The Italians

I was recently mailed a copy of Dennis Barone's New Hungers For Old, an anthology of Italian American poetry. While I don't know how many poems about grandfathers' butcher shops any one person needs, I was moved by a Gregory Corso poem I'd not seen before.


Italian Extravaganza

Mrs. Lombardi’s month-old son is dead.
I saw it in Rizzo’s funeral parlor,
a small purplish wrinkled head.

They’ve just finished having high mass for it;
They’re coming out now
…wow, such a small coffin!
And ten black cadillacs to haul it in.


This shows you the special power that comes about through a poem's compression, in this case the bringing together of big and small images. The compaction of the language causes a buildup of energy, like the latent energy in a compressed spring. And boom, when the energy's released. I'm not aware of any other art form that can pull off this feat.

Returning home

The dictionary says the word nostalgia is rooted in the Greek for homesickness, and though often it has taken on a negative pallor I marvel at poems that take me back.
Like this one by Thomas Lux, which I found while re-reading the story "Winky" by George Saunders, which appeared in The New Yorker. Lux's poem appeared in the middle of it.

Refrigerator, 1957


More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.


The thing is, the Perillos had that same jar of cherries.

Vogelsang

There's much to read in this world, and I've finally allowed myself to accept my tastes in poetry, which are somewhat old-fashioned and perhaps put too much emphasis on intelligibility--instead of making myself feel compelled to pursue the vogue. I've read somewhere that someone, perhaps Billy Collins, suggested that the word "accessible" be laid aside in favor of "hospitable"--now this would be an appalling switch. Though "accessible" has become tainted, the uncoolest adjective among the uncool,it usually connotes what Marianne Moore called "plain old English that dogs and cats could understand." Hospitable, on the other hand, carries the whiff of wanting to be liked, to make nice, to not ruffle any feathers. In my own work I do want to talk to the dogs and cats but I want them to be ruffled.

The book that's given me the most pleasure recently is Arthur Vogelsang's collected poems, Expedition. The language is plain, or plain-ish, and yet the poems are at the same time quite loopy and weird. Here is one:

Help

Lay down beside me I signaled to my wolf
Three pats of the sofa in the early morn
Then two pats of the heart to say why.
He did it silently, no reply when one does
What's to do. I must rest my hand on you
For a while for the usual reasons. This
Is easy to say between wolves or wolves and people
And difficult between people. For instance
A person might not want to absorb by touch another's pain
Then. The wolf loves to. The person might say
Oh all right, but clearly a burden to ease another's pain.
If you keep a wolf, there isn't much more they do
But they are specially good at it
Like the surf loves to be splashed with a whole bottle of poison water,
Try that and see if the waves don't turn over embracing without end,
Try that and see if you can find any poison after two seconds,
Or slowly slide your fingers through the first layer
Of your wolf's coat to the second layer and move fingers
Head to tail, tail to head, slower than slowly.
Anything could have happened to you yesterday
And you'd soon be okay. But first get a wolf.

The Public Common

It's easy to be nostalgic for the past, of which we have relatively little data, if we're trying to picture life before the formation of our own brains.

Lately I've been thinking of Emily Dickinson: her biographers report that she read the newspapers and that the newspapers printed poetry. Dickinson even submitted poems for consideration, once, I believe. She was rejected and turned her back on all that. There came the famous poem about publication being the auction of the mind.

Oddly, there were poems in the newspaper (New York Times) last Sunday. The theme was: poems of the season. Were the editorial writers on vacation, so they dispatched the student intern to dig up some poetry?

My favorite was by Sarah Lindsay, a copy editor by day, whose poems normally are third-person, fantastical, a combination of research and wildly detailed invention. So I was surprised to see this straightforward first person elegy, built on the platform of an extended metaphor. In technical terms, the poem is all vehicle (ha ha); the ground of the metaphor, the real death, is stated but not dwelt on. I found it haunting because it is so directly stated, the scene so vivid.

THE DRIVER

Twice we watched him leave us:
Once when the car loaded with us died
and rolled to the side of a highway into Nashville
in boiling August; later with cancer.
Empty jug in one hand, he walked away
step by step on a strip of pavement
about as wide as his shoulders,
hot wind of traffic panting on his left.
He would find help. He would attract it. Slowly
the rippling heat from the asphalt dissolved him,
his shrinking back looked like anyone’s —
he was gone before it disappeared.
We stood staring anyway
by the highway barrier wall
with mimosa tree-tips reaching over
as the other cars rushed by us
toward their accidents at a hundred miles an hour.

Speed

High speed internet has recently come into my life, and with that Youtube. So I post a clip of John Berryman reading Dream Song 29:


There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.




The body language in the clip is fascinating, especially Berryman's conducting of the poem with his long index finger. The liquid quality of his body (is he drunk?) and the angles at which he sets his chin.

The ending is justly famous, and now, looking at it again, I see how the whole poem works to point a finger at that secret guilt that some of us (all of us?) are hobbled by. That we have committed an irremediable wrong, and yet we don't know what is is; there is no evidence. And yet, inside, we are wrung. The heart is squashed.

Somewhere Robert Pinsky makes a distinction between guilt and shame, but he doesn't quite articulate the qualities of the difference. Berryman, I suppose, is talking about guilt, as the ending makes clear. But I can't tell which of these I feel. Perhaps both.

I'm back, we'll see

Two nights ago, I went to see the movie "Under the Salish Sea," which consisted entirely of footage of the undersea life of Puget Sound, of the Salish Sea. Among the amazing footage was the hunt of a gray whale by orcas. They exhaust the larger whale by chasing it, they lie on its head to drown it.

Coincidentally, I'd just been made aware of this poem by James Dickey, which is a style of poem that I'd not been exposed to before: the poem as thriller (like the movie "Jaws.") It makes the heart race, and it's impressive how Dickey gets from the southern U.S. to the arctic, via his boy-reading of the explorers.

Pursuit from Under

---

by James Dickey

Often, in these blue meadows,
I hear what passes for the bark of seals

And on August week ends the cold of a personal ice age
Comes up through my bare feet
Which are trying to walk like a boy's again
So that nothing on earth can have changed
On the ground where I was raised.

The dark grass here is like
The pads of mukluks going on and on

Because I once burned kerosene to read
Myself near the North Pole
In the journal of Arctic explorers
Found, years after death, preserved
In a tent, part of whose canvas they had eaten

Before the last entry.
All over my father's land

The seal holes sigh like an organ,
And one entry carries more terror
Than the blank page that signified death
In 1912, on the icecap.
It says that, under the ice,

The killer whale darts and distorts,
Cut down by the flawing glass

To a weasel's shadow,
And when, through his ceiling, he sees
Anything darker than snow
He falls away
To gather more and more force

From the iron depths of cold water,
His shadow dwindling

Almost to nothing at all, then charges
Straight up, looms up at the ice and smashes
Into it with his forehead
To splinter the roof, to isolate seal or man
On a drifting piece of the floe

Which he can overturn.
If you run, he will follow you

Under the frozen pane,
Turning as you do, zigzagging,
And at the most uncertain of your ground
Will shatter through, and lean,
And breathe frankly in your face

An enormous breath smelling of fish.
With the lungs staining your air

You know the unsaid recognition
Of which the explorers died:
They had been given an image
Of how the downed dead pursue us.
They knew, as they starved to death,

That not only in the snow
But in the family field

The small shadow moves,
And under the bare feet in the summer:
That somewhere the turf will heave,
And the outraged breath of the dead,
So long held, will form

Unbreathably around the living.
The cows low oddly here

As I pass, a small bidden shape
Going with me, trembling like foxfire
Under my heels and their hooves.
I shall write this by kerosene,
Pitch a tent in the pasture, and starve.

Report: that I have been making progress when it comes to memorization: "Richard Cory" by Robinson, "Pied Beauty" by Hopkins, "Casabianca" by Bishop, "When I Consider How My Light Was Spent" by Hopkins, "The Voice" by Hardy, "Three Moves" by John Logan, "Of Mere Being" by Stevens, "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Most of these have rhyme to help me along, except for "Of Mere Being," which was difficult, because it lacked this mnemonic device.

Recently I discovered James Schuyler, one of the New York poets who also qualifies as a nature poet, who puts nature off kilter enough to rouse the skeptical. This poem is one that's been an the back of my mind; now to bring it into the fore.


Salute

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

For the past year I've not written on this web site because (as anyone who googles me knows) I've maintained a web site, for my neighbors, on the great blue herons who nest in my neighborhood. The nesting area is threatened by development, not that they're an endangered species, yet I would still be sad to see them gone.

The heron site ended up under my name, when I'd intended to use a pseudonym, so that my public writing life would not be "soiled" by this purely local endeavor. And why do I regard the mixing of the two as soilage? Why don't I want it known that I spend/waste/utillize time not just in the supposedly high-minded task of writing poems but also in trying to make real change on a purely local level? Beats me. But I do not underestimate my capacity for shame.

The irony is: the heron web site may have hurt the herons. It alerted everyone to their presence, everyone including the developer, who promptly laid out his roadbed through the rookery (though the impact of the road waits to be seen).

One of the reasons I haven't written anything here is that for the past year I've been writing on a web site/blog that is devoted to a great blue heron rookery (nesting area) in my neighborhood that is threatened by development and which state biologists hadn't been aware of. The result is that the developer must build in such a way that minimizes impacts to the herons (which are not endangered). And the primary victory is that herons continue to nest there despite logging of the development site and the access road to the development, which runs through the rookery.


Here is a poem about the GBH that someone made me aware of when I was blogging for the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Turns out that it is Portland's official bird, and William Stafford was commissioned to write a poem about it.



Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron" by William Stafford

Out of their loneliness for each other
two reeds, or maybe two shadows, lurch
forward and become suddenly a life
lifted from the dawn to the rain. It is
the wilderness come back again, a lagoon
with our city reflected in its eye.
We live by faith in such presences.
It is a test for us, that thin
but real, undulating figure that promises,
"If you keep the faith I will exist
at the edge, where your vision joins
the sunlight and the rain: heads in the light,
feet that go down in the mud where the truth is."

This anthropomorphosizes the bird a bit more than I would like, but I think it is terribly difficult to write "the civic poem."

I'm off Harriet (the poetry foundation's web site) and have been entertaining thoughts about coming back here. Not to post my poems (because I want to give them time to find their vessels) and not to trumpet my own career (don't go anywhere to speak of) but perhaps to post a poem occasionally or to steer people to something good I've read.

Meanwhile, I do appreciate everyone's kind words.

Lucia is posting at Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog.

I’m sorry for not stating here that I’d let my anthology go dormant. One reason was that I didn’t think anyone was looking at it, but recently I finally opened it up and there were many comments. So to those people who did check in—thank you for reading my posted poems, it gives you a sense of a my (boring, middlebrow) taste. Maybe I will take the anthology up again at a later time, because on re-reading those poems, many of them forgotten by me (so much for the memorization), I realized how much I like them.

For now, though I wanted to say that I am blogging (part-time, another questionable experiment) for the Poetry Foundation, which is affiliated with poetry magazine. So you can read my maundering for the next few months at poetryfoundation.org. You will find there a wee heading that says “blog.” I’ll only be posting once a week, though, through the month of August. Perhaps that will motivate me to start posting poems again. Or not. So far, I’ve learned that the blogging world is a little rougher than I’m temperamentally suited for.

I’m sorry for not stating here that I’d let my anthology go dormant. One reason was that I didn’t think anyone was looking at it, but recently I finally opened it up and there were many comments. So to those people who did check in—thank you for reading my posted poems, it gives you a sense of a my (boring, middlebrow) taste. Maybe I will take the anthology up again at a later time, because on re-reading those poems, many of them forgotten by me (so much for the memorization), I realized how much I like them.

For now, though I wanted to say that I am blogging (part-time, another questionable experiment) for the Poetry Foundation, which is affiliated with poetry magazine. So you can read my maundering for the next few months at poetryfoundation.org. You will find there a wee heading that says “blog.” I’ll only be posting once a week, though, through the month of August. Perhaps that will motivate me to start posting poems again. Or not. So far, I’ve learned that the blogging world is a little rougher than I’m temperamentally suited for.

Explanation for extreme lapse: I had to kill off my feeble attempt at blogging, or not-blogging, because I was already spending so much time at the computer that spending additional time there, or here, simply became excruciating to my legs and back. Plus my tendency is to acquire enthusiasms, and drop them, I know.

The modern preference is for the improvised product over the polished one. Hence: reality TV, blogs. Such a distillation is flawed of course because then how come people aren't rushing out to buy jazz CDs?

In my writing I've perhaps gone overboard on the polish and hope to learn to improvise, to allow for more raggedness. But no one needs to read my ragged maunderings, and there are already so many poetry sites.

Now I've gotten a service dog (no dropping that enthusiasm for a decade: this seems longer than my lifespan but it seems important to simply forge on. Otherwise the wheels lose their ability to gain any traction at all.)

Onward.

Spiderspace is set up to accomodate short bits of information sent often--to wit, e-mail. Long e-mails are annoying (long paper letters=good.) And so it is with these posts: short is better. But they must come often, or the totality of the work is considered stale.
I worry what this will do to the brain, accustomed to the flash modality of the music video and the channel surf.
But I'll stick to my guns here by posting something long that I hadn't seen before. It's a piece of writing by James Wright--a prose poem? Not sure where it comes from. I found it in an anthology and it struck me, hard.
Wright is my favorite poet, possessing that combination of erudition and foolish drunkenness, which, to speak stereotypically, are masculine traits (men get sentimental when they are drunk, which drives women crazy.) It's a style that woman can't write in, to do so would be false. So the style is denied us, off-limits, however maddening that is to think.

The Flying Eagles of Troop 62

Ralph Neal was the Scoutmaster. He was still and young man. He liked us.
I have no doubt he knew perfectly well we were each of us masturbating unhappily in secret caves and shores.
The soul of patience, he waited while we smirked behind each other's backs, mocking and parodying the Scout Law, trying to imitate the oratorical rotundities of Winston Churchill as a Southern Ohio accent:
"Ay scout is trusswortha, loll, hailpful, frenly, curtchuss, kand, abaydent, chairful, thrifta, dapraved, clane, and lethcherass."
Ralph Neal knew all about the pain of the aching stones in our twlve-year-old groins, the lava swollen halfway between our peckers and our nuts that were still green and sour as half-ripe apples two full months before the football season began.
Socrates loved his friend the traitor Alcibiades for his beauty and for what he might become.
I think Ralph Neal loved us for our scrawniness, our acne, our fear; but mostly for his knowledge of what would probably become of us. He was not a fool. He knew he would never himself get out of that slime hole of a river valley, and maybe he didn't want to. The Vedantas illustrate the most sublime of ethical ideals of describing a saint who, having endured through a thousand lives every half-assed mistake and unendurable suffering possible to humanity from birth to death, refused at the last minute to enter Nirvana becaused he realized that his scruffy dog, suppurating at the nostrils and half mad with rabies, could not accompany him into perfect peace...
When I think of Ralph Neal's name, I feel some kind of ice breaking open in me. I feel a garfish escaping into a hill spring where the crawdads burrow down to the pure bottom in hot weather to get cool. I feel a rush of long fondness for that good man Ralph Neal, that good man who knew us dreadful and utterly vulnerable little bastards better than we knew ourselves, and who loved us, I reckon, because he knew damned well what would become of most of us, and it sure did, and he knew it, and he loved us anyway. The very name of America often makes me sick, and yet Ralph Neal was an American. The country is often enough to drive you crazy.

Somebody left the comment that I should make the blogness of the blog more bloggy, but it's not really a blog, I don't check in as I should. Plus there is the problem of being populist--writers are supposed to be iconoclastic, not populist, populism taints. However...

I have been thinking about poetry's purpose, having offered brainless nonthoughts about this in the past. Now it seems to me that poetry in fact has many purposes. Here's one, #7, the populist purpose: it is our civic glue. Well, at least for those who want to be glued. Certain poems mark our cultural rites of passage, but: do we still have poems that operate in this manner, the way "Howl" did? Where/what are our public poems now?

There was also Philip Levine's "They Feed They Lion," holding its mirror to the race riots of the 60's.

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
___________
I never understood the poem well until I heard Levine explain how he had a job in his youth, doing something like unpacking ball bearings, and one of his black co-workers held up one of the burlap sacks they were using, noting that it was from the zoo. "They feed they lion from they sack." A co-opting of dialect? Yeah, maybe, sure. But probably the most enduring exposition of those times.

Need to work on the first six reasons.

For days, the weather’s gone like this: rainbow squall rainbow squall…ad infinitum. I keep thinking it must stop but it doesn’t. Usually we have a steadiness of one thing or another. Not a steadiness of unsteadiness.

Why it matters is that, because the squalls will short out my electronics, I’ve been living in even more isolation than my usual isolation. The cost/benefit ratio of my going out into the world is pretty high, and I’m always trying to muster the oomph to leave the house. This seems like a queer sort of life, though I often think, well Emily Dickinson didn’t leave the house and she didn’t fret about it.

Then today I read this poem by Charles Simic that approximated the circumstances under which I live.

To Laziness

Only you understood
How little time we have.
Not enough to lift a finger,
Not enough to blink.

The voices on the stairs,
Ideas too quick to pursue—
What did they all matter?
When eternity beckoned.

The curtains drawn,
The newspapers unread.
The keys collecting dust.
My mind was like a motionless ceiling fan,

World-weary, languid
As if the bed was a barge on the Nile,
One red sail in the sunset,
With barely a breath in it.

When I moved at last,
The stores were closed.
Was it already Sunday?
The weddings and funerals were over.

A few sluggish clouds in the sky,
Shadows idling in the doorways,
The patches of waning light
More and more silent and absorbed.

___________________
Lately I’ve been thinking about the value of indirection versus the value of declaration. My mind chooses rainbow then squall then back to bow, and then the “accessible” bow seems childish.

No one should mistake my offhand comments as substantial, though I found it interesting to be the superstratum of a kerfuffle transpiring several layers below me, since the sad fact is...I do not look much at this cyberspatial nooklet. But I did look a little.

Modernism especially lobbied for the imagination's privacy, which I suppose all artists guard (maybe my imagination's not so private because my real life is, now that I don't much go out.) But that privacy hangs balanced against the reader's privacy when he-she sits down with the poem--there are strings that do the hanging, make the balance, and to cut the strings (=disdain the act of communication) was modernism's great disservice. Or so sez me/said me.

Of course, I in turn used to disdain Wallace Stevens. That pompous obscurant whose poems, especially that one about a jar, really twisted my panties. But wait: so how come his are the poems that stick in the mind? Those ones we don't understand? Sticking in the mind would seem to be the best evidence of a populist aesthetic.

These thoughts I thank while sitting on the back porch with my baby sitter (and it's me who must be baby-sat in case calamity strikes) one afternoon of late. It was lovely, though it sounds so phony-baloney, to read Stevens out loud on a fine day. She called my attention to this poem, which I didn't know, and which seems like an elegy to the self, though I don't know whether Stevens wrote it when he was old. It is the last poem in the edition of his selected poems that I own. The meanings and the imagination behind the meanings remain private, though it communicates openly in terms of its simple language and its appeal to the brain's capacity for memorizing:

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

------
The poem makes a better statement about imagination and privacy than I could make. The poem is also of a piece with his prose statement about the poetry of war.

Life is complicated, because everything connects to everything else, and now with electronica this connectedness is so pervasive that we live in a blur, it seems. Tornado where we are the tiny end of it, but also connected to the giant swirl above.

I've been reading some surrealist poets (namely Dean Young, whose new book is heavily indebted to Kenneth Koch, one of the New York school dudes, who passed away recently. I was thinking: surrealism can embrace comedy, that's what is does well, but what can it do with tragedy, what can it do with war?)

The NY Times reviewed by book last Sunday. It was very quiet here, and I felt like a bee in a cathedral. The reviewer talked about me as comic, and mentioned in particular a poem from my last book, which was a theft of a Koch poem. This is what I mean by the connectedness of it all.

The poem's long (a poem gets long when the connections start spiraling,) but I'll post it here anyway. I can't get the line breaks right--where there's a capital letter, it's supposed to be a new line, as originally written. Small letter means the line was just too long to fit.

One Train May Hide Another
(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line--
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia
Antica one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another--one colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
One idea may hide another: Life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple--this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by
the mother's
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love
or the same love
As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love lingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"
Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the
Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading
A Sentimental Journey look around
When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore
May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk
May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and
One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the
foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It
can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

An old friend just called because she's going to write a piece for our new local alternative newspaper (the only other choice is a Gannet affiliate,) and she wanted to incorporate something from my blog, which is NOT a blog, really. She is a peace activist, and want to draw on some cockamamie thing I said (we both attended Scott Ritter's talk.) Have been thinking/writing about my youth, which was governed by Vietnam, a war that remains vivid to me, not so much because ofwhat actually happened overseas, events of which I had just the dimmest awareness (I am just now reading Fire in the Lake to learn about the actualities) but rather because of the psychic force the war exerted on our developing hormonal teenage brains. Because we were only dimly aware, death seemed a vapor that engulfed us. It was everywhere, we were doomed, so there was no reason not to (for example) take LSD, what did the long-term effects matter?

Now an opposing idea circulates in the culture (or is it an idea that circulates among those growing old) that our paramount duty is to maintain our health. This program is hard for me to sign on to because 1) America is being run by people whose motives are so incomprehensible and things seem to be going to hell, and 2) I am sick and do not desire a long life. I guess I would like to return to the youthful damn-the-doom way of living, but can't work up the oomph to party anymore.

Here is a poem by Hayden Carruth that seems to fit.

On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam

Well I have and in fact
more than one and I'll
tell you this too

I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against

Korea and another
against the one
I was in

and I don't remember
how many against
the three

when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County

and not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now and then like a child
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.
__________

The poem's being so artless leaves you unprepared for the metaphor that closes and clinches the poem and leaves me breathless because I see that smile. Come to think of it...uh oh...I know whose smile it is. It is Donald Rumsfeld's smile.