Do not go.
I must go.
“You don’t have a complex, you have a cathedral.” said over the shoulder.
Not so. Simple.
It was shelter.
It was guileless.
It was free.
It was us.
It was me.
We know this.
Do not go.
I must go.
Poetry month: White Trash Haiku with Interpretation
April is National Poetry Month, and for April Fool’s Day something funny and clever:
Fanny Chicken passed along this hilarious stream of white trash themed haiku her sister wrote up several years ago, with excellent interpretive notes that amplify the experience.
Annotations are an underutilized art form. An example of what you’ll get at the post:
Carnival’s in town,
Who’s that runnin’ the zipper?
Like to git with him.
Interpretation: Note how the lure of the carnival is enhanced by the enchanting possibility of new romance. In this haiku, one can almost hear the “clickity whirr” of the zipper ride. It’s as though the reader sees through the author’s eyes: A hansome, although oily-ish, traveling man who’s yearning for a reason to stay in one place for the first time since his release from juvie 7 years ago. Maybe she shall inspire such desire!
More White Trash Haiku with Interpretation
Watery memory
Three days ago, I decided it had been decades since memorizing any poetry, and it was time to rectify that. What to memorize? I’d been studying The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and its part four, Death by Water, seemed easy enough. But I’m finding difficulty with three parts of it:
IV. DEATH BY WATER
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
For the LIFE of me, when considering Phlebas the precise words of the watery phrases escape me. They don’t stick. “the deep sea swell” “A current under sea”. I got “Entering the whirlpool” reliably but this is SO short and simple, it’s bothering me.
Wait. After typing this out, I got it now. Let me close my eyes and try reciting it again.
Good. Just did it two times in a row. Needed hand gestures, but got it.
See, internet? You CAN be remedial!
People inside people are the luckiest people in the world.
The routine that so shakes the world.
Meat and mouths on sticks that slap and bend and clutch then roll apart.
Ridiculous to watch, ridiculous that we empathize or yearn as we watch and cannot help it.
But the difference is the people inside
The people inside.
The people inside.
Be witching.
Darting through the sky dragging trails of coal black smoke.
Sometimes with letters, most often circles.
At times the trail is blinding magnesium crackling and sizzling with an odor that makes the teeth hurt.
Then I land, dismount the broom. Look to the skies and see other letters, other circles.
Higher in elevation from where I patrolled, less fresh.
I used to fly lower altitude, more often I tilt upwards to try the cooler air and better view.
Walking on, I see other circles, faded but over my station. For my notice?
Some a pungent bilious green, hopefully dispersed before they catch the breeze on earth. Birds and bugs dropping unconscious before then. Take shelter under a tree.
How many heartbeats do we have? Is it vain to take to the skies? Vain to scan upwards for messages and deeds? Tough to take direction (or evasion) when there are errands to do.
Beasts of the field spend all their heartbeats doing their duty, consuming, sleeping, excreting.
Beasts of the field do not look to the skies, or take to the skies, from compulsion.
Valentine’s Day new-timey sweetness
In ancient Rome during middle February they feasted quite deeply during pagan Lupercalia. To slit the throats of a dog and a goat then eat them would cure what ailed ya.
Then ladies’d stand naked in line, and while blitzed on wine the fellas all’d hit them.
Later on ladies’ names were drawn by men in a game to determine who later would schtup ’em.
Couples might bond, other times not gel, in either case they’d end up sticky.
While rollicking and violent, horrid and wrong, somehow that all ended as this edible Mickey.
The Valentine’s cookie was sweet, decorated neat, and blended to smooth consistency.
Eating it made me sluggish and slow, hardly rarin’ to go, and in the wild my rivals would pass me.
Would I end up behind down the Lupercalian line slapping laggard asses that didn’t quite suit me?
I’d probably stay back, plan a selective attack based on hair, guessed-at smarts, self-esteem.
Or would I have thought “Sod it all. Ave, Venus!” and hope my card would lead to love at first sight?
All this mulling now and then while with a ravenous grin I chomped down on this corporate copyright.
Three stanzas from ‘Under Ben Bulben’ by Yeats
“Under Ben Bulben” doesn’t quite work. Yeats tried to make it a culminating poem, even writing his eventual epitaph in the closing lines. I cracked it open tonight and rediscovered these three stanzas:
II
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-digger’s toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.
III
You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard,
“Send war in our time, O Lord!”
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.
VI
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near,
By the road an ancient Cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase,
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
How doth the proud plump peacock
How doth the proud plump peacock
lift its belly from the ground?
Stretching ornate plumes and hopes
when a wind assist is found.
“Woman’s Work” by Julia Alvarez
Thanks to Fanny C. for recommending a book of poetry: Rebel Angels, 25 Poets of the New Formalism. I’ve been making slow progress, but have stopped and lurched backward to re-read this poem several times. It’s not sophisticated, but it’s stuck.
Julia AlvarezWoman’s Work
by Julia Alvarez
Who says a woman’s work isn’t high art?
She’d challenge as she scrubbed the bathroom tiles.
Keep house as if the address were your heart.
We’d clean the whole upstairs before we’d start
downstairs. I’d sigh, hearing my friends outside.
Doing her woman’s work was a hard art
to practice when the summer sun would bar
the floor I swept till she was satisfied.
She kept me prisoner in her housebound heart.
She’d shine the tines of forks, the wheels of carts,
cut lacy lattices for all her pies.
Her woman’s work was nothing less than art.
And I, her masterpiece since I was smart,
was primed, praised, polished, scolded and advised
to keep a house much better than my heart.
I did not want to be her counterpart!
I struck out. . .but became my mother’s child:
a woman working at home on her art,
housekeeping paper as if it were her heart.
For my part, didn’t grow up with a Mom who was so fastidious, or LIVED so much through housework. My parents (split home-ish-ness, but consolidating everyone for simplicity’s sake) put an emphasis on us kids doing chores and housekeeping so we would not be totally useless when we left the nest. Seems obvious and common, but how many people/roommates have we known who moved away from home with little or no household skills?
The poem is a manifesto, but my place in life is not summed up in the last stanza, though in time it may be. While sputtering in my writing projects, I see my 8 y/o daughter taking an interest in writing story ideas or phrases in a journal she has, she’s made several observations over the years about seeing me write, and both kids sometimes ask about the state of my writing projects.
I wonder if I’m role modeling for her. If she’ll see my taking spare moments to write as an acceptable norm, a habit for her to build on. If my life is an intermediary step for any greater successes she may have. That’s fine with me. I’d be proud to see it.
Dying into a dance, an agony of trance.
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers’ song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the star-lit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.
At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
– Byzantium, by William Butler Yeats
This is the follow-up poem by Yeats to his Sailing to Byzantium, one of my favorites in my 20s. This poem, written only three years later, is a call-back where the narrator explores the city of legend he aspired to reach in the earlier poem. It makes me realize the aspiration to be a crafted mechanical bird, immortal, singing to lords and ladies of the past, present, or things to come is a way out of the trappings of age and a way into existence of art into posterity, but does not convey the mire, the nature and swamp and meat of life that gives beauty. The poem above seems more sage, an initiate regarding new arrivals. Art as a process of burning and refining. Sensible. Suits an accomplished genius like Yeats. Feels like the only things I have to share are laden messes, to convey the muck and the ooze of it all. I’ve not gained the knack for refinement yet.
While typing this, the itching from a new haircut trickles down my neck through the collar of my t-shirt and sweatshirt. Seeing the amount of silver compared to brown (once natural blonde!) that falls in clumps over the haircut cape while sitting in the chair continues to amuse. The buzzing and tugging and trimming that comes from a woman cutting my hair always feels more intimate than it should be. If there’s not much chit-chat, I tend to tip higher, but I still tip pretty high because in a small way grooming by someone’s hands feels like a moment. The race between my hair turning to silver, and whether I have hair left at all, tends to not amuse. As my hair has waned over the last two decades, I determined to improve my personality to compensate. But, as in so many such resolutions, I’ve let up on THAT a bit. The curmudgeon will out.
As I get to the tasty sludge of a dark hot cocoa at a high end, but not quite aristocratic, chocolateria, three Asian women are having a spirited conversation in a language that is not Japanese nor Chinese. Their pace is quick. Their voices complement each other, and it’s a relief to NOT know enough of their words to eavesdrop. Mild melodic background. Light laughter. I’m tempted to place my smartphone on the small coffee table between them and record their voices for future background noise.
And, like that, I’ve resolved I like Sailing to Byzantium better. The narrator laments, aspires, but is not accomplished enough, it has not yet reached the holy city. November is National Novel Writing Month, and I need to get ramped up on my project.