-the aging poem-writer waits

for the "common good" to show its true face of prejudice.

for daydreams to begin again which long ago lead him to impossible places.

for the portal to appear that he might witness what it is he's been up to––

to see what it is he's missed of the outside during his time at the table.

early Sunday morning complex, 8/9/'20

-Requiem for George Frayne still among the living, now dead-

8/1:
the new poem, the one about “honky-tonk” music
(generally speaking) is finished, but dated as to subject matter,
time and long distance geography.

the time for moving forward is of my choosing,

so I can stick around for awhile.

George Frayne could be dead by the time I get around to it.

meanwhile, the church grows increasingly impatient with me

like crazy Julius looking up to the scaffolding.

8/2:
I’m told by Donald Trump that my vote might not be counted
because I voted the easy way and the yellow-stained leak started again
without provocation under the sink.

also on the home front, the fridge is empty except for three

individually wrapped and processed American cheese slices

and television’s been a dud since they cancelled Fulton J. Sheen’s show.

8/3:
there's a sprinkling of sawdust in the far corner of the kitchen,
a mystery this morning that wasn't available to me yesterday.
my momma opined at times like these: "I’m a nervous wreck".

I've submitted a request for the right to use this confessor when justifiable.

8/4:
considering my medicine, I see it's five more days to qualify for a refill.
I've swept away the sawdust so I'm on the edge, waiting for tomorrow's results.
who am I kidding? I'm not getting any work done today.

8/4:

I’m loitering in my own house

which to my surprise I’m told is legal.

I've nearly surpassed the cat in lost time and lack of effort,

and "I’m down to seeds and stems again, too."

-leave blank-

the 1976 RCA Red Seal recording of “Porgy and Bess”

sits on the shelf alongside “Lulu” and “Wozzeck”––

fifth in line before encountering the spine of "Der Ringdes Nibelungen"
where therein lies a conundrum for another day.

I’ve read the libretto; Googled what others have said of it;

listened as intently to it as anyone can while doing something else.

that was yesterday during the time between rainfall and breaking sunlight.

yesterday, it was the premiere of George Gershwin's“Porgy and Bess”

between rainfall and into a breaking sunlight.

It’s the only time I remember listening to music in any form, when weather

outside my window seemed to have an influence on the experience, but––

well,–– it's as the grunting Neanderthal the Elder instructed
the hairy youngsters gathered 'round the fire:–– "fear no art"!

First performed in Boston, September, 1936.

First performance of this production, Houston, July, 1976
and New York, September, 1976.

This recording: Houston Grand Opera, November, 1976.

-Tuning-in to Mahler, but daydreaming of Beyonce-

1.

Everything’s moving slowly.

System says: not enough memory.

I need disc space.

Let’s cull some photos from the crowd

squatting in digital stasis.

It's just a quick click, hold, drag, and delete away.

But wait!

There’s Mahler posing and looking good.

Gotta keep Mahler.

In fact, let’s give a listen, shall we? –– (Slip

a silvery platter into the slick machinery.)

2.

It’s the “Kindertotenlieder”  breaking my heart again.

But there’s something curious in Gustav’s pose.

I know this pose. Wait a minute. It’s Beyonce’s pose! 

3.

Meanwhile, the wrenching "Kindertotenlieder" continues sinking

into the depths of my sensibilities and because I’m listening

to Mahler, but daydreaming of Beyonce, it seems to reason

that I can also walk and chew gum at the same time which is

the required "personal statement" I've attached to close my application

for a "MacArthur Genius Grant".

-navigating the "Arts" section-

In the beginning, God created the Apple and the Earth

1.
In this morning's "Arts" section, there’s a photo
accompanying an article of a young, smiling
Maxine Kumin sitting at her typewriter, and

she’s turned slightly in her chair to face the camera.

It's not the art of photography.
The shutter speed's factory preset is good enough.

I like Maxine Kumin. I read her poems.
I’ve paid money for her books.

The spines are well defined on the shelf;
Maxine in a row, but in no definitive order. 

It’s the typewriter at her desk

which got me to thinking about Maxine,

typewriting poems in her earlier days (not so long ago)
and how easy it was for me as I began to think about poems,
sitting at the luminous screen of God's anointed machine

as it defines proper grammar and corrects misspelling while
I tap its keys, giving me a head's-up option underlined in red.
It's a fast machine. It's a time machine.

Time machine, don't make me lazy:

2.
Yesterday, it ushered me into Charles Bukowski's
cold-water flat in SanFrancisco.
There's Charles at the fridge, beer bottle in hand, a woman
escorted from the bar who's been around the block at his side.

It didn't matter that Charles would've taken offense
at the rudeness of the intrusion.

Time machine, don't make me crazy: 

The slick apparatus has given us an open door
to more efficiently covet our neighbor's goods.
It's like getting a free pass to bypass the 10th commandment.

But eventually poems come out of it just as they did

from the young Maxine Kumin's typewriter, and of those

before her time and long before that, whatever the machinery at hand,

even to the age of the crow-feathered quill.

Acknowledgment:

 John Copley, if you're among the living, I've altered your "Crow Quill" phrase!

epilog:

I hear-tell one could go blind writing nightly by candlelight.

christ, according to past confessionals, I'd have to abuse myself

one hundred sixty-eight more times before I'd go blind.

-The Periods-

1.
Picasso had his share, often classified by colors.

And Bob Dylan had some real beauties.

With me, cataloging lengths of time from start

to finish, it’s often a matter of a day-or-two;

maybe a week; more if I concentrate.

So I’ll grant you that.

2.

In the larger sense of interstellar residence,
a number of stars have been classified as "fixed",
but they’re not really "fixed" as most of us

define "fixed".

The population defines "fixed" as a word,

but cosmologists define "fixed" as a term.

Due to our technical know-how
we can plot their transitions in time
from place to place expanding the pictures

the constellations draw.

(For example, we know what the Big Dipper 
will look like in a hundred thousand years
and not even Ptolemy knew that.)

3.
Well, the bills are paid-up for the month and up to now

the meandering nodules of the virus haven't found me.

Sticky little devils.

7 / 2 / 2020

-each in a place of our choosing and in our own time-

a musing over a far younger poet

so I write things down. so do you, I see.

let’s sit at our tables as we gather our belongings.

the interiors are cluttered with all sorts of stories, but

we can sort them out, you gathering those which speak

to your residence as I do the same for those which speak to mine.

after all, we've laid them down for a purpose.

the spines of books you've read are seen shelved behind you

and you've absorbed the richness of them, it's clear.

your documents are formal and convincing, unlike my own

which are sincere but fractured and nearly unknowable.

the papers I hold are older, vintage you might say.

a patina casts a veil of time over them and anyway
who would make the effort required to seek them out?–– but,

still, it makes sense for you and me to sit at the tables

each in a place of our choosing and in our own time.

there lie the impossible goings-on drifting inward through the doorways

not yet fully engaged but lingering and learning then drifting

outward from whence they came less naked as their beginnings.

coming to account after the acts 

in the beginning, the confessional list

was somewhat truthful, an examination

of errant deeds usually with equally wayward friends.

later, the list was a quick invention.

we were busy.

we had bikes to attend to

and the girls were changing their shapes.

later still, no list was necessary;

the same sins recited on a weekly loop.

the new testament refers to this as

regurgitations in the face of God.

Priest knew. Priest didn’t give a shit.

Priest was waiting for the juicy stuff;

confessing the act of self abuse in the still of the night

or the back row gropings with Saint Shirley of Locust Street

in the balcony of the Strand on Pleasant and 

lesser engagements like..

smoking cigarettes in the meadow behind the billboards,

or tempting the slow-witted Micheal Joseph, the kid

with two first names, into drinking mercurochrome because

one of us said it tasted like strawberries.

but in the end it was always the same admissions and dispositions:

two "our father's" and two "hail Mary's" and one "act of contrition". 

-It was a fast dream-

there’s a street beyond a granite ledge in another time.

It’s a very short street, very narrow, only two houses stand there,
nearly pressed side to side, shingled in dark wood, rough to the touch.

a meadow across the street sits unto itself,

stiff, sharp-edged, yellow as khaki, no brighter.

It has a name, this street, but the age of rust
and weather has worn it down.

It’s better this way, that the little connector

has no name to be investigated.

Inquiries would not serve it well.

Inquiries will muddle its circumstance.

an inquiry would only serve to soften

the edge of its mystery.

the street is paved in small-stone gravel.

why bother to steamroll tar over such a place.

what’s the need of asphalt to a street like this.

there's a romance drifting in of cats strolling around the interiors
and parakeets peeping and children at play. yes, children growing inside
as if within the warmth of another womb. but, no.

I don't see them.

no animals, no people, no rooftop antennae

to bring the outside world inside with a static reception.

a proof of nothingness: there aren't any clotheslines
running between the houses hooked window to window.
It all looks dry of life.

the innermost planet revolves like this.

I won't go back after the story's end.
there's nothing left to unpack.

there's no longer reason to report a finding.

abandoned houses on Way Street / Quequechan

Of possible mercury poisoning, syphilis,

and a drizzle of music appreciation

Let's consider Franz Schubert.

Admittedly, I'm not drawn to his music for a day-to-day experience

but I find the circumstances surrounding his death intriguing.

It might have been mercury, medically prescribed in his time which did him in

or the syphilis it was meant to cure, but couldn't.–– Who knows?

I'll tell you who knows. Nobody,–– that's who.

 

Now I’m thinking of writing my own "unfinished" poem.

It seems easy enough.

All's I gotta do is stop short; done before its time,

as unfinished as the B minor 8th.

In the meantime,–– was it syphilis or the poison of mercury,

medically prescribed that did in poor, poor Schubert?

Who knows? Certainly not me.

-he can’t breathe but I can’t sleep-

a George Floyd requiem

I know now

what I should've known all along

that a grown man’s knee pressed
hard

upon a grown man’s neck does
murder
to the man who has the neck––

that the guy who has the knee

has the weight of himself
transferred to the knee,
transported to the neck––

that the knee
has the weight of two grown men.

attached to the neck is the head which

cannot move.
there's a pavement pressed to the other
cheek.

head has a mouth; it whispers: mama...

there's a frothing at the lips.

street-scene's in the gutter,
the scene seen on television
running on a terrible
loop.

in the evening across the street

it's that late night yapper
again.

dog, tv,
neck, knee.

dog, tv,
neck, knee.
say his name.
his name is breathless man.

he can’t breathe but I can’t sleep.


5/25/20

-Charles Ives in Fall River-

when Charles Ives stopped by
early this morning

we talked over coffee and oven-
warmed cranberry muffins.

I asked him about that hint
of Beethoven's 5th

three quarters through his piano study No. 9

and with dabs of cranberry dotting his whiskers,

Charles Ives snickered, asking:
“why? didn’t you like it”?

Sure, I said. Sure I liked it.
I then asked him why he left the door open

which seemed to annoy him and he walked out
leaving a half-eaten muffin on the table and
again, leaving the door open behind him.

-how we come and go-

the lightbulb above my head blew-out last night

as I thumbed through pages of photos taken from

a long-in-print but long out-of-print monthly magazine.

there was barely a noticeable pop when it blew

with no downward glistening of sight and sound

such as we've witnessed with historically intriguing

slow-motion film experiments and there was little time

to react to the sudden darkness as light was snuffed

almost as fast as the speed of itself. 

(there’s a photograph of "Yippie" leader, Jerry Rubin

from the civil unrest of another time, taken by Richard Avedon,

who also photographed the Beatles, Dovima with the Elephants,

Twiggy, and a captivatingly forlorn Marylin Monroe.)

In the Avedon proof Jerry looks dry, disheveled,

he smokes reefer, but–– 

years later I saw him in passing; a more polished,

closed-form Jerry, dressed-up, neatly trimmed and chatty, walking

with undergraduates north on Oakwood in Ypsilanti, Michigan.