Capra

The populist right is a tragicomic opera, a dozen movies, a hundred novels and a thousand history books. We are living the narrative, darker than any noir. On the screen it would be a B-movie. In fact, I think I saw it as a kid. With some major editing it could be a Frank Capra film.

Director / actor John Cassavetes (of all people) praised Capra with these words. Maybe there really wasn’t an America; it was only Frank Capra. He created an idealized myth of the small-town in the heartland, so persuasive even city-dwellers adapted that vision as their own. In his movies tragedy would be no more than a temporary state. Let it be so.

Capra had a feel for the common man. He knew them but didn’t entirely trust them. He depicted their gullibility, how easily the masses could be duped and led. Sometimes they were an undifferentiated tribe, reinforcing each other with little room for dissent. They moved in waves from a mindless mob to an idealized hardworking and wise collective. He heard the vox populi, the voice of the people.

He could also spot a phony; the disingenuous flimflam man, the corpulent miscreant with greed as his creed. He would have cast the villain as Edward Arnold back then. Today Trump would play himself.

Capra is best-known today for his post-war box-office failure, It’s A Wonderful Life but he was in his heyday in the late 1930s and early 40’s. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington spoke to those times when fascism was an existential threat. Capra took on that force, albeit simplistically and sentimentally, but he caught the zeitgeist.

Americans accept political enfranchisement in lieu of economic democracy. Folks have a way of voting against themselves. A true democracy demands an informed electorate but we are famous for electile dysfunction.

The great enigma of our political carnival (as in carnivores) is the pulse of the body politic. Political party operatives have tried to manipulate it, pander to it and capture people's grievances and fears. Instead of well-meaning Everyman we are witness to a mindless demotic cult led by a stuffed, hollow man. (T.S. Eliot).

In Capra’s day we numbered 132 million; today we have an uber-mass of 334 million each with a mobile phone to confirm their beliefs and concoct new fables to chew on. The paradox is that the greater the connectivity the stronger are the centrifugal forces pulling us apart. 

It would take Capra on steroids to find the common threads in the American tapestry. Perhaps in the last reel Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur would knock some sense into the knuckleheads so they will stop shooting themselves in the foot till they haven't a leg to stand on. He would also remind them why we fought WWII.

 

Conversational Jam

 That’s what we do, over lunch or dinner; a table for two, three, four or more. Our words, our intervals make music, unrehearsed. Call it conversation or call it improvisation. We jam. brass, bass and basoon. I can’t hear you. Muffled vibes. Sometimes words over each other. That reminds of the time I… There goes a monologue, unzipped, a solo, saxing an amazement, a complaint, a plea. Digressing, Jammin'. Cymbals might clash, double reeds reconcile. Every time is never before. This ensemble. We riff. We say our piece. There's always room for the odd ball, the contrarian. Ornette Coleman dares in his wailing. Thelonius meanders down the river of his realm. We listen and hear our own instruments syncopating.

Men jam a different sound. Trumpets. Drum rolls. World War II reenacted again. Moving salt and pepper shakers around the way he surrounded the troops, the way you sank the winning basket. He percusses to persuade. Another toots his horn how he rebuilt his engine. Baritone sax like a jack-knifed big rig. That ain’t nothing, catch this trombone. Unstill the utensils. The Bird speaks a new language on tenor sax.

Women pass the Prosecco. piano and flute. Sweetmeats, anyone? Their strings pluck the drizzled salad. Sounds of how. Questions the bass asks up and down. Clarinet me more, do tell. Here’s a sidebar and the others hum and sway. It must be jelly ‘cause jam don’t shake like that. Take five. Cello me home.

 

Pits and Seeds

 I was a farmer once,

not tilling the back forty

but I nursed a grapefruit pit

I had planted in a pot on the window sill.

After a season of not over-watering

I had a bumper crop of green leaves.

At least that’s how I want to remember it.

 

I gave up agricultural husbandry

around age eleven never quite knowing

a seed from a pit until now.

Pits are in watermelon, right? Wrong.

Those are just big seeds pregnant

with embryos like poets on the verge.

Pits are the stones in peaches or plums

protecting the genius of the burst.

As for that grapefruit on the sill

it has taken me eighty years

to get my head out of the rind

from the pits to the seed.

 

And when the cymbals clang

or the phrase wings in

through the wall, through the noise,

it is a seed as in the citrus, 

music dripping with juice.

Logical Illogic in Wonderland

Order is the greatest which holds in suspension the most disorder, holds it in such a precarious balance that threatens its overthrow. So said the poet Stanley Kunitz. 

If ever there was a man whose right and left brain spoke to each other, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was the guy. A true polymath, he was equal parts Dionysian and Euclidean; his own mirror image as if he had walked through the looking glass. He was an ordained minister, a photographer whose work hung in the Royal Academy, wrote eleven books on math and most famously two children's books best read by adults. 

Carroll found the absurdity in Victorian convention through language, a kind of order turned on its head into a chaos of serious fun as when his Jabberwocky burbles his ambles. and before you can make sense of it off he goes galumphing. 

Was there a subtext or was he on a madcap romp? I think his genius was the way he hid a sobering agenda. Was the Mad Hatter, for example, afflicted by the toxic mercury used in the millinery trade? There is a menagerie in the garden with dandelions, snapdragons and tiger lillies. Well-named for benign menace. It is a Peaceable Kingdom in mid 19th century England....or is it?

In poetry one can assume each word has been weighed and carries with it a secondary reference. When Lewis Carroll mentioned qualities of sand in his Walrus and the Carpenter poem he may have been thinking about the sand in an hourglass which is code for mortality and how he would miss Alice as she left childhood and innocence behind.

Words are for leaping in some poets’ hands. Rub them together and sparks fly. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax and Cabbages and Kings When Dodgson / Carroll brings in Tweedledee and Tweedledum as mirror images, could he not be speaking of his two selves, Dodgson the math and logic professor and Carroll, the playful spinner of yarns? Add to this a third self, the social satirist taking a swipe at British Imperialism. And then there may be lurking a pedophile but let's not go there.

 Consider the Walrus and Carpenter landing on a beach where the sun is shining at night. Sounds a lot like another colony in a distant part of the Empire upon which the sun never sets. Not to belabor the point but those shoes and ships and sealing wax are all part of Victorian civility along with cabbages and kings. Gobbling oysters is what colonists do to native populations. It is all about domination and those cunning settlers.

Can a conservative, devout, tradition-loving Oxford professor with a penchant for postulates and proofs also write so-called nonsense verse translated into seventy languages which hides, within the lines, a disparaging view of the establishment? Of course, we contain multitudes and that is what poetry can do. Shine a light upon a dark corner of society which would be deemed subversive in a more frontal attack?

On the other hand, maybe there is no need for cryptic messages. I don't want to analyze it to death. Carroll's poem stands on its own walrus feet. Millions have read it since publication in 1871, finding delightful bafflement in its illogical logic.  

Driving

There was a time when

I knew if I made this light

I’d have the next five.

I would take 11^th or 14^th street

to avoid the speed bumps.

Now on my way to elsewhere

I take my driving slow,

enjoy the canopy of trees

(My friend said if it weren’t for speed bumps

he’d have no sex life at all.) 

I have no road-rage in me.

I'm making good time at any speed.

When a poem comes to me 

I write a few words

in the dust on my dashboard.

I can almost smell the cloverleaf,

the curvaceous on-ramps.

I forgive everyone their folly.

Maybe their wives are about to deliver

one of new persons in this world.

I can move over and make room.

We are in this together. We stop

and we go obeying the lights.  

It is called civilization. It gives me hope.

I am steering, asserting and yielding

into the flow, this river of chrome,

now a white water rapid with changing rhythm,

now a symphony, an adagio of traffic

and I in my psychic space with four empty seats,

my mind meandering with great thoughts,

so great I am allowed only a glimpse

in this vehicle, this vessel, this life.

Buoyant April

April is a happening month: Exodus, Easter, eager wildflowers, beginning baseball season and tax-time. However, we shouldn’t forget the most notable holiday: National Poetry Month.

T.S. Eliot proclaimed April as the cruelest month in his Wasteland poem. It was the month that began WWI which punctured the notion of progress, while reminding us of evanescent beauty, loss of faith and ultimate mortality.

A voice of gloom, he was. Not the guy I want to split a pizza with. My impulse is to celebrate life even with all its lethal folly.

Now more than ever we need an antidote to the violence of bulletins, bullets and bullshit. Poetry demands a different kind of reading than a newspaper. Words. well-chosen, can fill the page like impressionist brushstrokes. Even between the words there can be found a vitality to buoy us and open a shuttered heart or lift us like a resurrection. It is not a bus to paradise but transport to authenticity. A successful poem has a ring of truth and a music of its own.

One doesn’t need to write poetry to be a poet. It has to do with allowing that sensibility to find expression; to engage life metaphorically and find associations between this and that. It is less a way of saying than a way of being. One can live their poem.

I thought to take this occasion to offer some poems I wrote years ago which I recently came across.

Work

A warehouseman lifts a crate / and his arms are holding a child.

With a cleaver in his hand / the butcher watches a rose / bloom on his apron.

Under the hydraulic lift / seven colors arrange themselves / at the mechanic’s feet.

Hauling peat bog in Connemara light at eleven at night / iridescent dragonfly.

Moments, unsummoned, ease their way in / blood, oil and petals.

 ___________________________

Grandpa Harry

He was the kid wheeled by pushcart

from Warsaw to Hester Street.

hiding the rotten peaches on the bottom.

Winter meant gloves with holes

for his fingers to count on

and thaw over an ashcan cooking chestnuts.

He saw out of the sides of his eyes

for grabbing hands.

He could yell in four languages,

shut his ears to all of them

and to the hooves beating

their barouches and curses on the cobblestone.

                   

Crickets make him nervous

when they hesitate,

then start up again

rubbing their legs together         

bargaining for his life.     

Words and chestnuts were cheap, he said

seventy years later in our backyard.

He still can’t listen much

but remembers more than he ever heard.

He needs his noise-

it keeps his blood moving.                   

Cosmic Vibe Over Lunch

More than a foursome over lunch

we were a quartet. Adele and I fed lines

to Gayle and Tommy in a singing conversation

over the menu as the American songbook.

Every dish, a cue. Avocado on the side led to

Frim-fram sauce and chafafa on the side,

an oldie but goodie from Nat Cole. 

Don’t bother morphed into 

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.

We were aligned but not to be eclipsed.

(We looked at each other in the same way then.)

We found a cosmic music of the spheres in falafel,

the harmonic hum in the salad bowl. 

You say tomayto, I say tomahto.  

Tell the waiter, Anything Goes.

We sang our way through the dread.

At the drop of, Is that all there is,

Gayle became Peggy Lee.

Then let’s keep dancing, Tommy chimed in

over the omelet and salmon wrap

We were bewitched; we were beguiled.

A Bird in The Tree Is Worth Two On The Page

We came to a screeching halt. About a dozen people were looking up at the sky. I thought maybe Superman had spotted a phone booth or Icarus was being grounded for offending the gods with wax melting on his chutzpah.

But no, their eyes were fixed on the branches of a tree. We were driving in a desert area of Moreno Valley outside of Palm Springs. These were a group of bird-watchers in ecstasy over an oriole. They were in the middle of a heated dispute over whether it was orange-yellow or yellowish orange and was it a bobolink or a Baltimore oriole with no sense of direction. Birders have quick eyes and acute ears listening for the trills or see-yew song. 

And what kind of tree was it, I hear you ask. It was medium height with lots of leaves where birds might come and go in anonymity. It could have been a Joshua or an overgrown pinyon or maybe a common elm. I’m a big city guy and, as a kid, trees were 1^st base or the goal line. Maple and elm were bus stops. Yes, it’s true, as a poet I should be able to honor them with a caption. But my unknowing helped define me by who I'm not.

I’m throwing names around like I know what I’m talking about. In fact, I don’t know a sparrow from a swallow. Thank God for Google where one can get to impersonate a birder on paper at least. Lo these many years I have managed to live in the bliss of ignorance in terms of Nature. I can identify a willow only if it is weeping.

Am I allowed to love trees without a glossary of I.Ds? I enjoy watching their greenery swaying to capricious gusts of wind. I’m transfixed by the reptilian roots of fig trees and how branches reach for the sun with contorted elbows.

As for birds I know a hummingbird from a crow and a sandpiper from a gull but not much else. My head hangs in shame. I wonder if a rufous-sided towhee flew in my window, would it recognize itself in the Audubon book on my coffee table. If names confer mastery, I’m content living in an aviary without dominion. I would be in constant awe of their plumage even as they remained nameless.

 

 

Artifacts

Millennia from now when paleontologists sift through the rubble of what was once the fabled city of Los Angeles, they might stumble upon five million black rectangles, some baffling golden arches, museum-quality hard drives, and empty sidewalks with blue tents. Suppose they discovered a couple of bowling balls and a basketball court. What could they possibly make of this? From all that, they will be tasked to reconstruct a civilization.

Legend had it that we were a city of frozen yogurt shops and something called nutmeg-dusted frappuccinos but those relics could not be found. 

Residue from the stomachs of us ancient humans offers sufficient evidence of a lifestyle and bone structure so that a face can be re-imagined. The alimentary canal of a devout vegan can easily be distinguished from a meatatarian’s mastications with the DNA of ketchup.

How could they reconcile hunger and obesity? What would they think having found particles of threads from red caps on the skeletal remains of a species of humanoids with altered brains, alongside issues of Scientific American and shards of Enlightenment texts? Did these people in the early 21st century live in the Dark Ages or a rather advanced culture? Very vexing.

How will we be seen in the natural history museum of the distant future? Dead fish alongside plastic baggies and Styrofoam cups, advanced electronics gone to weaponry, architectural wonders and oil slicks. What strange people we must have been.

Yet there are uncut forests, land mass still untouched by rising seas and high deserts with a havoc of wildflowers and remnants of violins. The diggers sifting through our remains are descendants of those who somehow survived the 21st century cataclysm in sufficient numbers to have started over again, stuck as they are with our double helix.