Ho Chi Minh

back again
   this time, I remember the streets
I remember
      how people flood through cities
   like drops of water
In the rainy season
   there is always something flowing.

Bulb

I have been ready-
now making myself,
as I always have.
Time in motion
again, or at last
truly stopped.

Not sure where
the time passes more-
in change
or in stasis.

A spring bulb
buried in the earth
does both
woody brown nut of stasis
soil, earth, and blossom
green leaf arrows
pointing toward outer space,

But I think a bulb
is always changing,
no such thing as stasis,
just a different
pace of life,
just too slow
for our senses, like
the immovable earth
grinding its tectonic teeth
raising mountains in silence
to our eyes

and evolution
the making of humans
in graduated steps
of changes paused
in moments of being.
DNA is a bone
but also a ripple.
We never really
stand still.

Certainty/Uncertainty

The inevitable descent of home
   on a night baking
   with blurred stars,
   water music
   reverberating in tiny
   salt caves of sea shells.

The dog is unaware-
   he blends with the dark
   and the far off voices.
   They sound like bells
   to the hound, whose nights
   are often spent skirting
   the echoes of men
   while his spirit clamors
   to worship at their hearths.

But his body is too used
   to salted breezes and sand,
   too used and scratched
   and chewed and smudged-
   he blends with the dark.

He is still learning the ways
   of kindness. Still and watchful
   he rests on the beach and
   prays to his far off gods.
   It is the distance that
   sweetens his devotion.

The sea is an uncertainty-
   before him, then gone-
   always disappearing and appearing
   til one no longer questions
   the existence of the surf edge.
   The threshold is unanswerable
   to the way we see the world.

Dog sits. Waves come and go.
   Surf edge continues to lap
   its giant tongue against
   sand white and mottled
   with shells and footprints.

Man walks under stars, as he
   always once did. He treads
   the lip of the ocean,
   being the only certain thing
   between water and distant
   star fires. The water
   and the movement separate,
   simply pulse as two vowels,
   in out

   in

   out

Looking up, the trembling
of stars among darkness
calls down to him
a sense of home.

Prayer 1

The land will always bring you back
the promise is in the dirt and ashes
          thinking about what it would mean
          to a generation to unite "progress"
          with the earth or
bury it within
Hold that promise close to your heart for
it is a sure thing.

A pine forest filled with electricity
defying wiring and safe passage
to a Mohican in a steel canoe
          let me suffer this course too long
Meanwhile the desert waits
under a storm cloud.

The land will bear us again
for the first time as our mothers did
but until then I will keep
my mouth open
and bury hatchets
in favor of ropes
keep my maps
secret.

Been a while...

...since I put anything here. That last poem about DC was fitting, since that was not long before I came to Thailand. That's where I am now, small-town Thailand, teaching up a storm. Busy schedule, but I've still managed to write some stuff, music and poems. Gonna upload a few things today (internet willing). A lot has happened since springtime came to DC. Much of my new country visited, digested, revisited, regretted and remembered. No longer spring for me. Rainy season! I love it!

Washington in Spring

Springtime in the Capital,
the eve of evening
glows orange through
pink cherry blossoms.

Learning how to recognize
my own. Life, this is
the first year
I am beginning to taste
silver individual
will.

Spring becomes Washington,
which fades below greening parks
and blooms, waking up
to dogwoods, making it
harder to leave.

A season for souls,
all seasons felt
unlike autumn's
singularity. Growth
is a plurality.

Makes me want to
abandon words
of ancestors -
doing so brings
them closer.

I have neglected
much of my sleeping.
There is time,
and always will be.

"Of the Surface of Things" - Wallace Stevens

I

In my room , the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk, I see that it consists of three or four
     hills and a cloud.

II

From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
"The spring is like a belle undressing."

III

The gold tree is blue,
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.



-Wallace Stevens

Silo

I used to live around farms,
though not entirely familiar
with the inner workings of one.
Silos, for instance. All
the time I could see them
I never knew what purpose
they served - never sought one.
It seemed enough
they were there-
domed, like observatories;
unique and purposed
like a human thumb,
round and peculiar
against red-block barns.

"Myself I Sing" - George Oppen

Me! he says, hand on his chest.
Actually, his shirt.
                     And there, perhaps,
The question.

Pioneers! But trailer people?
Wood box full of tools—
                         The most
American. A sort of
Shrinking
             in themselves. A
Less than adult: old.

A pocket knife,
A tool—
               And I
Here talking to the man?
                        The sky

That dawned along the road
And all I've been 
Is not myself? I think myself
Is what I've seen and not myself

A man marooned
No longer looks for ships, imagines
Anything on the horizon. On the beach
The ocean ends in water. Finds a dune
And on the beach sits near it. Two.
He finds himself by two.
                        Or more. 
'Incapable of contact
Save in incidents'
                        And yet at night
Their weight is part of mine.
For we are all housed now, all in our apartments,
The world untended to, unwatched.
And there is nothing left out there
As night falls, but the rocks.

-George Oppen

Alan Lomax

Lomax recorded an enormous amount of folk music from all over the world.  His library is in the process of being digitized so it will be available to the world for streaming online (!). Saw this in the wikipedia article about him and thought it was funny, regarding an FBI investigation into his alleged Communist views/sympathy:

Yet what the probe failed to find in terms of prosecutable evidence, it made up for in speculation about his character. An FBI report dated July 23, 1943, describes Lomax as possessing "an erratic, artistic temperament" and a "bohemian attitude." It says: "He has a tendency to neglect his work over a period of time and then just before a deadline he produces excellent results." The file quotes one informant who said that "Lomax was a very peculiar individual, that he seemed to be very absent-minded and that he paid practically no attention to his personal appearance." This same source adds that he suspected Lomax's peculiarity and poor grooming habits came from associating with the hillbillies who provided him with folk tunes".

On a side note, I wish I had his job.

Potomac River haiku

dry grass clustering
branches swept back by old floods
cat licking his fur

"Birds Again" - Jim Harrison

A secret came a week ago though I already
knew it just beyond the bruised lips of consciousness.
The very alive souls of thirty-five hundred dead birds
are harbored in my body. It's not uncomfortable.
I'm only temporary habitat for these not-quite-
weightless creatures. I offered a wordless invitation
and now they're roosting within me, recalling
how I had watched them at night
in fall and spring passing across earth moons,
little clouds of black confetti, chattering and singing
on their way north or south. Now in my dreams
I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,
the watery face of the earth as if they're carrying
me rather than me carrying them. Next winter
I'll release them near the estuary west of Alvarado
and south of Veracruz. I can see them perching
on undiscovered Olmec heads. We'll say goodbye
and I'll return my dreams to earth.



-Jim Harrison

Anger

Moments when I am hunted
     by the beast Anger,
I look over my shoulder gasping
     at the patterns of his hide.
Some nights I have been walking
     among streetlights hanging
     vegetable from the trees.
I turn and see the dark shape
     walking beside me.

So much more now,
     so much clearer,
the thought creeps into the
     glow of the lamp - he
is not subject to reason.
     It will give him words.

I try to comfort myself with that,
still hurrying from circle to circle
of light and radial shadows.
     It's not always so.

Some nights I stand drenched at the edge of the woods watching fireflies in a field mimicking outer space spinning myths in half-light.

Humors

Where are the campfires?

People are like elements
fire water earth air
all made of life
giving rise to it
but too much of em
starts to fuck things up

Microcosm reflects the Macrocosm

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/01/scientists-mode.php

"A Book of Music" - Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, two lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers.  Where
Did it end?  there is no telling.  No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, or long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end.  Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons.  Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.


-Jack Spicer

Old Photos (Ike and I like each other)

Memories serve as entertainment, sometimes. Maybe sentiment is a better word than entertainment. I've spent time watching old home videos and looking through photo albums, as other people have, for entertainment...but what about when we look through others' photos? Others' memories (if that's what that is)?

My grandfather and step-grandmother on my dad's side (Grandpa and Grandma Linda, respectively) live in a colonial era house on the Chester River in Chestertown, MD.  When we saw them for Christmas this year, we left with a box of mementos from my somewhat recently deceased great-grandmother, "Binnie."

(She died three years ago, at age 102. Her house is right across the street from Grandpa's in Chestertown. Some things people call "timeless" - I would call Binnie "timefull." She had a beautiful smile, as well as a manic little pug named Mac - she had many dogs in her life, but this one I knew - who had an impressive wardrobe complete with a matching raincoat and rain hat. He was a real licker.)

Most of the box's contents were old photographs.  It's been fun picking out her and other remembered family members and friends in the pictures (though that's mainly the task of my father, as I don't recognize those people). They are both strange and familiar - do I imagine it to be so?

There was also a signed, framed picture of Dwight D. Eisenhower! An old friend of the USA, I guess you could say.  Haven't dug into the background on that one yet. The picture is an intersection of familial and collective memory - a mandorla-like artifact. And now it is a piece of my personal memory.

Speak, Memory

One of the oldest poems in print is the Odyssey.  Though often translated as "Sing, Muse," the first two words of the epic are perhaps more accurately translated as "Speak, Memory."  At least that is what I gathered from a class discussion on Stanley Lombardo's translation, which uses "memory."  The cover for his translation is an "earthrise" photo from one of the Apollo missions, a choice I quite liked. I like space in general, too, and most things to do with outer space.

Back then, of course, before the stuff was even written down, memory was the ultimate resource of the poet.  In the time of oral traditions, the memory of the bard was the text of the poem.  If you buy into body/soul dichotomies, you could say the poet's memory was the soul and the telling was the body. Each telling, like a human body, would have been unique in some way.  Maybe some had six toes on their right foot.  Maybe some were midgets.  Maybe some were beautiful women - like the beautiful women we think we remember, but when we rack our brains for the length of her hair, the subtle curves of her jaw, the precise colors of her iris, we are left with the singular, empty sense that she was beautiful, and nothing else.

"Eyes of Iblis" - Chris Moran

Spires of the sun pulsate and ache throughout the continuity of the void,
Through collapsed, weaning light. A limbic light whose fulminating aura is felt
Though never touched. I can never feel empathy for anything except for a failing thing.
Crossroads dim in this contingent vacuity. A devil touched me. Birthed me, brandished me.
Though my target eyes smile breath varnished. A tragic nudity, a stillborn. Palatial saturation.
Channels of decay. A fuming tension puts a barrier between my life-stream and other currents
Which flow parallel. The flow of days onward is a collapsible echo. Morph into an annihilated
Dream. The burning sensation of moon rain flitting the planet. To master our capacities
Fuller and fuller on command. To put my dream on this planet.


-Chris Moran

Beaverland

"Santorum thinks he’s a bold color and Romney’s a pastel. But the whole Republican field seems ensconced in a black-and-white ’50s diorama. It’s like they’re running for president of Leave It to Beaverland."

-Maureen Dowd, "The Grating Santorum," New York Times 1/7/12

Wet Dream

Dreams will have rules as well-
     I remember, in brackish river water
     beholding the pale naked body
     of my mysterious construction.

details as always are fading away
     or perhaps were never there
          perhaps their specifics were structured by desire
               and so I saw them
                    only because that feeling made them
                         necessary

The water held her,
and I in orbit-
she the starry backdrop
in slow revolution

I too was a revolutionary,
Growing, always, at that age.
My boy you have grown,
     whispered the part of me
     that had always thought of itself
          as an old man

Time has revealed the subject to me-
     she too was holding her breath

"Psalm" - George Oppen

Veritas sequitur...


In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down-

That they are there!

                              Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass

                              The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.

                              Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun

                             The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.


-George Oppen

"Man Carrying Thing" - Wallace Stevens

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:
A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists
The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived
Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,
Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,
Out of a storm of secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.
We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.


-Wallace Stevens