Poetry
There’s no sense
in telling you my particular
troubles. You have yours too.
Is there value
in comparing notes?
Unlike Williams writing
poems on prescription pads
between patients, I have
no prescriptions for you.
I’m more interested
in the particular
nature and tenor of the energy
of our trouble. Maybe
that’s not enough for you.
Sometimes I stick in
some music. I’m capable
of hallucination
so there’s nothing wrong
with my images. As for me,
I’m not looking for wisdom.
The wise don’t often write
wisely, do they? The danger
is in teetering into platitudes.
Maybe Keats was preternaturally
wise but what he gave us
was beauty, whatever that is,
and truth, synonymous, he wrote,
with beauty, and not the same
as wisdom. Maybe truth
is the raw material of wisdom
before it has been conformed
by ego, fear, and time,
like a shot
of whiskey without
embellishment, or truth lays bare
the broken bone and wisdom
scurries in, wanting
to cover and justify it. It’s really
kind of a nasty
enterprise. Who wants anyone
else’s hands on their pain?
And I’d rather be arrested
than advised, even on my
taxes. So what
can poetry be now? Dangerous
to approach such a question,
and difficult to find the will to care.
But we must not languish, soldiers,
(according to the wise,)
we must go so far as to invent
new mechanisms of caring.
Maybe truth, yes, delivered
with clarity. The tone is up
to you. Truth, unabridged,
has become in itself a strange
and beautiful thing.
Truth may involve a degree
of seeing through time.
Even developing a relationship
with a thing before writing,
whether a bird
or an idea about birds, it doesn’t
matter. But please not only
a picture of a bird. Err
on the side of humility, though
humility can be declarative.
It does not submit. It can even appear
audacious. It takes mettle
to propose truth
and pretend it is generalizable.
Truth should sting, in its way,
like a major bee, not a sweat bee.
It may target the reader like an arrow,
or be swallowable, a watermelon
seed we feared as children
would take up residency in our guts
and grow unabated and change us
forever into something viny
and prolific and terrible.
As for beauty, a problematic word,
one to be side-eyed lest it turn you
to stone or salt,
it is not something to work on
but a biproduct, at times,
of the process of our making.
Beauty comes or it doesn’t, as do
its equally compelling counterparts,
inelegance and vileness.
This we learned from Baudelaire,
Flaubert, Rimbaud, Genet, male poets
of the lavishly grotesque.
You’ve seen those living rooms,
the red velvet walls and lampshades
fringed gold, cat hair thick
on the couches,
and you have been weirdly
compelled, even cushioned,
by them. Either way,
please don’t tell me flowers
are beautiful and blood clots
are ugly. These things I know,
or I know this is how
flowers and blood clots
are assessed by those content
with stale orthodoxies.
Maybe there is such a thing
as the beauty of drawing near.
Near, nearer, all the way
to the bedside of the dying
world. To sit in witness,
without platitudes, no matter
the distortions of the death throes,
no matter the awful music
of the rattle. Close, closer,
to that sheeted edge.
From this vantage point
poetry can still be beautiful.
It can even be useful, though
never wise.
Another Ballad
You’re not old, I say to the old dog.
You’re handsome, and you will never die.
He growls at me to establish his waning dominance.
You are the king, I say. A ruthless king.
Why do I speak to the dog, you ask.
Why do I write of the dog.
Because long ago I took myself out of the running
for human company,
like my mother before me, who never again
wore a dress or skirt after my father escaped
this mortal coil. Never another
dress or skirt. Like my mother before me
I took myself out of the running,
no longer dressing to seduce via my own brand
of seduction. I was never seductive
in the traditional sense, but in the untraditional sense,
I knew how to wield seduction.
It had its day, let me say.
Let me say I wielded it effectively enough
to draw in a baseball player, a football player
20 years my junior, a used car salesman,
a pimp, a smelly old boss, a cardiologist,
and an old minister, who broke
into my house under the guise of needing a cup
of cool water all to tell me what I do to men.
You know, he said, what you do to men.
You know what you do to men.
It worked until it didn’t. It worked when I was,
for a time, the princess of a hive
of pansexual filmmakers. I hate her,
a woman director said when I appeared
on screen, I hate her. But she didn’t hate me.
My blue cotton pants bought on the street
in Afghanistan had done their trick.
My pants, bought from a man without arms
or legs who rolled over the streets on a skateboard.
Indigo pants, with a drawstring.
They did their work for a hot minute.
They did not work on Tom, who only
liked women who looked like him.
Who can blame him? I don’t blame him.
Had I been Tom, I would seek only myself
in the mirrors of other faces. He’s dead now.
He died, no matter how many women
in whose faces he found himself.
Is he seducible now?
Are the dead seducible? The answer is no.
Once they escape this mortal coil? No.
The dead are inured to seduction. Believe me,
I’ve tried. I’ve worn the pants
sold by the armless man. He took
the cash with his teeth. He, too, was inured
to contrivances. Charms I have since
given up willingly. Age did not steal them.
I could still give it a go. No, I gave up every charm
on that bracelet willingly. Snipped them away
with wire cutters. Donated each to a different lake
or river which swallowed them like a fish
swallows the hook. Yes, I hooked, in my time,
a river. A lake. I hooked a whole town,
my hometown, to which I returned
like a conquering hero on July 4, 1976
for the bicentennial celebration.
I wore what I wore. Shimmered and bangled.
Somehow, against the whole town, I won
the tug-of-war. I had no upper body strength,
no lower body strength, but by sheer power
of personality, defiance, shimmer,
I won the bicentennial tug-of-war. Still, all of that
I rescinded. Rescinded it like a bad law.
Wirecut the charms. Each and every one.
Seeded every lake and river with the old tools
of my trade, as lakes and rivers are stocked
with fish so that they will grow up to be hooked.
Sad, isn’t it? Both the fish’s story and my own.
Both are stories of subterfuge, illusion.
Empty, but in a good way? Not in a good way.
Empty, like an undistinguished bottle.
Like one of my grandfather’s whiskey bottles,
drained of its minimal magic. Maybe he escaped
his misery for a hot second. What misery?
Oh, the usual. A Jehovah’s Witness wife
who converted late in the game. Loved
her son more than her husband.
Couldn’t cook, all the poultry
raw at the joints. Made one good dish.
Sauerbraten. Then the son died and she tried
to climb in the casket. All to say, no wonder
he drained the bottle. No wonder the bottle
was empty. No wonder my mother donated
her orange skirt to Goodwill. Her black
skirt. My sister donated her pink bikini.
The one she bled through.
No wonder I talk
to the dog the way I do.
Lie as I do to the dog.
You will never die, I say.
You are young. Your coat is not gray.
You do not limp. You smell like fresh hay.
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