2 January 2007…..Bill,

The first of the new year comes the wolf moon, after the yule moon, old moon
And some say the snow moon.

Moons named, save one, by the Algonquins, west from New England to Lake Superior. When I travel I follow the names of the moons beyond Greylock in the Berkshires past the Finger Lakes and alongside the Hudson valley to the abandoned locks of the old Erie canal.
Certainly when the hungry wolves of January came out the mountains and crossed the snow plains and the frozen rivers the local tribes traipsed over to Ye Olde Cracker Barrel for a root beer, a game of checkers, hot sizzling swine strips and roasted chicken eggs. Nowadays you have to pick up the local field guide to demons to keep up with all the dwarves, wookies, retired Bosnian storm troopers, hardanger fiddlers, Hebrews, herbologists, yogis, gimcrackers, geegaw hawkers, punks, goofs, local punters and varied and sundry other magickal
creatures. The turn of the Worm and the Screw.

Still, all in all I’ve got no complaints Bill. I think of a scene from a movie, The Kingdom of Heaven where the knight protector of the city orders the bodies of the slain to be burned in a mass grave since they can’t be buried and the threat of disease could destroy the besieged. The Patriarch of Jerusalem complains that God will understand and if he does not then he is not God.
In the past few years, unlike many of the years of my life, I have more than enough.

           The ash grove, how graceful, how plainly ‘tis speaking,
           The wind through it playing has music for me.

I have more shoes than I can wear in one day. A local girl keeps my affection faithfully and a small feline follows one step behind me ( I’m carrying her food dish of course )

     Whenever the light through its branches is breaking
     A host of kind faces is gazing upon me.

There’s always music. I have cookbooks and more to read than could fill many lifetimes beyond what I’ll ever realize, knowing little I know. The geography of  nowhere and beyond the world is the world. So there’s much to change but I never lack for food, or shoes, root beer. Homilies and the great path.
Mornings in the western world become a meditation on the history and efficacy of plumbing. The great flow of poison and fertilizer from the Persian empire, Pompeii, the Holy Roman to the fleets of the Han, Sun King offal, and the myriad time zones compiled by Aztec astronomers, Enlightenment heretics, and Sufi mystics. Stone age and iron ships.
Someone is always standing up to the scratch line. Sustenance and murder on the left hand and the right.
Years ago on that riverboat out of New Orleans we would steam past a leper colony on our way to Natchez. Some of us would stand on the Hurricane deck while Dan played the calliope. They waved and we waved back. He usually
played some bright carnival aire and a steam calliope by its nature tended to be ridiculously loud, sunny and silly in disposition. He’d play the Jolly Cobbler, the Cuckoo Waltz, the Billboard March or That Old Gang of Mine. Once in a while though I’d catch him playing a few bars of the Ash Grove (the lyrics quoted above) and even less occasionally the Carnival of Souls. He’s catch me looking at him over the railing and he’d roll right over into Mr. Big Top on the next beat. He’d smile and shrug his shoulders. There’s always a back story.

Over the months I’ve had it I’ve read Kate’s paper over, carefully and again. It gave me occasion to reference Ralph’s piece in The Exquisite Corpse. Nowadays I read and read. Parcel of a life somewhat more graceful and insulated than I’ve known in the past. I revel and wallow in the scraps and references. Still I’m not alone. There is the incessant chatter of the dead and the displaced in this ear and the next life.

Let us admit that Poetry as attempt is its own Journey occurring for us within the confines of Wording, howsoever Wording might be made. –R. La Charity.

When narrative poetry is performed, the poet often uses imagery from ancient cultures, or at least pays homage to the tradition of poetry as “storytelling.” -K. Polak.

Although the subject surely speaks, and there is no speaking without a subject, the subject does not exercise sovereign power over what it says. As a result, interpretation after the diffusion of sovereign power has an origin that is unclear as its end. For whom does the address emerge, and to whom is it addressed? If the one who delivers it does not author it, and the one who is marked by it is not described by it, then the workings of interpellative power exceeds the subject constituted by its terms, and the subjects so constituted exceed the interpellation by which they are animated. –J. Butler, Excitable Speech.

The last time I performed was at Marcel Kopp’s funeral in Arlington. My eulogy was a poem I knew from Twelve Poems for the Naked Poet. Someone said it was perfect and everyone was listening and others were crying. Since then I’ve been in the audience but it’s been a thoughtful segregation. At one reading there were half a dozen poets that I had an acquaintance with and yet there was not a single nod of familiarity. Richard Cambridge sat next to me and I was a stranger.

Someone said later since I hadn’t been around for years no one recognized me and moreover everyone in the room was nearsighted and couldn’t see me anyway. I’ve gone to readings in some of the grand library rooms of Harvard,
McLean Hospital, coffee houses, bars, and churches. I’m quiet for now. Listening. Years before Kaldi’s I had a room in Covington where I lived alone and wrote. The idea of performing never occurred to me and I thought poets dreamed, suffered, and published what was never read. I wandered in and out of the city those years. Lean years and slim pickings but I was strong and living the long defeat and the gypsy cant. If I couldn’t fight through it then I could talk myself down.
Spring Grove Cemetery is one of the largest resting places for the Romany. It’s one of the reasons Cincinnati has had such a regular problem with tinkers. I knew a son of one of the caretakers and spent many days through the seasons on the grounds with Steve and his friend Suzy. We had worked together, Steve and I, for the Schillings in Southgate. He died in the Beverly Hills fire. I had walked out a week earlier in a dispute over wages.
I do have a great reluctance to stand in front of people. The years I moved from school to school and would get introduced to a class already in progress would develop certain skills. I would be able to spot the boys I would have to fight over the next few weeks. It was one thing to be new it was quite another to look as different as I did. Then there were the girls.

2 hours of latin

then 1 hour for lunch
in the woods behind the cinder track
it was a race against time
angela
(oh angel-la)
with her knees apart
white cheeks spread by my thumbs
framed in plaid
twin nuns that flesh
Gertrude & Hilda
and the red lips of Sister Blanche
who 1st made us conjugate
The verb love
In front of the whole class,
Fervent students
We were honor students
She crying
crumpling the leaves
In my hair,
Felix Culpa!
Felix Culpa
And I …?
Why, Qui laborat orat!
O fault most fortunate,
He who labors prays
we learned our lessons
with tears
Of joy and sacrificed even
our lunch
the book
Of hours and hours for
Those days
Were

The door to St. Henry’s had a guardian demon. His name was Monkey Reisenback. The way to Angela was through Monkey. So I did.

Learning to speak again is difficult.

but there’s the sudden stroke when the same old walks

note, only

once in a lifetime

the shotgunned streets

flush in branched alders

switched on the green buds

One stony morning

& all the magnolias turned white

as the moon milked.

When the things you always wanted to say

became the pure clout

rolled round in the throat

like a cloudy pearl left

Perfectly fit to say

that unsaid it was

Whatever it was,

a measure of having slandered it all

but left wanting

what was never heard

And What was ever

so hard

About shutting up

what could never be shut

comes round to change

all your tunes again.

Perhaps I’ve become too comfortable to skid. Nowadays. It takes me ages to get anything written. Kate mentions in her paper the effort to work through memory’s plumbing. Then there’s work itself. It bangs back harder now that I’m older. I sleep less. Dreams are grittier. I’m not living hand to mouth but … harmony is the opiate of heresy. So it’s out of bounty and not for fortune that I look to. Still there’s the war of the meadows, and the city and the utter mendacity of the ur-tongue, the seduction language, the destiny verbs. Say and be done. The Voice that calls on. What poet is not mad enough to flail against the celestial Salesmen.

Hope is that all’s well with you and Ellen and Kate. I’ll be writing to Kate about her paper in another moment. Somehow, it’s a comfort to know there is in the generations those who are starting out farther than I ever ended and can go where I couldn’t imagine.

There is always the risk of magickal interpretation and that’s enough to keep one’s own name in the book of changes.

....and if something extraordinary happens, what of it? There is no order to the world if that which is unordered arrives miraculously, as is, and by that chance all that is other is yet to be, was, and having been, to be again.

ken

                **********************************************************************************

April-abouts 2007….. Ralph,

The New Harmony Waltz…..used by Dow chemical in the Human Equation commercial, remember Bhopal?) beautiful tune

The winter here was also the mildest in ten years Ralph. Similarly only February was fierce and especially bitter when an ice storm rolled through. The hardware stores had a run on mauls, sledgehammers, picks, mattocks, hoes, edgers, diggers, and tampers. I saw people out there with axes and pitchforks trying to dig their cars out of the curbs and driveways. Folks were falling, flailing and cursing. Some were standing there in breath fogging their hoods and ice rimes hanging off their beards. Magazine beach park was a field of glare ice down to the river that was already frozen white. Some figures could be seen as if rising out of the steam from sewer grates. Mercury vapor and fluorescence at night made the air seem green and gold. Melancholy nights when I was prone to think of absent friends, kelpies and the Chinese New Year. It’s the way I’m wired speaking of alter contextualizing and the engrams of memory concatenation.

Though as the way of it my memory is a close and dear friend. I hope your grand daughter has as good a relationship with hers. I know and meet so many who are broken inside their own tracks. I was struck by this at the few readings I’ve visited over the past months. The recitations, the recipes of regret, damage done and never forgotten, anthems of revelation spoken but heard as a glancing blow if listened to at all. The others so eager to rise and speak hearing the blood swelling to the ear as they listen, most earnestly, to hear their own name called off the list.

I remember when my Buddhist mother sent me off to a Baptist Sunday school in Latonia Kentucky. I was sent alone. I didn’t know anyone and no one spoke to Me. The Sunday school teacher was named Bob White. I was confused by the difference between the words calvary and cavalry. The main event was the sermon in the large chapel at 11am. I distinctly remember how much I disliked the pitch and tenor of the pastor’s delivery and the size and feel of the hymnal. The loudest singers were the worst. Sheer volume over pitch as if they were Determined to be heard, praise over embarrassment, proof, I was sure, of commitment over flaw. At the end the pastor called for those, so moved, to come Forward and confess, out loud, their sins to the congregation. I was mortified. There was a compulsion akin to standing at a high place and wanting to step off into space. To fly and not fall too far from the tree (or fly and you will not fall or fall and you will fly….graduation becomes a bird ) That old demon’s dream of Jacob’s ladder. Wrestle the angel and win and all will be revealed. Still I remembered in the Norse myth that payment for this was the right eye would be plucked out. I looked at the people around me and they were all strange and pale and smelled of mothballs, VO5, Vitalis and cigarettes. Someone else farted the odor of eggs, bulldog gravy, and biscuits.

The poetry I was reading at the time was Masefield, Kipling, Lewis, Tennyson, Robert Service and Poe. There was the odd juxtaposition of watching the casualty figures from the police action in Vietnam accrue and reading the Charge of the Light Brigade and The Jabberwoky. It wouldn’t be long until it was translations of Persian poets, then Brautigan, William Everson and Childe Harold. Though for Lessons in morality I think of Victor Hugo, the Green Lantern who had a poem (in brightest day, in darkest night no evil shall escape my sight….) and Momo Daro (the Boy in the peach). I remember a lesson by a substitute economics teacher, When Lilacs last in the Courtyard Bloomed, who had the voice of an amateur Hypnotist; a wheedling, nasal alto whose persistent annoyance allowed no other recourse but a spring daydream.

Richard Cambridge sat next to me at a reading. He didn’t recognize me at all. I didn’t remind him. I heard later that he’s very near sighted. He was the last reader of the night and he read excerpts from the novel he’s worked on over the last, well, many years I’ve heard. It was a diatribe about being harassed by the police while hitchhiking from his youthful whenever to this reading under the house lights. I listened carefully but couldn’t help thinking of Steve Lansky and wondering about the fate of poets gone grey, near sighted and just a little deaf to anything but their own memory. Me too I often wonder. Still it wasn’t a bad story just that it didn’t redeem itself with anything but an image of Richard, hair haloed in the stage lights, though he tried to make it bigger, slippery, funnier, and wiser. He’s a good natured person and recites competently and engagingly enough to be afforded a sense of a senior reader in residence. Moreover he’s connected to the various venues in such a way as to be a target of opportunity for performers looking to be connected.

                         -All Day Permanent Red
                                        Christopher Logue

                          Hector is on his knees:

                          “Bringer of Daylight

                          Lord of Mice and Light

                          Help me drive the Greek
                          Into the sea.”


                         On Agamemnon’s right, the Child

               Due to put on 10 years and lose 10lbs this afternoon

                       “We are Greek! We are brave! Add your strength to mine!”

               As Lord Apollo answered Hector’s prayer:

                        “Believer –
               You are handsome, you are lover,

               Bursting with Hope and Possibility,

               Unyielding, ever-active, dangerous, true.

               But no man can do everything alone.

               Speak out, speak up,

               And I will help you drive the Kings of Greece

               Over the plain, across Scamander, through the palisade

               Into the shadow of their ships.”

Five years in Iraq, this year. Still, I feel things more acutely as I’ve gotten this much older and thinner in the sole, flatter of foot, shorter than I was, arch splayed. There is a terminus to beauty, it aches. There’s a fiddler in the common, panhandlers asleep in the grass, liars on the soapbox, and someone is whistling it’s the end of the world.

Mea Culpa. Mundus Vult Decipi. One taps oneself on the chest, “It’s on me. My bad, my fault”, and (the World Wants to be Deceived). The Sting, the grift done to a Scott Joplin Rag (I think less of the tune, The Entertainer, that was done in the movie and more of Solace, A Mexican Serenade, its pace slower, the theme more circumspect and the tone wistful and begrudgingly gay. I think of Joplin’s opera Treemonisha, panned and dead before his own death. From the chorus:

               Marching onward, marching onward
               Marching to that lovely tune

               Marching onward, marching onward
               Happy as a bird in June

               Sliding onward, sliding onward
               Listen to that rag

               Hop and skip now do that slow, oh
               Do that slow drag

               Dance slowly, prance slowly
               Now you hear that pretty rag

               Dance slowly, prance slowly
               Now you do the real slow drag

               Waltz slowly, waltz slowly
               Listen to the ragtime

               Hop and skip
               Now do the slow, oh, do the slow drag…………………..)

Isn’t much without the music and that’s the point isn’t it, sometimes. Two young Men got up and did their separate performances. Both were well rehearsed Comedic narratives. Metaphor served the humor more than the structure of the Image. Alliteration for clever affect as pause and gesture timed to cue the Audience to a point made, never failed to make a point, which was the point part way made. They were introduced as slam regulars and occasional winners and Seemed pleasant enough on the margins. Pass or fail.
A young woman got up and read a piece about the harshness and the hardnesses Of being a woman growing up postmodernly, wry and spot on in retrospect. How she came to love women in a way her mother didn’t understand love and This revelation was for her lover sitting at a cocktail table loving her. This started A small string of women reading their primacy of certitude poems. Gentle Maidens all. In my mind I heard Je vals d’un Coeur aimant, I am to be a loving Heart’s…an aria from Beatrice et Benedict, Berlioz’s take on Much Ado About Nothing. ( it has been noted of Berlioz when he wrote this, Listening to the score’s Exuberant gaiety, only momentarily touched with sadness, one would never guess its Composer was in pain when he wrote it and impatient for death. –David Cairns.)

The Circus of the Sun and the Dark Island. Rain days. Hearing Carnival of Souls on the calliope when the steamboat sails by the waving lepers.
Whatever you might read into my observance of the reading it is not, strictly speaking, a criticism. In certain ideas I can’t help myself. I’m a storyteller. I observe but I am loathe to participate. Crowds dismay me. Too often someone is looking at me out of the corner of their eye or when I come into a room people look up. It is unquiet. I can’t bear it. Much better are the solaces of my books, Barbara’s affection and the affable insouciance of Zou Zou the cat. Perhaps it’s my narcissism in the avoidance of any conflict or sufferance of another’s criticism of me. Though I might add that I’m as uncomfortable with praise as criticism. There never seems to be enough time. Smells like burnt toast. Seeing less hair in the mirror, more in the drains. I am convinced it is not all about me. Still I have been honorably mentioned as a folk hero to busboys.

On occasion I find myself reading the obituaries or taking walks through Mt. Auburn cemetery. When I lived in Cincinnati I read the funnies and walked through Spring Grove cemetery. For a long time I often though I wanted my own house more than anything else. Somewhere a landlord couldn’t put me out for paying the rent with a poem. People would know me and I would have known them for a very long time. I used to keep catalogues of homes and furnishings, decorations and finishes.




The Play House

It fell endlessly all summer

who ever thought it would end

like that, you meant

the house

or that thinking about it

endlessly would end.

It fell down the hill

and the hill fell too

against the fence