Transit

The bestial events in that holy, unholy land,

laden with sins,

have shrunk my map,

folded me across oceans to this ancient divide.

I am haunted by the butchery,

images of the fallen and those taken to tunnels.

What was a chess game for me of conversational

hair-splitting over Chinese chicken salad

in the safety of a back booth

is now a place where exhausted words 

have gone to die.

 

I am left grasping for a language to trace

the tears of my transit

from head to heart,

from my distant perch to the door

of my slowly un-shuttered chambers.

Have we not advanced since the ancients,

since the days of sacrificial lives

and slaughter of innocents?

By uncaging the beast

such vengeance discredits the cause,

assuring its own defeat.

Psalming

In ancient times a psalm was any song sung to the strings of a harp. If we listen, a certain music can be heard, a rhythm, a pulse to defeat the noise out of which we can create a psalm of our own.

The keyboard is my harp. Lyrics are what I write describing my engagement with life as I take it in; the injustice, carnage and mindlessness alongside love, mercy and creative bursts. I straddle two worlds… above the fray, distant and cocooned in green pastures, while preparing a table at the barricades in the presence of my enemies.

What if God, the Lord, is not a noun but a verb as in lording over one’s garden, one’s self. We are our own shepherds. Do we seek still waters? No, we seek the path beside the water, on the shore. To behold this water, this dry land, this strip, this Black Sea, this West Bank. The water is still and the air without wind to move invading sailing ships. We are wanting, left with rod and staff, at the great divide.

Let me presume that everything happening in our midst is happening inside the poet. Shall poets answer the bell heard tolling? Do they write out of their rage and despair?  Or do they breathe a more rarefied air above the valley of shadows? Is the poet the one who poles us across the water and puts music in our ears (Charles Wright.)?

The psalm I am hearing is the song of cessation from Kiev to Tel Aviv. Guns silenced. Pens to paper. Water shared. Cups running over. Grain as cargo. An adagio of diplomacy.

 

Sooner or Later

We must enter our dark and dank forest;

that dominion of wild-ness,

of stumps and excrescence,

where unseen forces commune

among the calligraphy of contorted branches

beyond my fluency. Screech and caw,

murmur and buzz outside my voice range.

Where I can be lost in the chaos

that has been shadowing me.

What seemed familiar is suddenly unknown.

I am prepared to meet my unlived (disowned?) self,

old bark shedding, maple gone skeletal.

These woods of brambles juiced,

nettles seeded and shedding trees

tapped for syrup. A lantern seen

from a golden grove unleafing. 

 

 

 

 

Sticks

I’m reminded of that old saw about the carrot and the stick. Maybe it works getting a mule to move the cart but I’m not fond of sticks or even twigs as a way of behavior modification. As applied to us humans it is even more abhorrent. I recall an English movie seen as a child, Tom Brown’s School Days, in which he was subjected to corporal punishment by a switch or whip or some other demented form of malice; knuckle-wrapping being the most benign in the sadist’s handbook. Whether this was a hand-me-down from those days of papal fervor or part of Brit imperialism or just garden-variety proto-Fascism, I winced then and I wince now. 

I’m realizing how that word, stick, is not one I use very much or have ever used except when attached to another word like stick-shift, chopstick or drumstick. As a kid, a stick was that piece that held a popsicle or toasted almond bar together. It was your lucky day if your stick gifted you with a free Good Humor next time around. After rain we would float them down the gutter in a race toward the sewer. On a sunny day I might have snapped a stick of wood from a tree and gone fishing for a nickel through a grate. Sticks were also a weapon along with stones which could break my bones but names could never…. My favorite stick was the broom which, when sawed off against the curb, became a stickball bat. Many a tennis ball got whacked with those vandalized sticks. I never once thought of the superintendent of the apartment building left with a disembodied collection of bundled straw. 

Once upon a time this country was a coast-to-coast forest with branches sufficient to convey a squirrel three thousand miles (if he could hitch a raft across the Mississippi). Non-stop trees were a super highway. Then settlers and our motherland put the axe to the woodland to create more pastureland and to get them through the winters. I doubt if stickball was on their mind or even cricket. In order for Britannia to rule the waves they deforested North America for their ships and steel mills. The big sticks also allowed Lincoln to build the log cabin he was born in ( that's a joke). As a boy scout I never figured out how to rub two sticks together to start a campfire. Maybe rubbing two boy scouts would have worked better. Raised as a street urchin I wouldn’t know about such things but why not just put a match to a candlestick? Before I sail down the River Styx this is my story and I'm sticking to it.

Vermeer

I just watched a new documentary about an exhibition of twenty-seven Vermeer paintings at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is the largest collection of his works ever assembled. The film, Close To Vermeer, is available on Kanopy, which is a free streaming site from most libraries. There are a few dramatic moments over the authentication of some work attributed to him with art experts, historians, scientists and an art collector weighing in.

The amazing pieces have always fixed my gaze. How he created so much narrative in such a small canvas, how he captured the Delft light and centered women as the focal point, all come together to astonish the eyes and add to the mystery. As my friend said, he revealed rather than depicted. Milkmaid, Girl with A Pearl Earring, Lacemaker, Woman playing the Flute, Love Letter, Woman playing Guitar are just a few of his well-known canvases.

The film calls into question the skepticism of science against the subjective response of the viewer. Yes, the green pigment was not applied in exactly the same fashion in one painting as it was in several others or the subject was at variance here from his usual body of work.

For a man who just spent forty million dollars I suppose these are matters of utmost concern. For the rest of us, who cares? Perhaps there was a copier of the master or maybe he was a mentor to a small group of wannabees or it could even have been painted by one of his daughters.

The detail of both the domestic scenes and even the view of Delft across the water or the street scene is so rich it is best viewed in the close-ups which the film renders. Given the crowds to view at museums one cannot get close enough to do justice to each scene.

Here is a poem I wrote about thirty years ago when Peggy and I returned from a trip to Delft.

 

In This Light

For the maid-servant it was just another chore among chores.

Morning bread, milking and now, the pouring.

For Vermeer secreted in the hallway

it was the sun on her flaxen smock, powdered blue,

his encounter with Delft light bent from the canals

filtered by linden trees from the mullioned windows.

He would still her sudden grace, pacify the noise

of fishmongers and his seven children playing.

There was an adoration in her face

as if the milk were an offering from her breast

fixed in his piercing eyes.

 

Yesterday our Holland trip came back in your photos.

There were the usual artsy and even a few

that died into postcards but there was also

the amazing ordinary which friends might shuffle past:

the elderly woman on the train peeling an apple,

a man in a suit at a sidewalk café,

reading a book, rocking his baby,

or the arrangement of freesia, sandwich and Heineken

as we lunched in our B&B.

How you halt time and the commotion,

compose it with shadow and angle.

The way Vermeer saw bread you see texture

and lift it to new life. You are no Johannes Vermeer,

just a descendant who sees with devotion and reverence.

What Clings To The Marrow

We seem to have no control over what sticks or what sloughs off the flypaper of our memory. Why can I name almost everyone in FDR’s cabinet of eighty-three years ago but hardly anyone in Obama’s or even Biden’s, not to mention a telephone book full of athletes?

Were Mutt and Jeff the inspiration for pairing Sydney Greenstreet with Peter Lorre?  Each of these names comes with a face as do Walter Winchell, Wendell Wilkie and Whirlaway.  

What may seem endlessly fascinating to me is sure to elicit a yawn to anyone else. Yet as an aggregate they reveal my propensities, passions and follies and, by omission, my vacancies.

Perhaps there is nothing trivial about trivia. We are archeologists sifting through the rubble of our own journey. One man’s artifact is another’s trash. Shard by shard we can reconstruct our illustrious junk sculpture of a life. If nothing else this private gallery can be the stuff to get us through an MRI.

Credit radio for evoking so many visual images. We stared into speakers and conjured everything from a barroom brawl to a courtroom drama. When Edward R. Morrow reported of bombs dropping on London I took cover under the blanket. I could smell the green grass and hot dogs when the ball game was announced and even took it for granted that Edgar Bergen’s mouth never moved when he ventriloquized Charlie McCarthy. It was our own imagining that got engraved in our bones. As the ratio of our senses is altered, we generate our own compensation. The visuals of audio. 

We live in a chaos of factoids where celebrities come and go faster than breaking news breaks yet why do the old irrelevancies still cling to the marrow? If I once knew the answer to this question I have long since forgotten it.

And so we beat on, (like Fitzgerald's Gatsby) boat against the current with a cargo of etched moments, ceaselessly into the past.

 

The Nothing That Is

 .. For the listener, who listens in the snow, 

And, nothing himself, beholds 

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
                                                       Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

The athlete without the menace of tattoos or grizzled sneer is pitching for the Dodgers. He is notable for his clean cut absence; nothing but his bare arm does the talking. His performance is enough without the compensation of signage. No snakes or crossbones, no platitudes passing for wisdom, no advertisements for himself.

Makes me long for absences. The unadorned, bling and swagger gone. Lost continent of mother's arms. Blank page surrounding a haiku. Rapid minimal strokes of black ink in a Japanese brush painting urge the essence from fallen petals. An unmet friend lo these many years and then words you cannot quite find. October maple is a ruddy diva in her death bed scene singing beyond the genius of the leaves. Skeletal trees in the mind of winter. The nothing that is there and the nothing that isn’t. To see what is not there is to behold a reality without all the expectations we have laid upon it. One has to see with the coal eyes of the snowman to have the mind of winter.

The wall in the Louvre was blank with only a nail where Mona Lisa hung a week after it was stolen in 1911. That was when Kafka traveled to witness what wasn't there. He saw the painting with his eye turned inward and he beheld its absence. The Portuguese have a word, suade, meaning combined joy and sadness for what is no longer there. Since Leonardo’s painting was returned it has been defaced, over the years, with acid and knives. It puts me in the mind of tattoos.

On the other hand, eight years later, Marcel Duchamp painted a moustache and beard on her face and turned the art world upside down by freeing our mind of the dead familiar. This is what we get for loving something to death. With his slight alterations Duchamp redeemed the piece from the banality of coffee mugs back into an organic creative form. A Dadist act against high culture decontextualized it and brought Mona Lisa back to life.

Maybe I’m wrong about tattoos. They are also a strike against established ways, a crude statement about individuality, a shock to convention. Some women find them sexy, so I’m told. They declare that one’s body belongs to oneself to do with as one pleases. 

Whatever they are rattles my sensibility. I can turn away if I like and I shall. I assert my right to bare arms, (maybe that's what the 2nd amendment was all about) my preference to see the nothing that is. At the center of the Mona Lisa is an ambiguity of gender, enigmatic smile and space which allows us to enter. We come closer to her mystery and our own.