A natural light through the leaves

Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.

Three mountain songs

1. There is empty, where a mountain used to be

and there is only the sound, as up from a well,

of people, a hole in the passive ground,

in the massive earth: a hole in the impassive

earth--they are echoing forth, in the light

like a plastered wall, they are thick like branching

cracks, as a house: it settles over time,

in seasons of chill and slackening heat,

and we their spiraling leaves.

They shake in the light, and we--with a mind

to speak like a child will sparkle its voice

through the vanes of a fan, such an enervating hum,

because he feels that all is not as

it is said to seem to sound, as if

electricity will never give out--

he touched a coin to a socket, and the burn

flat black, a spark and scorched new kitchen

veneer--as if the body will never

give out in the mind, lie down in the light

that is clear and is like no fire.

And there is empty, where people used to be,

and trees that were never blown down or away:

there is only the shadow, and only the things

that shine.

As a mountain must one day go, and in

the hollow, the moss, its ply and drunken

sapling green, its strong and watery being.

All this a memory of seeing.

And the loss, sky-black, below.

2. In the mountains, there you feel free

if your living is elsewhere, but your living is there

and not for so long that the height has flattened out,

but later, for any earlier insight

is a terrible perversion, monstrous, prodigious,

like a stillness resolved--it is the aversion

of the fixated eye, looking at and looking out--

into a choice, and the product of a choice:

a child who is surely alive, although

his heart is stillborn, a rouged and brazen

body box, skin fresh, for the ash made gummy

and molded like modeling putty.

The bodies are plump and soft; his heart

is made to pump blood, and when he breathes,

there is a sound like leaves that, dead, still rattle

over the asphalt like tin.

But in the mountains, you may wish for him to die

and, laying him out for animals, on the moss,

sky-black, to find, you may prefer to say why.

3. Not quite all around the mountain, the road,

and on it leaves, a rattle like tin

that is not elemental but machined of the earth,

filled once with a fluid of vegetables, salted,

machined of the clear-cut mountaintop, ziggurat-

truncated flat, or meat for the man

or woman who is tired all day to reheat--

as well as all night--and eat until 'deeply' and,

however impossibly, 'filled':

The impossibility being that oceanic

feeling when one, whether man or woman,

is the shore and the other--or child--becalmed:

when the land has locked the people under and in.

And something warmed over.

There is empty, where a glacier used to be,

its great indifference to the living--in passing

tones they hiss like steam, their swift

and inaudible being, their groans--and its glide

like window-glass over time to the bottom

of the frame.

How many more hammerings flat or

thin? How many more leaves that sound

like tin, and are heard--so rarely are they gold--

in the stillness that holds, on the surface, between
two sky-black waves of the sea?

(Edited 28 August 2011, begun 18 August 2011. These three together draw for their central image on Wang Wei's "Lu Zhai", a poem that does wonderfully much more than it says, and for their central theme, if there is one, on Plato's suggestion--more haunting when removed from the context of his elaborated metaphysics--that we may remember more than we have experienced. With thanks to students and colleagues in the Language & Thinking program at Bard College.)

A setting of "Getful of apple"

I'm honored to note that "Getful of apple" has recently been set for mixed chorus. A recording of the first live performance may be found here. The composer is Kari Francis, vocal percussionist for Musae, known from such videos as this.

The look that a woman or girl

The look that a woman or girl reserves

for a prettier woman or girl. It is

in part resentful, in part--her darting

eyes--full of pity and need, of a glancing

feeling of sympathy pains at pinched

toes, at arms and shoulders exposed

to the prickling air, of flush at pluck

of hair (her eyebrows and who knows?).

The one--as they say, as she may have been told--

is mousy and must seem dutiful: merely

dressed, not adorned, and dully colored,

she is used to standing out only when not so many

others are around. The other is strawberry

blonde and hungrily thin; she is clothed

much closer in, and shows much more

of her pale and prickling skin. She does not

wobble on her heels, however improbably

high. But she is not less dutiful.

The one is looking; the other is listening

in, to the thinned and darkened voice

of an older woman nearby: she used

to smoke, and still she wishes to smolder,

with makeup stark and clear. But it is

not bright: like her eyes--well past resentful--

and the heatworn russet of her hair, the color

of heatwoven corn. (And if you husked:

the stretched and restitched skin that barely

covers the skull, the cottony tufts

of the will, desire worn thin, rewashed,

and worn again.) The look that a woman

or girl reserves at what she feels is the end.

(Begun 28 April 2011, edited 2 May 2011. From life or what has been made, not asked, to pass for it.)

These period pieces

Because of formatting, this poem is available as a two-page .pdf dowloadable here.

His eyes are amber and slate

At the next table over, a man. He is small

of jaw; some might go further--I think

too far--and say "like a rat or a mouse."

But no. He is too lean and upright

and, in his delicately quarried eyes,

too deliberate and attentive: he is too bright.

It is true that, when he smiles--as often--

or laughs, although little sound comes out,

he shows a great many yellowed teeth. But we

should see how rarely he blinks, and each time

dares to think how bright and upright

is the woman across the table, his daughter: 

he couldn't be prouder or--what amounts

to the same--more relieved. The feeling is plain

in the granite-in-rainfallen grey of his eyes.

He is clearly surprised at having raised her.

He blinks and, thinking back, he wonders

what it would have been to have been raised

by a woman who … --he blinks-- or had

the strength --and thinks, despite that radiant

glow, of a woman bent over below

fluorescent lights, a linoleum kitchen

in colorless white and green, a white

that can never come clean, be it scoured, the bruised

and reddening silence--no sound is allowed

to come out--the desperate acceptance and over-

exposure to slams of cupboards and drawers

--he blinks-- the flatware rattled, the occasional

shattering glass --he thinks-- of feverish

polish and impossibility of shine.

His eyes are amber and slate --he thinks,

somehow it is not too late-- and the sun

through passing clouds --he has saved, if not

his mother, then another young woman after all this time.

(Edited and begun 10 April 2011; directly inspired by a vision, 9 April, of a patron at the local coffee shop; indirectly inspired--already envisioned--by the bright but clouded natural light, and its effects on the skin of tablemates, at meal 3 April. Many thanks to the visible and otherwise perceptible beauty, so deeply lived-in, of all involved.)

The musical rain; or, Four ways of looking at a lack of heard

I. The brightest thing there could be

 ... these may mean the

same thing, the poem whose appearance is re-

fracted by language and textual tradition (that

is to say, by human concreti-

zations of abstract time), much like the ex-

perience of working in a room with artificial

light: a thoughtless buzzing overhead and

blocking any vision--no matter how late one

works into the night or tarries (now, think of wicks

smoldering down, their slow unsmokeless

burning of the passing day)--of the light of those

formerly studied stars, such that one

hasn't learned to speak their language, but

mostly to know that a language was, long ago

spoken: and, now that the lines of communi-

cation have been broken (having always already been

bent by gravity, slowed in its slowing

wells, its curved and carvèd pits of

stick and commemoration, its granite

walls of implacable devotion to deepest

reds), to curse (for this is the light's profit

on't, taught not how to speak but to be

spoken: not the use of language but the

use by it). A man with a magic

book and a man who, earlier than you, was

able to look at the sky at night as a

being far and away, close to some

homely metaphor, of a distance never to be

conquered, for sure, but far and away the

brightest thing there could be at night: those

chaste stars, those chasèd stars, the

air's unbreathable purity and those

stars' excelling pursuit. Such a man, his

eyesight fading, would seek to transmit and,

so, transform their clarity of vision. (Like the

pilgrim on his way, the poet having once been a

pilgrim, any vision of the stars, any would-be re-

vision of a poem blacks out and backs out of trans-

lation at the cost of lost rhythms and times, the a-

scent much harder, against gravity and

out of its well, outwards and as it were

sootily out of the condensation and

frost-bitten meanings of hell ...

II. But the rest is not music

 ... likewise,

"the youth lies awake in his cedar'd garret and

harks to the musical rain": the covering

roof keeping him out of that rain and,

so, out of the rain, which may become

music at a deepening distance alone (that

is to say, at delay and--absent a

bed of mussed and drily muffling

hay--in a disembodying echo and decay).

He harks not to the 'the music of the rain' but to "the

musical rain", its incidental remaking (and

this is the problem of a poem as a poem, of

any top-heavy cybernetic relation): now

lost is the rain as naked and dripping,

lost is meaning in a youth's contrastively

feverish brain. Instead, there is a strained

tapping and slide, the sound of the rain as it

flickers and slicks the jointed cedar and

drips and naturally slips and anoints

what clasps itself, what tarries, to the migrant

spaces between. (These cannot be starred,

their darkness one of old dinosaurs' bones, in

which a red-shifted and reptile track of the

skies has sunk, having too deeply drunk of

blackest tar, into the deepest-

slumbering pit: as the youth pictures it, having

listened to Darwin, dreaming pre-Cambrian

minds, a matter of memory given over to a

claw-footed lumber, now hard like a daydreamed

fruit in matter of fact unripened, the

tap of leanest finger to greenest

rind). There is not only the audient

youth but, making his situation all the more

lonely (he is not pelted by rain but

sheltered and, having but feeling no pain, he can

be no song to himself: no recording of

sounds, only a distorting of sounds), that

haughty, insentient roof. He must have

a mind of rainwater to regard what ought to have

been his own mass of rain-matted hair, his own

rain-kissed skin and all the other wetted not with-

outs but rain-tossed withins, and not to hear

any misery in the sound of what

cannot, any longer, come in, what his over-

hanging roof--overmindful of body, un-

mindful of mind, the roof as permanent

keeper of wholly impermeant time--but the

rest is not music--just won't allow inside.

III. Still, the sounds drift in

 ... and, still, "the sounds drift in. The buildings are re-

membered" by the echoes of rain, its swift and in-

different pointillism: their pieces in uncertain

unions, only honoring the fact of their flat and

hollowing stops of the drops to fall, then to

catch at the breaks and streak where the nails went

slightly imperfectly in--their grey and

greening bronze and blooming rust, their

rustic thin and ten-penny overtones--where the

joints have grown more cottony still to any

feeling over years for the inclement weather, arth-

ritic and exquisitely sensitive to touch, to the

sapping cold and warming, to the the cycle of a

too-much-with-us and sublimely impossibly

far-and-away frequency of attention. The

sounds drift in, meaning that within is now

not without, no longer: the roof a trans-

lucence to sound, a sparkling skin, and a-

gain the angled room: a darkly

resonant space. The bright sunbrown of the

angled youth: he lies awake: he be-

lieves, he lies like a leaf of grass caused to

quiver and hum, held sheltered by fingers and

over which runs the harmonical breath of the

missing musician, what Whitman, recent to tele-

pathic dreams, would in his better lights look

past (that smoky with meats sweated and

dried, a long practice with poultice, with the a-

spirant departure of water from clothes, he

knows their sputtering sizzle, just as much a trans-

mitter as the spattering roof); like the shore to

which these breakered, these housebroken waves of

sound must drift! Could only they hit and

find their fit of skinny rivulet down

skin, as it cools from the day's worth of work, blue-

shifting, and warming to the sheltered pleasure of the

dark, of the cedar'd garret, of the poem that

he must find himself in. (There's a woman who

knows that it's bathers' bodies are better instru-

mental than the cedar of which more ancient or

plaited, upstanding hair might oily re-

dole.) Such a musical sound is a miracle of

loss, the sound of the rain interfered by the

mindless boards: a sound at the cost of

weltering what otherwise could be signal (only

try, only strain to hear those streamers of

water long down and around those bathing

boys!) but, thanks to the cedar, is not any

longer let in to the skin: is sound for

sure, but only in place--for it is special

pleading for ones, like nuns, to fret not at

narrow rooms--of a youth's special feeling for noise.

IV. Finally, about the voice

Is this roof's cedar that in whose limbs, un-

clothed, the blackbird alit? And if he

did, if so, did he know--even as it was

snowing and going to snow, and although it

wasn't yet night (and so no need for

any artificial or cultural light) but

had for so long of the day been evening--that his

perch would make this music of the rain for a

listener, who listens not in the rain (which,

frozen in the mind, is turned to snow of a

technically memorable kind) but within? Is

this why the blackbird is made not to sing, but--as

if the whole poem--"is involved in what I

know", that knowledge being, finally, about the

voice, its "accents and lucid, inescapable rhythm"?

(Edited 8 March 2011, begun 3 March 2011. After nearly a year, over which I wrote mostly academic prose, this sequence marks a return to writing poetry deliberately. To readers of modern poetry, references to Whitman and, especially, Stevens (no (consanguineous) relation) will be clear; in some phrases and images there are also Wordsworth, Milton, and Shakespeare. More ancient authors must probably be thought to appear here and there, but don't knock yourself out.)