Forty Years of Yes

My new book entitled, Forty Years of Yes – My Life with Peggy is now available.  This is a collection of poems and prose which I wrote either to or about Peggy. Some of my poetry goes back to the mid-1980s. We wrote two volumes of answering poems together back in the day, Letters to the Same Address, (Momentum Press) and Along These Lines. Peggy’s poetry about our relationship is a separate book, Two Is a Sacred Number, Peggy Aylsworth.

Putting together these pieces was a labor of love which brought with it some tearful moments but even more delight recalling our life together. We celebrated birthdays, anniversaries and Valentine’s Day by exchanging poems, some of which have been given a new life in these pages. There are a few which bewilder me still. The references were fleeting with only traces in some of the words.

Those of you who met Peggy or knew her only through her writing will recognize her irrepressible appetite for life. She met the world with all its pot holes, detours and severe tire damage, its unresolved mysteries and fools and to all of it she said Yes. She affirmed messy humanity because she also knew how to summon her own inner resources. She never stopped seeking but had the knack of finding as well. Tree-stumps, pods, bark, clouds, shadows and fallen leaves never escaped her. Along with all that was Peggy’s wide embrace of people, family of course, endearing friendships and even kinship with strangers. I needed another forty years to learn her secret.

My wish is that some of her spirit and soul will be conveyed to the reader. The book is available through Amazon or from me for the price of a Chinese chicken salad. Enter,  40 Years of Yes: My Life with Peggy: Levine, Norm: 9798357604071: Amazon.com: Books

Venice Here, Venice There

That city on the Adriatic is a great place but they need to do something about those streets. 

Our Venice has to do something about its waterways. We could do with more of them.  

Old postcards show gondoliers in striped shirts taxiing women in parasols and men in straw hats.

Italy's fabled city is sinking by inches and not just from the weight of tourists who come to listen to its sighs on the bridge in an endless deathbed scene. The sea has been reclaiming it for the past four hundred years. 

Our beloved town nestled between swanky Santa Monica and ritzier Marina del Rey has become a destination for homeless, alongside those those who bought Amazon at three,  artists, poets, skaters, and bicyclists. And then there is a boardwalk full of musicians, palmists, psychics, assorted vendors and people-watchers. It is one of the few happening places in a public space. I once asked someone for the time and he gave me a dime. It's a great place to pick up easy change. 

Old Venice is a living theme park with its skin peeling, bells kneeling and groaning under the load of pillaged goods as it slouches toward Byzantium. It has been largely abandoned by Venetians to hawkers, pilgrims and pigeons. But the sky is still the one Turner saw spiked by ninety churches. And a mirror brings Tintoretto's ceiling close. 

Venice, here. is a $20 parking space for Sunday brunch to slum with real people down on their luck who live above barber shops or in the back of tattoo parlors. However, there is also Abbot Kinney, our version of the Champs Elysees with overpriced eateries, fashionable boutiques, gentrified frozen yogurt shops and no place to park.

It could be worse, like Pismo Beach, the end of civilization where Jesus made a comeback and is homeless on the off-ramp, where Allah is stuck on an oil slick, Buddha's on his motorcycle chanting his repair kit, Yahweh is yesterday since all my friends are atheists and Noah lives with Joan of Arc over in the trailer park. 

Venice, there, is an unsinkable ship. Call off the dirge. The patient is critical but not serious. It drank Hemingway under the table. Now it is buoyed by its own obits and the chronicle in its grime. There's a wry smile in the prow of the gondola. The wash hanging from palazzos is doubled in the corrugated canal like a ship's bunting. 

Each Venice is a rescued swamp at land's end, one with an over-wound clock, the other still ticking. Ours has also produced some world-class painters and many literary figures along with our beloved funk. For decades Beyond Baroque has been a major poetry venue for hard-edged words issuing from that jagged right-hand margin. It is the mix of class and cultures which keeps the blood moving and the air charged.

Light In Dark Times

Some say this is no time for humor

so I send them cartoons.

Smiling widens the face

un-gnashes the teeth, un-furrows the frown.

When nostrils flare, they let in more air.

Laughing is jogging, inner aerobics.

Forbidding the irony, an amputation

of an organ unnamed. My Buddha

is the giggling Buddha.

Some say the banana is a black metaphor.

I say grapes to you, hold the wrath.

There's a dulcimer in the spare ribs,

herbs sing on the tongue.

Even with a fly in the still-life

and a skull on the table there is light

from the candle, from a source off the canvas.

And when grass is paved over

something we may call weed

pokes its head through a crack,

can even split the rock.

 

I know about Tucker and Sean,

how they sneer, how they smirk,

but what they’ve axed may be pruning

what they spew could be mulch.

Are those not buds surrounding the thorn?

The poet cannot un-say

we must love one another or die.

 

 

November 8th

In 1956 my presidential vote went for Adlai Stevenson. The first of many losers. My association with subsequent second Tuesdays in November is that of a wake; sort of an extension of Halloween or The Day of the Dead.  A time for keening.

(Cheer up, Norm, there are always those calendar scenes of Switzerland)

Given my history of disappointments, I cannot remember a time when an election was so consequential, felt viscerally in my psyche and in my bones.  And an off-year yet. Since Trump uncaged the beast, fissures in our midst have exposed seemingly irreconcilable tectonic plates. A quake is headed our way with numbers off the Richter Scale. November 8^th will be a plebiscite on the good sense or lunacy of American people. Never before have so many fallen so fast and so far. I’m cushioning myself against the turning off of lamps in this once beacon of a country. We might as well dismantle the Statue of Liberty.

One wonders how to rehabilitate seventy million fools. In Hitler Germany there were an inordinate number of PhDs in the Gestapo. Go figure. Somehow, they collectively lost their mind and later underwent an agonizing reappraisal. I leave that subject of mob psychology to sociologists, historians and psychopathologists.

Today we are faced with an army of the disgruntled. Is no one gruntled anymore? I would imagine everyone has grievances. You lost your free pass to the car wash or your shoelace just busted and your stretch socks are disappearing into your shoes. Get a grip; that’s no reason to vote for the guy with a satchel full of hokum.

Richard Nixon’s famous last words as the helicopter whisked him away were, I’m not a crook. Donald is such a miscreant he proudly proclaims, I am a crook, a liar and a cheat and you’re going to vote for my partners in crime anyway. And they do, to show those loathsome Democrats how much they are hated even if it means the end of Social Security, Medicare, civility and sanity. Some of us remember how Joseph Welch muzzled Joe McCarthy with five words, Have you no decency, Senator? As a measure of their depravity, those words would have no weight today.

Looking back at my sixty-six years as a voter I can own up to at least one moment of wrong-headedness. I cast my lot with Eugene McCarthy rather than Hubert Humphrey in 1968. In those good old days we had to deal with the evil of two lessers. Humphrey lost the popular vote by less than 1% but was soundly beaten in electoral votes. Hubert, by the way, was a pharmacist but one shouldn’t hold that against him. McCarthy ended up losing his way when he supported Reagan in 1980. I can now proclaim I was wrong. We are entitled to one stumble every six decades.

We seem to have lost our Middle of the Roaders.  The independent Middle was always a muddle. Now we see many of those who called the Middle their address drift over to the red pole for simplistic answers to the complex issues. Count the cynics with the cowards. It is far too easy to sit this one out. Abdication of rationality must be part of our DNA. Here Daddy, tell me what to do. There is a strain of infantilism running through the electorate.  

What to do? Listen to the flowers? Eat ourselves to pumpkin bliss? Find transport in Chopin’s Nocturnes or Whistler’s Nocturnes or see if you can get Keats to rhyme with Yeats? I Ain’t Got Nothin But the Blues, sang Mose Allison. A bluesy sax shows me the way to get out of this world / cause that’s where everything is.

I do have a modest proposal in advance of the 2024 election. Since California, New York and other states are so heavily Blue, why not organize a legion of 500,000 from those places to relocate into gerrymandered districts in Red states and tilt the balance in our favor? Let our surplus popular vote count!

Here I am at the bottom of the page bereft of any other bright ideas. I ventilate instead. For those who expected wisdom you are eligible for double your money back.

 

ELECTILE DYSFUNCTION

Why do Liberals go limp in November while Republicans are fully aroused? So say the poles..,.I mean polls. All that corporate money pouring in and the power it implies must be inherently sexy. And maybe malice and mendacity turn folks on; a perverse form of ecstasy.

In any case the right wing’s appeal seems more to the glands than the brain. While Democrats split hairs over agenda or lie semi-moribund, conservatives unite, rally around old myths and control the narrative however simplistic and distorted it may be.

A reasoned argument from the Left, supported with policy statements seems to address deaf ears. Indeed, the opposition has grasped the concept that arguments to a mass audience can be siren songs, using simple slogans, images and signifiers. Can it be that mindlessness causes a premature eradication of seminal thoughts?

This seems particularly true in an off-year election in which the task of both parties is primarily the turnout of their respective bases and secondly igniting the vast, low-information middle. This is where public relations firms and advertisers play a decisive role.

Selling a candidate is indistinguishable from selling a car or a box of cereal. Why do I drive a Honda? On some level below consciousness I have bought into a cluster of images that makes a statement matching me with my car. I’m not a Mustang. I’m not a BMW…….whatever that means.

Americans are nothing if not consumers. We not only purchase goods but we buy services the same way; evaluating teachers, judging waiters in restaurants and voting for our representatives often by subliminal impressions. Bush’s affability carried the day for eight years. He was the guy you (not I) wanted to have a beer with. If a candidate can fake authenticity the rest comes easily. The media pronounces whether he/she looks presidential as if our leaders should come out of central casting.

The agenda, the record, the issues all become subordinate to a snap assessment by the buyer-voter. A significant portion of the American electorate responds more readily to an orgy of fear and loathing than to mere foreplay of empathy and reason. It is primal; an instinctive reaction from the reptilian brain. The Republicans, those lucky stiffs, have tapped into this. Who knew that mindlessness was an aphrodisiac?

In 2008 when Obama won over first-time voters and independents it was also a visceral connection. Some of us projected a lifetime of expectation on him. He received other votes just because he wasn’t Bush or McCain. Now we are reminded again of the deep conservative roots in this country. If an election were Masterpiece Theatre we would witness the paradox of Downstairs voting for Upstairs. The underserved identify with the privileged.

I can only hope our young people, minorities and undeclared voters get Viagrified and see through the slick ads from millions of fossil fuel dollars, rise from their impotence and get turned on as they did two years ago.

 

Eight Blocks

Almost every day I walk eight blocks. Janice, my daughter dear, sees to it. She doesn’t take any of my guff. I didn’t know until now that I had any guff. In fact I don’t even know what guff is except that I have it now and then. 

When I say eight blocks, I mean four blocks and back and with my walker. So in effect I’m rolling; I can barely keep up with myself when the incline is downhill. When I’m climbing Mt. Everest on the last leg, it is for the imagined throng of cheering spectators. I might pass Sisyphus on the way up that Big Rock Candy Mountain.  

President Truman used to take his morning constitutional at a brisk pace while tipping his straw hat to passersby. I try to greet joggers and dog-walkers but I probably pass unnoticed to most whose world is in their mobile phone.

Suckled as I was by radio programs I'm remembering shows like Jack Benny, Fred Allen, The Great Gildersleeve and Fibber McGee and Molly. They were all structured around the theme of the boulevardier. Each week we stared into the speakers and saw our hosts walk the walk bumping into Mr. Peavey the druggist, Judge Hooker, the Old-Timer Mrs. Nussbaum, Sen. Claghorn and Mr. Kitzel. Sadly, folks don't stroll much in L.A. One might get arrested for vagrancy. 

We take the same route every day so I’ve become acquainted with the sidewalk. It is quite a topographical experience negotiating the reptilian roots and fissures; levels change every few steps as if I am walking on the roof of an underground civilization bulging here and caving in there. Upheavals need to be attenuated or overcome with inner music, images of pretty horses or trees with red blossoms falling. Yesterday I saw a squirrel climb the drainpipe while a frond fell as if as an answering gesture.  

I wish I had even a passable knowledge of the botanical glossary. Even now in the off-season nameless flowers pop up which live off the clock. A bird of paradise sticks its beak through a picket fence and at the halfway point there is a grove of about two dozen of those orange and blue flora asserting their place in the landscape, half rooted, half in the mind of an avian. A row of eucalyptus trees preside along the way like bearded sages which have endured one folly after another in their shrugging skin. I didn’t notice those succulents before or the fern in the alley.

I walk orchestrating a commotion. I’m good with that. I am my own Dudamel finding patterns in the turmoil. I'm presiding over the marriage of everything. Not all substances are soluble. An emulsion, maybe. For each piece of precipitous breaking news I pour off the supernatant liquid. 

My doctor says I should walk for endurance sake. I walk in order to achieve transit. Some days there is more news from Mahler than from Rachel Maddow.

A Harp In the Carnage

For every bomb dropped, particle of noxious air belched,

for every last syllable of loathing overheard,

moral violence spewed, every barbed lie,

choke hold, groping, ignorant oath, every

truth denied, every shrug in the midst of indecency

 

  (that was the easy part)

 

Is there an answer in the stanza,

a poem that can override the filibuster”

Will the bell in the fuchsia

toll for the mesmerized?

Is there enough nectar in the hibiscus,

enough dew to quench parched minds?

Is that a camellia blooming on the

blood-stained bandage,

a harp in the carnage of a smashed piano?

Can the trumpet in the foxglove be heard?

 

In the pharmacy poison foxglove

becomes digitalis. What can kill also heals.

The leaf that stops the heart

contains the alkaloid that slows

and strengthens it.

There is chamber music yet, pulsing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Falling

Goodbye, Hello. It’s autumn,

we must conjure the oranging

to appease the calendar.

The poetry book is in free-fall,

lost in transit, does that count

and chlorophyll is seeping from leaves.

in the annual deathbed scene.

It’s all right, Ma, it’s all right.

Listen, hear the diva singing Greensleeves

in burnt sienna. Think sycamore thoughts.

The coral tree has gone skeletal.

and there’s a pumpkin pie in the fridge

but the book, the book. She sent the book,

named; These Days of Simple Mooring,

I wonder where that came from? To be

anchored in this harbor-hush, far from

the clutter/clamor of junk mail foliage

tossed, unopened, autumnal

bloviations fading into gusts. Dirge

of Democracy on the verge of.

Speaking of Michelangelo

who came and went

and came back again. Purgation, he said,

with his chisel, purgation of superfluities,

honing the marble, seeking, finding

the heartbeat pulsing.

What of that lost book? Maybe pages

are yet to be written,

words as gerunds happening,

leaves of Whitman's grass or Columbo

 saying through his rumpled topcoat,

There’s just one more thing

before the simple mooring. 

 

 

Eight Pounds, Twenty-Two Feet

That’s how much skin we have. How would they know this? Somebody must have weighed themselves and subtracted their bones, cartilage and other organs. Now that I think of it, skin is my favorite organ. Of course, I’ve never met my spleen, pancreas or kidneys (and I hope never to have that pleasure), but my skin has endured the slings and arrows of eighty-nine years with hardly a register of complaint. That’s a lot to ask from a pile of protein and minerals.

Skin starts out soft as a marshmallow meringue and ends up as flaky as apple strudel. Bags and jowls, flab and scowls it has put up with me. We’ve grown emotionally attached. I’d know it anywhere. It may be a mess but it’s my mess. When it is exhausted it has enough good sense to slough off and grow its replacement. I have to love it for that alone. Skin is a map of my journey. While our innards, even our eyes, stop growing around age twenty, skin manages to elasticize and wrap itself around my entire body, creases and folds, twists and bends on demand, far beyond its infantile imaginings. True it is only skin deep but that’s deep enough.

I should apologize to my skin before it’s too late. It has endured those childhood eruptions from mumps to pox to say nothing of adolescent zits. It doesn’t seem fair that skin had to receive the insults of errant diaper pins and scraped knees which I wore emblematic of athletic glory. Along with this were the occasional slaps and whacks. Skin also had to wear the inner abuse of nasty organisms, raging hormones and ultimately a network of varicosity. And then there was my ignorant solar-worship when we didn’t know what evil lurks in the heart of the sun.

My only incisions occurred on my left arm resulting in a twelve-inch scar from a knife-happy surgeon looking for a pinched nerve that never existed but probably paid off his Lexus. Sorry skin. I’ll try to make it up to you but I can’t imagine how.

When skin has something to say it itches and waits for an answering scratch. Fair enough. If certain areas on my back call out for obliging finger nails it could cause trouble. Considering my back as a map of the United States, Missouri and Oklahoma (red states) are nearly unreachable unlike Maine and Washington (Blue states). I’m just saying.

Skin also lets itself be heard with pins and needles or goose-bumps. When it throws a hissy-fit we call it a rash. Go ahead skin you’re entitled to your platform for all you’ve had to put up with. 

I try not to abuse my skin. I’m not a hand-wringer. I don’t crack my knuckles or furrow my brow as far as I’m aware. I can only hope smiles and wonderment are less taxing that frowns and sneers, snarks or smirks. Just to demonstrate that I have my skin in the game I promise never to enter a monastery and self-flagellate. Nor will I tattoo myself into a billboard however noble or endearing the message, not to an inch of my twenty-two feet.