Tennis, Anyone?

Never been much for tennis. I admire the skill and stamina of the major players, and watch matches on television once in a great while, but my own few attempts at learning the game were painfully ludicrous. I was and am more fascinated by the language associated: love, ace, fault, etc., not to forget game/set/match. (Those last words figure in the titles of Len Deighton's best trilogy of spy thrillers, by the way.)

And I did actually get to Wimbledon one year for the familiar late-June/early-July matches, as this brief excerpt from my 1986 travel journal attests:

July 4

Happy Birthday, Miss Liberty. My London fourth was considerably more subdued than the party going on back in New York (per clips shown on the BBC Late News). I read, started a new light poem in my present euphoric mood, and then went with some friendly collegiate hostellers ("Shall we invite the old fart along?" "Sure, why not...") out to Wimbledon, which lies just a few Underground stops southwest of Kensington.

For three pounds I got to watch Martina Navratilova and Pam Shriver take on two young Brit upstarts who pushed them hard for a time, then knuckled under, 6-3, 6-4. And it was great fun to sit out in the sunshine with the tennis set, stroll among fancy tents and snooty socialites, savor the tha-wock, tha-wock of balls and the genteel greenery of Wimbledon.

But afterwards I was wishing I'd had some firecrackers to drop in amongst 'em all, a bit of Revolutionary rude-boy behaviour to rattle that stiff-upper-lip composure!

******
So: a journal entry as brief as my interest in tennis. But some years later, I did manage to find a way to express some possibly amusing thoughts, partly stemming from Robert Frost's famous remark (said of William Carlos Williams, maybe), "Writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net":

Poets Playing Tennis
(Frost vs. Roethke, Kenney vs. Kinnell)

The game requires a minimum of racket,
especially if one is tightly strung.
Play will be serious, yet play—
and as offhand as life.
Judgment of the court is all.

(As this twosome shows, however,
it is not always clear to what
or whom a player’s
service has been directed.)
The Linesperson does allow a certain latitude.

In fact, many of the best shots fall
beyond the line, revealing
a mastery of the graceful backhand
compliment. And a well-matched volley—
that sweet-spot mix of smash

and return, of ace and silence—
may come to seem some dazzling juggler’s
arc of many balls aloft at once.
After a time, you may distinguish styles.
One, inclined to rush

the net with a whelming yet elegant flurry,
always risks ending
tangled in waffling imagery and stretched circumlocution.
The other tends to lay back
along the baseline, taking the defensive;

still, that one sometimes can be caught flat-
footed, leaning the wrong way.
They play from love
to momentary advantage,
with neither ever managing to gain

control of this deuce of a game;
again and again the sense of it returns
to love and service. In the end, a foot
slips, or a trope; and the result?
A standard entry in the annals of the sport.

Whichever of them leaps the net
lands in territory both have known before
and will again. Theirs is the game
you are not set to match,
you novice of the

line, with your weak-
kneed lobs and stumbling
feet, insensitive
to a fault.

Birds of a Feather?

The two most important poets writing in English during the last quarter of the 20th Century--distinctive, innovative, acclaimed, influential--were Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. I came to revere the careful wit and rigorous thought of Heaney, and the sheer pleasure of his language (not for nothing was one book of his prose titled The Government of the Tongue), but originally I was quite taken with Hughes' early poems, back when he was married to then-still-living Sylvia Plath, and long before he lost the thrust of his work and settled for Poet Laureate honors instead. The Hughes of those first books (Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal) seemed to have immersed himself completely in Nature and to have attained pure dumb animal thought--owls and crows, jaguars and foxes, pike and trout, creatures great and small indeed.

One of my forever-favorite poems is his "Hawk Roosting," which begins "I sit in the top of the woods, my eyes closed..." and ends thus: "I am going to keep things like this." That is one never-to-be-forgotten, egomaniacal bird (like Hughes himself!)--and I thought of him while travelling Down Under back in 1986. Oddly moved by the duck-billed platypus shown at the Sydney Zoo, I read what I could conveniently find on that unique creature of living pre-history, and then cobbled together this on-the-road portrait, a recognition of Nature's bizarre sense of humor (the poem also a distant homage to Hughes' surly hawk). By the way, it's hard to make out, but the color illustration above shows creation of platypus--mammal, then duck, and then down below, a couple of platypi emerging:

Platypus

I am mocked: leathery bill of a duck
I root with, my flat snout
nuzzling the stream bottoms, shoveling worms
out, gobbling yabbies up from stones and ooze.
Fifteen million years you laugh at—my otter’s fur,
wet, and webbed feet. I live a sleek, watery secret
you would do better not to discover,
with poison spurs on my hind legs, and claws
as needed, aft and fore. Oh, I am other
than you dream of, you with your nippled love
and blood-birthed womb. My young come
from egg, and then seek mother’s milk—
and a hard suckle they have of it with no teat
to grapple. Eons of amphibious battle,
and I am here; with elegant flair
species arrive, then go; I munch larvae
and close my ears to the cries of you brief intruders.
I am monotreme: of beast and bird the sum.
So the meal chews bitter, this life; is yours better--
eggless, dry? I outlive and am free.
Yes, call me Platypus; the name suits. But of us
which is the stranger? whose world more meagre?
I survive my each plunge. Why change?

Things Are Looking Up

Humans are always looking up--to the Heavens, to constellations and particular stars, to mountains in the distance, to birds and leaves overhead, to the roof and even the ceiling, to sports figures and silly celebrities, to fast-talking politicos, and, of course, to a hoped-for future.

Here are two poems of mine about looking up from inside (and please note that the first, lacking a final dot-period, ends as intended; it's not a typo):

Rafters

I was thinking of rafters, of being
up in the rafters: a summer cabin,
crumbling wasps’ nests, cobwebs
misplaced with dust. A boy climbs
and becomes the inheritor of these.
Beams come together at certain angles,
and join, like the bones of the sky’s foot;
nerves and muscles ease, and he fulfills
flesh with his silence and his joy.

He is high. From his ribbed haven
he lords it over all gravity’s playthings,
exulting in his horde of small pleasures:
the planed feel of fir, knotholes
slipping through other worlds, the archeology
of dry husks, the reinvention of listening--
Stella Dallas’s torments diminished,
Green Hornet’s cousins mutable,
Jack Armstrong, All-American boy…

himself aloft. He waves his arms
and the NBC Symphony swells,
buoying the rafters, sounding
and resounding in the fiber
of sullen air. Broken wings
of wasps are made whole,
spider’s silk releases, the heel
of earth lifts. Transported
he flies, he cannot fall,

he is as he dreams in the music
of first memories where
dreaming is flying and falling
is flying and rafters are
flying and I am still



******

The Dormer

Rising from sleep’s undersea,
decompressing in gradations, I
see liquidly: the perfect shadows come,
hold for a moment,
then melt… or break and run.
Wrapped in the same flowing stillness but
attenuated by daily circumstance,
last night at the edge of sleep we
found each other’s heat in supine flesh,
stirring just long enough to meld
greater than we are apart.

Now from this nest of sheets and haunches
I see new wings, fleet limbs
flickering on the dormer ceiling,
spirits recreating us in light and shadow:
the cars that flutter past outside
bounce over pitted concrete, braking
for the downturn, scattering
their two-tone, heads-and-tails illumination
across the darkened pale of
walls that are not walls
to our slant, unceilinged selves.

Beyond this life,
splotches of evergreens sharpen and shift
in the brightness thrown by cars ascending;
then, bathed in red, they drift
and fall away, as we do
when we are not ourselves,
convected by each day’s disappointments.
I see the stress and hurry,
the spectres of cash and loss,
take up the trees and rush them away;

and I would become
some changing angel of the rooftops,
enveloped in loving possibilities--
who dances at his moment, then
vanishes in ambient light,
overwhelmed by morning.

This Gift Reversed

Now that I'm a wise old...er man of 65, all this looking back almost begins to make sense. One does need to take stock now and then, and writing an autobiography slightly disguised as a pop culture blog seems a more palatable (and possible) solution for my somewhat short attention span.

I do much prefer making new discoveries, hearing new music, reading new books, visiting new (as well as much-missed) places foreign and domestic. I've just returned from a whirlwind visit to Vancouver, Canada, occasioned by the amazing invitation of my pal, animator Marv Newland (introduced in blog chapter Newland of Animation, dated 8/20/07), to come use his spare ticket to experience sax giant Ornette Coleman--who in the event did so much more than simply blow Free Jazz. His three-bass band was crisp and tight, and funky when necessary, leaving the quintet's frail but phenomenal frontman to blow his heart out, from a Bach visitation to wild new stuff to the beautiful encore of Lonely Woman!

Anyway, the past is always with us, late and soon, getting and spending, sometimes allowing us to lay waste to our very future, whether personal or species wide. And here's one view of what's past...

In His Dream


He is me, yet he can watch me act.

Things move backward, but matter-of-fact:
Older, then younger, he un-ages;

His marriage removes its bandages,
Revealing faces lovelier once.

He gives away accumulations;
The less he has, the more he is him-

Self, the man he dreams I was in time.
He turns the book’s pages left to right,

But this gift, reversed, of second sight
Leads him briefly into misery,

Discovering his story, when re-
Viewed, as choices made in ignorance,

Lived on the pulses, lacking science.
Yet he is happier, freed of “I,”

All that case-hardened identity—
Circumscribed possibilities reeled

Back up the line, present loss re-called.
Younger than this now, he lives his days

Forgetting who he finally is.

A Local Habitation

"A picture is worth a thousand words"; a typical cliche with much truth beneath the gloss. As one who has made his living as a writer, I have to agree that the attempt to describe something accurately--rather than partially evoking it, let's say--is a tricky business; what empirical details are needed? can the words actually match the image? how much needs to be said (written, that is)? a thousand words, really?

What I have always valued is the idea that "less is more," fewer but right words, and one's individual imagination, believing that our internal images are stronger than the actual visualization. I cherish the listening experience, for example, be that music, information on the radio, or people conversing, whether to me or to someone else--eavesdropping, yes. Yet I do love movies, and seeing the world, and a beautiful face or body. (This blog is called "I Witness" for a reason. It's not only eyes doing the witnessing.)

And so we come back to pictures, whether great art or simple snapshot photography. From early master Jacques Henri Lartigue to Life Magazine's David Douglas Duncan, from the many W.P.A. photogs to, yes, Ansel Adams and Diane Arbus, from Robert Capa to Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz and scores more, I have found pleasure and fascination in, mostly, black-and-white photography.

Yet I am a word man. Only rarely do I ever place my own hand on a camera, depending instead on powers of observation and memory and description to do the job. During that 19-month trip around the world, for example, I took no camera, vowing instead to recount the experiences in a journal and poems instead. Well, you win some, you lose some, and some get rained out... as another cliche puts it. Much of the journal bogs down in insignificant details, not to mention the occasional banalities. And the poems? Well, just be glad I'm posting--slowly, please note--only a dozen or so drawn from those two years of travel.

Like most poets, a verbal test I have enjoyed occasionally is the attempt to render some striking painting or photograph in words. English poet Charles Tomlinson is one master at that (he was a painter as well), and W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Bishop were others who succeeded. This posting today presents a pair of my own attempts linked to favorite photos by Kertesz (begging the question slightly, I am showing his photos too).

Kertesz loved unexpected perceptions: architectural details, patterns found, people in odd moments, often viewed from skewed angles (from a hotal room looking out and down was a favorite). His photos are art; my poems are mere pastiche, but possibly amusing. See how many of my words it takes to "give to airy nothing/ A local habitation and a name..."

Kertesz: Two Photos

I. “Disappearing Act”

See where the partial man ascends to nowhere,
Bare legs and baggy shorts cut off in mid-air
By massive beams, broad horizontal stripes.
Vertical bar-like wires, supporting steps
Dangling in space, enclose him in a prison,
Sentenced to higher climbs. Whatever season
He’s risen in, the background verge shows scrub
And sand, tideland and piers beyond, a drab
Seaside community in haze; he could be
In Queensland, the Camargue, or close to Kitty
Hawk. That it’s “New York, 1955”
Seems apt, a site no harder to believe
Than this image magique, with printed contrast
So bright the air and house above are one vast
Field of off-white, with lines precisely squared:
Magritte reworked by Mondrian. But where
His head should be, a block of mirror, window,
Or trick exposure renders man a Hindu
Fakir vanishing up his rope of stairs
To graphic truth: in time, one disappears.


II. “Rainy Day”

“Tokyo, 1968”: umbrellas,
from above, across
a gray curve of street as mirror-dull as
a river embossed
by flooding; twelve well-suited businessmen
on parade, in rain,
herded, hurrying, reflecting but un-
thinking--a dozen
open brollies obviously no more
au courant than one,
here in the land of the rising water.
Oblivious, thus,
to the yen for P.T. Barnum’s patter,
these damp gentlemen
yet follow a bright-painted, quite non-Zen-
sical white arrow:
“This way to, not Progress, but the Egress.”

The Nights Escape Without Us

When I started this blog, it was really aimed at telling my life story a bit at a time, because I knew I was too lazy to write some sort of autobiography. I've witnessed a lot of major scenes and moments in almost 65 years, still have more tales to tell, and hope to see and hear lots more wonders before me and this thing are done!

One aspect that readers (there must be one or two of you) will have noticed is my shameless posting of the best poems I've written over the years, many of them published individually but no book ever compiled--Ed's Greatest Non-Hits, I guess. Today I present another grouping, several short, sort-of love poems joined together in one longer, multi-part suite I call...


Language of Night

I. Defining Evening

Evening comes down, and in, conjugating day
and night, separating the halves, the light left over
from the dark arriving, the planet turning away
as twilight--dual light--evens out, like lovers
meeting each other half-way, touching lips, then limbs,
clasping their opposites close in purples of descent,
shedding the light clothes of summer, easing them-
selves down, wondering where the close of day went
but not caring much now they are wearing night,
the black of the easy deaths of sex and sleep
put on as hours are, the blank in day’s despite
impossible to fill before morning keeps
its appointment in tomorrow as today,
and evening becomes a memory on the way.

II. Afterhours

Riffs of fire
split the molten skies,
pulsing through layers,
running the changes,
charring to black.

Night’s new arrangements
cool and slowly
harden. Streetlights come on
to anyone. Now
the moon blows sax,

a Pres-redential solo
floating butter-cream
over the grays: cat
can play. Lady whispers
her dream chorus—

sixteen bars of gone
reds, bone whites,
silent black-and-blue
notes. We are jazzed,
every one of us.

III. The Sending

Rise up, elusive woman,
on the limbs of my absence;
walk through the city
clothed in the shadow of my longing;
sleep each night
adrift on the dark waters of my desire…
while I lie here,
a thousand likelihoods from you,
with the scent of your shoulders
dreaming in my veins
and the pale dust of your nipples
weighing my eyelids down,
teasing my lips into speech.

IV. A Matter of Silence

The silences of the night go deep,
and deeper still, extending
to become ecstasies of the ordinary:
a whispering high up in the sycamore,
the bone-marrow buzz in the wiring,
the sibilant hairs along your mound
lifting one by one as they dry.
There are fricatives and plosives
pent-up in these minutes that I
dare not release before dawn;
the world’s geologic history retold
night after night in a dusty glass;
randy molecules of carbon and oxygen
jostling each other for space
with each whirled breath you take.
I believe in walls, in words,
in momentary lapses of memory.
Otherwise, how could I never
break down the barriers between us,
open myself to your nightly absence,
hold your heart in my deepening silence?
This is my plan so far:
I will lie here awake
for two days and most of three nights,
and then live again in your dreams.

V. In Sleep

We turn and circulate
through the regions of the dark.
All the faces we always wear
rise up as reclaimants,
surrounding this fragrant space
rich with wishes. Something tender
whispers in your breath: Open now.
Put on tomorrow, that you
waken clothed in plenitude.
Skin to skin, calf to hand,
we congregate after separation,
we wade through dawnlight
to the other side of language.
You bend me, I sleep you,
the nights escape without us.

VI. The Bends

She had gone deep,
fallen to grace
currents of sleep,
to drift in place

and dream among
fronds of desire,
nitrogen sung
in the blood’s fire,

the undertow
of ocean night.
Surfacing slow,
she bubbles light…

rises through floor
and silver sheets
to sprawl ashore,
her spaced heartbeats

declaring dawn:
the dark swim ends,
ecstasy gone
as sleep unbends.

Henry Reed in Seattle (Part 1)

English Poet Henry Reed (1914-1986) was my mentor for a time and, in the early years anyway, godfather to my daughter Krista. Here's how those unlikely connections came about...

Major American poet and difficult man Theodore (Ted) Roethke was the key figure in the creative writing wing of the University of Washington's English Department. He had been poet-in-residence for many years, with "younger" poets as diverse as Richard Hugo and James Wright, David Wagoner and Nelson and Beth Bentley, as his students and then colleagues. I had started college at Northwestern University, but the costs proved prohibitive, so I transferred to the U.W., in part hoping to study with Roethke if accepted.

In the spring of my junior year 1963, I accosted the big bear of a man in the halls one day, saying I hoped to take his class in writing. He growled a response of sorts, "See me Fall," and lumbered off. That seasonal reference became an ironic pun when Roethke died in his swimming pool over the summer, but from a stopped heart (I think) rather than from drowning.

The English Department suddenly had to scramble to fill some very large shoes. Over the next couple of years, guest poets came to teach for a quarter or a year, or simply to read/lecture briefly--we were treated to John Logan, Robert Lowell, Vernon Watkins, Elizabeth Bishop... and Henry Reed. (Already on campus, David Wagoner and Carolyn Kizer quickly assumed more important roles in the Department as well.) I was a full-fledged English major by then, and a smalltime fledgling poet, so I took courses from some of them as I moved on into the Master's Degree program. (I was a Teaching Assistant and also became the Assistant Editor, meaning submissions reader, to headperson Carolyn Kizer at the well-known U.W.-sponsored literary magazine Poetry Northwest.)

Memory says, for example, that I studied with Logan, took tea with Bishop, and became T.A. to Reed. We hit it off immediately--he the cultured English gentleman with slightly fey manner (I guess he was gay as we would say now, but I believe he was also more Capote-asexual than active), and me a married grad student with one son already and a second child on the way. I helped Henry in a couple of his teaching assignments, and he immediately became part of our family; we'd have him to dinner on the rare occasion, and he would regularly entertain my wife and me in fine restaurants around Seattle, always searching for the best (but affordable) wines on the menu. I remember him routinely asking for Puligny Montrachet and then settling for Pouilly Fuisse, back in the days when neither was commonly found in the Northwest (our honored vineyards and winemakers were still some years away).

Reed was a man of letters in the old patrician manner; he wrote poems, essays and reviews, and BBC radio plays, and translated many other stage plays, from mostly Italian authors. He had become literarily famous for two things. One was his poem called "Chard Whitlow," which was a spot-on parody of the T.S. Eliot of Four Quartets fame. Many amusing quotable lines occur in Reed's poem, but I recall most (too often these days) his Eliotic mantra, "As we get older, we do not get any younger..."

But really Henry was best known for a single poem, plus the sequels or partner poems that accompanied it later: "Naming of Parts" from his sequence titled Lessons of the War. In this poem, a daydreaming WWII recruit half listens to his sergeant discuss the pieces of a disassembled rifle, conflating the military words into images of the Spring season outside, which slyly become more sexual as the poem progresses:

... And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got...

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring...

"Naming of Parts" quickly became known as THE single most important poem written by a WWII soldier, as Reed was briefly. The First War had produced many poets and great poems, but the Second seemed not to lead to poetry. However, Reed's success did soon lead to subsequent, er, parts titled "Judging Distances," "Movement of Bodies," "Unarmed Combat," and--much later--"Psychological Warfare" (not as painstakingly wrought as the others) and "Returning of Issue." These were fine and sometimes funny, but none was as astonishing as the original poem.

At any rate, Reed became a regular at the BBC, writing wonderful comic plays to be broadcast over the radio, and that's how he made most of his steady income, until called to Seattle to teach recalcitrant American kids how to create poetry.

((The rest of the story to come in a few days in my next blog chapter.))

Love's Old Sweet Song

Speaking of failed first marriages and much happier second ones--as I sort of was last time around--reminds me that I've been waiting for a "right" moment to post my Hegelian trio of marriage poems, built around one ending and another starting. So why not today? Think of these as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; as the song says, Love is friendlier the second time around...


My Vasectomy Comes of Age


Lengthy marriages acquire an Oriental cast:
Each that isn’t Mao’s Long March,
A triumph of revolutionary principles,
Becomes instead the walk across Bataan,
With every decent impulse abandoned or dead.
I left all sperm somewhere along that road—
Marriage itself later—dying
To do my part for the regiment of populations.

On hospital TV sets, the vid of my X-
Rated operation proved a hit, the first “how to”
In ball-shaving and vas-snipping.
Blessed with worryless sex ever since,
A model citizen of that threatened state, I’ve yet
Fumbled through seventy-seven hundred nights of dread…
At worst, unmanned; at best, more vague and less
Ambitious. Or was that “the vasectomy in the skull”?

Whenever my testicles ache now, I wonder
What mutant elements coil there,
Waiting. Whoever persuaded me
That two children could be enough
Was never a father. Year after year I absorb
My own unborn, the hairs on my head grow
Scarcer, each new poem swims in grief,
Going nowhere fast.

What scrutably comes of age is this despair.


*******
In Defense of Flat Chocolate Wedding Cakes


Any time, love is a nervous condition.

On the sunwheel plaza high up each
pyramid of the Valley of the Sun,
Aztec priests got right to the heart
of the matter: the Cakes of Heaven
are seldom a body’s bread.

Nor should the hopeful couple approve
some half-baked cylinder shaped
like Chichen Itza’s Well of Maiden Sacrifice.
(Not that far removed, politically speaking.)
Imagine the usual sugary concoction,

small man atop clearly in reduced circumstances,

and the tiny woman, had she but tongue
to vent her anguish, shrieking like the Sidhe.
Neither would choose to live in such
a triple-tiered suite of dubious taste…
Let other weddings take the cake for show

biz. Our “I do’s” will not be
symbolically or otherwise consumed
at the Drive-in Chapel of Confectioners’ Dreams.
Marriage can be short and dark and give
you several raspberries. Chew on this

to remember our cock-eyed optimism.


*******
Prime Numbers


As one into two goes two,

You into me into you
Makes two ones joined together,

Equivalent forever:

A number greater than one
That yet transcends two alone.

Subtract either one of us,

The sum is the same, but less,
No better than a fraction,

One requiring correction.

Still, when rightly multiplied,
One times one won’t be denied.

Divide us by space or time,

Our total will remain prime
No matter where we two are,

Our unity rooted square.

Whether counted one or two—
You/me paired, or me-plus-you—

When the math of love is done,

Two into two exceeds none;
One over one becomes one.

John Keats Solo

Back in the late Eighties when I was struggling to become a playwright, one good idea I had and worked on for a time was a one-man show based on the writings of Romantic poet John Keats, surely one of the greatest of all those to have written in English, and a tragic figure as well for his having died so young.

Selecting chunks of poems and whole brief ones, and interspersing these with excerpts from his letters and journals, I attempted to shape a largely chronological telling of his life and works for my on-stage Keats to recite. The arc of that assemblage actually seemed fairly sound, just too long. All I had to do was cut and paste a bit more, edit the material intelligently, and...

But then, for no reason but lethargy, I abandoned the project at that mid point...

Digging in a box recently, I came across all the notecards and paste-up pieces, still rubber-banded together in numerical order. Maybe thinking and writing even this brief mention will inspire me yet to complete a Keats one-man show.

In the meantime, I want to present the decent poem I wrote after reading about him and trying to think a bit like him. The title and epigraph should explain all, except that the scene of the actual historical reference was Edinburgh--which may be of interest to those who love Scotland and that great city. (Never a Rebus around when you need one!)

Resurrection Man

“The subjects were stolen from nearby graveyards,
doubled up stark naked in sacks, and smuggled in at
the dead of night by body snatchers—‘resurrection
men,’ as they were called…”
--Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet

I hoist one up, bend him over double,
Stuff him in the sack, in his skin.
I always leave the clothes down the hole—
I’m no grave robber—though some women
Get to be a bother stripped stark
Like that, lank hair full dangling,
Short curls a thicket in the dark…
But I choose not to get entangled.

They pay me four quid each body
And ask no questions. Nor do I,
What they do after. Cut the loins apart,
Peel back the sullied flesh—hell,
Let all of life’s putrefaction out.
Dead’s dead. The animate’s gone; the soul,
Whatever that is, leaked out, escaped;
And burial, the placebo of fools.

Better these grubs of Med-men
Get what’s left than the maggots below.
I can even bear the merry japes:
“Hi-ho, the Resurrection Man!”;
“Here’s another one risen, then”;
“A grave truth, friend Horatio”;
“Found your ghoul in life, have you?”
Let them scoff. Oh, I know them well:

Whistling past the graveyard, that's all.
Sod them; they’ll be under it soon enough,
And some other digger in their turf.
I am content to body-snatch, in sum.
Still, it’s working the nights, sleeping
In the daylight, gives me this dream…
The tumult has died, and the tumulus
Waits unguarded. I bend to it alone.

Lord’s luck, but the stone rolls hard!
And inside, a-shimmer in the blackness,
Blood dried brown and wounds gaping,
Lies this man, the corpus of us all;
But only dead, bound to the dust.
I lift him up, strip off the blooded shroud--
So light; how could he bear the weight
They pressed on him--and stuff him in.

Hoisting the body up on my back, then,
Swaddled in its corpse-snatcher sack,
I stagger out from that cave of night
And carry him forth to the harsh light
Of the world’s theater of dissection…
The rest I’m blind to. Full sweat-sore
I waken drenched, unable to forswear
The mystery, for man’s or God’s sake.

Telephone Woes

(Ironic note first. This posting was delayed for days by my fershluginer computer which kept sending error messages and shutting me down every time I tried to use the damned Internet for anything! Now, please, read on.)

During that recent whirlwind trip to England, I tried to call back to the States on several occasions, but had trouble connecting--a hidden flaw in our cell-phone, caller-i.d. society.

The nine-hour time differential was awkward enough, but not the root problem. First off, the so-called international phone card I'd purchased didn't work for some unknown reason. Next, all my attempts at calling collect were shortcircuited by cell-phone rejections and answering-machine messages that were (of course) unable to accept calls. Moreover, my grudging follow-up calls attempting to pay by credit card all fetched up against a different frustration--connections that were going through but only to answering machines rather than actual persons!

Would I have been better off using some cell I'd carried across the Atlantic? Advance costs quoted for those seemed exorbitant to my (Luddite) thinking, so I ignored the idea, but as it was, I still wound up paying outrageous amounts (partly due to the painful dollars-to-pounds exchange rate, it's true) for poor results with almost no aural satisfaction.

The whole experience made me wish for the bad old days of recipient phones that simply were answered or not, and phone booths that commonly could be found inside post offices around the world--where you could pay by stacks of coins that were actually returned to you if the calls didn't go through.

Maybe if I'd persevered at a callbox... But just as the number of U.S. phone booths is dwindling, England's fine old red callboxes are also disappearing, albeit more slowly. They are still a thing of almost architectural beauty seen from without, but the insides suffer all sorts of abuse. What is it about phone booths that brings out the worst in people?

Well, donkey's years ago, back when Margaret Thatcher ruled Britannia's waves, I wrote my own fractured ode to a callbox, and here it is, still pertinent in 2007:

Man in the Glass Booth

I close the door
abandoning, for the moment, lorries’ roar,
thick skin-
head posturing, and nearby takeaway den
din. In here, I
can almost hear my
self think.
Not that it does,
much. Britannia’s
on the brink
as usual—or so the tabloids say.
Moi aussi…

but soldiering on, of course,
both of us;
old news. Having carried
no news from Aix to Ghent,
I now curry
none in London. Nothing fit to print,
anyway: a sign
of the Times. As if by design,
among the invitations to leather
or massage, and the cruder
callbox-Byrons’ rhymes, I see
“For a good time, don’t call Maggie…

back.” Small chance of that;
the phone’s been rendered hors de combat.
What’s more, someone’s
put the boot in through two panes,
had a spo’ o’ bovver wiv a yellowed parchment
directory, and taken
greater pains
to scratch out all dialing instructions.
Even the cord has the mange.
Slightly squiffed, like Clark Kent
I have come in
to change…

my luck, if not my shirt.
Quite absurd,
really. The grimed glass displays
some misplaced Man of Clay,
out of pence
and pluck, who couldn’t
stay in touch
with anyone tonight. I’ll just reach
out and douse
the callbox light, and drowse
a while in
silence.

Spies and Ghosts

Two novels read lately (coupled with a viewing the other night of the movie Breach) have revived my always-lurking fascination for the Spy Novel, whether set in the Nazi era, the Cold War, or post-collapse Russia, where the spies have become entrepreneurs, even heads of state!

Ladies and Le Carre fans, I give you Christopher's Ghosts by America's master of espionage fiction, Charles McCarry--plus Martin Cruz Smith's latest brilliant novel, called Stalin's Ghost (what's with all this ectoplasm?), which has no spies but rather post-Soviet death squads and soldiers turned politicians; the madness of Chechnya and the near-madness of chess.

McCarry wrote two of the greatest spy novels ever, The Tears of Autumn (regarding Vietnamese involvement in Kennedy's assassination) and The Last Supper, both featuring (as do most of his books) an agent named Paul Christopher, sometimes present and sometimes absent, but even then still haunting the actions of others. Two other early books, The Miernek Dossier and The Secret Lovers (the title a brilliant pun), center on Christopher too; and these original four together form a kind of Alexandria Quartet, with The Last Supper serving to tell you what was really going on in those earlier books you thought you had figured out!

Christopher's Ghosts, going back in time to the late Thirties and then ahead to the Fifties to tell more of the convoluted history of Paul, is sad and beautifully written, but somehow--I think--not as complex or involving as the others, even though it forces the confirmed fan (and I qualify!) to reexamine yet again some of what he thought he knew. That's McCarry... always another layer of onion to strip away.

And speaking of onion-dome Orthodoxy, Smith's list of great Renko novels, starting with Gorky Park and reaching a moody and frightening climax (or so we mesmerized readers thought) in last year's amazing post-Chernobyl story called Wolves Eat Dogs, now must make room for Stalin's Ghost. Stubborn-as-ever Renko, who seems more droll with each passing year, gets cuckolded, choked, and shot in the head, and that's just in the first half! But this aging investigator is no master spy, no supercop immune to pain; he suffers and bleeds and needs time to recuperate, yet still drags himself back into the fray, confronting various "ghosts"--of Stalin, his father, and the Chechen dead.

I think I won't reveal any more, but rather just say: Buy it, read it, check out Smith's other novels as well as those of McCarry. (And I include the third Renko novel, Red Square, omitted from his current list of published works for some unknown reason.) If you can read The Tears of Autumn or Wolves Eat Dogs without feeling haunted or short of breath, without aching deeply for the central figures, you're a better man than I, Gunga Deighton.

Given that one of the recurring themes in Smith's and McCarry's novels is the pain of love, the tragic consequences of caring for others, I think I will end this with a somewhat relevant poem, written back in the time of Gorbachev, when my first marriage was coming to an end...


Glasnost, Lesser Spirits

The thaw has breached us.
And now in our icebound Baltics
a certain freedom of movement strikes

the alders, as flights of rhetorical starlings
pursue their social revolutions.
Snow that lay like linen

now flows in rivulets
down the steps and sidewalks,
and dissident speech of crows marks

preparations for the May Day coming.
In all the withered-away reaches of the state,
suddenly green

young workers arise,
throwing off the chains of mothering earth.
It is Progress of Spring all over

again, the break-up of a long, hard
chill, after the Fall
and rime of years. In this

spirit of no love and understanding,
we brush aside the dust of bitterness,
shed our heavy coats, and walk

carefully, negotiating each
step, taking the sun…
apart.

The Colonel

My father died a few years back, but he lived long enough to celebrate over 60 years married to the same woman. If Marge and Ed Sr. were still around, today would be their 66th anniversary. First, D-Day the 6th of June, then A-Day the 7th--made it easy to remember the date every year!

Since next weekend is Father's Day as well, I decided to consider Dad in this slice o' blog.

Born in 1917, he was third in the string of four boys of a well-to-do family residing in Joliet, Illinois. But the Stock Market Crash and Depression wiped out the family money, so my father and his brothers (one of them nicknamed "Cheese," mostly because Leimbacher sounds something like Limburger!) went to college and/or work early; no playboy life for those guys.

In fact, I think my father quit college slightly early to work as a shoes/clothing salesman. He joined the Army Air Corps in '40 when war started looking more likely, and then completed his degree after WWII courtesy of the GI Bill. (If these factoids are wrong, no doubt one of my sisters will set me straight.) He was a flight instructor throughout the war years, and even served as a "poster boy" of sorts for the work of the Air Corps (see photo).

Anyway, he started a water-softening business in the later Forties in upstate New York, then got called back to service when the Korean War began. His hapless partner drove the business into the ground (so to speak), so Dad decided to make the Air Force his career thereafter. But he was no driven Cold Warrior. Serious, hard-working, yes, pilot enough to keep his flight pay, yet more an administrator and manager, Dad still rose steadily and became a Lieutenant Colonel.

We dependent brats took to calling him "The Colonel," but really that was because Mom and he taught us three to think and be in-dependent; and by the time of high school and college, social issues like Civil Rights and Vietnam and the Feminist Movement all created a widening rift between elders and upstarts that made the "parii" (another nickname) wonder if they had created three young Frankenstein's monsters.

But we all survived those angry years, and Mom and Dad were able to call on us as their years advanced and health declined--my sisters especially rallied 'round. I carried some residual resentment from the stuff said back and forth in the Sixties and Seventies, but I guess things were okay by the time they died.

Some years ago, I tried to address the differences in a poem meant also to be a tribute to Dad...

Your Shirt

I wear it sometimes.
Recruited by seams
and sharp creases,
military press,
rapt in epaulettes
and flap pockets,
I briefly become
another: someone
larger, uniform;
I’m armored warm.
Midnight-blue wool
might not be cool,
but the USAF cut
doesn’t chafe… much.

Touched, I salute
the brass we accrued
as service brats:
h.q. where your hat
and hash-marks hung;
no one place for long.
Which meant I grew up
all over the map...
intellectually.
You expected me
to act sans orders.

In off-base quarters
the soldiers’ old saw
("No Asian land-war")
brazenly became
"Reclaim Vietnam
for US." I balked.
Then father-son talk
burned down a decade
of sniping and Red-
baiting... Long ago,

that war. I’m blue
at 55 now,
while you’ve turned slow,
receding, 80.
Peace, separately
made, suffices—
the past, I guess, as
shucked off as your gear
I sometimes wear:
the survival boots
that counsel how to;
the warm-up jacket,
requisitioned, that
helps me play ball.

I’m your son… still
cadging cast-offs,
unwarranted gifts,
the blessings of your
heart’s blue yonder.
Shrunken over all,
you might not fill
the shirt these days.
I try to, always.

Irish Times

I'm midway in an excellent debut novel, a more-than-mystery titled In the Woods by Tana French, set in the environs of Dublin and concerning a detective who was himself the victim of, maybe, kidnapping or, maybe, abuse as a child (he has amnesia about the events and only his partner knows of his troubled history), forced by the murder of a young girl to revisit the scene of... whatever happened back then. Very atmospheric and elegantly written.

And it has caused me to think of the Green Isle, the Four Green Fields, Galway Bay, peat fires, bog people... But who am I kidding? I've never been to Ireland, or Eire-plus-the-North. I've lived overseas, traveled around the world, been to Europe several times, but no Ireland. Ridiculous.

As a perennial reader and sometime writer, I cherish the Irish: Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney, and many others (maybe even Tana French henceforward). And I've loved Irish music since i was a wee lad, from the Clancy Brothers to Moving Hearts, from Van Morrison to U2. Heck, if I drank beer, I'm sure I'd be a Guinness regular...

Should have gotten there while the island was still an economic backwater, the still-lamented homeland for so many emigrated Americans. Now it's become The Celtic Tiger, most jobs-prosperous nation in Europe. And now even the Northern combatants, Orange and Green alike, are swearing to work together for peace. (Makes you wonder if there's maybe still some tiny hope for the Middle East.)

Ah well. Cultural references aside, what I have done in my stumbling fashion is write a few poems with a struggling Irish lilt to them. Here are the best two (and reading them on the "page" means you don't have to hear me mangle the accent); the first came from discovering the quotation from Flaubert--I have no idea why my imagination then went straight to the land of
Joyce--and the second was my attempt to pull a fast one:


Bear Language

"Language is like a cracked kettle on which we
beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all
the time we long to move the stars to pity."
--Gustave Flaubert

I beat the cracked kettle
with a single stick of hazel
and listen as the thick syllables
run together. The chain pulls
this way and that, rattles
its own countermeasure, and hauls
me up tall, tipsy-toed to reel
Old Blarney in, drool and all.
Oh, he’s a handful,
he is: brown fur matted wet, male
razzle slapping his time, the usual
twinkle of trouble
in his one good eye. Bears

‘ll dance for you, and stand still,
shuffle and stall and sometimes scuffle
a bit; but Old Blarney’s a regular dazzle.
He rears back, high as Maeve Hill,
and sets his bear backyonders to heel-
an’-tow, and wriggle sure and all.
With his great paws flapping uncle,
his gap-tooth smile,
and his raggle-taggle tinker’s airs,
why, honey wouldn’t melt in his muzzle.
And thereby hangs a tale…

Or did. Just the last April
it was, at Derry Fair, and him on a publican’s table,
stepping out something fierce and typical.
Till he backstepped his backside full
in the barman’s electric fan, and fell
all over himself and nine pints with the froth of the pull
still on them—pell-mell and holywell
water, prancing and roaring and clanking, hide-hairs
a whirlwind behind him, parts of Old Blarney mill-
ing amongst us like the pieces of a puzzle
we couldn’t reassemble,
though we patched up his pride by wetting his whistle
with enough of the stout to befuddle
Cuchulain. He passed out in a puddle
of Guinness, still licking his chops, wishful
like… And now he just grins and bares it all.

Me? Oh, I’m just the bit of a shill.
Whilst Old Blarney struts his wonderful,
I blather and beat on this kettle
and watch his tin cup fill,
till the stars come out all unawares.



Postcard from Northern Ireland

I wanted to write something
better than ranting
that follows the letter of meter,
and rhymes.
Reflecting the times,
I settled for this
bit of rhetoric.


Postscript added days later: finished In the Woods, and I do recommend it highly. Some plot stuff can be guessed as one gets closer to the end, but not what happens, or doesn't, to the conflicted hero. Bravo; excellent writing throughout. I hope Ms.French shows her stuff again soon, Irish or not.