You need to play the sound because it’s a sort of song, but here are the words anyway:
poetry
Excitable Jack Horner
another from A Child’s Meth Lab of Verses
Excitable Jack Horner
Excitable Jack Horner
sat in a corner
eating his curds and whey.
He put in his thumb
and pulled out a crumb
and like an ass began to bray.
from A Child’s Meth Lab of Verses
Bad Choices
In Nashville, Mississippi,
not far from the Rio Grande,
there lived a French Canadian trapper
named Hedrick Eckelmann.
He wrote a short novella
about the Second World War.
It ran ten-thousand pages;
he called it Less Is More.
He married a gal named Betty Sue,
who gave him two fine sons,
but she died a virgin at 44
cleaning one of his guns.
Terribly devastated,
he remarried within a week,
and lived happily ever after
until he choked on a steak
right outside of Nashville
in the heart of the Lone Star State,
right across the river from Canada.
Damn, he could’ve had a V-8.
A Sub-Literate, Sorrowful Not-Walt-Whitman Hitching
I missed a bus in Baltimore, and with no place to stay, restless, desperate, running low, I thought I’d try to hitch a ride.
I should have known. Ain’t no decent man gonna pick up a hoary-headed hobo nowadays.
I stood on the shoulder, stuck out my thumb, squinting down the highway through the afternoon exhaust, hoping that some good Samaritan might stop.
Eight hours later, round about one or so, a jacked-up pick-up pulled over, one of them monster pick-ups, black, four-door, with a stunted back seat of sorts.
“Hop in, old man,” the driver snarled. “Let’s go. Ain’t got all night.”
I slung my bag into the bed, climbed my way way up, and slammed the door.
The passenger rolled up his window, the driver grabbed the wheel, put the pedal to the metal, war-hooped a holler, laid some rubber, and we was on our way.
The two of them wore their baseball caps backwards, nothing but kids, white, maybe twenty or so, but right off I could see their eyes lacked light, like they was lost.
(And I could’ve been sleeping in that depot waiting for the morrow).
“How much you plan pay us for this ride?” the driver drawled. “We ain’t no commies, ain’t got no use for no freeloaders.”
I told them I was bust broke, that if I had me some money, I wouldn’t be standing on the side of a highway at one a.m. in the morning.
The passenger punched me in the chest, slapped my face, and while I was wallowing, jacked my wallet.
The driver pulled over, hopped out, slung me to the ground, climbed back in, then drove off with my bag in the back rattling around in the bed of the truck.
That was a month ago. I’m back in Mayo now writing these so-called adventures on scraps of paper.
I keep them on my person, in the pocket where my wallet used to be, so on the day they find me dead, they’ll know a bit about me.
Elegy for Saisy Joy
1
Our Saisy never really shook off that early abuse,
the beatings, starvation, the two-foot chain.
She’d wince when you went to pet her,
snap if you rubbed her head for too long.
As her rescue “foster mom” in Statesboro put it,
“That gal’s got her some food issues.”
Like stealing bread and hiding pieces ‘round the house,
gobbling down the rankest roadside carcass, knocking over
garbage cans, consuming their rotten whatever.
Afterwards, her Stygian, Technicolor diarrhea
would ruin our rugs.
2
Yet the rescuer’s daughter named her Joy
for that dervish dance when you’d grab a leash.
She’d rear and buck like a bronco, jump, hump her back,
swivel in a circle, smile like a very happy cartoon dog.
And what a beauty! that black slick fur, the brown undercoat,
distinctive of one of her breeds, the German Longhaired Pointer part.
On the beach or through the woods to the dock she’d strut,
a country beauty proud of her charms.
Indifferent to birds and squirrels, she hated cats,
despised UPS trucks. Her frantic bark was acquainted
with the dark — PTSD the vet once guessed.
3
That morning there would be no dance. She had died
in her sleep, and lay there on the rug peacefully unaware,
her eyes closed. She didn’t look dead, was barely cold,
but her teeth were clenched: no more biting, eating,
romping, barking, being. She hadn’t seemed sick,
was playful during her very last walk twelve hours ago.
To her it probably wouldn’t matter much, the vacancy
we feel when we return from work or a trip.
I can still see her, though, at the top of the stairs,
beginning that dance, nodding her head, smiling,
humping her back, clicking her nails on the wooden floor.
Miss Saisy
Those Were the Days
for Jack Miles
In the beginning, God talked to himself.
“Let there be light,” he said.
His words were simple, his
sentences declarative.
Let there be this and that,
and it was so.
Finally, he made “mankind,” a pair,
in his own image, male and female.
In those first days, he walked
in the garden in the cool of the day.
Barefooted, in the garden,
on breezy afternoons talking to Eve and Adam.
Those were the days before farming,
before thistles and thorns.
Those were the days before poetry,
and poetry, alas, begins with a curse:
And dust shalt thou eat
all the days of thy life.
And the beat goes on . . .
The grass divides as with a comb.
Random Thoughts
This week, during our summer break, the members of the mighty English Department where I teach have met voluntarily to fine tune our program.
Despite my having to abandon the funky barrier island where I reside and drive twenty minutes to the mainland, it’s really enjoyable to banter and swap stories with friends and colleagues who can pick up on obscure literary allusions.
Part of the fun is that we establish motifs, repeat at apt times absurdities that have come up, and one of the major motifs this week has been an anonymous student’s declaration after reading Walden that he or she “hates nature.” (By the way, we don’t name names – I only know whoever made this absurd statement as “a student”).
Of course, hating nature is hating the complex interconnectedness of atmosphere, water, vegetation, geology, animal life, etc. that has given rise to the consciousness of the nature-hater. It’s sort of like saying I hate ingestion or respiratory systems.
Nevertheless, we know what the student means. She/he doesn’t dig Thoreau, the great outdoors, would rather be inside in an air-conditioned space staring into some sort of screen.
And maybe, this American Lit student learned when reading Stephen Crane and Jack London that nature is absolutely indifferent to him or her.
So, there!
Anyway, yesterday, when riding my bike along Atlantic Avenue, I caught a whiff of a rotting carcass hidden from my view, and a nature-hating muse descended.
Random Thoughts
I detect death’s sour stench,
some small decomposing carcass,
oleander hidden, as I pedal past
into a stiff salty headwind.
Overhead in the same direction,
the broken V of five pelicans
flap – flap – flap – glide – flap,
and the stench is now behind me.
How sweet it would all seem
If Charlie Darwin hadn’t thrown
his monkey wrench into the works.
The pelicans splash like kamikazes.
Walt Whitman’s Boys
It was you that broke the new wood.
Ezra Pound, “A Pact”
Old Ezra said to ditch the metronome
and use the musical phrase instead,
locked doors, keyholes, camisoles, not ideas.
Robert Lowell made it personal.
Mental illness was his muse,
his fingers trembling as the typewriter clacked.
Seamus Heaney brought us down to earth,
his pen scratching old words across the page,
bogs, tors, spades, blackberries, frogs.
But Old Walt Whitman was the daddy of them all,
whirling his words like a hurricane,
snapping trees, flooding streets, derailing trains.
3:24 A.M. Tuesday and Counting
Alas, Lonnie sliding into second in Game 7 of the ’91 Series when he had a clear path home in a 0-0 tie.
Another ditty courtesy of my major muse, Insomnia, who brings us those dark hours when ghosts— in this case Lonnie Smith of the 1991 Atlanta Braves — crawl out of their shallow graves to grieve us.
A coon must be prowling round the water garden,
rattling gravel, or else frogs would be drowning out
the barking of that distant dog.
Sometimes with the windows open
I can hear the ocean, but not tonight —
just the whisper of insistent desperate yipping.
Here come the croaks — that’s better,
the hoarse sturm und drang of their desires
seem to trivialize mine.
When’s the last time I let out
a primal scream? Was it in the ’91 Series when
Lonnie Smith failed to round third and score?
Too bad I can’t slam shut my mind
like the lid of a laptop. Too bad Lonnie got deked.
Too bad that was then and now is now.
Trafficking in Mockery
[Warning: if you are a language purist, you may find the following sentence offensive because it contains toxic levels of tautology, that rhetorical error more commonly known as redundancy, or “needless repetition”.]
Like so many of my fellow left-leaning quasi-communistic bleeding-heart progressive liberal pinkos, I listen to NPR in the mornings on the way to work and in the afternoons on my way home. I teach at an academy where I attempt to indoctrinate the sons and daughters of prominent citizens into post-Enlightenment thinking. In other words, via a survey of British literature, I guide students out of the fog-bound valleys of medieval worldviews. We begin our journey in the dragon-ridden wastes of Beowulf’s Geatland, hike along an upward trail past Canterbury Cathedral, through the killing fields of Macbeth’s Scotland, as we climb Alexander Pope’s metaphoric mountain, reaching three months later the summit of the 20th Century where we can enjoy the far-reaching vistas that history and science afford. It’s a thankless often dangerous, trek, but, by Darwin, damn it, someone needs to do it.
Anyway, listening to NPR is about as sun-splashed and uplifting as the Marianas Trench. Each morning and afternoon familiar voices catalogue the latest beheadings, mass migrant drownings, pandemics, news from Syria, coup d’etats, and/or pronouncements from Ted Cruz; in other words, I get a daily digest of TS Eliot called “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history.”
Bamiyan Buddhas, before and after
I particularly find upsetting when fanatical Islamists (speaking of fog-bound medievalism) destroy the artistic heritage of their civilizations, for example the Taliban’s destruction of 1700 year-old sandstone statues known as the Bamiyan Buddhas in the Hindu Kush Mountains of central Afghanistan or ISIL’s bulldozing an 8th BCE Assyrian gateway in Arslan Tash.
It brings to mind William Butler Yeats’ poem “Nineteen-Hundred and Nineteen,” written during the Irish Civil War. The poem takes a despairing look at the human propensity to destroy what is beautiful. It’s divided into six sections marked by Roman numerals, and the first section is divided into six stanzas of ottava rima.
Here’s the first stanza, eight lines with the rhyme scheme ABABABCC, and in rhyme impoverished English, making those three rhymes sound like straightforward speech is the mark of a master poet.
MANY ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about. There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood —
And gone are Phidias’ famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.
He’s alluding to now lost artistic wonders of the ancient world like Greek sculptor Phidias’ statue of Zeus in Olympia and his statue of Athena that once graced the Parthenon. Yeats was a mystic, so he was apt to believe that the mutability of the moon could affect earthly events. Nothing tricky here: beautiful things disappear in time.
Here’s the second stanza of Section I:
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
He’s suggesting that like the ancients his generation also had noble “things” when they were young, “things” like established, disinterested laws, humane traditions, etc. His calling these noble institutions “toys” suggests indignation at being so naïve back in the day. Optimistic Victorians (though Irish, Yeats was born in 1865 and spent a good bit of time in London) enjoyed decades of peace and prosperity, and optimistic members of that generation thought that progress would continue perpetually. WWI, the Russian Revolution, and the Irish Revolution disabused them of that illusion. Indeed, it seems to this NPR listener that “the worst rogues and rascals” will never die out.
Stanza 3 of Section I is an elaboration of these ideas:
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance.
Note the Biblical allusion to Isaiah’s prophecy in Isaiah 2:4 that swords will be changed into ploughshares in the coming ages of peace. Yeats seems to be saying, even though we didn’t literally change weaponry into agricultural implements, armies were sort of theatrical relics, “showy thing[s]” that had to be hauled out every so often in parades to make sure “drowsy chargers,” i.e., horses, would keep in practice for performances.
However,
Now days are dragon-ridden[1], the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
This stanza needs no interpretation. Its anger is palpable, and I love the lines “The night can sweat with terror as before/We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,” which serve as a great description of the nakedness a tragic figure like Job or Lear suffers when his world view has been brutally stripped from him.
The next stanza, however, is not so transparent:
He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
On master-work of intellect or hand,
No honour leave its mighty monument,
Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
But break upon his ghostly solitude.
I’ll paraphrase: he’s talking about people intellectually astute enough to look at the dead end hopelessness of the human condition without seeking escape through platitudinous bullshit, people who realize that all of civilization one day will be rubble. Despite the difficulty in carving a 55 meter Buddha in the face of a cliff or composing an oeuvre of gorgeous poems, these works will one day disappear. The “one comfort” I guess is that triumph might distract those people from their ghostly solitude, their heroic stoicism in the face of futility.
Section I ends with this stanza:
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say? That country round
None dared admit, if such a thought were his,
Incendiary or bigot could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.
Yep, what we love disappears, and vandals burn and loot and sell artifacts; they “burn” and “break in bits” and traffic in stolen artifacts.
The poem seethes with anger in a mocking tone that turns on itself. Here’s the killer 5th section:
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked — and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
Yipes!
Yeatsian gyre
A problem with Yeats — perhaps I should say the problem with Yeats — was that he had crazy ideas, ideas like history transpires in circular motions like an electric current running up the coils of an outstretched Slinky. He thought that the 20th Century had whirled us into a new age of barbarism, and, of course, the 20th Century sucked, and the 21st continues to suck. In another, better poem of his, “The Second Coming” he wrote, “The best lack all conviction/While the worst are full of passionate intensity, “ which rather aptly describes the characters featured on Morning Edition and All Things Considered – conviction-less Hillary and Jeb on the one hand and passionately intense Osama Ben Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdad on the other, two bigots who certainly didn’t make it very far up science’s summit.
Better, I suspect, to turn off the damn radio, roll down the window, and let the wind blow back your hair – that is, if you have hair.
[1] Interesting, when I used “dragon-ridden” to describe Beowulf’s Geatland, I had forgotten the term appears in Yeats’s poem. O beware of plagiarism, O seeker of academic aid. Cite your sources. Orwellian search engines lie in wait.
You Do Hoodoo 