Lightning splits the sky

Lightning splits the sky, crash lands behind the mountains on the horizon as we drive back from Ridgefield where we spent the day with relatives at the house KC's sister's housesitting. Long, skinny road leading to a long, skinny driveway, heavily shaded by trees tall enough that you nearly have to cock your head back all the way parallel to the ground to see their tops. KC said I would like the seclusion and, yeah, it's not bad. Vaughn gets to spend twenty minutes or so in the pool before it starts to thunder. Swims the length of the pool a few times, with the help of floaties. She already swims better than her old man. And that's not that much of a lie. She joins Papa and me in what I would probably call a den, harking back to an earlier time, but what seems to be universally referred to as a family room. We catch the end of a show on Animal Planet, some tanned, brave soul helping to save the elephants of Borneo. I'm holding Dash to keep him away from pulling on the dogs' tails while KC helps her sister with preparing supper. It's not long before Dash is about to doze off. I walk him around and check out the art on these strangers' walls. It's almost all abstract. There's something off, I think, with likening poetry to visual art when talking about its reception or the expectations of its audience, and how much more radical visual art is allowed to be. With so much contemporary poetry, the reader is expected to have a familiarity with the last fifty or so years of literary theory. As often as not it's all the reader is given, no flotation devices to strap around the arms. The art viewer doesn't need to rely on theory, doesn't need to take a stand, interpret or otherwise engage the work, all the viewer needs is to be struck by the piece, some quality of the piece, and have sufficient cash to purchase it or a print. Art and music don't invite scholars exclusively, so why should poetry? Not that poets should be making poems for those who don't like it. But it should be clear to anyone who steps outside of the insular nooks of the poetry world for even a short time that something is wrong with the way many poems are made these days. Even more wrong are the mechanisms, the industries, around the poems. We have burgers and hot dogs and pasta salad, and a special dessert, one-bowl chocolate cake, made by KC and Vaughn in the morning. Everyone loves it, except Vaughn; she likes it, but prefers the chocolate chip cookie Auntie Joss gives her. We stay long enough so that Vaughn can help feed the two dogs, scooping the dry food, and then the wet food, into their big ol' steel bowls. And then we pack up and head home, not realizing till we get there that we forgot the leftovers we were going to take. Driving north on 35, KC tells me about a house she knows in Ridgefield she wouldn't mind owning one day. If we could. I shake my head. "I don't want to live in Ridgefield," I say. "I used to have negative associations," she says, "but it's really nice. If we had a windfall," she says. "I don't want to live in Ridgefield," I say. We merge onto I-84 in Danbury, rain pouring down on the windshield, broad flashes of lightning lighting up the dark sky. "I like Washington," I say, "if we ever have a windfall." She knows this already. "Washington—or maybe Kent." She doesn't say anything, but places her left hand on my right, which I don't regard until now when I'm writing this down.

John Ashbery's Birthday

Do you remember how it was in the beginning when the rain was an understatement and the maintenance man inside you brought his lunch pail to work every day? Do you remember his name was Charlie and he ate fried chicken three times a week and he had two missing teeth, one upper, one lower, at the front of his mouth. Like a vampire, he couldn't be seen when you looked in the mirror. But if you buried yourself in sleep long enough, if you woke with a start and immediately forgot why, then you likely were only moments away from having shaken his hand. And sometimes you sat down on the floor together, played cards till dawn, with B movies playing on the TV in the background casting a gray-blue light. He always wanted to eat, but whenever you offered him a snack he refused. Said he was on a diet. But you could see his bones almost through his skin. He was young and wrinkled and spoke to cats and dogs most freely. He didn't have a preference. He was like an angel in that sense. An angel without wings digging a hole under the fence to get to the other side. Fried chicken in his eyes, he was as much at home in the east as in the west. And his daughters played outside, skimming over the ground less like rocks over water than like sunset over the slopes and treetops on the horizon. Of course, he's childless, so when his youngest daughter crashes into the bird-feeder, he doesn't run outside. Sunset can't upset the man who does—not at the moment at least. The man who remembers how it was before the rain became hyperbole. Who after washing his daughter in the bath, cleaning her scrapes and bruises, brushes the invisible calloused fingertips away from the top of his spine. Who puts his daughter to sleep and picks up his son, takes him downstairs and starts swaying to a song called "Maps." His ten-month-old bundle of Ashbery in his arms, fallen asleep, barely.

Where were we

Where were we? I was sitting with my back to the windows that line the south wall in the dining room. Back to the gray light on the rainy noon. Vaughn sitting across from me. KC sitting to her right. Dash in his high chair to the right of KC. Between me and Vaughn, the tuna casserole she helped her mom make. Different this time because they used elbows instead of bow-ties. This is as good as it's ever come out. We talk about how we haven't had it in a while, and how maybe that's why it seems so good. Or maybe it's because we're all so hungry. KC cuts up tiny pieces to feed Dash. As much tumbles out of his mouth as stays in. He likes it too. It's quiet, now, across the street. In the lot being excavated in preparation for a new two-family house. Rain coming down hard enough it forced the work to stop. The rain as benevolent force. Vaughn's through and ready for dessert. Today she chooses Edy's orange & cream low-fat fruit bar. What we used to call a popsicle. I get it for her before either KC or I are done with our meals because she's been good today. She'll be upstairs setting up a party for her stuffed animals before KC and I start on our dessert. But now, where were we? We were all at the table and KC was shooting glances at me as Vaughn was chatting away at us. KC could tell I wasn't registering a word. My mind more than half elsewhere. I'm thinking of Dale Smith's Black Stone: "What we are to each other is locked into language—" and there may be a sense in which that's true, that bears closer inspection. Language may be, as Heidegger had it, "the house of being," but I refuse to believe we're locked in. On a hot day, where I'm sitting, I can feel the sun through the window behind me as its heavy rays shawl my shoulders. I could turn around in my chair and see the house next door, the rain flowing out the gutter, dropping to the driveway and running down garageward. I could see the cars blurring by over the glossy black pavement with its shiny yellow demarcation, blurring by under branches with deep green leaves drooping under the weight of too much water. I could see the empty, muddy lot across the street where more and thicker trees used to be. I could turn knowing that KC and Vaughn and Dash are turning with me, and it's not quite because of language. They are with me inside me, beyond where words can go. What if we could kick down all seven doors in the house of being, what would it be? Now what about the lyric as phenomenological inquiry?

Rock and dirt pour

Rock and dirt pour into a dump truck across the street, like ice cubes into a cooler amplified. The dog next door barking at god knows what. Vaughn downstairs singing her "I love being a mermaid" song. Cars brush by outside, the harsh hushing sound of tires rushing over wet pavement. Must have rained overnight. KC talking to Dash in the bathroom but I can't hear what she's saying. Dash grunts his small joyful grunts. Kick off the top sheet, into the morning routine, which starts, properly, with putting on a ratty T-shirt and a pair of shorts, hit the bathroom to pee, wash hands, splash cold water on face, and then downstairs, turn on the computer, make a bowl of Heart to Heart, sit down and start to read. Ron Silliman blogs on Barrett Watten's list of books "most 'essential' to [him] as a poet." I remember I made a top ten list like that when I was considering a low-residency MFA program which asked that question on its application. That must have been 2000. Made the list; didn't complete the rest of it. Don't remember the exact list. I'm sure Revolution of the Word was there, and The Birth of Tragedy; they'll always be there if only because of their primacy in my personal reading history. Same deal with Rimbaud's Complete Works and The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Hart Crane. Charles Bernstein's Conent's Dream would have been listed in 2000. Would it be listed now? Probably, but if so, possibly only as part of a development. I pour myself some tea. What else? The Tennis Court Oath, definitely in 2000; definitely not now. Selected poems by Ted Berrigan, definitely on that list, and still, even though there's now a Collected. The Green Lake Is Awake? Probably. Collected Creeley? Probably. Selected Patchen? Probably. Is that ten? Who's counting? Who cares? Vaughn's in the living room watching Sleeping Beauty. Dash upstairs asleep in his crib. KC stepping out of the shower. Last night she finished The Deathly Hallows. And now the rain's pouring down outside. Where the cars keep zooming by. Us in our brown, little Arts & Crafts style home.

"Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid"

UPDATE (Aug 3,2009): This poem, "On the Beach," is now on Tom Clark's blog. Check it out.

Poem Cube Poem

Finally visited Jason Nelson's Poem Cube last week. Improvised a poem for the Bridgewater Fair, which was an exciting day for Vaughn. Here's a slightly revised version of what I posted there.

At the Bridgewater Fair
Goats are lions
The quiet roads are Mia Farrow
When the clouds cattle over
We milk the day
Bees will chase us
My daughter my wife and me
Where there is no bridge
And the only water is rain
The sky pulled tight as Joan Rivers
Ah Connecticut decay
Bees sting our cattle hearts
We are the goats my daughter feeds
From her hands—to our quiet fair wells
The rain means a chance to milk
The wells we lion and chase ourselves through.

The Labor Day Special (Kenneth Patchen with a side of Siddhartha)

For Labor Day, a poem by American working-class hero poet, Kenneth Patchen.

Gautama in the Deer Park at Benares

In a hut of mud and fire
Sits this single man—“Not to want
Money, to want a life in the world,
To want no trinkets on my name”—
And he was rich; his life lives where
Death cannot go; his honor stares
At the sun.

The fawn sleeps. The little winds
Ruffle the earth's green hair. It is
Wonderful to live. My sword rusts
In the pleasant rain. I shall not think
Anymore. I touch the face of my friend;
He shows his dirty teeth as he scratches
At a flea—and we grin. It is warm
And the rice stirs usefully in our bellies.

The fawn raises its head—the sun floods
Its soft eye with the kingdoms of life—
I think we should all go to sleep now,
And not care anymore.

_____

Other links:

Mingus on Patchen, plus two poems, including "Let Us Have Madness"

at The Academy of American Poets site

A handful of love poems, including "For Miriam"

Three more poems, including "Pastoral"

Hymn to Rain

      by Joe Ceravolo

Again rain on the evolved leaves.
Rain in the jungle forest
where people tend the garden
or hunt the monkey.
Rain where people pound the pavement

and wet trucks rest
after a flashing night.
Rain that dissolves the mount
or fills the valley
or breaks the dam

or wakes the face
washes the hair
stiffens the organ.

Rain that dissolves the dreams
or creates the dreams
in atmospheric phantoms.

O, praise be rain, praise be mist
praise be fish deep and dark,
praise be stirring ocean
and starting wind,
and kinematic waves
in altered motion.

Rain before life, rain before
                   death
Praise be rain again, rain again praise!