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.

My friend was talking about Wallace Stevens the other day, and I realized that I don't know much about Wallace Stevens, I'd always avoided him because I didn't understand his aesthetic. But. If you are talking about poems to be comitted to memory, then it's the Stevens poems that pop up: "Emperor of Ice Cream" (the corpulent one, the roller of fat cigars)--why? Maybe he was working on the problem of how to turn the psyche (the privatemost of utterings) into a civic utterance, a public utterance. Whereas someone like Ashbery is concerned with the psyche's utterings, but not necessarily turning them into something civic.

So while I was thumbing through my Stevens book I found this, which seems applicable to the recent posts. I don't think he intended it as a poem. Anyway, I'd never seen it before, so I will post it.

[Prose statement on the poetry of war]

The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact. If that is true, it follows that the poetry of war as a consciousness of the victories and defeats of nations, is a consciousness of fact, but of heroic fact, of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one's thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic. It has been easy to say in recent times that everything tends to become real, or, rather, that everything moves in the direction of reality, that is to say, in the direction of fact. We leave fact and come back to it, come back to what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was, not to what it has too often remained. The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace. But in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming.
Nothing will ever appease this desire except a consciousness of fact as everyone is at least satisfied to have it be.
_____

Back to Lucia: I'm still chewing on this. There is of course a problem with fact right now, that is has, in a flash almost, become so fluid that fact doesn't exist. At least in its "represented" forms. If fact was in opposition to the imagination in the WWII days of Stevens' writing, the fluidness of the new non-facts still aren't equivalent to the imagination. Or are they? Your imagination can create a cyber reality where you fly around on a pterodactyl. (Dactyl!) Or you quit typing and go outside to stare at the trees, so that's what I'm going to do.

No poem now, but I will post that I heard somebody quoting Mark Twain on the radio: "Patriotism is being proud of your country all the time, but proud of your government only when it's right." Or something like that. No, no--now I remember. It was from a documentary made from interviews of former CIA people and weapons inspectors, who stated that the administration, including honorable people like Colin Powell, knew it was lying on WMD. It made me feel badly about not having done enough...well, I didn't actually do anything...to stop the war machine. All I've done is write poems. Someone left a really thoughtul comment about this.

Vivian--who made this web site and tells me what to do since the electronic world is mostly foreign to me and I am content to leave it that way--said I should write: I do not have cancer. I do not have cancer, Lisa! Whew, what a relief. I only have m.s.--is that a code, as people once said the big C? The lesson is: stick to poetry, though I will say that the new drug I'd been researching, which I mentioned because it was recommended to my considereration, was taken off the market because someone died, and the disturbing thing about this news is that I learned it from the business page of the NY Times, reporting on how the company stock tanked as a result. Shine, perishing republic.