Scarriet

All that crawls, walks and flies,

All that is beautiful, and more beautiful, dies.

Love that shoots up in flames of love, like fire,

Dies in the fire burning and dying, dies in its own desire.

We thought love would last forever, but knew

Even as we loved most intensely, this wasn’t true.

We argued—Romantic versus Modern—an argument primitive and wild,

The oldest argument—for and against the child.

There on the stairs she stood.

Beneath every sky I knew she was good.

Long futurity, the only repair for the question of death,

Was ours to kiss, the mouth, the lips, inside the lips, and the breath.

We kissed on the stairs, and more stairs, to escape the eyes

That might see us. But the love that sees itself, still dies.

See the love in the moon, the moon in tempestuous skies.

We had questions and arguments. I said only the child

Makes fires over graves, and turns horror to the responsible and the mild.

Your pajamas were made a thousand years ago
In the cool, etruscan shade,
By people dreaming of romance and sex.
Are thousand year old thoughts of love needlessly complex?
Add cold weather and bring in the heater,
Cold culture, the Pinot Grigio, the speculation on Tyrannosaurus rex.
Is it the closet or the stock exchange
Which is needlessly complex?
They cover themselves in virtue because the letter
Of the law is in their purview—but is this better?
Cost and rationale are what Rosalinda expects.
Is the spirit of the law needlessly complex?
Rosalinda is nice to animals.
We note the law form, the dog poop, the ex.
Selling improvements, we see we are punished especially today
By the needlessly complex.
We know it is really about the gossip, the acting,
Not the nudity or sex.
I can’t believe she loves him! Is she blind?
What notes did the oboe play? May I hear them again?
Rosalinda makes no sense. Nor is she kind.

When we write a good poem

It is we who write the poem

It is we—it is really we—even if it seems me,

Solitary, glimpsed, standing beneath a tree,

Smoking in the cold rain,

Is the one writing the poetry.

I write because I don’t like pain—

None of us do, and there’s that “we” again—

And poetry finds a way

To make a poem from pain for you today.

The secret is, a little poison is good,

And this is what the poets have always understood.

The best thing for me

Is the cigarette of toxicity

Because a little poison is good.

This is the secret poets have always understood.

When the leaves fall, and the air turns chill,

We contemplate what it means to be ill,

But when mother gives us sugar and carbohydrates

We love with our tongue what our inside hates;

We do not know what’s happening inside

Or where the slender lovers hide,

But when poison flies into me

I understand what’s going on immediately.

Everything I feel from the cold rain

Pushes the poetry out, as a cure for pain.

It was sugar—not cigarettes—which made me insane.

I thought we loved sugar, but we

Grew into wisdom; we cannot be

Poets, if we lie about the house and eat;

We go, instead, to dreary places where meat-eating smokers meet

And we talk of all the ways we

Write poems. This is exceedingly interesting to me.

The beauty of the particular scene,
If there are streets, or not, or the streets are picturesque,
Doesn’t matter. The artist finds shadows and certain perspectives
And makes great photos in neighborhoods where no one would want to live.
Every space on earth, bare or not, has vistas.
Vistas with their length, their laws of vision, entice the eye,
Making even this crappy part of town interesting in all its views.
Don’t trust art—or should we call it art? Don’t trust the eye
Which makes near and far boulevards crowding but stretched in the eye
In the morning when fog surrounds the sky—those cheap white buildings
Appear nice in the distance. Do you see what I mean?
Vistas are beautiful, even if there is no beauty to the scene.
The mathematics of sight is more
Beautiful than art, the mathematics of vista finally forgives,
And makes this ugly stretch of the world beautiful—
Where nothing wants to live, but lives.

To not have love is to have love,
Because everyone knows love is desire.
Love you don’t have, but want, is love.
This is why I seem cold, with my burning fire.
I have love. I have you. Because I have desire.
I do burn. And my burning is so hot
I cannot show it. I seem cold. But I’m not.
I have love. I have desire. I have you
Because I do not have you now.
I had to have had love to not have love,
And to not have love is to have love.  I wondered how
You were cold. But I don’t wonder that anymore.
Love is to not have love. Love the god does not have love, I’m sure.

To know love we had to see a body—
Bodies the only object of human love.
So bodies are the basis of the process
By which love is more when having is less.
And so bodies always fade when they are loved,
And the face loved shows a mysterious distress.
Bodies are the gateway to desire;
Bodies obey the disappearing law.
Bodies turn away and say goodbye.
You loved the body. Now it must die.
In my mind is the volcano of the past.
Desire! Desire! Only desire will last.
The longing madness loves the most.
Love sees the body. But the body is a ghost.
The body is not real. The love we hold
In love, is what we held.
I saw her on the other side of the hill in the mist and yelled.

Your attitude is terrible. No,

That’s not it. You are all attitude.

You know, all one sees now are relationship

Videos on the “narcissistic” personality,

On how exactly men and women love differently.

Those psychology films are wrong. He lost his grip,

Hart Crane, the poet. And went over the side of the ship,

And in the rolling, gray waters was lost forever.

But you’re nice; you imitate Wordsworth,

And write careful poems, defending the prickly earth.

Meanwhile, you anxiously watch those videos

Invoking your narcissistic ex, counting your woes,

Trying to figure out how men and women are different,

And why love fails—crazy sighs within excrement.

You haven’t had a thought since two thousand three;

You read political articles, which agree with you, eagerly,

But if you saw words that at last could save your soul

You wouldn’t touch those words with a ten foot pole.

It’s not that your attitude is good or bad.

You don’t think at all. That’s why you are sad.

He’s a narcissist, and, of course, she is. And the sorrow

Alters, depending on whatever one happens to imitate tomorrow.

There hasn’t been an original thought here

Since the bikini. Since beer.

To know how much crowds hate crowds,

A crowd has to be in one, because alone,

The crowd inevitably begins to miss its favorite jerk.

But at least you get along with people at work,

Serving the crowd—which deceives itself inside its misery.

Have you seen a child, imitating

Everything—everything? All everyone is,

Men and women, are big fat jerks, all the same,

A great imitation and mockery machine,

Taking revenge against authority

When Wordsworth wouldn’t let them do this or that.

Two things exist: Blank imitation. Blank infinity.

Feel your way. Things seem to stick up, from the page, or the canvas, endless and flat.

Dear Rosalinda. Stop coming into my café where I write poetry

Wearing leather. Your black boots with elaborate buckles? Excellent.

“I don’t want to see you if I can’t have you” is not what I meant.

That sentiment is boring, and in bad taste.

All the work you did on your appearance shouldn’t go to waste,

So go ahead. Let’s see your jacket and your combed hair.

I’m writing poetry. Go ahead and look good. It’s only fair.

Just want you to know I’m noting every particular, the sound

Of your voice, the way you hold your hands, the emotions

Which play across your face, the things you say, how much you seem

To want me, or don’t want me; I notice these things confidently

As if I were in a dramatic, egotistical waking dream.

I can write poetry when the café is crowded, I don’t care,

Rosalinda. Or that other café. You can go there.

Poetry, Rosalinda, will not help your causes.

Poetry is not speech, but the delicate pauses

Between the speech which finds its way

In blinding light or darkness—saying what it says by what it doesn’t say.

Poetry dignifies its subject. The poet is a stupid ape

Who invades poetry with talk of murder, acid attacks, and rape—

“Rape is bad” was never, and will never be said, in a poem—

Not because the statement isn’t true, or shouldn’t be known;

When you say the bad is bad, it’s not a poem.

When you put such things in poems, vain and stupid ape,

You seek to dignify yourself—“look at me! I’m against rape!”

Other stupid apes, who seek to praise themselves, give you prizes,

Further dignifying the poetry which merely repeats what poetry despises.

Everything has a dual nature: what it is, and the container of what it is;

The flower does amazing things—but in the appearance of a flower;

In pain, an hour seems infinite; in pleasure, an hour doesn’t seem like an hour;

The hour of pleasure went by so fast

Dear love is more than what it was—fear belongs to a distant past,

But the hour—the hour—is fresh and new,

And will always be an hour—exactly an hour. Despite me. Despite you.

The poem is the subject; it cannot be

Who you are, and no matter how much I love, have anything to do with me.

Happy is very smart, and this is why

There is so much injustice.

The miserable die in misery.

Unhappiness cannot think;

Therefore, the miserable cannot be happy.

Before thought—sweet thought!—is possible, joy

Must surge through the body,

Exciting our thinking. The goal

Cannot exist. We are immediately happy

With the world to be happy. I don’t remember why

I am happy, and in your cloudy misery,

You are unable to follow my thinking.

You read what I am saying, and disagree.

You are certain wisdom is not joy, but misery,

Life, you say, is difficult, short, and bad—

You think it’s idiotic to think smart is glad.

“The survivor,” you say, “facing harsh reality,

Is not some grinning fool.

Before you are happy, you need to work—or go to school.

And further, because life is sad and brief,

Joy needs help from wine or the aromatic leaf.

Happiness is not from intelligence, it is from a certain worth

Attached to men.  Unlike me, you—a man—are less close to the earth.

To say happy is smart, and that you have joy, or don’t,

Is the stupidest thing. Don’t say that again, don’t.”

She went on, refuting my poem for quite a while.

Feeling like a child, I looked at her and smiled.

She looked at my smile. I thought she would smile, but she did not smile.

“Woman, a slave and yet vainglorious, stupid and unashamed in her self-love” -Baudelaire

“She was a child and I was a child in this kingdom by the sea” -Poe

*

Women with skin of ivory, and beautiful black hair

Are women you might love as Poe, or love as Baudelaire.

Women who pull the collar of their coat around their neck,

Or look out at the sea, eating Italian cookies, from their breezy deck;

She tries not to think of me as she sips her bedtime tea,

In the prison of her pride, and when she sleeps, she writhes upon the key,

The key of simple love, which if she took it out, would set her free.

I was a gentleman, and wrote her poems, in vain.

She stood upon her phone. She pressed her lovely face against the window pane.

She let me have a kiss—

Upon her mouth, which was voluptuous—

But nothing hurt me like that mysterious sneer,

Which feeds heartbreaking love—the only thing lovers feel, when feeling is sincere.

I told her I was helpless, which was all she wanted to know.

She didn’t tell me things. Her mystery was severe.

I told her everything I wanted her to know.

I was afraid of her. But only because of love.

And now, in these warm October days, I strangely love,

Breathlessly, aesthetically,

One could say pathetically,

Like Edgar Allan Poe.

I imagine her dreaming, restlessly on that key,

And, in her horror, she sits down next to me,

And we clasp hands; we wander to a late night shop with wine,

And we know what we want, immediately,

And she wakes, horrified she spoke to me.

I loved the kiss, but I can’t forget the sneer,

Which feeds heartbreaking love—the only thing lovers feel, when feeling is sincere.

THE REASON there are so few good poets is not difficult to understand. The poet is sensitive to an extreme degree, and because of this, makes a big deal out of the small.

This is both a gift and a curse.

Admirable is the person who can produce something marvelous from an idea or two, from almost nothing.

But those who make something big out of what is small tend to be worrisome and unreasonable at best, and hot-headed psychopaths at worst—the kind of person who worries themselves sick over a rumor, or explodes over a slight, and this weak, anxious temperament (always making a big deal out of the small) is unsuited for calm and lengthy poetic contemplation.

The accomplished poet is paradoxical; they are cursed with a personality which makes a big deal out of everything—and yet, miraculously, they are also slow to anger, even-tempered, thick-skinned, and calm.  They have to be, to write poetry.

The poet is in possession of that faculty which transforms the trivial—mere words, syllables, sounds—into sublime speech—and this uncommon, visionary character which fantastically creates the grandiose from nothing, is naturally the sort of person who is volatile in the extreme—but the poet, has a dual nature; is both extremist and conservative at once.

Such a person, with two powerful and absolutely opposing psychological tendencies, will, as a rule, be extremely uncommon among any population.

This is why poetry does not progress—we look back at previous eras and find genius randomly distributed; we observe in our own day a greater number of persons with leisure to write, thousands of writing programs encouraging poetry, and increased material conditions for sharing poetry, without any signs that poetry as a rule is better, or that poetic genius is expanding itself in any measurable way.

It even seems that genius is diminishing, and poetry is getting worse. Perhaps, in total, it is not getting worse—there are just more poets and so, more bad poetry. But poetry does not, by any measure, seem to be mechanically improving.

Poetry does not improve—because there is an algorithm for the good poet which does not change.  The good poet—as a poet—will create something out of nothing.  The weak person—as a person—will create something out of nothing. The good poet cannot be a weak person.  The good person cannot be a good poet.  Therefore, personality-wise, the great poet is impossible.

If what we have just said about the paradoxical task of poetry—making “the small big,”—seems to be mere psychological claptrap; nothing more than silly theory, the following, perhaps, will be better received.

It refers not to the person, or the poet as a person, but the poem—and therefore, is, perhaps, a better explanation for why the good poet is not common at all.

Poetry is thought and prose is incident.

Alarming incidents, thrilling incidents, horrific incidents, which writers recount, seek, embellish, and share, are told, sought, worked up, and shared for the simple reason that this is the life blood of all story-telling, that which thrills and excites.

Exactly. This is precisely the problem. Incident detracts and distracts from the great poem; incident belongs to fiction, not to poetry. Poets who share sensational incidents are actually harming themselves and their art—using what they think is necessary, but which is actually the opposite.

One incident, thoughtfully presented, is the soul of the poem. Fiction, by its very nature, is a series of incidents. The horrific or outlandish incident has the necessary space in fiction to live, breathe, and be believed.

An incident which is verifiable and viable outside of the poem does not belong in the poem.

A political reality does not belong in the poem.

The hour does not belong in the poem. The hour can be presented in fiction and the reader can think about that hour. But only the hour which thinks in a moment belongs in the poem.

Only thought belongs in the poem. Not incidents which live on their own.

There is a reason why Pope described poetry as, “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,” and not, what oft was seen and completely understood and ne’er so well recounted.

Innumerable poets fail to understand this, and this is why, for more than any other reason, there are so few good poets.

When I loved it was only to love,

It was not to see the moon, or the five stars,

Or feel, in my hand, ever so slightly, the sweat of your hand,

Or be at the beginning of a long line of cars,

Or be a king lying in a tomb in a foreign land,

Or to weep at some black and white film’s end, a projector

In the old cinema humming somewhat behind my seat and above.

When I loved it was only to love.

It was not to hear, or to write a magnificent song,

Or sleep in the bottom of a boat in Venice when daylight rose,

Or be savagely sad, indignantly right, or happily wrong,

In a mist somewhere, deciding and not deciding

What cooperation, if any, I needed, from those I did not love.

When I loved it was only to love.

Or maybe I lie, and what I also had to do

As I loved, smiling, or not smiling, at you,

Was to be sane and gentle, and not go mad,

And when love inevitably ended,

To be happy for that saving grace, that you, too, were sad.

We scan the news to see

If the criminals are being punished,

And when they were caught, and how.

You don’t need to read the news.

The guilty are suffering for what they did. Right now.

We scan the news, but what we really want to see

Are the innocent—and how completely unlucky.

And the truly wronged? That’s me. Do you want me to explain?

It’s enough to say I’m happy.

The weatherman appears to be happy, as he says something about rain.

These congressmen cannot be poets.

Poetry does not follow money

Or the distribution of money.

Poetry lives in a realm of dreams

Where money is not money. Where nothing is what it seems.

Poetry is not the shirtless man with a beer.

Poetry is not that. Poetry is here.

Poetry belongs to the child, who first learns

Beauty will not hurt you, but the beautiful burns.

Do children in the womb dream? They do.

They do not dream of money. They dream of you.

It happened over there—back over there,
She said—pointing to the far mist
Surrounding the mountain—
Where inside the mountain, a cold lake
Surrounded by rock, a lake
Where its one species of fish
Eats amphibian, and thinks it snake,
Regretting but slightly its mistake—
Ravenous—but ravenous is everyone at last.
It happened, it happened in my distant past—
A lake which is a gorge of pure rock bound,
Bound on all sides by rock, where hungry birds look for prey
In the dark pool made of rock all day,
Where tall walls shade
Creatures who barely hide; I was afraid.
She pointed—over there, it happened over there—
When I was a girl, and he was a boy;
What is romance? Love? Excitement? Joy?
Compared to the slow responsible life?
The perpetual eating? The vulture’s wife?
It happened over there—deep in the mist—
And rumors are vague, but rumors persist—
Rumors of gods who the gods kissed—
For the interminable days in the beginning of time.
It happened over there, to me; it happened one time,
As the mist descended into the mountain—
Mist surrounded the lake; it happened too fast to remember,
But I remember. If it happens once, you remember—
It happened once. It was sad. And sad that I remember.

“I know in one step. You, in two.

You think. I simply love you.”

—“Love Not Only Loves, It Judges” Tom Graves

Immediacy and infinity are two sides of the same coin.

The mysterious connection between immediacy and infinity is what makes love (and poetry) both impetuous and eternal—is what gives earthly love both its “can’t wait” energy and its real existence in the Platonist sense that only what is eternal has real existence. Everything else is merely the coin itself, the metal that rusts or eventually melts away, the universe of disappearance, ephemera, illness and death.

One knows what is beautiful through the senses immediately. And all beauty known immediately is infinite, and therefore sublime and profound and everlasting and actual. Beauty known immediately belongs to Nature or God, to actual existence—the star made for the moth of the mind. One does not have to think through, in steps, the beautiful, and this immediate judgement, or knowledge, or understanding, or experience, belongs to the realm of the sensual, the physical, the material, the actual, which strikes our eye with its immediacy and which is experienced sensually.

The poet conceives the best poems, as the universe was conceived, as a whole—and this happy immediacy in the poet’s consciousness participates in what scientists have termed the “Big Bang”—the instantaneous creation of the material universe.

In order for the poet’s immediacy of conception (what the whole is) to have real existence in the physical world, so that the created poem is a fully realized poem with real physical properties—and not merely a group of words attempting, by picking their way, in the accumulative act of seeking “meaning” in a step by tentative step, manner, a meaning always elusive since it must be sought by choosing which parts best convey what the whole is supposed to be (since the poet thinks to find out what the whole is by continually adding parts)—the poem conceived immediately, exactly as the physical universe was conceived immediately, real and eternal, must have material properties in the poet’s real conception of it and in the resulting reader’s experience of it.

The physical existence of the poem is not an inferior byproduct of the poet’s “thinking;” the physical poem, which strikes the ear the way a beautiful body of water with the sun glinting off it strikes the eye, is the poem, fully and completely, and is not the result of “thinking,” nor is the poem meant to be “thought about” when it is first experienced by the reader.

Anything can be “thought about” later, even pieces of garbage—the act of “thinking” or “thinking about” has absolutely nothing to do with experiencing a poem.

This sort of “thinking” inevitably ruins the poem, and destroys the aesthetic sense completely.

In the preparation for the writing of the poem, there can certainly be this kind of “thinking,” the sort of “thinking” all non-poets do, but the immediacy of creating, and the immediacy of experiencing, poetry’s existence in time and space, is physical, sensual, material, and does not belong to “thinking.”

Rhyme and meter distinguish the poem as the real object of interest.

But rhythm and meaning interact in language—in prose, as well as in poetry. Pitiful would it be, to aspire to be “a real object,” and how is it anything but an empty platitude to say “a poem” is “a rhyme?” It insults our intelligence to even come near this platitude, and every good poet, even those with great affection for song and rhyme and rhythm, never commit themselves to the formalist platitude in practice, or conversation. The platitude is still true, however. The poet can rhyme towards silliness—or towards sublimity. It is up to the bravery and skill of the poet.

The lone poet is prolific, and will write several poems in an afternoon, and invisible roots will connect the sudden serial efforts, so that an excellent poem will result, due to the good poem (or an okay poem which fails for a particular reason) composed just before, or the good poem composed just after, in a frenzy of muscle-cloud creativity, as non-poet thinking is enslaved to the poet’s project.

The other sort of poet, far more common, will take six months to write a poem. They will sketch out attempts for the first part of the poem over several weeks; a month or two will pass, and then the second half of the poem will begin to take shape; the earnest zeal of revision takes over, as the idea of the poem slowly comes into focus, urged on, almost accidentally, by this, or that, image, usually.

This other poet inevitably achieves greater worldly success—for during those months when they do not compose, what are they doing? They are networking—making all those friendly, social gestures which insert and cement themselves into advantageous company: their non-threatening personality soothes, their poetry, since it is not very good, does not threaten, and the poetry will often be socially enhancing, as they write about the “right things,” or, in a slightly different strategy, their poetry inhabits a kind of “educated” obscurity, truly advantageous because obscurity is critic-proof; it has no real existence, and therefore it cannot be judged as bad.

The prolific poet, the poet of genius, is too poetically besotted to do any of this, and if their poetry is truly good, and it hasn’t been accompanied with fawning networking, the quality of their poetry is seen as nothing more than an outsider threat. Especially to those for whom poetry belongs exclusively to networking—which inevitably destroys everything which has anything to with poetry.

The prolific poet, lazy to the world at large, may be moved to write an essay in which they assert that “fully material immediacy, which has no time to think” is the most important quality of the poem. And the supporting quality which is: “eternally admirable fullness of expression,” or, in other words, sublimity, beauty, and unity, which defies immediacy, precisely because we wish to linger over its substance, which the poet has miraculously “fit” inside immediacy.

The temporal, material existence of the poem is its duration, and how that duration is expressed by meter (and rhyme).  There is no other way for the temporal poem qua temporal poem to be physical. Yet the immediacy of the wholeness of the experience in terms of soul-enhancing meaning and beauty and sublimity is more important than any mere ‘poem as rhyme’ platitude. 

The great disadvantage which the poet faces, as one who would reproduce the excellent—the excellent, by its very nature, will not be easily reproduced.

It is easy to hold up a mirror, as many poets do, to what is ugly, discordant, painful, wrong—and though many poets do this in the name of solidarity and justice and democracy, the true result is that the unpleasant is reproduced, in both form and content, and the percentage in the world of the unpleasant is increased—unpleasant poems of dribbly prose assert to the helpless reader—“you see? the world really is a horrible place! there’s more evil and wrong than you know!” Moral individuals cannot resist this spread-the-news-as-poetry, and build whole “poetic” careers around it. But morality has nothing to do with poetry. But since all is contained in the Big Bang, it could matter to the poet.

My son wants to study psychology. I always had an interest in what
Makes people tick. My brother and I would talk for hours. What
You had to do to make it through and be a happy person. That
Was an obsession of mine when I was shy and nineteen.
Political activism was great, but Freud and Fritz Perls,
What the inner person really wants, or can’t want, meant more.
My lapsed protestant parents raised me to be secular and educated.
Religion teaches you to be good. They taught me to be happy.
A fine distinction, that. Not that I abandoned the good,
The good was lazily applied by Christian vestiges as a child,
Not drummed in—perhaps it worked out for the best, by accident.

Now I ask myself—I chose poetry over psychology, finally—
What is psychology? In one word, I would say: Invisible.
Psychology is the study of the Invisible. Religion and poetry
Are certainly children of the Invisible, but psychology is the Invisible itself.
Where is the most Invisible found? In people. The secrets of people.
Add to the Invisible the Unspoken, but the Unspoken is often Visible—
Despite what you did not say, I see what you wanted, and what you are.
But what is that?  What did you want to say? Now let’s see.
Did you go to class? Where did you sit? Did you take notes?
Is this like those nightmares I had when I was late for class
And traversed the entire campus looking for what I never found?

Mars stood next to the moon,

Dwarfed by her size and light,

The vivid red of Mars neither large nor bright,

A point beside the moon—brightening the night.

The moment I glanced these two together,

I knew I wouldn’t describe the weather,

Only the moon and Mars, both silent and far away,

A portion of the universe circling to stay.

Last night I looked for the gleaming moon,

Where she had often been,

But yesterday belonged to the rain and the wind.

Tonight, here is Mars, and the bright moon, too,

The moon, familiar, but Mars I also knew.

I rarely see Mars, but there it was,

A hand’s length from the the moon—who makes me think of love.

Why, she wonders, do we call her moon?

Why, he wonders, do we call him Mars?

And how much foolish poetry is written

Underneath the stars?

Cats are actresses. Dogs are porn stars.
I recently saw lonely women compared to dogs
In a woman’s poem—what do you expect from poets?
Their moral apologies, their moral ambiguities, and shame,
As they feel around the real and try to give it a name.
The wagging, slobbering loyalty of a dog
Is an acquired taste. A dog, a kind of sexual partner without sex,
Has saved many a life from pure despair
When otherwise we would go out of our minds
From loneliness our indignant irritation always finds.
You had too many thoughts, didn’t you?
In your desperate loneliness you were not wholly focused,
Like da Vinci, like Mozart, like a dog.
Plenty of men prefer the loyalty of a dog
To anything a fast thinking woman can offer;
A dog can be disgusting, but no person
Will be disgusting for very long.  I should know this
But I don’t. The disgusting won’t remain
In the public eye for long. It’s private. Who the fuck knows
How disgusting people can become?
We hate you, women, because
Love is fragile, and females initiated every romance that ever was.

A chickadee will never see

How a blind composer took her phrase, and added to it a melody—

A famous tragic song of love for all

Who love the difficult love, which holds us all in thrall.

The bird on the bough will never know the plan

To abort the child because it was a different man,

And that the aborted child was born alive and almost saved,

The DNA was switched by the trusted doctor she thought

She loved, and, as the doctor came to murder her, was caught,

And murdered by the assumed father, the rival, as she was slain.

Will poetry, or the chickadee, ever be more than it is, if it knows this pain?

As soon as you begin reading this, you’ve crossed

Into it. This poem exists because you are able to cross

Into it. Otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

Existence requires borders. Everything. Even a list.

Why is life perplexing? There are places you go,

And places you don’t go. That’s all you need to know.

Why is this so difficult? A note in music has a certain duration

Or it’s not a note among the notes of that composition,

Which is—is the audience ready?—playing only when it’s playing,

Just as this poem is here only for the time it’s saying what it’s saying.

If there is a place which is happy, outside of it is nothing, or sorrow.

Happiness today is made of borders—keeping away sadness tomorrow.

The world is mathematically round to keep the non-mathematical out.

The world is measurement and order. Beyond is misery and doubt.

The poem—I’m not inventing it—will keep you here, until it throws you out.

The poem has both of us—me, the poet who saw it first, and then you;

The poem took you when you entered it, and finally, what are you going to do?

The place you entered, and the place you will exit, keeps out all that is bad.

The poem keeps out, but also, to be a beautiful poem, contains the sad.

The poem, like all existence, has a border,

But sadly, is a border solely. Beauty walks these walls, keeping order.

Love not only loves, it judges,

And this is why love fades away,

And only the cigarette butts from yesterday

Remain—after you cry, and plead, and say what you need to say.

Only the poet who sings a sweet song,

Hates what needs to be hated,

And sees the poem of drippy prose is wrong.

Only a poet hates the one who waited

To show her hate, and when her hate is revealed at last—

Love, asking for honesty, having forced her hand—

Love, not only loving, but seeking continually to understand—

Finds hate, calculating, doubtful, slow, the winner; love unfortunately is fast—

Since by its very nature, love is unable to doubt.

Love belatedly discovers the hate, and judges the hate out.

When I loved you, fully and completely, and love surprised

You in your very eyes,

You looked at me in love, hiding as long as you could, your hate.

I loved you until I understood. You are pitied, wounded and waiting. I never wait.

Love and judgment are alike in this—

Bright. And with the speed of light, surround, and ruin and kiss.

I know in one step. You, in two.

You think. I simply love you.

No one is real. Everyone is a spokesman for someone, or something, else;

Everyone is a puppet for a hidden agenda. A willing, or an unwilling, dupe.

And the landscape of secret competition is so complex, willing and

Unwilling are the same. Seeking security and pleasure is simple,

Right? Absolutely not. All we know are thoughts inside of thoughts.

Everyone is confused absolutely and a puppet absolutely.

Love requires trust, but anyone who trusts a puppet is a fool.

I must include myself in this charade, and ask you not to believe

Anything I say. What can I say in favor of this or that? What do I know?

I am being used. By what or whom, and for what purpose, I’m not certain.

I could represent a large enterprise, changing from within,

And my resistance to change could be, in an odd twist, in favor of it,

Or my actions could be secretly against it, or, a preparation

For something entirely new, separate and different, which will benefit

Those people over there, or maybe I’m an agent for an operation to soften

And confuse, planting seeds for the next unforeseen uprising and change.

I don’t know what my feelings and thoughts are for, or what they indicate.

I don’t trust you. I don’t know what to tell you. What the hell? This poem is over.

When I am to the dark house gone,

My poetry maybe will travel in hearts a little farther on.

But if I failed as a poet, I will not know.

I only hoped, and still to the dark house I go.

When I am to the dark stars gone

The bright stars, as they always have, will shine a little farther on.

This does not require hope. It’s something I know.

The bright stars will shine. When to the dark stars I go.

Crime is like love.

How can we prove

The criminal did it again and again,

And loved us, with love that doesn’t end?

The brash detective proves

That even a lover, a lover who loves,

In one place and one time,

Even as they loved, committed a crime,

Kissing us falsely under a tree.

Prove it, detective. She loved me.

She came to me of her own free will,

To be loved and love. Prove every thrill

Of the mood by that shadowy lake

She felt freely, and all for my sake.

Every sigh she made in the grass

Was for me, and the mood did not pass

When she went home to rest.

Her restlessness was love at its best.

Prove her lack of peace proved

She was mine, and I was the one she loved,

And when we met and kissed again,

It was love which did not want to end,

Whether we kissed on the mountain or by the low lake,

And she tenderly kissed me only for my sake.

And when she didn’t love me that one time,

Can you prove, that this once, love wasn’t like crime?

That she wasn’t guilty, and love didn’t pass

Away, and when later, she kissed me in the grass,

And she told me she was still in love with me

It was love that was the same as when we kissed by the sea?

During the depression, I lived richly.

During the war, I lived peacefully outside of town.

The year the crops and gardens failed,

I enjoyed sugary meals from 7-11.

When I thought about what I was doing I didn’t know what I was doing.

I wrote poetry that was not poetry.

I had thoughts about love that were not about love.

The day the towers fell I was raising children,

And thinking blindly in the back of my mind about many conspiracy theories.

Working on my Ph.D., I drank beer and played Pac-Man

At a Big Ten school, avoiding drunk football linemen.

In 1986 I had more doubts about her after she expressed herself, and yelled.

In 1996 my mind was clarified by a smoking habit, and I was more loved, albeit I smelled.

Paid to take my money, professionals had the money in wealthy days

I paid to those who were in debt to be above talk of money.

There was a huge crisis. Because it was balmy and sunny.

All politics and all philosophy belonged to one particular, silky-haired asshole.

The differences that were not really differences took their toll.

My lover and I during the Age of the Selfie did not take selfies at all.

And once, I think, my short, successful friend pushes me from behind, simply because he is small.

You permit me these thoughts,

These hopes, these stairs, these sights

From the top, with the city trees in view,

As I depart the station. If I saw you,

Before I was allowed to know you were

My love, my maker, making all these things occur,

You, the one who is coming,

You, much more than my troubled thoughts—

I would be too excited; I would fall down the stairs.

The fact that you are not here protects me.

If I saw you, if you were to be seen, to add

To what is only my sad, daily scenery,

A light in shadow emerging below,

Perhaps between those two parked cars,

On that street, where every day, I go

On my interminable commute, my commute would be

Over in an instant, the rapid light and shade.

I am walking down the stairs carefully,

Cool but excited, writing this in my head—

Seeing you? This poem? Is that what you made?

Your brain, the size of a nickel,

Must confront ten trillion dollars in change

Every second of every day. Life

Is an endless variety of sadness and torture

And your heart keeps saying it’s OK it’s OK.

Your memory is a beautiful woman

The universe wants to enter: do you remember

How the crowd agreed with you and you felt love

In a way that swamped the embarrassing

Episodes when it was just you and him?

Your brain is amazing. It’s almost worth a dime.

But look. Here comes the coolest god:

Forgetfulness. She is never on time.

The eye drinks astronomy
And by the perspective of geometry sees,
The universe, her children, and the poet’s unease.
The farthest star, just out of sight,
Is seen by mathematics, if the calculations are right.
The farthest star, must fall back into
The beginning, central to seeing the you and the non-you,
The big bang, where nothing into matter grew;
Relation, the soul of matter, and so you knew
Perspective was how distance mirrored time.
That was the reason, as a child, you were charmed by rhyme,
And you liked to think about where the universe stopped.
Eventually your whole definition of infinity was dropped.
Today when you prick yourself, and there’s a little blood,
You automatically think of sex and horror films and food.
You thought a little too much, and it spoiled love.
She would have figured things out with you
But you had slightly more mundane things to do.
You couldn’t keep what you were thinking all in one place;
You were writing poems; you were worried about your face.
Poor poet, you know one thing: Many things into one thing will fit;
A little shaping of this verse, and that will be it.

The sad is my object, and I play with it in poetry and song.

She feels sad as a subject, and feels the sad is wrong.

I was able to kiss her and want her and my poetry

Loved her, but her love was deeper, so she left me.

I could be all and everything; I could kiss her, and then be apart;

She was focused on me and me alone, but she broke my heart.

Her daily rituals and appointments enslaved her until I

Arrived to make her happy—yet she made me cry.

The man is more artificial, and has a superficiality

The woman envies; she gives up her melancholy for clarity

And renounces all which prevents the sexes from being the same.

With a pocket knife she carved into my poem, “I Love You,” the first four letters of her name.

Cloudy sunshine emits more light than a lighted room.

Compared to nature, the mind is an unvisited tomb,

Which in darkness picks over the remains of its dead,

Traces of memories fooling itself in a foolish head.

The mind is only an eye, and, when the mind is its own subject, a subject of gloom,

Trapped by its own melancholy, and when it fights

Sad feelings with happy thoughts, it deludes itself with small lights.

The reassurances of the depressed

Repeat themselves in a skull which admits no light, no guest.

“There’s no one here!” Examine the mind,

And the eyeless discovers it cannot find the blind.

Instead, change slightly the old and visible in that piece of history we know as a day,

And make new melody with bright error inside harmony. Seek joy and knowledge that way.

The beautiful face is like other beautiful faces,

The beautiful iconic look other faces share,

A beauty instantly recognized which the knowing cartoonist traces,

But her face compares to nothing—some similarity is there

To other beautiful faces,

But her face violates the template lovers see;

Her face, by the normal measure, should be ugly.

But it isn’t. And those who meet her more than once,

And get over that first illusion

Of the awkward and the ugly, gradually reach a different conclusion.

Her face is like the Christ, a difference the gift of God.

I, too, thought her face was strong, but odd,

A chin too prominent by the architect’s hand,

A beauty even beauty could never understand,

Not beautiful because it was her—

No personality shining through—

But a timeless architecture, imperious and pure,

A beauty not really for love—but belonging more to awe,

A face in an opium dream of lust, no cartoonist could draw.

Her face is the template of a beauty yet to be,

And not only did I succumb,

Her face succumbed to me,

And even now I am dumb

And cannot speak; wit does not belong to eternity.

There is nothing that must be said,

Despite what the vain poets say,

There is only what should be said,

And what we might have said, yesterday.

Do you hear nostalgia in “yesterday?”

That’s mostly what poetry is. That’s mostly what the poets say.

And if you are sad, you must be sad,

But I don’t know anything that must be said.

Examine all the poems, examine all the lives of the dead.

We find the attempt, and all attempts against what was attempted,

And further attempts, and we always attempt, as we should,

And if we ask for the bad, pretending to ask for the good,

The world will punish us, exactly as it should.

You should know this, but maybe you don’t,

And maybe they will tell you, or tactfully, perhaps, they won’t.

You don’t need to explain too much, or you shouldn’t;

You may hurt my feelings, but really, you wouldn’t.

But now the poet comes along and falsely says, what I have said, must be said.

I will write of love—before it is a love, before it is a love of someone who’s dead.

But there is nothing that must be said. Just say what you think you should.

Then tell me again of love that’s neither bad nor good.

When beauty doesn’t know it is beautiful,

Because beauty wants something more,

Who dares to tell the ignorant

What ignorant beauty is for?

The response will be like the stars

Silent, in silent skies,

Or the sneer on the face of the one who has those beautiful eyes.

The additional, which the beautiful wants,

Adds more to how the beautiful wants

Secretly more beauty.

Everything is sad and needy

Except pure beauty.

When beauty doesn’t know it is beautiful,

It seems more beautiful still,

As when anger burns in fury

But has no fighting will.

“Fight me!” You cry, knowing anger is there.

But anger is far more angry when anger doesn’t care.

When beauty doesn’t know it is beautiful—

Actually, beauty not knowing is always the case;

Beauty isn’t confident, just because it has a beautiful face.

Everything can bring down the beautiful—

We all fear humbling disgrace.

Be careful what you say to the beautiful,

In poetry, or in person.

Less beautiful when it leaves its prison,

The beauty is not a beautiful person,

And wants to be beautiful again, in the prison,

Trapped by its beautiful face and eyes—

You’ve seen the mute stars look down, trapped by an empty sky.

You’ve heard the poet—the big baby—in love with beauty, cry.

Look! The evening lights of the town gleam across the bay—

Each light, a human story; but they have nothing to say.

Those unable to think abstractly,

Will hate abstractly, because feeling needs a place to go.

What is the abstract? It is emotion knowing—when we don’t really know.

We think with our feelings, sometimes matter-of-factly,

When the mundane thing must be done,

But daring insights, when we fly close to the truth, or the sun,

Turn our feelings into thoughts. We triumph in the mind,

As thoughts become feelings, when music, both beautiful and blind,

Narrows pleasure by increasing it.

Look at this poetry. It is music.

But those with no insights can only abstractly be abstract,

Can only feel the frustration of feeling, or examine dully the dull fact.

Abstraction is ubiquitous—because partial information

Belongs to expert, child, intoxicant—drunk in death, or elation.

The rush to hate abstractly appalls us. Will all the women hate all the men?

The whole society becomes infected. Madness. War. Here it comes again.

Remember, there is always a reason. Reason can and will understand hate,

Even when it’s directed at innocent you. Let’s go. It’s not too late.

Yes I admit

I’m a Darwinist in my thought and wit.

If I see the cutest face on a short woman

I think, “Oh yes, cute provides hope for

Her—hope is natural for the human—

A cute face making up for lack of stature,

And so short and tall, rich and poor, we have these choices,

But I hate them, and when I hear the chattering voices,

Shall we go to this restaurant or that one?

All the hopeful ideas and decisions,

The elections, the Darwinist decisions,

Filling up our hopeful lives and days,

I reject these human interactions

And dwell, instead on the divine.

Maybe the restaurant is closed,

The short one rejects you. Fine.

I won’t go to a restaurant.

I will wander. What people hate is what I want.

No I can’t eat that! But I expect to dine.

for William Logan

Poetry is not a medium for painting,

Yet I see poets painting all the time.

“Let’s make a poem a painting! Let’s not rhyme!”

And we wonder why poetry is failing.

A novelist is great when he knows about whaling?

A firefighter, an expert on Rome?

Is the poet a world traveler

With a collection of maps, who just stays at home?

The poet is allowed any number of trades,

But here’s the point: how is a poem made?

I’ve seen poets plunder the dictionary

For the rarest colors—to paint a picture no one can see.

We have the color of the sky—breathtaking!

And look, the color of the sea—my heart is aching!

But now the poet has forgotten what to say.

The picture he was painting got in the way.

And while the sunset is crazily igniting,

The poet doesn’t talk. He’s dryly writing.

He believes his painting is learned and profound.

He guards the museum. He doesn’t make a sound.

How many kisses do I have for you yet?

A thousand kisses for each regret.

Two kisses for every sigh we made,

When apart from each other, we sighed in the shade.

A kiss for every sigh in the sun.

A kiss for every decision to run,

When we thought to run was best,

From love that died yesterday in the west,

And away from love, we took our rest.

The reasons to go became too many,

And for years, no kisses; no, there aren’t any;

No kisses when I think of you,

No kisses when only a kiss will do,

To remind us both of how much a kiss

Is what we wanted, and will always miss,

Despite reasons we shouldn’t kiss,

Reasons which die next to the bliss

We felt, when sweetly, we bent to kiss.

I have kisses, I have more kisses yet

For our hearts, miserable and weary with regret—

Bodies, heavy, older, and tortured with pride—

Kissing, we’ll laugh when pride has died.

We’ll kiss more sweetly than that first day

We kissed—and kissing, knew kissing was the way.

Let me ask you something. Is it worse

When you are certain and you reverse

Your opinion? I was sure Beethoven was better,

And now I’m sure Mozart is the greater composer.

Is it good to change your mind?

And when you love her, and then you don’t, is the song

Which played in your heart still right, or now wrong?

Beethoven transported me to places

I cannot describe. But now look at these faces.

Do they care that Mozart and Beethoven changed places

For me, tonight, as I listened to Mozart’s piano concerto in D minor again?

They are completely bored. They don’t want to argue with me.

Look at them. They are bored. You see it immediately.

I want people who understand me and love me.

Maybe I’m crazy. I want it all.

The greenery. The argument. The concert hall.

Everything that is necessary is a ritual,

And a ritual is only finished when we do it alone.

Religion belongs to our solitude,

The sacrifice done by the sharpener of the stone.

You laid things out the night before,

And then you took the other through the door.

You wish you hadn’t decided to reject

Love—but you work, and that requires respect.

If you are bored in the back of the church,

You belong to the millions who belong

To a ritual so you might escape it.

In your heart you secretly love a song,

A hit, which everyone else is listening to.

To make a knife, with a knife they scrape it

With all the patience they expect from you.

You were depressed and who knows

How you languished. But now

You are less troubled. You wear the clothes;

They don’t wear you. If the cow

Must be eaten, the sacrifice must be made.

The ritual of sacrifice is a ritual of no choice,

The symbolism of shadow is yours in the shade.

You needed no religion to remove every aspect of my voice.

The ritual is performed best by a crowd

Because in a crowd we are never free.

The performance was loud,

Unlike the quiet freedom of my poetry.

There is no ritual to an abortion. Just have it done.

Freedom is free of ritual. But, yes—once, they did have to sacrifice the son.

For my revenge, I remain young and green,

Making sure spring laughs, and the laughing mountains are seen.

For my revenge, my glad youth parades

Past your planted memories, cool and shaded,

Which your madness had piled high with grim,

Uncomfortable, monuments to him—

My rival who defeated you, his roots covered in ice,

Authority standing over the pink and the nice.

In my green buds bursting from rough, old bark

I prove sweetness won’t surrender to conspiracies of dark,

But sings like the error-free birds do,

Their coats, feathers and loves, new,

The territorial battles made earnest and enthusiastic again.

If I can be new, why should I fear old, impolitic men?

If I can be a child, why shouldn’t you take my love up

And drink from the rose’s delicate cup?

Youthful secrets know time will do

In my green immortality what this poem does to you.

Read this poem again, after a year,

Or eons, if you like. I’ll be here.

Poets who are not critics, you should take note.

The poem worthy of itself is writing critically of what it just wrote.

If your poem hates criticism, your poem does not denote,

But sinks to muddy death in pure self-satisfaction,

Seeking a reader’s pitiful, gullible, second-hand, reaction,

The flow of inspiration blocked by thick, leafy redaction.

You who believe criticism of poetry is hate,

Safely meander towards nothing, pleasing obscurity your obscure fate.

The next line is always waiting for you—but you couldn’t wait,

Hurrying to illustrate your case—a clumsily played card,

Your metaphors for air immediately turning stale and hard;

The reader falls into reading shard upon shard,

The little meaning of this standing for the tepid meaning of that,

In the most obvious gambit of resemblances,

Or, if you are sophisticated, metaphors, perhaps, which don’t quite fit,

To win the reader—but the poem? You don’t care about it.

You pursued a poem without the poem in mind.

You wrote only to them, thinking your poem, like you, could be kind, or unkind.

Cleopatra worked at my café.

Gradually she added paint to her face

And became more beautiful every day,

She got more beautiful every time I visited the place,

Which was often, because I liked the change in her,

As I did my writing—the days, the poems, a blur.

We are bored, so bored—we have to fill up the days

With meaning—that’s difficult, but we have to find the ways.

Meaning always means a challenge, the labor and stress

Of having children, a respectable job, a job with consequences.

Cleopatra was on her feet all day. I couldn’t have cared less.

She wasn’t Cleopatra, but I convinced myself she was.

Idiot dreams! Vanity! But that’s what Cleopatra does.

There is a certain dissatisfied type who hates

Those perceived as superior—saddest of fates!

All strive to be better, comparing themselves to others,

And some compete with love and good will, but others

With resentment, whine and hide, behind mentors and mothers.

And someone who blurts out in public life,

“America was never great” reveals at once his resentment, his pathos, his strife.

But since all of us struggle against this truth

That we are inferior, and constant proof

That we are inferior besets us each day,

We must forgive, and we must actually say

What does make America great,

And what this might have to do with our fate.

First, the obvious: a country is a home

Which we share with citizens; to roam

Among the dark hills, the wandering sea

Always implies a safe return; to be

Homeward bound is to know the great

As your place, your green shadow where loves wait.

Your home yesterday, today—this is why America for you has always been great.

Next, the martial, mixed with pride and pain,

The wars won for necessary gain.

An international war is how America was born,

A child, from a world Empire torn;

We were an Indian land worked by slaves,

The resource-heaven which the workshop craves,

And the British were this close to taking over the world,

Until comedy intervened—the Yankee flag unfurled.

Yankee Doodle Dandy boldly entered, and then,

A few battles, a contract—and the world would never be the same again,

And soon it was an America where all came

To be famous in a new and faster definition of fame.

New nations build new circuses and new devices to find

The empire was at once the consciousness of races and almost kind.

But the world will always be the same; different men

Love different women and different women love different men. The world follows the same plan,

Feeling itself as one—one creation, one message, the same man

Building the telegraph—which announces to himself the Civil War,

And a woman, seized by opium, coughs, and America is not America anymore.

The Victorian Christmas, with its beautiful lights,

Gave way to louder and quicker and lovelier delights,

And strange gods with beautiful eyes whispered to us our future fate:

“All is theft and illusion, and America was never that great.”

But let us return. Can we return? Who are we? If there is a flag that waves

From sea to shining sea, who will fight wars and take care of the wage-slaves,

And get up each morning to love what should be loved, and not what the infinite confusion of the infinite universe craves?

I look at what is not that great and I see you,

But I’m not that great either, and I’m hungry and I’m mortal, so what do you want me to do?

I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, I’m a deplorable, and I’m going to make sure

You don’t get rich off government, and home will be these trees, these factories, these shady houses clinging to this shore.