Scarriet

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. 

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 certainly, since all is contained in the Big Bang, it could matter to the poet. Any moral attitude can be inserted into a poem—the question is simply: what are the physical properties of the poem qua poem which you are fitting the morality into?

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 the loneliness our indignant irritation finds.
You had too many thoughts, didn’t you?
In your 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 clever woman can offer;
A dog can be disgusting, but no person
Tends to be disgusting for long.  I should know this
But I don’t. The disgusting doesn’t remain
In the public eye for long. It’s private. Who the fuck knows
How disgusting people can become?
Men hate women, because
A sensitive woman initiated every great love 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—I, the poet who saw it first, and then, you;

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

The place you entered, and the place you exit, keeps out what’s bad.

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

This poem, like all existence, has a border,

But sadly, is a border only. Beauty walks the walls. And now gives the 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 calls 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, 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 once took the money

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

There was a huge crisis—since it was balmy and sunny.

All politics and philosophy belonged for a moment to a 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.

Once, my short, successful friend pushed me from behind, simply because he was small.

You permit 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 small 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. We can figure it out! 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.