poetry
Here’s one for Galway Kinnell
Midnight Bucolic
Love the jacket.
Love the scarf,
red, isn’t it?
Is this Vermont?
The sheep nodding
in the valleys.
Put on your boots,
the ones like Dad’s.
The leaves just tinkle
as we walk by.
Hey friend
who taught me
nightmares,
is it me
or is it
the camera angle,
when you sit there,
jacket hung
on its Shaker
peg,
you look like Frost
in his barn
listening to the hens
gaggling all night.
Galway Kinnell reads St. Francis and The Sow
(Galway Kinnell died 5 years ago)
from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry – Walt Whitman
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.
Baseball – John Updike
It looks easy from a distance,
easy and lazy, even,
until you stand up to the plate
and see the fastball sailing inside,
an inch from your chin,
or circle in the outfield
straining to get a bead
on a small black dot
a city block or more high,
a dark star that could fall
on your head like a leaden meteor.
The grass, the dirt, the deadly hops
between your feet and overeager glove:
football can be learned,
and basketball finessed, but
there is no hiding from baseball
the fact that some are chosen
and some are not—those whose mitts
feel too left-handed,
who are scared at third base
of the pulled line drive,
and at first base are scared
of the shortstop’s wild throw
that stretches you out like a gutted deer.
There is nowhere to hide when the ball’s
spotlight swivels your way,
and the chatter around you falls still,
and the mothers on the sidelines,
your own among them, hold their breaths,
and you whiff on a terrible pitch
or in the infield achieve
something with the ball so
ridiculous you blush for years.
It’s easy to do. Baseball was
invented in America, where beneath
the good cheer and sly jazz the chance
of failure is everybody’s right,
beginning with baseball.
Memory Gardens – Allen Ginsberg, (on the death of Jack Kerouac, October 21, 1969)
covered with yellow leaves
in morning rain
-Quel Deluge
he threw up his hands
& wrote the Universe dont exist
& died to prove it.
Full Moon over Ozone Park
Airport Bus rushing thru dusk to
Manhattan,
Jack the Wizard in his
grave at Lowell
for the first nite—
That Jack thru whose eyes I
saw
smog glory light
gold over Manhattan’s spires
will never see these
chimneys smoking
anymore over statues of Mary
in the graveyard
Black misted canyons
rising over the bleak
river
Bright doll-like ads
for Esso Bread—
Replicas multiplying beards
Farewell to the Cross—
Eternal fixity, the big headed
wax painted Buddha doll
pale resting incoffined—
Empty-skulled New
York streets
Starveling phantoms
filling city—
Wax dolls walking park
Ave,
Light gleam in eye glass
Voice echoing thru Microphones
Grand Central Sailor’s
arrival 2 decades later…
feeling melancholy—
Nostalgia for Innocent World
War II—
A million corpses running
across 42nd street
Glass buildings rising higher
transparent
aluminium—
artificial trees, robot sofas,
Ignorant cars—
One Way Street to Heaven.
*
Gray Subway Roar
A wrinkled brown faced fellow
with swollen hands
Leans to the blinking plate glass
mirroring white poles, the heavy car
sways on tracks uptown to Columbia—
Jack no more’ll step off at Penn Station
anonymous erranded, eat sandwich
& drink beer near New Yorker Hotel or walk,
under the shadow of Empire State.
Didn’t we stare at each other length of the car
& read headlines in faces thru Newspaper Holes?
Sexual cocked & horny bodied young, look
at beauteous Rimbaud & Sweet Jenny
riding to class from Columbus Circle.
“Here the kindly dopefiend lived.”
and the rednecked sheriff beat the longhaired
boy on the ass.
—103d street Broadway, me & Hal abused for sidewalk
begging twenty-five years ago.
Can I go back in time & lay my head on a teenage
belly upstairs on 110th Street?
or step off the iron car with Jack
at blue-tiled Columbia sign?
at last the old brown station where I had
a holy vision’s been rebuilt, clean ceramic
over the scum & spit & come of quarter century.
*
Flying to Maine in a trail of black smoke
Kerouac’s obituary conserves Time’s
Front Paragraphs—
Empire State in Heaven Sun Set Red,
White mist in old October
over the billion trees of Bronx—
There’s too much to see—
Jack saw sun set red over Hudson horizon
Two three decades back
thirtynine fourtynine fiftynine
sixtynine
John Holmes pursed his lips,
wept tears.
Smoke plumed up from Oceanside chimneys
plane roars toward Montauk
stretched in red sunset—
Northport, in the trees, Jack drank
rot gut & made haikus of birds
tweetling on his porch rail at dawn—
Fell down & saw Death’s golden lite
in Florida garden a decade ago.
Now taken utterly, soul upward,
& body down in wood coffin
& concrete slab-box.
I threw a kissed handful of damp earth
down on the stone lid
& sighed
looking in Creeley’s one eye,
Peter sweet holding a flower
Gregory toothless bending his
knuckle to Cinema machine—
and that’s the end of the drabble tongued
Poet who sounded his Knock-up
throughout the Northwest Passage.
Blue dusk over Saybrook, Holmes
sits down to dine Victorian—
& Time has a ten-page spread on
Homosexual Fairies!
Well, while I’m here I’ll
do the work—
and what’s the Work?
To ease the pain of the living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow.
October 22-29, 1969
Buttoned Up
“Whoever has no house by now will not build.” – Rilke
so many houses
all buttoned up
mid-October
late afternoon
kitchen lights on
silence in the barn
each tool hung
on its proper peg
I know these people
I’ve never met
every autumn I long
to be them but
I’ve walked away
from every home
I’ve ever owned
lights off tools forgotten
dark and exposed
winter in the wind
Autumn Day – Rainer Maria Rilke
Oh Lord, it’s time, it’s time. It was a great summer.
Lay your shadow now on the sundials,
and on the open fields let the winds go!
Give the tardy fruits the command to fill;
give them two more Mediterranean days,
drive them on into their greatness, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house by now will not build.
Whoever is alone now, will remain alone,
will wait up, read, write long letters,
and walk along sidewalks under large trees,
not going home, as the leaves fall and blow away.
(translated by Robert Bly)
(Photo: Little Sebago Lake, Maine – December 2016)
Climbing along the River – William Stafford
Willows never forget how it feels
to be young.
Do you remember where you came from?
Gravel remembers.
Even the upper end of the river
believes in the ocean.
Exactly at midnight
yesterday sighs away.
What I believe is,
all animals have one soul.
Over the land they love
they crisscross forever.
[I Saw Myself] – Lew Welch
I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it
and vowed,
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through
and then heard
“ring of bone” where
ring is what a
bell does
(Photo: Oakland, CA – April 2006)
Edge of Atlantic 