For Tierra

It seems possible though unlikely
That a poem might conduce a little
To the increase of goodness in the world
Though just how remains obscure

For somehow the beautiful the true and the good
Sustain a broad equivalence
And in the aesthetic objective or moral sphere
Each gives reason for approval

But against all that there is only good or bad art
Not moral or immoral
So if the poem is to exert beneficence
Some interpenetration of the spheres must obtain

And horrible evil-doers sometimes love a poem
And all make judgments of the beautiful
As no doubt of the good and true
But each judgment judges of some thing

We need not ask how we come aware
Of the fragrant rose or the trusting child
For the stuff of the world asserts itself
Distinctly and with ineluctable emphasis

What are these binoculars
doing on my desk

Old fools complain that everything they love
Has now been declared bad for health
And worse the authorities always change their minds
Old fools write songs about the gillyflower

Old fools complain the price of everything there is
Including the latest innovations
Nobody used to need anything that costs so outrageously much
Old fools write songs about the gillyflower

The gillyflower tender leaf smells sweetly of clove
The gillyflower doesn’t grow around here
The gillyflower pictures in the crumbling book of the past
The gillyflower hardly a soul remembers

Old fools complain the young people’s neglect
Of everything eternal and true
And how all deny the wisdom of great experience
Old fools write songs about the gillyflower

Dear Charles

You asked me today whether I had written any poems lately
And I was overjoyed that somebody had taken an interest
You especially
And you followed up with a question
Concerning publication beyond these humble pages
And I gave the same answer I give
When we talk about bookings for our band
That’s marketing
I’m in research and development
Which is a snobbish and unacceptable answer
But I can speak to you artist to artist
And ask whether you think I’m right
That a certain snobbery obtains in the artist’s calling
Especially one of long standing
And I’m reminded of a conversation
Between a member of the nobility
And a great artist of our own time
Who painted a great mural in the great house
Asked by the patron how he had achieved a particular effect he replied
Years of practice

And our conversation continued
And we discussed the troubled relationship
Of the artist and the public
And I claimed that the artist’s responsibilities include
Educating the public
And I went on rather gratuitously
That the public must desire such education
Gratuitous because as a schoolteacher I know
That the desire to learn is the sole definition of student
And you did not say
Though you could have
That the artist you admire perhaps more than any other
Held certifiable membership in the avant garde
And although no superstar of pop
Sold many records
Presumably intelligible to the masses

Sales have never stimulated my interest
Perhaps because I have made so few
Despite or because of my infrequent and desultory attempts
I have an unconsciousness moral objection to persuasion
People do what they want
As they should do
I can’t compel them to enjoy my work
I can’t even explain to them my work
I could never teach creative writing
Though I have been called upon to do so once or twice
And I teach essay-writing all day long
First
Ours is not a neoclassical age
Ours is an age that favors innovation
Which the neoclassicist Dryden called
The blow of fate
And the contemporary artist faces the impossible task
Of reinventing the wheel and everything else
And secondly
Which amounts to much the same
Ours is an individualistic age
And expects art to be individual expression
Even in the collaborative mass media
And how do you teach the expression of oneself

So is this a poem
Are any of them
I say yes
It is a thing made out of language
A verbal artifact
With some attention paid
Not only to the semantic content
But more significantly
To the superfluous
That is useless
As Wilde said
Elements
Especially the phonological ones
Especially the rhythmic ones
And I am a rather elderly man
Set in his ways
Who uses no punctuation

On a different plane we are collaborators you and I
And collaborative art is more rewarding
Even though it is easier
Than hacking compulsively away
I was well into adulthood before I learned
That our culture is an industrial product
But that knowledge came as no disillusionment
Since I knew that the art I loved best
Had arisen in industrial circumstances
But I also knew that I had lived through a renaissance
That began on the Ed Sullivan Show
And ended at a racetrack outside San Francisco
And in the jungles of Viet Nam
And with a second-rate burglary
And the throngs in the 27 Club
And yet artists remain true to their imaginations
And they create art
Whether under noble patronage
Or in search of the grail of a record contract
Or here in the early early morning
Hacking away
In lonely compulsive bliss

They can all be dismissed as first-world problems
Problems with the kids
Digestive complaints
One crappy dishwasher after another
And yes some people live in the first world
And though they may vaguely sense
The ordeals endured by the rest of the world
They do not as that Woody Allen character did
Cover the living room wall with the image
Of a man blowing another’s brains out in Saigon
They must cope
They must admit
That contrary to explanations current in childhood
Unavoidable problems have arisen

I have a problem with abstraction
It’s always been there
But it seems to have worsened
With this recent turn to a confessional mode
With its degrading dependency on the first person
I just don’t think about tangible things
I’ve seen plenty of objects in my life
This street light
This mailbox
The horrible intrusive privet from next door
Yes I live in the suburbs
I’ve always lived in the suburbs
I don’t know how to live anywhere else
My little horse gives his harness bells a shake
I’m so sure
I never see wheelbarrows or chickens
I took a pony ride at the church bazaar once
Parochial school a privilege

Or an image of some delicate plant
Found only in some particular locale
So acutely observed
So cunningly selected to serve
As objective correlative
To some intense yet impersonal
Complex of emotions
No that’s not me
Instead I hand it to the critics
Though in fact my secret’s safe on these pages
Though every poet craves fame
The old pagan afterlife
And I still wince to call myself poet
And I imitate the great masters
Though just how isn’t obvious
Or lapse into total
Tjnbui pmist effrenti gurdrif insay
Or simply state that emotions seem important
Even though I can’t even see
Much less explain why that should be the case
And I tell myself and others tell me
To avoid the harmful ones
And I don’t want to harm anybody
And there’s nothing to be afraid of
Nothing to be angry about
Nothing to feel the loss of
There’s nothing

Of all the poems in these pages
Only one
Entitled Desert
Has garnered the approval of strangers
And I fear that those who approve of it
Approve of something in it of which I disapprove
Namely the ostensible sentiment of the following line
The Hindus Muslims Jews Christians and agnostics deserve to die
And indeed the whole last stanza
Even though earlier in the poem
The opposite assertion appears
Characterizing the belief that the wicked deserve to suffer
As a canard
Now any reasonable person understands
That mutually exclusive statements cannot both be true
So which one is false
Unless they both are
That the justice or necessity of suffering among the wicked is a canard
Or that all humans deserve not merely to suffer but to suffer and die
I see that I have placed my trust in the reasonableness of others
Or at least in their attentiveness

I remember an occasion when Stevie Wonder
Performed Superstition on a television program
The host asked Stevie
Whether he himself were superstitious
To which with impressive patience the artist pointed out
That the lyrics state clearly
Superstition ain’t the way
I was shocked
First by the discourtesy of the question
For what decent person
Would admit publicly to so foul an acquired ignorance
But then I remembered that many disclose nay boast
That they act according to beliefs
Concerning bad luck ritual practices and the influence of demons
And my shock subsided into mere disapproval
Of the host’s inattentiveness
But here was an instance
Not of socially reprehensible acquired ignorance
But ignorance of the morally neutral
And one might say natural kind
The host has not learned to read a poem
And supposes it to be an unmediated statement of the poet’s beliefs
I’m always amused when people approvingly quote Shakespeare
Without noticing apparently that the words were spoken
By a rascal a fool a naïf or a villain
And this poem begins Very superstitious
And withholds the identity of the one
To whom superstition is attributed
And many of the words are devoted to
Cataloguing without immediate comment
Various superstitious beliefs
Such as the bad luck accruing to the baby
Who broke the looking glass
And perhaps the host was a more sophisticated listener
Than I supposed
For the refrain insists that
When you believe in things that you don’t understand
You’re going to suffer
And theists Christians among them
Profess to believe in things they don’t understand
And rather than dismiss their beliefs as superstitious
Celebrate the prevalence of supernatural forces on earth
They refuse to acknowledge the contradiction
Between belief in bad luck
And the suffering that the song warns
Follows upon superstition
Reason requires that one or the other
Is the truth

So it comes down to the problem of truth and poetry
Of which there are two separate problems
The first
The disparity of truth and statements of truth
I speak not of now
The second
The disparity of objective and subjective truth
Constitutes my current theme
Now nothing literally nothing
Is more obnoxious that the statement of a falsehood
With the smug disclaimer
Well it’s true for me
As if the sum of 7 and 5 varies from person to person
Or one could wish away the fact of slavery
It is nevertheless reasonable to observe
That different people react differently
To the objective and the social worlds we all share
Partly because ignorance is always infinite
But isn’t wonderful to say I don’t know once in awhile
And partly because emotional responses are unpredictable
And poets prize the inner life
A character flaw no doubt
A narcissistic pretext for the display of prowess
And some emotions are perfectly accordant to reason
As when we mourn the loss of a loved one
But other emotions were better never having been
Which I will not delineate here
But only will I say read Gut before reading Desert
And it is craven paranoia
Not to say authorial arrogance
For me to claim that those who have expressed approval of my work
Do so for a motive that I deem a bad reason
For they may well be more sophisticated readers
Than I have supposed
Nevertheless
Why this scandalous poem before all the others
When I know each of them to have established an occasion
For considerable practical difficulty

And the great practical difficulty is to express feeling
Not merely to name or pantomime feeling
A game of charades or a general knowledge contest
Not that the expression of feeling is everything
And poems can do many things but always in the key of feeling
But indeed
And this is no doubt another flaw of character
The poet revels in rhetoric
And worse the mere nonsense of sound
Such as the assonance of revels in rhetoric
Or perhaps since alliteration also obtains
Only half-assonance
And the ecstasy of effrent as when
Cirt lignes sid konaist lagnap
Moreover the rhetorical strategy
No more than the phonological and indeed typographical atmosphere
Is never calculation but always strives toward
Truth to imagination
So not always but often irony bespeaks rage
Not the most admirable of feelings
And one resorts unconsciously to irony
When the straightforward truth is too horrible for statement
As to react to the belief
That it is not enough for the virtuous to prosper
For also the wicked must suffer
And painful death and the overpowering dread
That accompanies death
Are not enough and therefore
The wicked must suffer unimaginable physical agony
Even after the dissolution of the body
And all are wicked
All all deserve to die
There I did it again
And I would that I could wish away The Inferno
And the Middle Ages and Western Culture
The rage of Achilles and the health of Gregor Samsa’s sister
And how dare I deny
The glories of a civilization that also produces garbage
As humans necessarily must
But it is our lot to make art out of garbage
As Rauschenberg did
The muddy mess of inner being

They were right Miss Lennon Father McLoughlin Sister Martina
Garner up the bushels of wheat
Assemble ruthlessly assemble
The Man within and above
Whose name is the Gentleman
Rigid and tall
For man is born sinful
As is obviously obvious
Born selfish vain untruthful inattentive and unclean
Unformed and disproportionate
Defects neither avoidable nor reparable
Therefore must you store away the wisdom of the ages
The old ways are of God
The new ways of the devil for example communism
Therefore must you inscribe upon your soul
As upon your flesh
The commandments and the precepts
Until at last you are possessed
Of and by a golem
If that word had not been contaminated by its history
And the preceptors spoke not that word
But it was the doctrine they intended
The Man made not of clay but of grain
So say instead The Great Man within and above
Call him Authority who is authorized to speak
While your unclean and untruthful self
Shall listen attend and heed
For you yourself are no gentleman
But instead a brute
A vice-ridden lowly animal
And thus for you is no salvation
For though you confess your sins
You do not examine your conscience thoroughly
You fail to recall the foul acts
That you commit by animal impulse
Like a dumb that is unspeaking animal
And you neglect to expose
The most shameful of your misdeeds
And instead meretriciously substitute
Plausible unexceptionable peccadilloes
So that your imperfect contrition
Yields only a feckless and null penance
And no absolution when He spews you from His mouth
And faith is a gift and in your vanity
You have nobody to blame but yourself
If you believe the gift to have been withheld
And worse you have no firm purpose of amendment
And you prefer to nurse the fleeting wish
That without renouncing the pernicious receipts
Of your debasement
You might somehow gain waiver
From expulsion into the outer darkness
Where you already reside
Hopelessly
And the suffering you now know will persist eternally
When in fact your only hope would have been
To assemble the grain-encrusted giant
In the days of your early childhood
While airplanes drop upon you atomic bombs
Therefore must you content yourself today
With the desire so unlikely of fulfillment
That you might at last hear and obey
Unto your own absolute infinite negation
And it is better never to have existed than

Shut up
Say okay

All the monsters have come again
The bespectacled giant
Who tramples originality
The planar cranium
Who obliterates distinctions
The elastic armed
Who thwarts defenses
The leering mushroom
Who quells enthusiasm
The breather of poisons
Who distracts and confuses

Not so much why have they returned
As why did they ever absent themselves
I think I must have summoned them
I was quiet and contented
Seated on the floor
Filling the containers
With melted paraffin

A wise or perhaps merely prudent person
Knows when to ask for help
And from whom
The latter being the harder condition
Most people do not recognize
The enormity of the distress
And consequently
Ob sisten ohete u ohetet ven obra ma
And hence the permittivity of the dielectric material
Tendentious abeyance
But that’s just tera bespectacled talking

One is never satisfied
To be truthful I am never satisfied
With symptomatic relief however efficacious
After all the Master Symptom
Will not be overcome

The bloated hag
Who knows what you’re going to say
The spinal spiral
Whose reach exceeds its grasp
The wrinkled tallboy
Who leads into temptation
The pliable rectangle
Who gives birth to monsters
The spindle-legged preacher
Who has an answer for everything
The antlered layabout
With the face like a fish
And distended purple belly
And crimson dessicated eyes
And stumpy or missing limbs
And reedy sharp mouth-edges
And mucilaginous lesions
And quivering shoulders
And rusted claws
And oozing joints
And leprous skin
And corrosive utterances
Who does nothing horribly

Give me cornbread when I’m hungry
Corn whisky when I’m dry

During World War I slackers were tarred and feathered
I admit it okay
I am a thief of time
Too much agenda
Too much friendly fire
This very moment
Intentional derangement
Movement by force
Self-abnegation
And I cannot bring myself to believe that rule makes right
Sound census
I prayed for madness
And madness came
In modest proportion
Still I hit the toll road
Voluntarily
And in this
Whom have I harmed nobody not even myself
The only times
When I committed injury
The only times
Were in pursuit
Of that other agenda
The secular one
Whilst I in looking upon that
See only threat
Torture
Imprisonment
Ridicule
Quick violence
A signal error
A single compound error
That achievement establishes the quantity of one’s worth
As a child
I collected feathers
I had a scarlet macaw
A golden eagle
A goldfinch
Names that meant more
Than the brightness of the object
Someone made me
A paper hat
I never learned
To do it myself
Auditory learners
Make poor writers
Poor warriors
Poor athletes
Poor physicians
Even if the doctrine of sensory learning styles has undergone thorough debunking
I might have been a musician
Had I sacrificed my childhood
Occupational habit
Please welcome to the stage
One in danger of tenure
Rickety bookshelves
Acidic paperbacks
Acetate gown
Humble scrivener
Obsolete taxonomist
Borrower of ticket stubs
Borrower of nondescript garlands
Dampened clingclang
Nothing big
Halfhearted attempt
And hence failure
To carry out intention
A poem is neither true nor false
And I have harmed myself
Unintentionally perhaps
Who never once achieved
A single instance
Of fitness of epithet

Shameka says Something’s wrong with the dinner table
The surveillance cameras are picking up
People using their cutlery and napkins
But missing the actions she doesn’t know what they are
That show much amiss
And words misdirections cover-ups and manipulations

Shameka says she doesn’t know what’s wrong with people
They keep trying to make eye contact
When she walks from the parking lot into the building
I wish they wouldn’t take such an interest in me
So many envelopes with inscrutable addresses
So many messages with misaligned subjects

To ennui most modern of sins
A new sin has been added
Too new to have a name
The commuter supplants the insouciant flâneur
The solipsist ousts the secretly gay observer

There are no streets to amble
All embark for private worlds
The slender wires white or black
The heads bowed in submission
Realms of new sensations new celebrities

New tribes new enthusiasms
New luxuries new frissons
New crimes new indignations
New achievements in unheard-of endeavors
New spectacles of elaborate failure

New abstraction of image from thing
All are freed from the heavy weight
Of bodies animate or inanimate
In blank material space
Gone forever the libidinous touch

I have more memories than if I had a thousand years
From screens that receive the white-hot projection
Screens excited by electron rays
Screens composed of picture elements
Screens that illuminate and divide

Is there anything about you that isn’t perfect
Don’t mention that mole on your belly
High up near the left side
The single maculation the single note of contrast
Your compact body your pure body
Uncontaminated with judgment by thought supplied
Nothing to judge in the flawless contours
And when you speak is not the sound
Like chrism on the brow
The scent of freshness the scent of ancientness
Dark in all the right places
Florid in all the right places
And your touch
Transitory soothing emphatic
When we retreat to the secret to-us familiar region
The landscape of forgetfulness and remembrance

I don’t know what I’m doing or what’s to be done
A good three quarters through the journey
Living into an age of flails and epic fails
I thought of myself as an easygoing child
Or so I was told by those who would have known
And who doesn’t know casts the stone
And even as a child I vacillated
Between dull contentment and lacerating anxiety
And hence I never know what’s to be done
And hence I recur to the middle course of routine
Or rather wish that such a course should obtain

The progression is rather simple
From bright-eyed child
To wild-eyed youth
To heavy-eyed sour bitter old man
Who knows not what he does

Do I screw up more than others do
Should I compose while under the influence
Should I pursue the truth of theme
Or instead dedicate myself to practicing
The skills that mark true artistry
Should I restrict myself to what I know
Since I know that restriction frees the mind
Or should I speculate at large
Admitting without discrimination
The elegant the perfunctory the noble and the banal
Or should I sulk in silence
Awaiting the next peevish outburst
And curse my lack of inspiration
My lack of decorum
My defect

Concerning the cultural patterns in Acamura
The people there place great stress
On the disposition of the dead
And especially upon providing
Appropriate footwear for the deceased
For the dead’s own shoes are proscribed
As are those of close friends and relatives
And hence some member of the community
Perhaps even a stranger to the mourned one
Must step up to make provision
And enable the great departure

Well uh
Current events piss me off

Ah shit

The green enamel
Translucent over the white ceramic
The five pairs of legs
Just lobes really
Like the upreared head
With its coarse circular screen

It is not necessary to say words
But only speak
Whatever comes
Into the circular screen
And hear the modulation
The voice of the oracle

Abundant recompense
My ass

Among the infinite and therefore breach-honorable rules
We find the one prohibiting self-expression
Or rather to be fair sentimentality
From which self-expression is said to arise

A misreading it turns out
Of a critical rather than a poetic stricture
Asserting that knowledge of authorial intention
Is neither available nor desirable

Feminine lore of textiles
Stitching and unstitching
Easy for gentleman professors to dismiss
When every made thing has a maker you fools

Lift your tender eyelids maid
As opposed would you say to eyelids tough and horny
And if you’re trying to be objective then concede
No analysis without synthesis

No wonder then that she places the embroidered fabric
In the dresser lacking some number of glass knobs
Along with her unconventional punctuation
In countless thousands of fugitive stanzas

Sometimes the inscription
Seems almost intelligible
You can almost make out an O or a C
But then the C seems just an O again

Sometimes the words seem to speak for themselves
How else explain the spontaneous assemblies
And the citizenry swear to a man
They each heard an audible call

But when challenged to remember
What it was made the Giant significant
They murmur and glance from their eyes’ corners
Seeking confirmation from one another

And one or two might have the presence of mind
To recite what was it
Translation or commentary
And what’s the difference anyway

Maybe it’s enough that it originated
In the misty lore of ancient days
To stand here congealed
And pedestalled in hewn granite

Maybe people need this
This abstract intuition and yet
Arbitrarily right cannot aptly compensate
For necessarily wrong

Ig coud autdarv jui sloenlic
En effrent libreo pmist

Ansgt bitbagia sinlent
Thoiesi di mondaquoetdi

Setht rew scendar moniana
Sistre obrepices cvmwoflux

Vilcon jui
Jui vilcon quis sistre thniclicot
Sie vitar tremloss dlor plema
Besiogne ne pmisti effrent ceal

Posseblit necoud cvmpenflux
Crescliss met vrei plusia
Fluxas brefigor ansgt dlor
Ie couden na geirp

In those days people heated their houses
With oil delivered by big trucks
I watched when such a truck
Brought about the death of my dog Sam

And it is wrong of me to make a claim of causation
For Sam was the cleverest of dogs
Who could climb a fence to practice
A nasty and infamous habit

For Sam was a chaser of automobiles
Who died when he attempted bigger prey
I was watching when he leaped
And caught a bumper or stairstep square in the back

He yelped
And for several seconds through the gutter
He dragged with his forepaws
The inert hindquarters

He collapsed and my mother commanded firmly
That none should approach the body
For fear that Sam would awaken in death fury
To attack his loving master

The driver saw what had happened
He came to the door to offer payment
And my mother reassured the man
That no payment was necessary

The death was bad
But far worse were the long seconds of the dragging
Running from death
Clinging to a life of suffering

He may know not what he knows
But knows not grief

Randomness fractures dings
Pocks and false starts
Abbreviations shortcuts and broken links
Wrong numbers and missed connections
Aberrations fouls and accidents
Fissures and lacunae
Contaminants leaks and shortages
These are not defects
These are the materials

The salivary dregs in the vodka bottle
The content of the landfill
Nay of the sewer
Seafoam and pissfoam
Amino acids no different
From those of the comet
That first impregnated earth
And brought forth Aphrodite
And stirred the wrath of Achilles