Scarriet

Piles of notes, transparent in their piles—

music. Great musicians don’t play with smiles.

Mozart may have smiled in the wings

but not the opera singer when she sings—

unless a smile is called for in the script.

Smiles and music are antithetical.

I saw the vampire sleeping in the crypt

and sad music crept along the ground.

Where else could such horror be found?

But any scene or mood is ripe for a smile.

Pleasure and satisfaction were mine for awhile

with you, who turned away from me, at last,

with abstract words—and a chilly smile

separate from our passionate past.

Most of our lives are things we wear—

Smile. And remove it. There’s nothing there.

I was comforted.

In my icy pride

I didn’t move. Hot kisses floated in with the tide.

Reluctantly, the night gives up its hours.
Hurriedly, the air gave up its sun.
Who lives in the cold and dark?
On climate earth, everyone.

Dark, the way to the distant grave,
Dark, the entrance for everyone.
Reluctantly, the night's hours
Travel towards the wayward sun.

Those who disagree with you
Have put together a plan.
The night is cold, again.
I saw the world and ran. 

I contemplate your eyes and love’s proximity

and wonder which matters the most. Love

requires the flesh but it also requires the ghost.

Insane things and hidden things and images

floating, as if described in a bad poem, or floating in a sympathetic mind—

hunt for love, hunt for love! when the hunter, not the prey, is kind.

Proximate love, proximate love! what is convenient is luxury more than enough;

I swam the seas and found nothing. I found a comfortable love, this convenient love;

propinquity and quantity was prominently my sin!

I am ashamed of where my ghost has been!

I am the poet, the theologian, the teacher, the jerk,

easy this existence compared to those who actually work.

Proximate love! It was easy because it was near.

The superstar loves his maid.

I loved you well in a former year.

The surrounding pool

protected us. Poems officially require school.

Wasn’t my soul infinite? Even in bed?

Infinite love! Infinite love!

But lying here, my soul is dead.

The violinist throws the music over her shoulder.

What keeps these musicians attached to their instruments?

Why do they with windy precision obey?

Is it because there is no Beethoven today?

Is this why the children hurry down the hill?

Does the gravity of music affect us all?

I am stuck in the concert hall

with madame and aunt taking a rare vacation.

The painter holds onto the window sill;

what would Mendelssohn think of our nation?

We have what we desire: the appalling number of afternoons and evenings

when we didn’t do anything! Mozart wrote

every single authentic note.

These songs have floated away.

Is this why my life leans on instruments today?

They exist outside the channels of my imagination.

When, in composition, I welcome dream’s uncertainty and surprise,

the soft, dream-like light of the wan projector’s eyes,

(how did you turn up in my dream? where were you before?)

I’m tortured by the very understanding the dream lacks

which teases me into understanding more—

first reality I reject, then fantasy tires—

which dream is the dream the dreamer desires?

I’m safe here from all ideology and argument;

in the dream, all argument and gossip is me;

my ego, that turns high sabotage into the quaintest age of poetry,

now wakes up, and of course there they are;

they will analyze my poem—

they are the enemy, just by being who they are,

mysterious and unknown.

They always make me doubt myself;

they are now discussing game theory

and they make it clear it is impossible to define the word, “game,”

which expands its meaning constantly.

Without trying, they always get the best of me.

You don’t like them either? Then we are One.

But unfortunately they are One. This won’t work.

They convince you I’m a jerk.

I take comfort in refuting them at last; I finally define the word game

to my splendid satisfaction. I achieve satisfaction.

A game is whatever you lost that you could have won.

Which mortal wins in life? None.

In the end, none of us win. Not even poems. This doesn’t want to be one.

Poetry has an urgency when you who write it do;

this means the temporal overcomes the spatial;

(I might as well spell it out for you)

it means you finally get it that you’ll die;

the best poems are a long sigh

with the words a total accident; did you really think

I was saying something specific? That a plan

was in my head? That a poem is a machine made by a man?

No, it is the realization that the ending

is something—depend on it—I’m sending

in a complete overcoming of the thing.

There’s a number of hexagonal sides.

Loves are on the amusement rides.

I take one step and sing.

You can easily see how love turns into hate.

The problem is a person has to wait.

I could not bring myself to say goodbye to you

and the years passed so I didn’t have to.

The very thing that made me too attached

fed goodbye; a lonely plan was hatched,

and it was easy; life is full of sleep and sad

music in those distracting shows we watch

when exhausted; the best art is slightly mad

and it always comes down to one of those;

the trade, the error, the one that had to be,

when you rest, and resting, write poetry,

forgetting the fate of life’s gaps and design

when you are late as you write the last line.

Your poem will be analyzed later (and she

of course will not remember what you wrote)

and it will fail for the very reason that poetry

exists; and now the plain, uncovered note.

It is important that you don’t exclude water

from your imaginative domain.

You cannot go back. And your citizens will be in pain.

Once you have decided clouds in poetry

cannot be tolerated, they will not be;

the overwhelming interest in art is always:

what can we remove to more easily make the landscape seem more real?

And strength is important. A manifesto says

for the sake of its followers, “use the finest steel”

and that’s it: chapbooks will flourish; modern

times, like trains, full of calendars, will come;

this is comfortable; hurry into the interim;

smiles flash; finish playing the steel drum.

You’ll be surprised at how many sounds are possible!

Who said a cacophony

couldn’t celebrate a poetry?

But a warning: once you decide on a course,

the canals will forever be dry.

Keats will simply perish. And you cannot say goodbye.

The sophisticated are not afraid
of anything---except others who are not afraid of anything.
The sophisticated form clubs and cabals.
They have long meetings
until meetings are no longer necessary. 

The sophisticated understand belief is hard-wired
and cannot be avoided.
Some populations are fearless
due to credulous, optimistic beliefs
and these populations must be targeted for destruction and panic.

The nearly sophisticated lack an understanding of belief;
they believe things without knowing it.
The nearly sophisticated run interference
for the sophisticated, 
sowing doubt and panic
in the optimistic populations.

Optimistic belief has always confounded the world.
The sophisticated understand belief itself is atomistic reality.
The truly sophisticated do not confute belief,
but invent new beliefs
for their shock troops,
the nearly sophisticated.

Poet, let us hope and be naive---
admitting, in order to love,
the optimism we must believe.

How does the physics of our life

squeeze us into our life?

How do we unravel so we know?

Why do the trivial intricacies

appeal to us so?

We don’t want to die

though in every corner of the sky,

in every ditch,

is the suffering, the ignorance, the lie.

My gilded poems prove completely false

and the one I loved wants a divorce.

A green world for the browns is the path—

and now the whites do not laugh.

The mixture is yet strong;

most are kind; most of us do get along.

The first to bet on dumping oil

makes that move alone. Predictions toil.

Elites make the lumpen boil.

I grew on a mountain of wealth—

past generations of entertainment and health!

The 1950s were a beneficial breeze.

When we were children, evil slowly got started.

Now the CIA makes sure we are broken-hearted.

My ancestors smashed the world,

producing leisure and apologetic poems—

better than your passive-income ones.

I’m afraid the new rules will not be

good for you. As for your poetry…

Don’t go, April, now that you
Are to warm sun and cool winds inclined—
Yet I know you will.
You’re measured by days
And cannot stop for my sad mind
Or linger here because I praise.

You are measured by what is lost:
All the years that are no more
And other Aprils gone. So if now
Winter’s nothing is your being,
It’s best I leave my thoughts of you,
Loyal only to time fleeing.
Who wants to be left behind?

Our one escape from pain
Is winter passing,
Not April, or this terrible going in the mind—
Winter is always coming and April
Hurries towards us, blind.

Without warning, a good poem
dropped on the internet. It was right there
to read for free. Rumors of this happening
had been going around the internet for years:
a good poem would simply show up,
sans credentials, and no one
would be able to prevent this from happening.
Language poets and the Modern Language Association 
and distinguished academic publishers remained silent on
whether the poem could be good if such a thing were to happen.
"Professors need to eat" was overheard in New York City,
a towering metropolis, but reaction
was generally muted. The swamp
contained a river meandering.
The froth on the beer died.
I spoke into the microphone very fast. 
A rumor had it that Rosalinda cried. 

All revolutions in love were literary—

until the sexual revolution (sex being a strong

element of love) broke the mold—

cinema, the Great War, the automobile,

and later in the century, birth control.

Irreverent poetry has no soul.

What other people do

unfortunately affects you.

You cannot love if love is not where

morality is. It hides, instead, behind your hair.

Utterly transformed, Beatrice is now some girl.

The old graces and rules are dashed

upon the electric steps. Nothing is cashed.

We have joined the loose brigade;

comforts and winks are written

everywhere; only what’s in vogue displayed.

Each poetry wars against the other;

I’m not able to do this anymore.

My agenda’s lyric

is a drink thrown in the muse’s face:

Not banned poetry—only unfinished.

Beatrice walking at a slightly faster pace.

In the 19th century, citizens would have lunch

and watch a battle. Now, in war, citizens

are for lunch. I cannot stomach tales

of 20th century war. As an idle citizen, fragile,

old, and full of doom, even a game of chess

makes me shudder. I feel sorry for children

and dogs. O take me to the flower show.

Return, Victorian poems and sentimentality!

Polite poem, it was always you! The word

should be the soldier; fight with language;

with all your cunning and sincerity tell a tale:

The 20th century is when it all began to fail.

“The woke are asleep” —somebody

Believing intelligent design

would seem to make one conspiracy-stupid and naive.

But we are intelligent, or not, based on what we believe.

The atheist uses intelligence to find non-intelligence,

which is brilliant, no doubt.

Intelligence within finds the opposite without.

The world made itself, by chance—

things knocked about for billions of years;

we evolved from rocks into sensitive beings

vibrating stories of laughter and tears.

A rock can’t do that. Why is there a debate?

A miracle is a miracle, whether on-time or late.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say

Existence started before there was “yesterday;”

we cannot know how it started; I saw

the universe by the universe’s law

which exists together with the universe—or not.

We either have nothing—or more than we have got.

Both priest and scientist, it seems to me,

can easily agree;

they both need to go back—to philosophy.

Once, many years ago, I heard Socrates—and for a moment understood—

the secret to wisdom is the word, “good.”

The real experience is walled off
from all other experience 
so it can be a real experience.
The paradox of this enters our minds slowly: is being walled off
what makes something real?
When the United States was alone,
how did it make us feel?

I am still living on that real experience 
when I was isolated with you.
We weren't supposed to be isolated
so we didn't know what to do. 

Invite the revelers, experience 
the dance danced by everyone.
Why doesn't this feel real?
I experience the trumpet and the drum.

Up in the secret loft,
where the music is heard softly below,
I ponder the real experience 
I had with someone else
ages and ages ago. 

OK yes the crazy shaped me;

dad was not only jealous of mom,

but of each male child;

this bound him to family and made the safe

argumentative and wild.

I was obedient to my parents’ wishes

but I didn’t know what those wishes were; the family

had its own reason for existing; “The butter, dear!

Bacon and eggs! Dad is dad, He’ll remain here.”

I shyly went off to college, guessing all the time,

worried, comforted by plays and rhyme.

I was obedient but had dagger thoughts.

Disobedience was for losers. I obeyed

but for a larger purpose. Everything was delayed.

I watched others make a fast buck;

they knew what they wanted; this made them dull;

I was aloof; hesitating gave me intelligence,

if not material luck.

I was tortured by the inability to know

but I trusted philosophy. I took my reading slow;

(awesome, illuminating, dialogues of Plato!)

neither spiritual, nor materialistic, I was odd;

I kept converting to my own method of converting;

the only way I knew how to wrestle with God

was to send angry letters to first mom, then dad;

Philosophy cured the maudlin; finally, I was only sad.

At Iowa, in front of friends—Karla said I was showing off

(I was always drinking beers, always had a cough)

when I said I heard “I want my mother” in the melody

of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony.

It took me a long time to settle down;

a bookstore job, then a job over at the college;

serious, yet joking finally about it all

is the best way to soften the fall;

I had scares and heartbreaks, enough

to be grateful, to get that experience

they say we all need.

The truly simple things are still true;

that’s what i think. But will they always be true?

I don’t know, really. I better ask you.

The skeletal beauty of winter
is more beautiful than spring.
Sticks stick out of the water. 
The cloudy harbor is remembering 
things dead in spring.
Winter, warm and quiet by the shore,
wishes to remember something more.
Is it me remembering you---what to remember about you?---
or the whole thing remembering the whole thing?
Vegetation growing on the harbor floor
doesn't notice the season changing.
Reflections of far things
in the gently undulating water
surprise, like melody, my eyes.
I listen to the quiet scene
and myself speaking (awed, speaking to myself)
as if the landscape (naked trees) were an ear.
Rain is warming, in gray lengths, winter.
If this is New England at the end of December
I don't believe there's anything to fear.
Seagulls cry and feed on the low tide.
The exposed land of rocks and snails
allows me to walk closer to the other shore;
I don't need to remember anything more
unless my poem would grow heavy
with what I saw; details always their own law.
After all, you live on the other side of this bay;
what do you think they and I might say?

Today on TV, life seems especially

shiny, odd, and creepy

but the scratchy, doggy, suitcase life

goes on; we take a nap, life

changes; moving, what do we do

with all these books? How can we

afford to live here? Which in the news is true?

You need to take control.

It was always finally about you.

Bad things pile up at the end of life;

bad decisions now assert themselves,

or maybe you chose the safe route

and you’re okay? Not likely. Lives

gather up reckoning inside every mind;

we’re all sad. Life is a series of naps.

I hear the noise: man versus woman, east versus west;

life is a series of naps

and the last nap is the best.

If you feel the truth and live it

there will always be someone

who will make you explain

so you feel stupid or insane.

You were secure in your honesty

and it even brought you joy,

but along comes an honest anarchist

presenting forbidden chaos:

“what do think of your “truth,” now, truth-boy?”

And yet you can always fix the problem,

shooting accurately, with abandon, as it gets dark

in an unlikely performance in a pick-up game:

“swish, swish, swish! I’ll show you who’s insane”

and from there to opening night

where you’re playing the Professor in Ionesco

(“The Lesson”) and emotionally you triumph;

these things shape you, make your truth insane,

the poet you are, the one who doesn’t need to explain.

“The book that needs to be written next is the The Hatred of Poets.” —Kent Johnson, reviewing Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry.

If your poem is bad you can say it was a joke.

If no one gets the joke, then it becomes

a poem again, since few understand a poem

which is a poem that still might be a joke.

Poets make big names for themselves

with this trick alone. You know who you are.

Credulity, the blank sky. You, the big star.

“hey tom. guess who else sent me a poem?”

Sex with many is the actual or implied state

which wrecks us. Jealous frenzy beats wildly

in the calmest breast. Gary Cooper was stabbed

and shot; fortunately the ladies missed.

When have the jealous ever been able to resist

the sneering provocation, no matter how good

the love? Hemingway said ‘Coop’ was perfect,

and what exactly does that mean. It means cheating

and sex with many is the idol of this world,

stirring all behavior; don’t you know why death

and its sexless partners were dancing for you

on the religious stage?

My poem can fix things. Look how

it sends the solemn music to you now.