one dusty pair of loafers

GOLDEN DOOR

A cloudy day in June.  The silver-

green hearts of cottonwood

shape an eave of old

whispers overhead – over

Hobo’s sleepy crown.  He drifts

along the riverbank

like wind.  Who to thank

for this vagrant splendor?  Lifts

one eye to meet mauve milkweed

flowerets.  The milky

pod will land later.  He

recalls the King of Butterflies – his seed

of fire, smoking bloody thorns

out of the House of God.

Beyond Land of Nod

dawn twilight hovers between horns;

the Minotaur, hideout collapsed,

glances sideways now –

he’s facing you, Hobo.

Ennui & self-disgust snap

shut his labyrinthine face.

An intellectual

despair (material

forces define our fate) will place

disconsolate Ophelia

& lonely Juliet

upon the parapet

of Golden Gate.  Barefoot pariah-

poet joins them (leaves behind

one dusty pair of loafers).

Ice coats the Minotaur’s

sealed lips.  Hobo’s refined friend

Henry wavers on river-ridge.

He breathes deep.  Steadies

himself.  Watches eddies

spread calmly (from Stone Age).

A tiny flint, like mustard seed

planted its yellow point

in Henry’s mother-heart.

The soul is feminine, she said,

her clay says welcome to the plant.

A fishy pie plate

              *

framed between what

look like Twin Cities’ restaurant

cartwheels?  Double helix, welded

with rows of keys... inside

a box of buffalo hide... ?

Disc-knot, or gyroscope... plaid

4-leaf clover in a Star of David

spun toward peace...

Frisbee (call the police)

or flying saucer?  Air-bridged

harbor, so she sang – a lightning

prism.  New Colossus

in the live-oak moss –

her beacon-hand.  Smiles, welcoming.

Grain of the laborers trains Henry’s

unison.  His ancient sigh

for Juliet-Eurydice

brings grey-eyed Emma Lazarus

out of a purple sea – her Liberty.

The seed of fire is Love –

soul’s only treasure-trove;

find Her & you have found Me

too, murmured the grey ring-dove

whose cloudy wings unveil

a glinting copper seal –

bright penny from the King’s alcove

(of Lincoln logs & Memphis marble

made).  Now Henry sleeps

in Charley-oak – he keeps

the crown of Manitou arboreal

while Hobo swims down Milkweed River

branch to branch, & limb

to limb.  Says, Go find him

who seeks you in deep-end despair.

Love’s gyroscopic equilibrium

(from seed-beginning

to rose-blooming

end) is manifest Wisdom;

she dances like a cloverleaf

until you turn with her

into that Golden Door –

her almond Agape (undying life).

6.29.17

stranger in the land

WELDED KEYS

The old words climb from the well of time

like a Norway spruce,

aquamarine – set loose

like fiery needles from the flame

of Psyche-Liberty (breaching

Columbia, rose-grey

dauphin).  Light spray

from Ocean’s breathing-hole – the sting

of Cuban salt.  Strange emissary,

stranger in the land,

your phantom clock-hand

gravitates toward Harper’s Ferry –

ticks back, between slate gray

clouds, the frozen sword

over its chessboard hoard

(gold poison-cup, primed to betray

the Union).  Carlsen’s hesitation

in hamlet-limping lines

of Sabbath silence... Martin’s

magnanimous memory... the unknown

veteran, shrouding a still-life

Lincoln penny (pinned

atop his heart).  Sound

heard in Ramah... Rachel’s life-

saver, bobbing Caribbean blues.

Queequeg on welded keys

surfacing velocities

Atlantis-radiant... bright jasper hues.

12.1.16

                          "Reminiscences of 1865", by John F. Peto (Minneapolis Institute of Art)

just east of Providence

LAST WORD

Scavenging Raven found a crust

of broken mirror for

his nest above the river,

in a craggy oak (Blackstone, dust-

laden, winding her copper yarn

just east of Providence).

Po (or Eridanus)

glinted in that shard; a purple crayon

traced a spiral crane-dance there,

pinned to a dove-grey water-

wheel (by hand).  The daughter

of Caesar trolled a welded cluster

of rust-rose keys just below the surface –

keys to the worm-riddled door

of haunted Sant’ Apollinaire

in Classe (where Pharos ghost-sails

teem for Stilicho, Galla Placidia).

At his perch, Cautantowwit

reads smokefires lit

from Paris – On 29th of May

Corn Maiden will pirouette

one Final Show (a Waltz

to End All Wars).  Salt

is good, croaks the haunted vet –

share salt amongst yourselves, &

be at peace.  The night bird

oars southwest – his last word

whistled into silence (prairie-land).

8.23.16

Note : on Aug. 23, 408, the great Byzantine general Stilicho was executed in Ravenna.

Weldon finds his shoes

O FLOWER

                                   For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing

This evening light over the sink

& clutter of Mom’s pots

dish soap, what-nots

stillness of an eye that doesn’t blink

pupil of an unseen commonwealth

Lincoln-logos of a realm

Time cannot overwhelm

where Walter nurses back to health

Hart’s broken farfalla-tower

& Weldon finds his shoes

again   & Berryman his

balance on that bridge   O Flower

Joy   Out of these winter fields

where Bruegel-raven   zig-

zags   over leafless twigs   &

Guillaume’s pink turban   slowly   heals

Your graven images of gravity,

Henry   my autumn fall

1132   a burial

at sea   the perspicacity

of buoyant Jonah   one grey gull 

white-feathered underneath

lights on a wave   breathe,

Dove   lift down from empty skull

my ashen diamond   the snow skims

sparkling   under the sun

& from bright gatherings one

Flamant beams   whose warmth redeems

7.27.16

make it new

OLD SALT

Herman riveted to crow’s-nest,

Dante wearing out

his shoes... Weldon, forgot

by Golden Gate, & Berryman, a crust

of snow beside the limestone bank.

Moon rose from sea

with magnanimity,

night’s passionate gravity... & sank

these antithetical children of the sun

beneath immeasurable Ocean-

wave.  Matrix of one

twinkling eye... stuttered translation

from sharks’ dogma to Cutty Sark

sped rondure-eloquence –

an Ocean River sense,

human inheritance (almond birthmark).

The old salt bears his Southern Cross 

as shark-tooth earring,

tattooed heart.  The singing

shrouds (sea-urge, wave-moss)

remind him of Jonah, lost infant

of the crew – of Jasper,

& Francesca too – Ariel

in Ravenna pines (al fresco fundament).

Make all things new.  An emerald gong

plumbs planetary tides –

sun-shimmer plies

Gennesaret to Tuscan hills (all-human song).

7.13.16

someone could write a very good article on the affinity of Weldon Kees & Donald Justice, if it hasn't been done. Kees - Justice - Stevens form a sort of affinity constellation.

Beautiful day here today. I was home today.

Minor literary miracle : I discovered (with help) the poetry of Donald Justice.

Ignorance is a gift from God, as Nick de Cusa explained.

Like a door opening on my own life.

Justice.... Stevens, Rilke, Bishop, Crane.... Kees. Listen to the music.

would be interesting to look at Laforgue & Weldon Kees.

Well done, Keyes. Spangle your Banner. Happy 4th to you & all.

(Cara, me & Juliet)

Myself included.

Halloween.  The sun’s already down.
Everywhere leaves are gathering,
lightly rustling and shivering,
their ruddy bloom already fading,
the sun’s dry wine drunk to the dregs.

 
The neighborhood grows anonymous.
Soon the small ghosts will appear,
flickering and half–transparent
under the streetlights, costumed
for space travel, or the Middle Ages.

 
This is that ancient harvest night.
Harvest of time, harvest of souls.
Tonight the years are buried quietly
under a shroud of old leaves, and I
am a child too, standing at the door.

Everything can be explained, probably, by Nebraska. "The plainness of the plains." [Mandelstam] A different landscape of emotional perception offered by small Midwestern towns & farms - different from the jazzy coasts, or the steamy South. The near & the far, the vast & the small, interpenetrate. Time slows down. Childhood is another country.

Kees was an only child, maybe a happy one. Some of the bitterness could stem from exorcised nostalgia. Look at this poem:

1926

 
The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking.  Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

 
An orange moon.  I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

 
I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon.  Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.

Milton & Doris were movie stars of the time. Childhood another country. How doesn't this terse, somber poem shed a certain slant on the art & life of Frank O'Hara? (& on Tate, Ashbery, & all the permanent children of American poetry? Myself included!)

Reading more Weldon Kees. A terrific poet. Here's an interesting article by Dana Gioia on Kees's influence & reception. Gioia raises a number of questions about the neglect & "non-canonizing" of this poet, who has been praised & imitated by so many other poets (as opposed to critics & anthologists). But he doesn't really answer them, possibly because Gioia doesn't examine the poems themselves very closely. Donald Justice addressed the issue directly back in 1960, in his intro to the collected poems, which he edited. Referring to Kees's (suicidal) vanishing act, he wrote: "If the whole of his poetry can be read as a denial of the values of the present civilization, as I believe it can, then the disappearance of Kees becomes as symbolic an act as Rimbaud's flight or Crane's suicide."

If we shift the "disappearance", here, to refer to Kees's critical reception over the decades, then Justice's statement makes sense as an explanation for same : ie., there is something in the "whole of his poetry" - in its thematics, in its bitter, painful, satirical, harshly stringent, mournful tone - which makes it very demanding and hard to take. Kees's playfulness skimmers over depths of grief, sour laughter, moral outrage. There's a vertigo of despair & social rejection at work. Yet it's also thorny in another way : Kees can't be typed as a bohemian or dismissed as just another lightweight visionary "poet". Apparently he was careful & conservative in dress & manner : it's reflected in his writing. The surrealist & experimental elements are employed with prosaic clarity & force; the diction is simultaneously plain and baroque; the rhythms are steeped in blank verse, sharpened & enforced by echoes of the iambic beat of Crane, the long measured lines of Eliot. The impact of individual poems is a combination of pleasure & shock.

To repeat : Kees is a terrific poet, from whom many have learned & many more could learn. But his stance, his worldview - its clear-eyed, emotionally-overwrought bleakness - has its costs. It's not something teachable, and it's not something societies of any place or time have welcomed with open arms. To paraphrase one of the former Iran hostage-crisis hostages (who was referring to the new Iranian President), Kees is "not on [anybody's] Christmas card list".

Perhaps Kees himself - the person, in life - was victimized by his own acidic art, the melancholy bleakness of its tone. He was undone by his own vision.

I'm going to be reading & studying him from now on.

Didja know Bob Dylan probably borrowed the phrase "Idiot wind" from Weldon Kees? See the last line of "June 1940" : "An idiot wind blows; the conscience dies."

p.s. & Kees's mother's maiden name was Zimmermann ! Omigod! [Twilight Zone theme music here]

Rainy muggy day here. Started reading Weldon Kees, Collected Poems. At first glance, he seems powerfully talented... & very very gloomy. Not in a boring way, though. Not at all.

Back in the late 70s I was living in a communal house. There was a quiet blonde-haired guy there, with what I now recognize as a Weldon Kees moustache. I can't recall his name, or any of our conversations... except that we had a mutual interest in poetry, and that he asked me once if I'd read Weldon Kees. (Never heard of him.)

When the mysterious housemate moved out, he did a generous thing - gave me his personal, hardbound edition of Whitman's poems & prose. A very nice rust-covered book, which I've never stopped reading.

So I open the Kees, & the first poem is called "Statement with Rhymes", which begins : "Plurality is all." A sort of despair-ody of Whitman.

In this week's New Yorker essay, Anthony Lane tries to figure out if there isn't a literary genealogy or factual background to the sort of Everyman character, who appears in a number of the poems, whom Kees calls "Robinson". Is it a reference to one of Celine's characters of that name? He mentions a couple of other possibilities, which I don't recall. But my guess is, the main allusion (with the caveat that I don't think allusions have much importance in his work) is to another poet, whom Kees seems to resemble in a number of ways : E.A. Robinson.

Lane plays up the image of Kees as kind of a shadowy, spectral figure, an outline, a ghost, almost not there. Robinson is his alter ego, the shadow of the shadow.

Kees apparently committed suicide off the GG Bridge. Somewhat mysterious circumstances, body never found. He had talked about going to Mexico. There have been legends, sightings, speculation that he vanished, went incognito. All baloney, apparently. Then again, that quiet, reserved housemate... back in the 70s... (dyed his hair...?)

An article on Weldon Kees in this week's New Yorker.

Kees articles tend to surface mysteriously, periodically, on some kind of comet cycle of decans.

Everything can be explained, probably, by Nebraska.