Monday, March 18, 2024

Spring Song

Spring is like a perhaps hand, wrote e.e. cummings, 
arranging, rearranging…without breaking anything,
light and dark in vernal equipoise
yet unstill in the commotion of spring,
with all its myths rising from winter bondage
like soufflés released as in held breath
while the world teeters in a fool’s hands,
narcissus bulbs loud with blather foul the air
from high in the tower the potentate gloats

while those with illegal hands stoop below,
Truth shredded as confetti
to be dropped on 5th Avenue snowing us
even as we are seeded then sprung
like those wild new-born poppies splattering
the desert floor of Anza-Borrego.
Fauvists at their outrageous easel
signify what Cummings called
the great illimitable earth.
There is a Yes after the final No,
an urgency that persists, a pod
opening here and there, March madness.
The number of red lanterns on the coral tree,
has doubled overnight to six,
startled this morning by the juicy pear
under the bruised green skin,

a cycle saving me from ever ending.


  


Friday, March 15, 2024

Silence

Hearts, they shrink

Pockets swell

Everybody know.

Nobody tell.              

                              Buffy St. Marie

 

Bad enough the noise. Incoherent blather.

Worse still, the loud silence

from those who know better but dare not utter.

One Repub. said he’d rather lunch with Hannibal Lecter

than attend the party retreat.

But still, but still, sealed lips in the chambers.

Congressional multitudes gone mute.

A high decibel hush can be heard.

Spines wither in silence.

American silence, same as German silence

of ninety years ago.

 

Poets, too, are silent, aghast,

having emptied their store of words.

Hoarse from pleas, obliquities on deaf ears.

I turn to the silence of fierce gusts,

to the wrath of a Biblical sky

and finally, to the silent spring

ready to burst on the desert dance floor.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Lincoln Boulevard

You are the north and south of us, 

the missionary's road, before colonized by cars,

old sins paved over for new ones,
Ugly as a mirror image, 
beautiful as a Rauschenberg collage.
Lincoln, the emancipated street conceived in liberty 
and dedicated to vehicles.
Showrooms, Sig Alerts and junkyards,
Motors are revved and the yogurt is frozen.
Quick Lube, fast food, strip malls are naked,
palmists, paychecks cashed and graffiti.
This is Americana where nobody walks. 
Is that you, Walt Whitman listening hard 
for bumper stickers singing? 
O Captain, my Captain, turn away; 
sprigs of lilac no longer bloom. 
We’ve emptied the wetlands in your name 
and filled the open road with bumpers of chrome. 
Lincoln, you are a gasoline alley 
and your thick air is exhausted,
part funeral procession. part parade.
Yet, some still lean and loaf at their ease. 
Surfers and surgeons mingle at the Cock & Bull saloon. 
A Suit stops a street vendor for a bouquet of roses. 
The Uber driver keeps a screenplay under his seat.
(Construction ahead- one lane)
Where the created equal eat 
sushi and salsa, 
pad thai and pastrami. 
Here is our body electric, 
neon diners and 
all-night laundromats, 
Pollock’s drip and 
Ginsburg’s Howl
clear as a dusted frappuccino.
We're here at LAX, 
to disappear

into thin air.

We've made good time 

on our way to elsewhere. 

Friday, March 8, 2024

Imagined Places

My brother was an only child till I ruined everything. He never quite forgave me for having been born. I'm told he had an imaginary friend he called Borneo. I’m not sure if Borneo was a stuffed animal or a place to hide in which case Arthur was way ahead of his time.

He was born two months before the market crashed in 1929. Maybe he got blamed for that. The Depression became his depression, whereas I swam into this world two weeks after FDR was inaugurated and got credited for that.

When war broke out, he was already at war with himself, defenseless against the artillery of life.  I grew up driving Nazis from Stalingrad and the Allied forces advancing across the front page of the New York Times.

When I was about thirteen, plus or minus, my friend Stanley and I invented a country we called Abaldabia. It was our Borneo. We picked an island, from the spinning globe, off the Siberian coast. What where we thinking? That’s where dissidents were sent to disappear yet we probably imagined some Gulf Stream current to make it tropical.

By that time Arthur was stationed in Korea. Not so far from Borneo. He returned still feeling ill-equipped. Suddenly I became four years his elder. Perhaps I could impersonate an adult better than him.

Abaldabia is now my secret room, my sanctuary. From a spot on the map I brought it to my inscape. I've become fluent in the lost language of imagined places. My passport to poetry, not for hiding but for launching.

Arthur was never at home in this world. Did he see Borneo when he drove his car into the side of a mountain at age thirty-three? Perhaps he was telling us that it was of Eden he was dreaming all along.

                                                                                               

Monday, March 4, 2024

Richard the Third

Having just watched the movie The Lost King, I was reminded of this blog I wrote in  2013. The film depicts the heroic work of a woman who had reason to believe Richard was buried under a parking area in Leicester, U.K. and, when shown to be correct, how the academics and politicians took all the credit. The King's remains proved he was maligned by Shakespeare reminding us that the Bard wrote at the pleasure of the Tudor Queen Elizabeth. Art is not to be taken as history. 

Speaking for Richard..........

Better potter’s field than these five centuries under a parking lot. Ignominy was my lot in life and death. But now my bones are free for all to see. No twisted, withered arm, my back less hunched or humped into a mountain as Will Shakespeare had it, no unequal, limping legs, just a curved spine and shoulders asymmetric. Bad ink has maligned me and stained my fate on folio pages.

Elizabeth called me that foule hunch-backt toade so her father’s thirst for severed heads would not suffer by comparison. As if my misshapen form had misshaped my deeds. They did worse than erase my name. One had me retained in the womb for two years. Another born too soon, unfinished, sent into this breathing world, scarce half made up… to disproportion me in every part. In death from Bosworth Field they stripped my body and dragged me to display. In the history books it is written that my body was despoyled to the skyne, and nothynge left above, not so muche as a clowte to cover hys pryve members . . . trussed . . . lyke a hogge or calfe.

But did I not hear the peasants jeer at their cursed act? I tell you I was loved in the forests and the fields, everywhere outside the court. Yes, yes I clawed my way to the throne. Treachery was in the air. But did I not ride to battle with the crown on my head? In my bones, from under cars and concrete I have been a student of the kings. Take note: I was the last monarch to die alongside his men. No Tudor lackey can re-write my bravery and the kingdom which but for a horse was mine. Nor can the chronicle deny I initiated bail to those accused, a beneficence which lives on forevermore. Is this the act of a usurper? Remember, history is merely the victor’s version.

Let this be their winter of discontent, while my grievances against the Bard’s mighty pen are redressed. If my visage seemed fierce and I chewed my lower lip, as reported, it may have been in compensation for my shortened frame. Yet it did not diminish the rage required to orate my call for peace between England and the Scots.

Let it be known that my first act as king was to ensure that the law of the land be administered fairly to all regardless of property or means. I allowed for petitions of the poor and set up legal aid for them in a Court of Requests, later abolished by my successor, Henry VII. Furthermore, during my mere two-year reign, I protected our merchants by prohibiting the importation of goods from abroad, exempting books which I encouraged for my people. Laws, henceforth, would be written in the common tongue, by my decree. During my reign sufficient benefits accrued to the populace, to generate an industry of defamation to my name by the opposition.

From inside my subterranean tomb I have heard spoken scurrilous attacks that besmirch public servants even in this enlightened age. Deceit got ennobled in a master’s hand during my day. Today it just requires repetition.

Hear my pleas. Yet shall my good name be restored. I feel it in my bones.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

About Dry Grasses

Six of us went to see the latest film by the preeminent Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The movie is called About Dry Grasses. The grass doesn’t show itself till about the three-hour mark in this three-hour seventeen-minute narrative. Until then snow covers the screen and also swallows some of the subtitles. But I am not complaining.

All six of us were enthralled by the stark landscape against which the main character was shown to be sweet, artistic, mean-spirited and duplicitous, by turns. Just when you might feel for him, he would betray your trust and then you might get a glimpse of another dimension in his character.

He is a modern-day Ulysses, pragmatic, amoral yet achieving a certain humanity as he struggles for transcendence. He perseveres like my orchid which has died three times and is now fighting for another rebirth.

Like Ulysses, he is a man of many turnings. I came away thinking he is a self-deprecating version of the director / writer himself. At several points we see the still photography of the protagonist which is clearly the artwork of Ceylan. He is telling us not to demand purity. The multitudes within are struggling to survive. As Tarzan said to Jane, It’s a jungle out there.

My orchid has a tongue. It speaks fluent orchid. I see it wagging, reminding me about her three weekly ice cubes to quench the parched roots. The dry grass speaks to us of Nature’s cycles. Petals drop or get buried under permafrost but thaw and regenerate like the human spirit. At one point we too might seem desiccated with despair, then buds appear.

Over enchiladas, guacamole and strip steak we six agreed with ourselves, far from the Anatolian winter. Conversation flowed from the spring we contain wetting our meadow of dry grass.

Monday, February 26, 2024

Norman Conquest

In the year 2066, a mere 42 years from now while most of us are enjoying our next incarnation as butterfly, butter lettuce or butter pecan ice cream, it will be the 1000th anniversary of the Norman Conquest. I intend to celebrate the occasion regardless of what shape I’m in. As invasions go, this one was momentous and not altogether destructive. I’m particularly pleased about that since they did it in my name. 

150 years before that, the French were ruled by Charles the Simple, who evidently earned his title. He accepted a horde of Vikings to occupy and protect a section of northern France which came to be known as Normandy (Norse Men). Thus was Norman born. I just took a bow.

It was on an October Thursday. William, not yet the Conqueror set sail from northern France with a gaggle of wine-soaked men to defeat the more pixelated forces of Harold at the Battle of Hastings. This is where Michael Kitchen presides as Inspector Foyle. He might have sniffed out the plot and defended the sacred shores but, like most European wars, this was simply a family squabble, not to be denied.

Normandy Bill, with some familial ties, was promised the crown by Ed the Confessor of England, who inconveniently died and Harold, his brother-in-law would have nothing of it. His throne was also being challenged from the north by the ruler of Norway. These were the days when Europe’s monarchs were at each other’s throats, unlike today when everyone loves everyone else, except for you-know-who.    

It might also have been a food-fight in which French toast got the better of English muffins and the result was eggs Benedict. The Normans had made better dishes to set before the king and so they did. Thousands came over to occupy British soil. They not only brought their latest recipes for technology in the form of weaponry; they also brought new notions of society, government and their mellifluous tongues. Mingling took place with the romance language of the Normans marrying the more guttural Anglo-Saxon speech of the Brits. The result was a most profound effect in the evolution of language, with the eventual meshing of Latinate and Germanic we now call English and speak, for better or worse. 

At first only the court, administration and elite spoke French while peasants stayed with their old Saxon words. Over time the one trickled down and the other met it and merged. The word, government, itself, traveled the channel in the period known as Middle English.

After a three-hundred-year orgy the new vocabulary became the common tongue. The old Brit words tend to be truncated and hard-edged while the French were often polysyllabic and lyrical. Those four-legged creatures in the pasture, sheep and cow, became French on the plate, mouton and chateaubriand or filet mignon. It is estimated that 10,000 French words have been folded into the English language. In that sense we Anglo-Americans are multilingual and all because of some Normans who came and never left.