last
And nobles executed poachers in their parks
I specialize in the rare the decorative and the easily grown
Wormwood dark cereus and sickly orchids

Truth in the world of objects is available to everyone
Theoretically and to the extent that it is known
But the inner world requires expression
And must be coaxed into being
Experience transmuted into words
As the farmer beguiles the yielding earth

The disaster has already taken place

Well he said
We no longer have a port on the Baltic
So we’ll just have to build a railway
And all applauded their youthful and enterprising king
But this meant austerity

All the luxuries
All the things that indicate kingship began to vanish
The court composer no longer
Hung around the little concert hall
The master of revels
Gone
The little bevy of courtesans
Now absent
That hurt the most
Pieces of furniture and gigantic paintings
Began disappearing
The little concert hall was converted into a print shop
Nobody knew why that particular transformation
Had been carried out

Eventually after much saving
And after much frankly injudicious borrowing
A few miles of track were laid
And before long the railway stretched
Across the little kingdom from frontier to frontier
A splendid locomotive was purchased
And richly appointed carriages for passengers
And baggage cars the size of houses

But nobody wanted to ride on the train
Magnificent though it was
For neither passengers nor goods
Found the need
To traverse the little kingdom from frontier to frontier

Soon the king fell into a profound melancholy
And seemed to age overnight
We never knew our port was so important
He complained to the workers in the print shop
How dare they take it from us
Whoever it was