Brown Calendar

I've been away. I know. I promised this to be daily bread. But the thing is..

Life has a tendency of getting in the way of itself.

I was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2016 on the day we accepted a foster child into our home.

I went through treatment, had surgery, completely reshaped my body and learned how to use my colostomy and dramatically shifted my body image. We adopted the child who needs daily support more than some other children.

Daily bread sometimes isn't poetic. Sometimes, it's just harvesting the grain, milling it, mixing the dough, letting it rise, and baking it.

That said, I have begun writing again, in fits and spurts, not daily, but as I process what's happened to me.

It is now a year after my surgery and I am due for my annual checkups so I'm looking at my medical calendar on my iphone, which my wife called the Brown Calendar.

I think it's rather poetic...don't you. Sometimes, poetry isn't written in words. It's written by the life you live and only written down later on. Maybe that's the answer to my original question: How does a poet attempt to view and experience the world as a poet in a world that does not reward those characteristics?

There is no reward, but the life. There is no view but the poet's. There is no world to experience but the poetry within it.

That said, here's a fresh poem about my calendar.

****

Brown Calendar

It started as a joke. My first appointment

with the radiation oncologist

made the diagnosis real. My mother, sister, wife, friend

and barely new foster child were there

as they spelled out the next 6 weeks,

where they would cook the tumor in my

rectum (and all the surrounding tissue)

and shrink it, like an overfried hamburger.

They were frustrated that the chemotherapy

hadn’t started yet and, seeing the need

to organize my treatment in time and space,

my wife, the smile who kept me from dying,

made the Brown Calendar and shared it

with everyone’s iPhone so everyone would know

where and when I’d be treated.

The tumor

shrank from 8 cm to just under 2 before the surgery

to reshape my body in order to save my life.

The radiation also burned the nerves in my penis

so I leak like a rain gutter after a rain

and the boner medication doesn’t work.

Brown, the color of shit. The color disgusts me.

Brown, the color that signifies I survived.

The color empowers me. Brown, the color

Of not being intimate. The color abandons me.

Brown, the color of my calendar.

The color counts my hours, my days.

And it started as a joke.

Strong Enough For Another Day

A lot of people will be thanking Robin for the laughs he gave them. A lot of people will be citing the genie, the radio personality, the doctor and teacher he was so many times, the board game character, the father who dressed as a nanny, the Peter Pan, the comic, the alien, the cartoon sailor, even the post-modern Dante from "What Dreams May Come" as his gifts to us. So many memorable characters...

I liked some of his lesser talked about roles. My top three Robin Williams movies are: "Being Human," "The Fisher King," and "Toys."

In these movies he was broken, he struggled with finding the right words for the moment, with the pain of life. It wasn't some demi-hero "carpe diem" bullcrap, peddled by Hollywood. He was trying to effectively tell a story by showing the struggle without the triumph.

Not that the triumph can't or shouldn't be there, but sometimes, to understand it, you have to look at the struggle and not go anywhere else but into it.

"Being Human" is probably my favorite of the triplet and is the least available or well-known of all these: in it he plays several characters, all called Hector, throughout history. It somehow tells the story of all of humanity via the struggles that Hector has during his lives. There are many common themes: loss of one's home and family and identity, slavery, journeys made alone and the guilt one feels about allowing the world to leave you alone and abandoned and enslaved by its circumstances and the lesser men who ask you to suffer for their sake.

"The Fisher King," a retelling of one of the Arthurian myths of Percival, the only knight to have actually found the Holy Grail, but foolishly wasn't able to recognize it until he used it on someone else. He played a homeless man who lost his fiancee in a tragic shooting and because of his trauma developed a debilitating mental illness.

In "Toys," he plays a man-child named Leslie who recently lost his father, a toy mogul with a Wonka-esque toy factory, and has inherited it but must face his uncle's claim to take over the factory and his plans to manufacture war toys that may or may not actually kill people. It's simultaneously a commentary on war and father figures.

Each of these characters has a huge, unfillable hole that the movie insists on not filling, despite our expectations that the industry of entertainment has trained us to expect. It simply says, "Robin, here's your problem and oh, by the way, here's a severe handicap to overcoming that problem. Now solve it if you dare." And the viewer, who understands the story, is drawn into it and experiences that struggle and maybe the same fear, frustration, and discomfort his character does, while the viewer who doesn't understand the story disconnects and starts playing "Snake" on his Nokia.

These movies are all about redemption. They're all about the overcoming of great Sin, not the evil that the devil convinces you to do, but the traditional understanding of Sin as Error, the fatal mistakes in judgment that one or two beings make that carries this huge domino effect on everything else.

I connected with these movies because in the character, I saw the person underneath the actor; it was easy to see what drew a person to these roles. I saw Robin, not doing a really good job of being Robin Williams. And I saw a sorrow that I recognized as my own, I saw hopes lost and messages misunderstood and a deep kindness for mankind, despite having received deep cruelties from mankind.

Ultimately, I saw in him the man I was and I contrasted those roles with his more famous roles, the comedic roles, the heartwarming roles, and I knew those other roles...weren't all there was of him. That was just the face he put on so that people would recognize him.

His death affects me because "Mork & Mindy" was my first favorite TV show, a sitcom about a strange person who no one understood, but was fortunate enough to be protected, taught, and loved by a woman named Mindy who, nonetheless, did. What a dream for a misfit kid like me to have!

His death affects me because I see myself as Hector, I see myself as Parry, I see myself as Leslie Zevo.

Robin Williams death shows that there is no escape from what's hunting him. The Red Knight always catches up.

Three years ago, I lost my father. Two years ago, I was separated and spiraling towards suicide. One year ago, I moved into a house with my wife starting a new life of strength and hope. I may never overcome my father's death, my own regrets about the time with him I lost, my need for a dad, my own mistakes that hurt the people I loved, that dismantled the trust they had in me, my own failure to love my work.

Those who say his sense of humor was his genius don't understand that it was his armor.
Those who say suicide is cowardly don't understand what kind of strength it takes to deny it for so long. Those who say depression is fixable don't understand the problem.

I don't want to be happy all the time. Anyone who does is missing the point of being human.

I want to be strong enough to stand up for myself but also treat people with the kindness they deserve. Kindness that too often goes ignored by people who don't value it or unreceived by people who aren't used to getting it.

I am sorry that Robin could not be strong enough for another day. I am sorry for his family and it is a frightening thought that there, only by the grace of April (my wife), Madison and Monroe (my nieces), and a little fat cherub or two, go I.

And I don't want to go that way.

Bastard

Stopping time is as easy as remembering.

Let's say you have a father. You have a relationship with him,
one that changes with your perception of him, one that changes
with his perception of you. You grow up, you do
things on your own, you listen to your own heart--
fuck him
and his nonsense about adulthood and responsibility--
and then you discover
you are responsible for your actions, and he
can't bail you out and you see his wisdom and you see his love
that only seems to match what you and he are.

And then he goes and dies.

You try to hang on to every memory you ever had, even memories
he doesn't belong in and you see his influence and his presence
and is it any wonder that God is a father? You see he was there,
always there, guiding you as a model and you clung onto every memory,
like a man sweeping the ocean towards him, trying to embrace
everything in front of him and pull it around him like a coat or a wall.

You rail and you gnash and you cry because
it wants to be forgotten, it wants to get loose
but you're trying to hug water

and you can't remember.                   And the fact you can't remember
is suddenly comforting. Maybe it wasn't him that made you this way,
maybe it was you alone and so you allow yourself to forget

how a man died without a word to you,
because he couldn't breathe enough to say anything to you,
and how you cried until your marriage broke, how you let it all disintegrate
into his ashes, how angry you were, not at him, but at your loss, at his absence.

And "your absence has gone through me," the poet wrote...

And you remember words you never expected
to attach to a memory of your father and then
time
stands
still.

"like thread through a needle:" the poet wrote...and your eyes mist up and
your saliva pools between your teeth and it's everything everything
everything...the poet wrote, "everything I do is stitched with its color."
The world stops moving.
The traffic outside stops playing in your ears.
The voices of humanity silence themselves.
The oxygen pauses

in your lungs to acknowledge absence...

and then rushes ahead to catch up and the blood in your heart
pumps hard and the tears and the saliva are released in a flood:
not a memory
of event, but a memory
of emotion,
a memory of absence, and then a stitching of your life.

And you grimace: "you stopped time, you son of a bitch,
you figured out how to get underneath the laws of physics and steal
pieces of the universe back from it, you sneaky           little           
 

Morning

~for my wife~

The universe woke up today
and decided, fuck it all, I'm gonna make THAT one
cry.

The universe put on its dark silvery robe,
strolled on down to the Fate Machine and hit
"brew."

The red light whispering into the darkness,
the hum of stars and planets churning, someone on Earth
stops.

This person looks into the sky, or into the air between atoms,
and feels the overflow of heat and tears permeate their being:
Nothing

will ever be the same; I am having a realization
that I am not the best me, that I am flawed, that I am
lost,

that I have been forgotten, that I am shit on God's shoe,
that I have no motion but to finish my dinner, wipe my chin, and
diminish.

Mmm, the universe thinks, good enough to the last drop.
Waaah, the person weeps, never ever good enough.
Lonely,

the universe is so lonely, with only itself,
and, with so many of us, we are so
powerless.

We have but each other and the universe has its power.
I give us, the universe and all of us in it, a new name:
Mourning.

What is it that we keep losing, that it keeps hurting?
What is it that keeps hurting, that we can't give
up?

Why don't we wake up before the universe does
and say, fuck it all, we're gonna make our own god damn
cup?

Taken Toys

When I was a child,
I would pocket my friend's toys:
a marble here, a fading GI Joe there;
a half-used eraser, a Yahtzee die,
the army guy with the bazooka,

or pieces: the plastic plug from a watergun,
Barbie's shoe, the Play-Doh knife,
a Hot Wheels car missing wheels,
a jack, the Transformer missile
that wouldn't fire from the launcher.

It wasn't the stealing, it wasn't the toy,
but the need to have a memento,
a reminder of my time with them, a reminder
of how happy a child could be.
            LITTLE DID I KNOW,

that they weren't thrown away or returned or lost
in the cushions or down the grates or retaken by other children:
the other day in a dream I opened a room
and found it filled with all my taken toys.
Growing up, I'd forgotten them anyway.

The Suit of Armor

The Suit of Armor

Over the shirt and tie, I've been wearing an everyday suit of armor
to protect me from the anger, the manipulation, the habits
that gave me the power to act without consequence.

It is a heavy, but blessed suit of armor,
kissed by an angel of redemption, forged
by the devils of regret. And I do not begrudge

wearing it. For now. But I hope for the day,
that my skin oxidizes and takes on the blessing,
but not the weight of this armor, its soft, fleshy

vulnerability encased in the patina
of a goodly man, able to defend himself
against the encroaching host.

AND WHEN I AM GREEN WITH PATINA,
my blood will no longer boil or foment beneath my crust,
but shall shine like light and pour forth like poultice.

The Poem In Which I Bleed

It has been a while since I wrote.

I don't miss it. I don't even feel guilty. I think I'm happier lately than I have been and I'm not writing anything.

I keep going back to this thing my lovely, adoring wife said, "You bleed when you write." I think we were discussing me going back to school to get my PhD and I told her that I probably wasn't writing deeply enough, that I couldn't reach the level of intensity that I usually reach when I'm writing and she remarked , "You bleed when you write."

And I think I've been thinking about that because with what I've been through, I'm tired of making myself bleed for words. I deserve a happier, successful life. How long can the junkie continue his addiction before the thing that makes him feel so alive nearly kills him? How long can an artist bear the pain of creation before all he knows is pain?

To what purpose do I cut myself open and why don't I just stop and start putting love into the world?

And I think that's the answer: I started this blog so that I could ask myself how a writer can view and experience a world that does not reward him for being a writer.

I'm not going to torture myself because I can't write what I think I should be writing, or can't live the way I think I should be living, or can't see what I want to be seeing.

I'm not going to torture myself at all and if it hurts, I'm not going to indulge in that pain. I'm not going to twist and turn it and gnaw on its rusted edges and make my mouth bleed on it anymore.

I'm going to do this life up with my own special breed of quiet, awkward, elegant joy, and if it comes out as a poem then, lucky me. If it comes out of a series of good and noble acts or conversations at dinner or favors I pay forward, then lucky me too.

This life is not meant for suffering, not meant for bleeding out. This life is meant for enrichment, for fleshing out and there is a limit to poetry. And I have reached it. There remains little meaning in the act of writing for me but I am not sad about it.

There is more in the heavens and earth than I've dreamt of in my philosophy. There is more magic to be played. There is more that I can do and that which I do will not be with my words alone on a page.

They will rise, they will be born, they will live as their own and I will smile as a father and as a grandfather and as a great grandfather and my kinsmen are poets and artists and good husbands and great men and sailors and doctors and teachers.

The poem in which I bleed is no longer the poem I write. The poem in which I blossom is the life I write.

The Voice in Your Heart is Not Your Own

Try.

That’s what my heart said.

It kept saying it for so many years; after so many

disappointments, it still said it: Try.

But after the last one, after he passed, it stopped.

The heart stopped saying it, as if the reason it had been saying it

was that it was his heart, not mine. All those years,

he was telling me to keep trying.

 

The voice in your heart is not your own.

Another’s heart, instead, speaks to you,

and when it goes silent, you tear at your universe,

just to hear something speak again.

 

Your heart speaks to another, do not forget.

What does it say? What does it say, my darling?

What does my heart say to you?

Self-Confrontation

I've recently had the opportunity to allow myself to stand outside of myself and gaze out at the edge of a smoldering world, the smoldering world of my history of trauma.

It is nothing unique, nothing more or less than anyone else's, I'm sure, and I think that may have been my first mistake in thinking that I could handle all of it. I've been so busy dealing with it all, day in and day out, fighting the symptoms but not the disease, that I forgot to step back and remind myself that this is mine and only mine. It is my responsibility to own it, my responsibility to learn about it, my responsibility to take care of it so I can live my life.

It begins with the coma, with that initial disconnection from my brain and a concerted attempt by myself and my doctors to reconnect it, but my emotional landscape was set ablaze by the dual natures of my parents own emotional landscapes: my father, unable to connect because growing up love wasn't safe and in order to prevent himself from becoming the monster his father was, he stayed at arm's length from me, still loving me but still distant, as if his heart might explode by getting too close. My mother, struggling with bipolar disorder most of her life, the emphasis always remained on her emotional safety, on her emotional landscape and mine was sort of left at my own devices.

And I ran into dark corners, into corners that hadn't burned yet and I laid the foundations of my friendships and relationships there, until they burned. I was like the Road Warrior, alone, just looking for that next oasis in a post-apocalyptic mess. Only I wasn't a bad ass, I wasn't a hero, I couldn't even save myself.

A few years ago, I ran out of places to run to...and then my dad died...and then my marriage began to collapse because of an infidelity, an infidelity I allowed because all around me there was no comfort in the love of friends and family and this burning city of my emotions made everyday feel like a crisis. I hid inside fake emotions, inside emotions that I thought people wanted me to feel. I even manipulated them in order to give creedence to those fake emotions so they felt all the more real to me. That caused more pain to myself and loved ones that I didn't count on.

And now I'm outside of myself, policing every manipulative or potentially dangerous impulse I have, still unsafe in myself, but safe from the burning of the past, and now I have to build up a new city of my emotions. And I have to lay foundations on top of the rubble, foundations in emotions I've never known: self-trust, self-respect, self-forgiveness, self-discipline, and self-confidence. I know that I can feel these and that it will finally be, it must be, a genuine feeling, but the question is how to do it while preventing the inferno that engulfed my life over the past two years from rising up again and taking my tiny successes and turning them into ashes.

It is all I can do some days to get out of bed. It is all I can do to pay a bill, or do a chore, or remind myself that I like to play Magic: The Gathering. I reach deep for each fraction of each friendly smile.

I think this slow, ever-present plodding along is where all that self-whatever is going to come from. I hope it is.

I seriously hope it is. Because I don't want to be the Road Warrior in my own head anymore.

Water Poem: Morning

She smells like flowers and magic
on a morning that the rain has decided to come down
and celebrate how water falls.
The drainage spout from the building next door
 
pours out onto the grass below in heavy clumps.
How different water falls when it is tangent to a mountain,
how necessary waterfall seems, how dedicated the water is
to being in one place, cradled by the ground
 
as puddles and mountain lakes, streaming towards an ocean
held by the rock of this earth. These bedfellows, water and soil
are like her and I, sleeping late, and it is like magic
on this morning that she has decided to stay.

Higgledy Piggledies

There is a fun form I've been composing with semi-frequently lately: the double dactyl. I wrote several while I was on vacation recently and truly only began to relax once I had begun writing them Light verse lovers might recognize it as the "Higgledy Piggledy" lyric. An example:

Higgledy Piggledy

Joseph DiMaggio,

Jolted the ball but was

Jilted in bed.

Marilyn walked, but he

Necro-romantically

Laid her in rose bouquets

When she was dead.

 

-Gene Weingarten

The first line must be "Higgledy Piggledy" and the second line must be a name of who the poem is about. The last line of each stanza breaks the double dactyl rhythm (STRESS-unstress-unstress, STRESS-unstress-unstress) with a trochee (STRESS-unstress) and an iamb (unstress-STRESS). The second line of the second stanza has to be a made up 6 syllable word that also fits the rhythm of the double dactyl. All other lines are written in double dactyls.

The thing about forms is that they help provide a framework for a poem when you're not sure what to write. Writer's block shouldn't be a problem for a writer as long as they have a few minutes to play with a form. Writer's block is not about a lack of ideas, it's about too much pressure on having a good idea.

The form frees you from that pressure by saying, "Fuck a good idea, just find an idea that fits this."

My experience with formal poetry has taken me down some pretty interesting twists and turns in the path to a poem and it is rarely ever a wate of time.

It's fun and when you have fun, you let your guard down, you release those pressures and you can breathe free.

 As a writer, that breathing free is so important. In that free breath of air, you can hear the rhythms of all past language, the iambs and trochees and dactyls that so many other writers before you breathed. And in breathing with them, you put yourself in sync with them, like two lovers, one holding the other's ear to their breast to let the heartbeat in one calm the other until you're breathing in sync, two hearts beating in sync. And in sync and in harmony is a really peaceful place to be for a poet.

Being a writer of light verse won't ever win a Pulitzer Prize, but it may be a way to stay in a vacation state of mind. Which during extremely difficult times is a better place to keep your mind.

Language Acquisition

So I wrote a lot about my coma in the beginning and I'm going to return to it again because that's what I do. That's what any writer does, they return to threads that keep showing up in the great tapestry of their life or their work.

I'm going to start with what I do now. I am compelled to study and talk about and discover how people acquire languages and this is languages in its broadest sense to its most specific sense. Over my life I have asked questions such as: How does one acquire the language to fit in to a certain social group or profession? How does a child learn to read and write? How does someone discover the context it takes to translate a poem into English well? How do I describe in language that everyone can understand my own unique and half-terrifying, half-comforting experience of being trapped inside yourself, your body a prison you later have to relearn to trust, your body a planetarium for your mind to project all its fantasies onto the wall of?

I address the first question in the English composition course I teach for the University of Alaska. In it, I have the students collect empirical data about the writing conventions being used in their field so that they can see through empirical research how to write within their field. Otherwise, they're left to guess half-consciously, and learn through trial and error. I use the work of John Swales and several genre analysis studies to not only describe this process and model it, but also to help dtudents engage in this part of their learning.

I addressed the second question when I worked at the Boys & Girls Club. I had the honor of working with a particular child who, not only had some behavior challenges, was also struggling with his literacy at school, so much in fact, that he may have been held back. I took it upon myself to learn the components of early language acquisition (alphabetics, fluency, and comprehension) and then to use a multi-tiered approach to his learning these principles about the language. By the time he was through my classroom, he was reading and writing at the approriate level.

I address the third question when I translate a poem, particularly one in a language whose culture I'm not familiar with. I work heavily upon notes from my Romanian friend when I am helping her with assistance in translating from or to Romanian. This process involves a lot of clarifying emails back and forth across the ocean, a lot of suggested substitutions and deviations from the literal translation. I learn bushels full of valuable enculturation with every translation.

The last question though, that's a tough one. Ultimately, my mind has a distrust of its body, it fears it and its unreliability, but also sleeps well within it, like a coccon, encased by it, protecting the imagination from escape, from sabotage, from disruption.

Talking was difficult after I came out of the coma and it is often difficult today, when other's are present. When I am alone, when I am with just my thoughts, my imagination, I am able to speak, under my breath, seamlessly with no stutters, with no hems and haws, and "what do you call its." A person's presence, even those I trust more than myself, have a silencing effect on me.

And I wonder sometimes if I wouldn't function better on my own, a hermit, with no connections to other humans, just so I can feel freer with my thoughts and able to make what I imagine happen.

But I crave that human connection, even if I fail or connect poorly. I am like the computer seeking the internet but shutting itself off from it because my firewall is on.

Which is about as close as I can come to a metaphor for saying the following conclusion about what my life has been leading up to. I say it without sorrow, without a need to be pitied, without pride. I say it as a matter of fact only.



I have experienced oblivion first-hand. I do not fit in this world, nor do I belong outside of it.



Maybe there's a bit of sorrow in that.

The Poet's Moment

Poets, in many ways, are trained to believe in impermanence, that all beauty fades, that all living things die, that love, in all its splendor, decays.

And so we write poems and odes to the impermanent, in an attempt to memorialize them, in order to make the impermanent seem less permanent. For if Shelley hadn't written about those two vast trunkless legs of stone, who would remember Ozymandias and his crumbled ruins?

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
--Percy Bysshe Shelley

The monuments we build out of stone or glass or metal seem permanent, but they are hard to copy. They are one of a kind. If they are destroyed, they never return to their former glory. But I can make copy after copy of a poem and distribute them to people I know, I can post it on the web, I can recite it during those silences in a conversation.

And you might recieve that poem, might take a few minutes to read or listen to it. Maybe a few more to try to let it move you or help you connect it with something that matters in your life.

And it might be a lovely moment in your life. Or maybe you'll discredit it. That happens a lot too and although we poets complain about it, we do it too. We're human. Only so much can touch a human being and sometimes poems don't do for one person, what they do for others. You build a relationship with a  poem, like you do with a person. You have some you go back to time and time again in times of need. You have some you hate and those you love dearly. You have a favorite poem and you may even have one you don't read often enough but when you do it takes you back to another time and place.

And the moment when you realize you're thinking about people you know now instead of the poems I'm describing is the moment when you see the impermanance we poets see.

I've been struggling with my marriage lately and with my father's passing and the two events, though unrelated are affecting each other and I've just recently learned just how so.

People keep throwing the word "happy" at me, as in "Only you can make yourself happy." Or "I wanna make you happy." Or "You have to decide what's going to make you happy." Why is happy, a temporary emotion treated as if it were a permanent thing in our lives, as if it were a state of being or a goal. It is simply one of many emotions that are as impermanent as every other emotion.

Except fear.

Fear is, if not permanent, persistent. It takes hold within us. It abides within us and so I think what we mean by "being happy" in the permanent state, is really living without fear.

*

I'm not very good at planning for the future because Robert Frost taught me that way leads onto way and I shouldn't expect to go back and that the road not taken versus the road less traveled by makes all the difference. So a future is about as impermanent as anything can get. Nothing is set in stone, or better, verse.

So I strive to live in the moment. The poet's moment, the moment of awakening into the future, the moment where the thing being remembered ceases and the memorial begins. That moment of becoming something else, that moment where love becomes sensual touch becomes love again. That moment of stretching far and away.

Translating Eugenio Montale

The original in Italian:

La poesia

Dagli albori del secolo si discute
se la poesia sia dentro o fuori.
Dapprima vinse il dentro, poi contrattaccò
duramente
il fuori e dopo anni si addivene a un forfait
che non potrà durare perché il fuori
è armato fino ai denti. 

The word for word Italian to English transliteration:

The Poetry

Since the dawn of the century discussion
If the poetry is in or out.
He won the first, then counterattacked hard inside
the outside and after he became a forfeit
that will not last because the outside
is armed to the teeth

English Interpretive Translation:

Poetry

Our modern poets have argued
whether poetry comes from inside the poet or outside.
Poetry revealed himself from inside the battlements
and In was thought to have won,
but then, he relinquished
because outside, Poetry was armed to the teeth.

***

I've never taken a course in Italian. The transliteration was conducted by some Microsoft program designed to translate web pages. But that is not where the poem's meaning comes from. It is as if I have chipped away at the stone to reveal some of the geode underneath. The act of translation must first transliterate, but it also must interpret.

Montale seems to say here that it is both inside the soul and outside the body. It exists wherever there is a human being and I agree with him. Poetry as an internal act is very personal, very protective. The poet constructing poetry for himself creates a world and its structures for him to live and work in, to protect him from the outside.

But the poet must also construct poetry for the world, the poet must use his words as weapons to tear down ideas that people hide behind, to force them into the open, to reveal the vulnerability of us all. To lay bare our faults and injustices, and to set us free from our illusions.

Poetry must be both inside and outside, must reflect this constant conflict of this inner landscape and our outer environment. And good poetry, the poetry that really is able to turn us from being protected to being proactive, from being on the defense, to taking up arms against our oppressors, that poetry that serves to connect us to our other, better self, is also the barrier between the two worlds. It is also the door.

And in Adrienne Rich's words, "It promises nothing. It is only a door."

And it occurs to me that non-believers can go ahead and not believe in poetry or the soul or the spirit or the life force or whatever other invisible things we have created words for out of a need to hope for something better. Just because you don't believe in it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It only means you haven't opened the door.

And you haven't opened the door because you want it to promise you something which it cannot.

I feel courageous opening that door and I gladly walk through, not knowing if I am going outside or inside. That is the job of the poet: to walk through poetry, to live through poetry, to speak through poetry, to infuse everything we contact with poetry.

Ash Wednesday by TS Eliot

I
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is
nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.


II
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each
other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.



III
At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond
repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.


Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy

               but speak the word only.

IV
Who walked between the violet and the violet
Whe walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,
Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke
no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile


V
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.


O my people.


VI
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

You're Missing It

Is sharp.
Is filed and shaved down.
Is a dot on the map.

Is infintely small, yet still exists.
Is the reason for speech, for action, for thought.
Is what I'm getting to.

Is often questioned about it all.
Is blaming you for everything.
Is showing me the right direction.

Is a place on my body where it hurts.
Is a place in my mind where it hurts or decides.
Is of no return.

Is of fact.
Is here where I am.
Is the place where the pin hosts an angels dance.

Is the place where movement becomes language.
Is the thing that matters most.
Isn't going to change.

Isn't going to stretch out along a line.
Has no depth, no width, no length, just direction of travel.
Is what I'm coming to.

Is a mark of significance or insignificance.
Denotes the start or the end.
Denotes the midway.

Is the first thing I write and the last thing I write.
Is the thing I do when I don't write.
Is what I've made.

Is sharp, is movement.
Is the purpose and direction.
Is infinitely small, yet still exists.

Been spending a lot of time with the Muppets lately...

I've seen the new movie twice, I'm watching the old episodes of The Muppet Show, and the classic: The Muppet Movie.

A few of my more recent posts here have referenced Kermit and Jim Henson.

I listen to the soundtrack for the new movie almost daily, which features two versions of "Rainbow Connection," the Theme from the Muppet Show, Mahna Mahna, and a bunch of other songs, new and classic that are right up the Muppet alley.

I almost always start to cry when I hear Rainbow Connection because it speaks to that poetic center of which my whole self tries to orbit around.

"Rainbow Connection," written by Paul WIlliams and Kenny Ascher

Why are there so many songs about rainbows
and what's on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,
and rainbows have nothing to hide.
So we've been told and some choose to believe it.
I know they're wrong, wait and see.
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection.
The lovers, the dreamers and me.

Who said that every wish would be heard
and answered when wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that and someone believed it.
Look what it's done so far.
What's so amazing that keeps us star gazing
and what do we think we might see?
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection.
The lovers, the dreamers and me.

All of us under its spell. We know that it's probably magic.

Have you been half asleep and have you heard voices?
I've heard them calling my name.
Is this the sweet sound that called the young sailors.
The voice might be one and the same.
I've heard it too many times to ignore it.
It's something that I'm supposed to be.
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection.
The lovers, the dreamers and me.

This song talks about rainbows, not being what scientifically they are: a vision, an illusion. And in legends and myths and religion they are symbols. Symbols of promises, of the end of a storm, of good fortune and faraway magical lands. And yet, though we know it's just a trick of the eye, not one person can say they don't feel a little more hope when they see a rainbow.

And yes, Double Rainbow Guy, in all his cheezy, flaky, stoner, memehood that made him a mockery: part of me wants to salute him for allowing himself to be touched that way...

It talks about wishing on stars about how improbable it is that every wish will be answered and yet...we keep doing it.

And it talks about voices, voices that call to us, voices that wake us from slumber and say this is your task, voices that could be calling us to the rocky shoals to strand us on a reef, to toss us about and steer us off our appointed course.

And yet... they call. They keep speaking, even when we tell them not to. Even when we show them just how much it hurts us to reply.

And yet...we answer. Not because we expect anything different but because they call and we can't ignore it. We feel it is something we are supposed to be.

The voice tells me to love, the voice tells me to dream, the voice tells me that this is who I am. That I am among them, those lovers and dreamers, those magic bean buyers, those Kermits and Shel Silversteins.

You see, for all you pragmatists out there, if there's any creedence, any stock to put in a belief system and an afterlife, it is through our imaginations and our love and our dreams that we get there and the lover, the dreamer is the person who can get there.

We, your lovers, your dreamers, your fools on parade, your Double Rainbow guys, your star-gazers, your optimists, your rose-colored glasses wearers, your unabashed romantics...

We are your defense against the coming darkness of death and decay and nothingness. Treat us kindly.

The Parallax Event

There's a short story by Andy Weir called "The Egg" It can be found here:

http://galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

And it tells a story about how all of us are the same being, that each of us is a life of that being, that through some parallax event, we are born as one of those lives, live it, then die and are reborn somewhere else, somewhen else to experience another of our lives.

The idea is that once we are finished, we will understand compassion for everyone, we will know unconditional love, we will be truly Godlike. That this world is an egg for all that to happen inside of.

I like this idea. I like it because if it is true, and I am viewing things from my current perspective it is Nathan Deeter's time, it is my life, it is my world.

It makes me feel a little self-important, a little like I matter a bit more than everyone else right now.

And then I see it: if the story is true, it is not helping me learn compassion... It's helping me learn vanity.

I've never considered myself very vain, even if I really was. I was picked on as a kid, sidelined, marginalized, left to my own devices because I was too smart, too sick, too quiet, too weird, too uncomfortable in social situations. Or perhaps I was not athletic or good looking or quick-witted or socially adept enough to be understood and accepted by peers.

So the adults who worked with me and cared about me tried to convince me of how special I was. Parents, grandparents, teachers, and my best friends in my early childhood, these guys:

Being a child in the 80s was an onslaught of the "you're the only you there is and that's special" message. Maybe I was.

Maybe I was learning vanity back then and when the message that I continued to get from real people counterbalanced the messages I was getting from fictional people, I guess I had a choice to make. Believe the ugly messages and devote myself to the real world, or believe the special messages and devote myself to the imagination.

I chose the imagination because it felt good to be there. And nobody told you in the 80s that the real world can feel good too.

They didn't make it clear that you were special BECAUSE of the people that enrich your life. That's how I learned compassion.

If I ever mistreat someone, it is unintentional because I am enriched by everyone in my life.

Lately, I've been feeling more mistreated and because, as an adult, I'm trying to choose the real world, I'm feeling like I'm owed a great deal. A ripe dose of beautiful reality or an even healthier dose of retribution. Thirty-seven years is a long time to put up with not being enough or being too much.

Just east of myself

Just east of myself, you and I
Are making love in an eggshell of satin,
We are somewhere between John and Yoko
And Jack and Rose.

There is no greater joy I will ever know.

North of myself, I am counting the steps between us
At this point in time.

The number seems immense and there is much sorrow.

Just west of myself, I am playing a clarinet
And swearing to only speak in its hollow tones.
Forever. A soft, mooing loneliness.

To the south, the rioting masses.
The horde angers, the graves undug,
The light and silence leak into the earth and all reeks of endings.
You ask, the solemn flowers upturned.

And I assure you, they are,
But only just slightly. And to the east. In hope.

On the Romantic Spirit

William Wordsworth spent most of his life doing two things: walking around the Lake Country in England with his sister and writing poetry with Samuel Coleridge.

He did this because that was what made him happy, that was what kept him at peace.

He and Coleridge were the first of the Romantic poets. To understand romanticism, you have to start here.

Their poetry differed from so much in several ways, the first of which was that instead of using poetry to show how clever they were, how their intellect was their greatest gift, they used poetry to show how observant they were, to show that their senses were far greater than their intellect.

Wordsworth composed poems while he and his sister walked, long poems which he would remember and write down when he returned from his walk. They often described the places he saw, the people he met, and the tranquility he encountered from walking, from being in nature.

All poems are love poems, but they are not always about two people in love. Sometimes they're about the relationship a man has with the world around him; that relationship can be qualified only by looking at it through his senses.

This is what having the heart of a poet means. Observing the world around you, taking it all in, every ounce of it that is possible, sometimes being overwhelmed by your senses and allowing that to guide your actions, your motivations, and your livelihood.

And loving it. And questioning it. And turning it over in your mind. And yes, eventually rationalizing it. But living inside your senses, not going numb to the constant barrage of sensory input.

The romantic knows the present moment only, he is able to live in that moment, to slow down his own perception of time and see and hear and feel and taste and smell every molecule of the moment.

To know a beloved is not just to know their little quirks, their living patterns, their profile data, but it is also to know their potential. Everything you are in this moment, I see body language inform me and I feel subtle changes in skin, smell anticipation, hear a slight rise in the timber of voices and know what you are feeling.

Wordsworth's contribution to the romantic sensibility is the zealous devotion to nature and the senses. Your body takes in your enmvironment and is at home in that. Your intellect can't see the forest, hear the crunch of the snow, feel the wind. Your rational thoughts can't taste the air as you breathe it in deep.

Only your senses can do that. Only your senses can open up the Romantic Spirit.

Isn't this why the old romantic moves involve things you can smell and hear and see and taste and touch? To open the rational mind to a set of irrational inputs and overwhelm it so that it is forced to revel in it as a child plays and discovers the world around him.

I would much rather see the world as a sandbox to make discoveries in than as a place to be categorized and replaced into boxes as the pragmatists would have. Some life experiences, particularly the most important, can not be sorted and classified.