This little blog will be 1 year old on Jan. 4th. I'll be away until Jan. 5th, so y'all come on back around then, hear?

Have been flued out for some time. Advantages of illness : wrote my first children's story. People have been telling me to do that for years. Look out, Madonna.

Rumor has it the Schooner of Quietude will try for a comeback next year. A flotilla of iamboids was sighted off Chesapeake Bay last week. Word circulating (anonymous Topper) a sonnet mole has penetrated Buffalo. Gangs of Strong Monsieurs heckling Lang Pos reported in San Jose, of all places. Peace, O my people.

Live it up & party down (cough, cough) - Happy New Year, where'er ye be!

Still bugged out with bad virus. No whiskified egg nog for me, thanks [sigh].

Watched PBS magical-mystical program last night on origin of 3 Kings. Magi may have been Zoroastrian astrologers from Babylon & environs. On April 17, BC 6, there was an eclipse of Jupiter by the moon in the constellation of the Ram (which signified Israel). Gold : royalty; frankincense : holiness, priesthood; myrrh : death & burial. Lo & behold, there on the program as one of the commentators was William Dalrymple, whose book I mentioned here a few days ago (From the Holy Mountain).

Here's a very old HG poem :

Proverbial


 
I give you the parables as I received them -
my mother's voice, the nursery rhymes,
the memorized rhetoric and the anthem
leading us like sheep to death sometimes.

 
The mystery ringing in our ears,
the noise of the cultivated howl
of ubiquitous unknown lusts and fears,
the music of monkey, wolf and owl.

 
In silence before music and the word,
a voice already prepared to save
delivers you into a pastoral world,
out of the dank and bestial cave.

 
A cadence I cannot repeat just right -
the pristine choir of many morning birds,
or the patience of children in the dancing light
performing the ritual of careful words.

Looking around at home, I found these curious precursors of the long river-poem (Forth of July). Sections of a poem called "Octaves":

4

 
Is it the sea or is it a voice,
or is it a sea-voice (rocked
by heartbeats long ago docked
in petrified wave-lengths, ice-

 
water)?  Or the wind in a tree.
That one, rising like a broken delta.
Speaks through me.
Rafted away now...  Huckleberry.  Selah

 
6

 
Mississippi, Mississippi...
Gravel and silt slide down the stream. 
Mississippi, Mississippi...
Spell it out, spell out your dream.

 
Why should I spell it out for you
(New York - D.C. - California)?
I hit the road before you do.
(Minnesota...  Alabama...)

& finally, here's an couple of odd (as usual) bits of something for the day, from The Grassblade Light:

21

 
The snow covered the ground like the shoulders
of his white bull, only colder, colder; he saw a cloud
of ice breath, chill between warm heartbeats.  Old
Blackstone, in clear December light, ponders, ponders.

 
Some penetrating sound, a loon-call through the aether,
or... some answer to a riddle, rectifying denouement,
perfect solution... some snow-crystalline all right,
like the moon sailing across deep soothing black... or...

 
Good King Wenceslas looked out
on the feast of Stephen
when the snow lay round about
deep and fresh and even

 
High clear children's voices above the dark
tops of pine trees, as they make their way
through snow from house to house.  Gradually,
slowly, peacefully (in the cold night).  Hark

 
the herald angels sing...  He looked out toward the mangers
of the world.  There... on the outside of the inns...
in the cold, among animals, straw, the thin
coverings, the sparse walls... the hungers, the dangers.

 
And like Balthasar astride his mule (riding west
and staring east) old Blackstone thought:
what One is this? - as, bright-wrought,
an arc of moonlight moored above that nest

 
(a lowly nef, berthed under a lofty shell).
An airship, or some hovering bell... it shed
a sweet, translucent music overhead.  And
music changes everything (as Wenceslas could tell).

                       
                     12.24.98





 
22

 
In December, in the snow, in the clear cold air,
everything grows double, everything is allegorical,
like those distant crows, high over the Bruegel
valley, and the hunters turning home, bare

 
bodkins, empty-handed; a half-moon, small
and delicate, glows through a haze,
and the stiletto of one star beside it says:
behold tight-woven final acts of good and evil

 
here now passing... upon theatrical soil.
Here simplest things are full of profundity:
hungry wayfarers, winecellars of reality...
gypsies, flocks, shepherds... an angel.

 
Meanwhile, under the dome, the black stone
of Isaac waits.  And gathering specific gravity,
to the city - through Stephen's Gate - comes Jubilee,
like spring streams down from Zechariah's canyon.

 
And he will stage these holograms of Incarnation
(strange attractors, gathering wise men toward one
star's dark matter)... cask them, roll them on board,
until the ark of Wenceslas is full, and Stephen's crown

 
goes round again, millennial - in those meadows 
where Time does not run down, but circles...
where May Goulding conceived, and Stephen's bulls
are papal, Romany... where Blackstone throws

 
his final boomerang : a child is born,
and everything is changed.  Come down,
you shepherds, to the manger now, come down,
behold - how God is cradling Isaac like a son.

                         
               12.24.98

Wishing you holiday cheer & lights - *

HG down with respiratory bug past few days.

reading My Name Is Red, by Orhan Pamuk. I like his style, have read most of his novels.

also immersed in tomes from library about medieval Aleppo & Islamic history. Aleppo, I love that name. Comes from arabic word for "milk"; legend has it Abraham stopped there on his way from Ur, & offered goat's milk to his neighbors. Many ancient shrines to Abraham in the area.

"That in Aleppo Once..." - short story by Nabokov. (A quote from finale of Othello.) Birthday of Nabokov & Shakespeare : April 23rd, St. George's Day. Patron saint of Russia & England. St. George a curious mythical figure : related in Islamic culture to the mysterious saint Al-Khidr, or "Green" : figure of strength & vitality, spring fertility (St. George & the Dragon). Shrines to Al-Khidr in Aleppo too.

"Milk", MLK, Melchizedek, Melchior. . . a motif in my poetry (Island Road, Stubborn etc.).

Happy solstice. It starts to get lighter today. (Just so you know. Prof. Hinkel told me.)

& speaking of heaven, I just finished Wm. Dalrymple's travel book, From the Holy Mountain (Owl Bks, 1997). He retraces the steps of 6th century peripatetic Byzantine monk named John Moschos, who kept a journal of his own (The Spiritual Meadow). Dalrymple's book is a remarkably vivid 1st-hand report on the fading (or maybe surviving - some of these hermit monks are amazingly resilient) remnants of various strands of ancient eastern Christianity still hanging on in monasteries scattered through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel & Egypt. A unique lens on the Middle East.

Mairead Byrne's blog Heaven has been added to my list of links, which is hardly universal & rarely used by me. But I noticed over at the Buffalo poetics pen (where there's a "Keep Henry Out" sign) that she felt left out of the blogland link whirl. So there you are, Mairead. Merry Christmas, ho ho ho, from the highly-networked blog-Santa club.

It's been a quiet day in blogland, but I couldn't resist furthering the knowledge and love of cheese among poets & poetry/cheese lovers everywhere, with this quote from today's AP wire services, courtesy NY Times:

Back in Connecticut at the Abbey of Regina Laudis, 
nuns raise sheep, work the fields and sing Gregorian chants 
eight times a day. Marcellino, who is also an accomplished 
vocalist, was assigned to make cheese. The scientific interest 
came later.

 
In the 1990s, Marcellino won a Fulbright scholarship 
to study in France. She eventually spent four years 
here studying cheese fungus, going from farm to farm 
collecting samples. Her fame grew, and she was profiled 
in a documentary that coined her nickname: ``The Cheese Nun.''

The complete article can be found at the Times site (for which you might have to register), here.

Jordan keeping up on cheese situation. There appears to have been a drop in interest in cheese poetics of late, both here and in Limburg. I attribute this to the recent focus on V-neck sweaters (I mean in the archival sense, of course : the V-shape being an ancient symbol of many things, including early "holding & lifting" tools, such as the Akkadian steamshovel). Prof. Hinkel's recent study, Molten Hermeneutics : Melted Cheese Metaphors in the Life & Work of Amalia Lamia (Left Overbie Univ. Press, 2004) should bring the recent dropsic malaise or aphasic lassitude in cheese poetics to an abrupt (top-broiled) end. Happy Holidays, Prof. Hinkel!

Mike & Jonathan continue good dialogue on fiction/poetry and the relative merits of Yeats & Milton.

Seems to me that Mike's demurrals might apply more aptly to the whole late Romantic/Symbolist poetic ethos, of which Yeats is probably the best exemplar. That is, the supposed weaknesses he sees in Yeats are representative of a larger phenomenon.

The advent of fiction signalled a split between poetry & prose. It's no accident that "Romanticism" referred originally to a return to medieval poetic romances which were analyzed, parodied, mourned & mocked in the greatest "modern" novel, Don Quixote.

Cervantes inaugurated the role of novel as analytical instrument, and with the progress of the social novel, marginalized poets began to see a parallel between the disenchantment of life brought on by science & industrialization and the dominance of "prosaic" values in literature. In a manner somewhat comparable to the development of abstraction in painting, poets began to emphasize their social role as avatars of pure imagination. The fact that, as Mike mentions, Milton had finally to choose between scriptural revelation and the book of nature for a "true" poetic representation of cosmic reality anticipates the Romantic attitude.

The core of the Romantic argument was, that prosaic, analytical description, whether in literature or science, actually fails as mimesis, is somehow untrue to the Real, because dull prose could never represent the ecstatic, mystical wholeness & beauty of Creation : only the inspired imagination could foster the images of innocence, sympathy, synthesis & unity, worthy of that ultimate reality.

Yeats' fascination with George Berkeley (the Irish idealist philosopher), and with the effect of imaginative symbols, are attributes of the "classic" Romantic stance. The Romantic poet registers a protest against the falsity of objective description : "we murder to dissect". This is fundamentally a religious attitude, which asserts the sacredness of reality against the profanation of (a scientific-Faustian) detached objectivity. & in my view this confrontation between poetic imagination and "objectivity", between prose & poetry, is not yet completely played out. Some of Wallace Stevens' gnomic aphorisms (about the "poetry of reality") still speak very tellingly to this issue.

I


 
LOCKE sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.


 
II


 
Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium’s mouth.
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the forest loam,
Out of dark night where lay
The crowns of Nineveh.

On Saturday morning I had an odd premonition, thinking "They're going to find Saddam before Christmas." Turns out they were finding him at the time.

Here's some semi-doggerel formality, from Way Stations, on the general theme of falling kings:

         Ballade Royale


  
         "The enemy is seething at the gates
 and all our stratagems so sorely tried
 have surely failed, and rebels – ingrates! –
 spit at us, and slink away, deep-dyed
 in treachery."  So courtiers sighed
 and muttered dreadful news, in sheer
 despair.  The king was full of foolish pride.
 All eyes filled with dismay – each heart with fear.

  
         "Let's go unto the king – it's not too late,
 perhaps..."  So down stone corridors they glide
 sharing the doom-filled business of the state,
 to find their king... lolling, side by side
 with his luxurious and mocking bride.
 His eyes feign drowsiness as they draw near.
 He snores – or mumbles something crass and snide.
 All eyes filled with dismay – each heart with fear.

  
         The great king disentangled from his mate
 and leaning on one elbow hoarsely cried –
 "Bring me my harp, O cowards that I hate!"
 The instrument appeared.  His fingers plied,
 and with his long arm's curve struck, chord
 on chord, such harmonies! – so sweet, so clear,
 his servants melted... floated on a cloud...
 All eyes filled with dismay – each heart with fear.

  
         "Miserable souls – your anguish I deride!
 When I am gone to rest – upon my bier –
 you'll curse your God I ever lived – or died!"
 All eyes filled with dismay – each heart with fear.

Good blog day. See Bemsha & the Sonnetarium in debate. I like this from Yeats:

And I declare my faith:
I mock Plotinus' thought
And cry in Plato's teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar paradise.

& on Beauty & Form, me sez (in "The Granary"):

         We were twelve-year-old friends
 When I became your apprentice –
 Careless for numb noon,
 Caught up in steady response
 To crafty forms and riddling shades.

Jonathan yesterday, on "tolerance." & speaking of Beauty & Tolerance, the flap in Paris over Muslim veils in school will surely be one for the history books. Si francais! A thousand Mata Haris, au centre d'haute couture, using their coy Oriental veils as a wedge for political Islam!

Tolerance in governance, oh, it must be the key. A public space of universal equal rights requires, paradoxically, a generous hospitable attitude toward ethnic pride. Finding the balance between group interests and the interest of each & all : civilization - life itself - based on wisdom & mutual acceptance among "others".

& in regard re-finding the past, see interesting comments on Baxter Hathaway & Lyn Hejinian at Cornell, over hyere at the Hotel.

Form is discovering beauty as fate.

 
The plot of a poem is the beautiful resolution of its form.

                            
                              *

Discussion
Intellectual Form is moving :  logos reveals that pathos 
is ethos, and vice versa.  (This is the Theorem of Integral Beauty, 
the Golden Section, the Goulden Rule).

We love words
and "form" is simply having fun with words.

Thus my Mandelstam obsession
is merely an expression of "nightingale fever"
(ie. the joy of speech for its own sake).

Ovid (et al.) frames the meaning of politics & social life
within a context of happy babbling.
That's what poets do.

". . . for lack of what is found there."

The great forms
are great imitations
of greater forms
(like fern leaves).

Kasey writes about the dumbing-down of poetic syntax & thinning-out of tradition among contemporary poets.

In terms of getting a perspective on the contemporary scene, these phenomena (along with, I would add, the loss of "depiction" or mimesis among the post-avants, which I've been harping on here) seem more important than the supposed divide between mainstream/experimental or Quietude/quirkitude.

But I'm not proposing another critique based on badmouthing. Let's look for the poets who do rediscover & synthesize great "finds" from previous poetic eras.

It's not a matter of stylistics alone. It's recreating & reliving something perennial, having to do with the immediacy/presence/role of poetry in human experience (both individual & collective).

Am reading John Latta's & Dale Smith's engaging table-talk in conjunction with these pronunciamentos.

another little bit from "My Byzantium", written late 90s.

3

 
The crowd was moving beyond the guardrail
and surging up and down in gleaming escalators
between the two unmatched exhibits

 
I was in the crowd and with the crowd
memories between the tracks of the trekking pilgrimage
statuesque in lived postures of waiting and looking.

 
At the eastern pole of the great museum lay
Mondrian.  There was a tree in a Dutch backyard;
branchlets billowed a crisscross scandal until

 
with the lantern of his lifelong devotion
a surprise habit was to kiss Mrs. Ernst unlike
a monk, erring, earnest, in the back of a NY cab;

 
while at the western pole was to be beheld
the family album of Alfred Stieglitz –
not Venus not Diana emerging black and white

 
beside the dock in skinwet bathing suit,
or the two dignified old dames a-walk
down a country lane away from the horizon.

 
Choose:  your home movie extracted lovingly
undamaged from the real?  Or the concrete circumflex
of a node of apposite contraries?

 
What are we looking for in glasses?
"there is always something deeper, a little deeper,
in the waste places, along the roadsides"

 
It was a crystallization
of hope longed for, one
something

 
one, what was the number
of the archway
upheld

 
crumbling
unspoken
yet

 
flit, still
as, as
if re

 
me
mbe
red

which mayhap brings me back to Byzantium & "walking through the pictures". This is from "My Byzantium" (you may have seen it before. . .):

 
7

 
On Valentine's Day on my lunch break
I walked down the hill to the School of Design
to see the Crucifixion with Two Thieves
by the Master of the Providence Crucifixion (Dutch, circa
       1450).

 
After 500 years the colors still bright as a dream.
Jerusalem in the background, strange towers of mauve, beige,
violet, the high walls flecked with scrawny trees
(no goldfinch near), the line of horsemen
in blue Martian armor (or Flemish 1400's) appearing
out of a crevice in the pale
green, springlike fields
    
                          and surrounding the crosses,
crowding the stage, the gray horses, their necks
like tensile steel with unknowing beast grins,
the fop soldiers and gawking onlookers, the boy
(or dwarf?) reining in the horses for the lords
staring in gratified excitement
at the three hung men, a swordsman
(realistic touch) ready to hack at the calves
of the thief on the left - the three men
of exactly the same build, only
Jesus more deathly pale, calm, as if asleep.

 
In the foreground Mary faints, weeping
(like the women outside the execution arena
in Afghanistan today, NY Times 2.14.96),
her arms hollowing, ready to become
a bronze Pietà; two of the soldiers
peer sidelong out of the picture frame,
but John and the Magdalen look you in the eye
out of hell, still, out of 1450.

 
Beside the Crucifixion a little gilded wooden niche -
relic, even older (Italian, 1250 or so, hand
of Lippo Memmi) – a blonde in a red cloak,
sky-blue undergarment, holds a little casket
(myrrh-box? urn?) and gazes with almond eyes
from under her hood at me,
the blush on her cheeks still faintly there,
her look still veiled and distant, yet looking, still
    
                            B
       M  I  N  E

 
(A little further down the hill below the museum
you in the yellow t-shirt under a black sweatshirt
circle the gargantuan monolithic pile of the Supreme
Courthouse in a banged-up Falcon only
to look through the corner window
behind the iron bars hoping
to catch a glimpse
of a certain Irish cop
– like a goldfinch
tethered to the law.)

 
Snow is falling today on Providence,
it comes down gradually from cloud to ground;
soon Mardi Gras, then Lent, a drop of ash
on seared forehead; and through the
mirror of a dusky glance I see
one green-eyed almond Magdalen –
a chalice in her hands, she holds
this dying light in pale green fields,
while snow falls slowly over Providence.
 
                         2.14.96

My affinities (based in "optimism") may also imply certain resistances to various idioms of disaffection & resistance among my contemporaries.

Mandelstam & Crane, in Henry's mind. Very old news to some of my blog & poetry-list interlocutors. Must seem like tunnel vision, combined with backward-looking reification/idolatry of a couple of Modern Masters.

But the summary here today is just that, a simplification of my perspective, & I make no apologies. Myriad paths crisscross in poetry land. The era can be read with different lenses : feminist, multicultural (shorthand for many perspectives). I've been drawn to & inspired by scores, hundreds maybe, of other 20th-cent. writers.

I'm writing here, rather, about a couple of 20th-cent. poets who (along with Akhmatova, Berryman, Berrigan, Shvarts, Honig, Stevens, Montale, Celan, Brodsky - a few others) exerted a special guiding or pivotal or modelling or inspirational effect on my own writing.

& why or how did they do that? By means of a fusion/combination of worldview & poetic expression. Poetry remakes - reinterprets - the world with its discoveries & commitments. & our homemade "pantheons" have motives & consequences.

the most thorough study of Mandelstam's critical writings that I know of, is Mandelshtam's Poetics, by Elena Corrigan. her book doesn't deal with M's famous tribulations under Stalin, or his poetry per se, but focuses on his theoretical prose and its relationship with contemporary poetics (postmodernism).

I guess my glibness is back.

How do I understand the perspective that informs my "affinities"?

I'm a sort of melancholic optimist, that's how I see it. A metaphysical optimist, due to engagement with religious ideas & experiences. A political optimist, due perhaps in part to happy childhood in the exact middle of 50s Middle America (plus naivete or complacency? you be the judge). Melancholic also by nature & experience.

Perhaps a religious perspective not that far from Eliot fills me (in contrast to him, it seems) with metaphysical optimism. Which partly explains my fascination with Hart Crane's response to Eliot (as opposed to WC Williams'). (Williams strikes me as a kind of populist-empiricist. Crane more like a visionary-idealist. Crane's idealism has religious connotations which I don't find in Williams.)

I found similar "major chords", a similar optimism, in Mandelstam. Not a superficial but a profound saying YES, different atmosphere from Eliot.

Pound also has some grand & wonderful major chords. Along with an almost total mis-reading of religious & humane values in history. Or, should I say: Pound seems to display quite thoroughly & openly how passionate humane impulses are twisted & destroyed by a combination of aristocratic snobbery & wolfish aggressive (un)realpolitik.

Pleasantly snowed-in here for a few days.

I guess people reading my entries about Byzantium, Mandelstam, etc. would have to overcome a sense of obscurity, incoherence, hobbyhorse-ism.

Someday maybe I'll write a My Mandelstam, like Tsvetaeva's My Pushkin or Howe's My Emily Dickinson, & try to render some coherence to it all.

In poetry, I do two main things, I guess. Under certain favorable circumstances, I write poems. Otherwise, I think in "poetics", which is a jumble including my own taste in reading & my response to other writers & traditions (not just an aesthetic response but a personal response, which includes aesthetics, politics, "world-view", a sense of kinship, etc.).

This is how it is for most poets, I figure.

I've probably absorbed as much of the general assumptions of my time & generation as everybody else. Thinking about it off the top of my head this morning, I think I tend to orient myself as part of an era or a century - and an era which is either ending or transmogrifying into something else. This era began around World War I ("the real, not the calendar, 20th century" - Akhmatova), and was characterized by a new kind of self-consciousness, perhaps a sort of apocalyptic thinking, which simultaneously recognizes its alienation from the previous age, and tries to comprehend or interpret or summarize it in a new synthesis, for a new era (ie., Modernism).

In the atmosphere created by the modernist poets & those who followed (up to our own time) I guess I make certain choices & elect certain affinities or models, like everybody else.

to be continued, maybe. . .

I grind the crystals of copper carbonate, the azurite or verditer, the famous mountain blue of the receding planes of aerial perspective, and paint my way, blue by blue, up to the distant sea, where my ship lies waiting.

- Michael Frayn, Headlong

. . . & the difference between Byzantium & US being, of course, Roger Williams of Rhode Island (theocracy vs. church/state separation). it circles around like that in my poetry (around the snoozing head of Wm. Blackstone).

. . . then again, of course, in my poetry, the Byzantium effect is a subset of the Russian theme. . . with me everything begins, & begins again, with Mandelstam.

the thrill at the heart of Wallace Stevens' "first idea" : that's what this art/nature oscillation is all about. . .

My longstanding haggle with Language Poetry & post-avantism (admittedly a form of shadow-boxing with my own peculiar version of those amorphous phenomena). . .

a crux there being that a kind of littery literalism of the letter became a cliche or dogma over the 80s & 90s. . . & one of its affects being that the trope of self-conscious literalism (even as irony) tends to disrupt representation or mimesis. . .

so there is no "walking through the pictures" anywhere. . .

which seems to attack or cancel out perhaps the most interesting aspect of art in general, which is the oscillation between art & nature - the mimicry & confusion of the two. . . & the theological mystery at the root of this oscillation (what is "creation from nothing"?).

so it's interesting to me anyway that the theme of "Byzantium" runs through much of my writing in the late 90s (both in a political sense of US being a latter-day or parodic Byzantium, and in the sense that the old Byzantine aesthetic/theological issue of iconoclasm/iconophilia is so fascinating in itself). . .

I think of the post-avants & the postmodern theorists as iconoclasts (in the Byzantine sense). . .

& the aesthetic values which got sidelined during this period of iconoclasm included representation, mimesis, "thick description", direct presentation, narrative, etc. . . things I've been interested in. . .

(- just a little horn-tootin' polemics, for a Friday afternoon in frozen Blogland. . .)

Odd (or just repetitive) how plot of both Stubborn Grew & long dream-poem "Grain Elevator" pivot on a "spirit guide" of some kind (Bluejay, my grandfather's ghost) leading narrator Henry through & into a painting (30s prairie storm picture in the latter; Renaissance Magdalen miniature in former).

See also 2nd "chapter" of Stubborn ("Ancient Light") : the whole thing is about interaction between people & artworks (in London).

         "Leave it for lost!  It's gone for good!
 Come on, come with me!  Move, move
 And walk – walk through the phony frame!"

Am reading the entertaining Headlong, by Michael Frayn, about a fellow who discovers a missing Bruegel masterpiece in a very Bruegelish out-of-the-way English rundown manor. I see the protagonist is doing just what I do! ("Bruegelizing" what he sees.)

It's about to start snowing. . .

Old poem from Way Stations :

         The Granary
       
                                          for J.P.
    
         There were huge comfortable rooms,
 dusty with archaeological bric-a-brac,
 brass rubbings of the Black Prince,
 and a photograph of your tiny sister
 smiling, holding a shard in a trench.

  
         I loved the cozy smells of your house,
 perfumed with antiquity and your mother's
 potato cooking, her high throaty
 European sparrow voice, calling Johnny!
 Johnny!  Dinner's on the table, boys!

  
         Your father a kindly cultivated man,
 modest, his speech dry and bright
 like a cello – questioning us
 at the table with witty attention –
 a doctor who treated Guillaume Barré.

  
         We were twelve-year-old friends
 when I became your apprentice –
 careless for numb noon,
 caught up in steady response
 to crafty forms and riddling shades.

  
         You inhabited a cloudy solitude
 like a meditative Leonardo, yet you
 marshalled all the armies of Europe
 in brilliant colors for us to survey,
 clashing and surging across the floor.
 
 And all history lay buried in the big
 Egyptian attic, that family granary
 of Time, steaming through the deep quiet
 sustained chord of Minnesota summer,
 the dense last hours of childhood.

  
         All except for the room set aside
 for your older brother, with the bright
 football pennants and the trophies –
 a father's eldest son, whom I never
 met, who never came home from Vietnam.

Me, Bartleby?

Emotional realization yesterday : I don't have much going in the world other than poetry. Better lay off the chess for a while.

Noted here a few weeks ago that Anny Ballardini, mysterious unmet angel over yonder Italy-way, had taken it upon herself to translate my bk-long poem In RI into her native tonggue.

Any publisher out there who might be interested in doing a bilingual ed. of a long documentary sort of poem (vaguely Patersonish) about New England 1630-1640s, with Rog Williams, Key Into Language of America, Canonicus, Miantonomi & Narragansetts, w/divagations on Salem witch trials & King Philip's War, Anne Hutchinson, church/state separation & liberty of conscience, founding of RI, RI/Boston rivalries, RW & Milton, etc. etc. (poem written in early 1990s, now transmogrified into lingua di Dante)? Well, my email is listed on this blog. Otherwise we will probably self-do it, Nedge-style.

Not feeling very inspired nor glib toward the blog these days.

Poetry seems distant.

I read novels, plan prose projects, play online chess (when I'm not working).

Hope poetry comes back (it may).

Perhaps I'm going through a long-term natural (d)(r)evolution.

Seems to be no "context" for what I've done or haven't done, in the neighborhood. (I'm sure this is a familiar feeling.)

The battlefield is empty. A field seething with wind & crickets.

Disconnected from EVERY scene (except yours).