Now take my measure, measure-man,
and open the old dry goods store on Blake Avenue
the one on the corner, the old man spoke no English
festoons of rickrack yarn ribbon my mother
understood these arid mysteries
                                                                     I waited
in the shadows of language
I will never understand I will never speak
I have studied Latin Greek German
French Italian Spanish Welsh
Sanskrit Hebrew Chinese Tibetan
and can barely speak English
when someone calls me
because speaking means having to say

means having something to say
to the man in the shadows
the dry old man among tape measures
his yardstick nailed to the edge of the counter
his cutter his shears the accurate his patterns

o God there is a pattern
the blue sky is over me now
white clouds sailing my way over mountains

there is a pattern
I will never understand
and I had nothing to say to the old man
to the cloth, what word mattered?
nothing to say to the Murtha girls
waiting for the bus with me at our corner,
to their pink voluptuous flesh
what word mattered?

what word does the body need
in its immeasurable completeness?
and what did their clean sweet Catholic minds
need of my language?
the blue smoke of my longings and my
red passion
                          to remake the endless
structures of the whole world
without damaging, green me, a single leaf?

o God I had nothing to say to them
and the habit patterns of sentences
dried on my tongue
Use This Word In An Ordinary Sentence

Not even fear could let me speak
when the crinkly brown Simplicity patterns
lay strewn over the dining room floor
and my mother was darting pins in and out of blue fabric
and roses of wallpaper climbed the pale plaster
and the piano rumbled in my aunt’s parlor
under the stride of Uncle Joe’s barrelhouse
and the crucifixes glowered down over my coming and goings

and no pattern I could form with all the words I knew
o God how many words I knew
would ever mean anything when I actually said it,
I am afraid of the crucifix I said
they laughed, pushed me up the hall past it
or I asked what is sufficient to the day like Jesus says?
and they shook their heads and rubbed my hair
yet these were their words, not mine,
I had none of my own,
it was their sentences
I was giving back to them,
these aliens of my mother tongue,

I tried to find the key to their
hearts, the dry mysteries their juicy bodies
I looked in their books but my own
heart and my body
never had anything to say.

 

 

Close to the new—

the tenderness,

the smell of leather

lavender

rose

            you are my mother too,

we are born

from all we perceive,

fully born, I mean,

it takes so many years.

 

Walk out of the sea at last.

Blow a tarnished silver horn in your mother’s
garden.

Sometimes it is wise to open the door.

Open the door and just stand there sleepily
alert.  Not waiting!

The trees have been whispering  their secrets
all winter long with their alphabet of
branches, now fall silent, blushing with leaves
in green embarrassment.

The ice is almost all melted now.  And all the
gouges and scratches and skate scars on its
surface have dissolved into the pond.  Year
after year!  No wonder water is so wise.

But sometimes it’s all right to wait–just make
sure you’re not waiting for someone, not even
me (whoever I am).

No wonder we get tired after two-thirds of a
day– at every moment we are on a road that
forks in front of us, every breath brings new
choices. Haven’t you ever wondered why we
need so much sleep?

Any sentence that begins with “I” can’t tell the
whole story.  But it tries.

Read the signs:  blue sky, shapely small cloud
over tall spruce.  I think that’s its name.

Sometimes you feel you’re walking through a
dreamy empty city like Berlin, not too many
towers, lots of skies, wide streets, everything
safely in another language.

They say that Connecticut is named for its
river, its Indian name, that meant it flows
both ways at once–estuarial, obviously, like
the Hudson (whose Indian name had the same

meaning). The river flowing south as the tide
flows north.  Nothing natural can ever finally
make up its mind.

There’s a hill I know up in New Lebanon where
you can stand with one foot in New York and
one in Connecticut. Face north and your left
foot will be in a sort of Sufi monastery
downhill. God knows what your right foot
believes.

Everything happens at once.  How could it be
otherwise.

I never met my grandfathers, both were dead
before I was born. My mother’s father in the
one photo I have of him looked a lot like
Wallace Stevens.  I never met him either, but
he taught me most of what I know, though
you’d never know it.  But it’s what I mean
when I say Connecticut, speaking of what
words mean.

I think there is a temple on the other side of
anything, a sacred spacious building where

true god is served.  To find god go, to the other
side.

I love it that we have borders and frontiers,
especially the kind between states, real
frontiers you can cross freely, nobody
noticing except something deep inside you
that knows, that always knows.

It has connect in it, of course, and cut. Does it
mean cut all connection, dwell in sublime
isolation?  Or should we be wise and ordinary
(the ordinary is always wise) and read it in
English:  connect the cut, span the gap, heal
the wound, make the skin of our lives whole
again.

Stevens at the end wrote about rocks, the
rocks of his place. We belong to the stones of
our town, our glacial boulders turned up in
our fields.  How could we live so long if we
weren’t part stone?

Slim hips of Connecticut wading in the Sound,
across from my own island.  Grandfather
owned a little chunk of it but I left home.

So when I say or I sing come out of the
shallows to me do I have to have someone in
mind?

Why can’t we all just sing?

Heal me with your song–
every woman a wizard, every man a sage.  Just
open your lips, let your breath do all the rest.

28 April 2020

                                       

drive a truck through Kansas

why don’t you remember

isn’t dawn animal enough?

Casual, leaning on a maple tree

you watch the myriad

can’t it be me? 

                                   Am I

the only one to be only?

Kansas again, a cushion

below your heels, gradual

erosion of the peneplane

 

somebody’s birthday every day

give a kid a drone for Xmas

all a child ever wants to see

is whatever isn’t there,

it takes a lot of growing up

to take an interest in being here,

landscape of the moment,

 

or was it a birch tree  I meant,

the white one, you write on its bark,

childhood has its advantages

try to remember them

it’s only time gets in your way

the necrology of feelings

scribbled in a thousand sonnets

 

why did I get up so early

was I trying to catch the snow at work

before it sneaked away

or took the El back to 1950

girl on the platform bla bla bla

a poster to show how she should be,

a wall is to lean on like a tree

or was it a lamp post in London

an outcrop near Laramie?

 

You’ve got to lean on something

it’s like carrying your bed with you

snug under the covers as you go

dreaming on your feet

like a batter waiting for the pitch

flexing muscles you don’t have

dreaming images you can’t see

but still,

                         but still,

do it while you can, some

other lad will take up the thread

the tale, or lass, or let me

know how I can help

I used to know how.

 

2.

So that’s what the pre-dawn glisten

of streetlights said on the wet road

I think I was the only one awake

to hear it, but you never know—

the woods are full of listeners

what else is a tree for

they bear witness

 tell all that they have heard

since they planted us on earth

but we’re seldom smart enough to heed them

and for God’s sake how do you heed a tree?

that’s what they should teach in schools,

they teach us to listen

but to the wrong characters,

they should instruct us instead

on how to hear trees and listen to stones

then Bach would come back in all of us,

most of what I know

comes from hearing the church walls talk

after the hymns finally stop,

just sat in the light and listened.

 

 

3.

So why do I talk so much

my kind wife wonders

at breakfast especially

that long-awaited brunch

when the sun if any is high,

I talk and keep saying listen

Listen to the glisten I say

and she looks at me quietly

and wonders why I

of all people can’t hear what I’m saying.

But saying wants to be said,

o fearsome judge, saying

is what the stone does

and can’t I be shale a while

like the rock ledge in the back yard,

can’t I listen by speaking,

that’s what I’m trying to say

now go back to your lox and eggs

and I’ll try to be quiet

at least for a while.

April 25, 2020

 

 

A Tribute to Carolee Schneemann (1939 – 2019)

for Clayton Eshleman

 

I was young, I mean I was new at being old.

Stones are always welcoming— they parted

long ago to let us in.  A cool cave

not a hundred miles away.  Dark within of course

but I had lights of several sorts, some easy

to the conventional hand.  I was a tyro

on the earth, a brief newcomer, my speech

ringed a little with elsewhere— Somerset? Judaea?

The first friend I met down there was Philippe Soupault,

he wore a little wooden cross around his neck.

I kissed it reverently for new Time’s sake.

He was leading a parcel of pilgrims

towards a special rock where St. John

had left a drawing, ocher and lamp black on the shore

as he passed by so long ago.  Every year

Philippe Soupault told me he leads his neo-Christians to the place

and each spends a day or two before it

figuring out the meaning of what the Saint had in mind

as his holy hands defiled the silent stone with text.

Or was it text? No one was an authority

on what just happens in your head when you look.

There is no weather to wash the signs away.

I went on my way above, always a little timid,

but fear gives a sharper edge to things,

just like desire.  I stopped for lunch at a café,

all shiny metal and polished marble, service slow,

food delicious— a soup with kale and raspberries

built out around tender meat.  Leeks.

The bread of under earth is dense and chewy,

perfect for the man it was my business to become.

 

CANTO II

 

A big blonde showed up as I walked, pretty,

taller by an inch than me, a big girl in flower dress,

appearing as they always do, unexpected, seemed to know

each other, walked beside me telling of her plans

none of which included me.  “The Earth is full of me” she said.

She needed the bathroom and I left her there,

calm goodbye.  A lingering glance.

It seems I had to go the go alone.

And it is best that way, tu sais, a boy

of so many winters looking for springtime

down here where flowers come from.

Now there is a kind of mist that lives down here,

drifts through the sketchy trees (haven’t

done the leaf work yet) and empty streets,

a mist like the ones I love up here with all of you,

spring mist, river dense, water swirling

or drifting soft through just such empty trees

as those below.  I walked gladly through

the humid kisses of it on my skin,

what little I dared bare.  For nakedness 

is rare below the ground, it needs the sun

to summon it.  Down there they pray in clothes.

 

 

 

CANTO III

 

I saw a light ahead, I mean a light not my own.

And sound — it carries well beneath the ground—

as of revelers ahead, music even

but of a kind I did not know—

sounds happy up ahead.  I am scared

of simple joyfulness but gritted my teeth

and stumbled onward, picking up little chunks

of garnet as I pass— my native gemstone,

sidewalks of New York— red stones never fail.

“Your trouble,” she said, “is being rational.”

Not the blonde this time, a woman’s voice,

contralto of the cave, but where was she

while her voice was leaning on my cheek?

“The rational,” she went on, “cannot experience,

or not much.  Can’t feel the dissonance

sweet in actual things, all image and no meaning.”

Who are you, I asked, but meant to say Where?

“Never mind.  You matter to me, I mother you

like a daughter, help you breathe when you are old,

teach you language when you’re young enough.

Without language there could be no lies—

and where would the likes of you be then?”

 

 

 

CANTO IV

Deviants are everywhere to be found—

I must be one of them, so many road signs

and whispers try to set me straight, the path,

the path!  Who are these voices

that know me underneath the ground?

I decided to brave the music and plunge ahead—

I came upon a campground with a county fair

all glows and gleams and bottled sunlight.

Men were all in cages while  the animals

prowled around, some of them on leashes

led by women, others just guessing their ground.

I feared being captured so I knelt down to pray,

not sure of what god is in charge of such a place

so I prayed to my own faith and hoped for the best.

Nobody saw me, they all were giddy with music

(high horns? desperate bassoons,  tin drums?)

filling the beast troughs with wine, the women

drank too, but none for the boys in the cages,

tongues hanging out, boasting of sports victories,

balls thrown, caught, kicked, hidden, consumed—

such evil things to do to perfect spheres.

Poor men!  I am one but am still free, who knows

what heaven says to us us who count our deeds,

think them worthy.  Non homo ssum sed vermis,

King David is said to have said though not in Latin,

creep on the ground all the way to the stars.

 

 

 

CANTO V

But who are these voices that tell me what to do,

tell me what im thinking, tell me who I am

and where I’m going, and why do I only hear them

when I’m  deep down in sleep or underground?

Women and animals and the occasional dead bard,

whistle wisdoms, starlight stratagems?  The rock

relies.  Trust granite, remember New Hampshire

where you learned to walk below the surface

clutching at last to the mother rock.  Lust

lives down there too but that comes later,

when the pelicans have swallowed all the fish

and cherubim sing Thomas Tallis in the trees,

you know when—and it was that voice again

disguising itself as music.  Have you ever noticed

how human voices in ordinary conversation

from far off can sound like instruments,

clarinets, say, or cellos?  Which one are you?

Have you noticed you’re the only sinner here?

 

 

 

 

CANTO VI

Lordy lordy as we used to say, to sin by music!

Without the bushwa grandeur of the opera house,

the jostled beer spray of the midnight rave,

just ordinary hum hum hum alone to sound

like Strauss or Mahler maybe if you’re good.

Good sin!  Babylonian banquets of pure imagery!

Semaphore signals by abandoned tracks,

Orpheus autographed the standing stones,

girls gliding through arpeggios, seals bark.

dolphins nudging drowning poets safe ashore,

all the stories you tried not to hear, school stuff,

billingsgate of the obvious, chanticleer alarmed,

fox in the pantry, ants on the moon, the bull fight

still going on, the mincing picador, lute in flames,

the chemistry set you didn’t get for Christmas,,

 all the dead Saracens reproaching the Cross,

domes over Transubstantiation, music pure,

music simple, music is what happens in the head.

 

 

 

CANTO VII

Could it be so easy I asked and almost fell

against a damp wall all smudged with something,

oil of lavender?  moose milk?  I know so little

about things though things are all I know,

all I love.  Bring me things I cry to the morning

and noon sings full of substances, domains

without dimension that still cast shadows,

a shadow is how you know a thing’s a thing,

not just more music.  Bread and cheese,

zeppelins coming over the horizon, white

cane of a blind man, a boulder in the backyard

claiming to be there before the Flood, who knows,

things are mighty in their understanding, things

celebrate human ignorance, giggle at us, I too

have been smirked at by a pebble.  Even so

I came down here, willingly, stepping barefoot

out of dream, in the hour of the basking shark

on the day of the unknown twins, onto the glacis

of my mighty castle, Here I am, I cried, available

to wisdom and vulnerable to truth. Only then

did I realize I was deep nelow the earth, happy,

frightened as usual, wondering what comes next.

 

 

 

 

CANTO VIII

 

Or was it something just real that I heard

walking in the dark road north it seemed

as from a Russian station, home, could it

have been actual music made by humans?

And where is home anyway when you’re under ground?

Everywhere, all around.  Passed a little cavelet bright,

a poet’s birthday party clamorous inside,

French noises, vowel harmonies as from the East.

I lost my compass long ago and had to walk by prejudice.

And something told me I was nearly there.

I stopped inside to add my greetings

but this time I left my body just outside the door

so I could float unseen amongst them, blessing

them as I wafted through their words

O onyx labyrinth in which the beast is born

I heard the birthday girl declaim to mild applause

but I was thrilled somehow and blessed her more.

 

 

 

CANTO IX

 

Have you never weaned of the wandering hours,

the ordinary day-night raga we all learn to play?

Getting nowhere fast we used to say, thrombosis

of trombones, helter-skelter vibraphones

a few shy kisses in the bushes and good night?

Then you’ll grasp how just me felt,

Why was I anywhere, and who were you?

I mean anybody matters, who? who?

Lonely lover’s dismal owl— but I was Love

itself himself herself, aren’t I, who else

wanders through every rock and lives under everything?

Why else would I be here but to love—

know, touch, teach, worship, give—

synonymous of the godly work we learn in dream.

Lef t the party early, wanted to be in my body again.

 

 

 

 

CANTO X

 

Now set the stage for my departure.

I’ve spent my whole life walking home

—that’s why down here is so easy,

no lions, few wolves, a bear or two,

and headlights passing all night long.

Anyone could be my friend, my father

come to pick me up from school.  Stop

any car and ask the occupant his DNA,

who was on the throne when he was born

or she if by chance she is your mother.

O short breath of the departing dream,

that tiger-striped noise in the chest, hula dancers in sight,

swoon of under, come to rest, sit down.

But there are no park benches down below,

no ottomans or love seats or davenports,

it’s rock or nothing and you take your pick.

All right, Virgil, I slip down here to rest,

having seen it all and understood none of it

and so can still be happy, sort of, brass

pipes in shiny bathrooms, the clink of silver

in ancestral homes, a ring-neck pheasant

I loved by the Cloisters, years boxed

in decades, a seal coat in the closet,

everything is here again and I am done.

Those were the names on the contract he bade me sign,

he said it was a poem, I said it was half his,

he said Don’t worry, sign it with someone else’s name.

Staghorn pen in my fingers as I woke.

I don’t get much older but my body does

and waking just left me where I was—

underground and over it the same astrology,

gastronomy, we dine on shadows and never really die.

My body was older when I crept back in,

been sitting too long, knees stiff, sinews dormant,

I grunting rose.  Back on the path, a witness,

on jury duty for the whole of earth—

Everything is evidence and the judge seems to be asleep.

Walk, walk, safe as baseball, safe as sugar,

walk, little bone bag, walk.  I heard a whistle

close, close, it turned out to be my breath.

 

CANTO XI

 

There is no moon here, and the sun shines up from the ground

I mean the ground I walk on, not the ground

above me where you are walking now.

Coaxing first leaves on the willow trees

along a stream so far ahead I can’t

hear its purling even in my dreams.

For in this sleep or dream there is sleeping too.

I stared down at the sun so long

my skin grew darker and warmer,

I felt it was consuming the light itself.

I fell to my knees and started praying.

praying was an old friend never quite forgotten,

I prayed to the soft earth I knelt on, that’s it,

I thought, Pray  to what you stand on – that’s

what she meant, I realized. But who was she?

So many voices all the same, and all differences

are just music?  She was the mother tongue

that never lies. And the bird of heaven upward fell.

 

                           …9 – 11 April 2019

Robert Kelly reads poem for Robert Duncan, from a reading at Naropa in July 1992

Now we have opened the moon

now listen carefully

now place those semi-precious

memories—lapis afternoons,

garnet sunsets, onyx swoons

of passion midnights—

safely inside its hollow shell.

Bell.  Listen for the sound it makes

as it remembers and lets you forget.

This is healing.  This is his touch.

 

7 March 2019

So assume every note

in Brahms’ Handel Variations for piano

is a word.

Who can speak so quickly?

What would they be saying?

Is it music’s glory

that we’ll never know?

And yet someone wrote it down,

clearly, in context and in place,

and last night Misha Dichter

pronounced it with his fingertips—

a lost gospel, an instruction

manual for an undreamt machine?

 

6 March 2019