The chasm

You grew, grew, grew. But you couldn’t move. You couldn’t. You couldn’t move, but you advanced. You couldn’t exist any more. (One couldn’t exist any more.) A straight line, a spiral, a spiral on a straight line couldn’t exist, but one existed, one grew, one grew straight and advanced nearer to vagueness, but in a spiral, a tantalizing one, a more distinct one, but higher, higher, higher, and so more tantalizing. Things couldn’t exist in more distinctness, no, in more vagueness, in any dimension.

Had muddlings existed, muddlings couldn’t move in a spiral. But muddlings couldn’t exist, so muddlings, most muddlings, move in a vague spiral, to more distinctness, and couldn’t move in a line (so tantalizing the line) with a higher distinctness and a more tantalizing vagueness. Most distinct muddlings exist in one dimension. What things? Spiral things? Things that exist? So that was the most advanced you grew.

Things had existed. That grew more distinct. As you grew nearer, things grew more and more distinct. As you advanced, things grew more tantalizing, so tantalizing that one dimension grew a spiral. What dimension was that? No more You any more, that one. So you advanced, advanced, advanced. You grew, you grew, you grew. Most distinct spiral lines existed so that you couldn’t move more things nearer. No, no, no. Higher, higher, higher. One had had that, one had had one more line, and that was the most one had had.

Thou should'st be living at this hour

There were hot and muggy days like this on Avenue B in the mid-Sixties. People yelled or screamed, but you were used to it. Cops were on every corner. You’d be afraid to enter or leave your building. A window was just as good as a door and your apartment was sort of on the way to someplace for just about everybody. Your neighbor cried when he discovered another cherished possession stolen. You didn’t cry because you didn’t cherish your possessions. On a day like this you’d buy some wine and make some curry-seeming food and listen to a raga. You’d go to see a movie, or two movies, or a friend, or a bunch of friends, staying out as late as you liked, standing on streetcorners or looking at books. Then a strange kid follows you home because he thinks you were looking at him “with significance” on the subway.

(This sounds like some really old novel. If I did write a novel I guess it would be old at birth. When people began writing about the Sixties, I thought that they all had it wrong and that I would get it right if I made the effort. I don’t think that now. I’d rather channel Lawrence Tierney. A lot of noir in my diet lately.)

The tenement I lived in isn’t there anymore. I noticed this about three years ago on a visit to see friends who had a new baby. They lived in the west 60s and going downtown was a tourist kind of thing. Well, I’m a tourist kind of person, I thought. We got to Avenue B and I saw the gap between two tenements. The gap, the ghost gap, was where I lived for about two years, two fairly eventful years, in the old-novel era.

When I moved to Avenue B I was working as an office boy in the ITT headquarters building on Park Avenue in the 50s and in another building around the corner on Madison. I worked in the Patent Department. I get the two buildings mixed up now. The one on Park had the top executives’ offices, including the nearly always empty one belonging to the ex-CIA director.

We had a library, with law books and official government publications filled with diagrams and descriptions of inventions. I spent many lunch hours there reading poetry books. One attorney noticed this. Indulgently, he told me that he had written poetry when he was in college. Some time later when he saw that I was still reading poetry, he showed some irritation. “Still reading that stuff?”

The Madison Avenue building overlooked the rear of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. One time a pope came to visit the city and stayed at St. Pat’s. Another celebrity visited and I actually shared an elevator with him. It was Walt Disney! His New York offices were in the same building.

During most of this period I was waiting for my first book of poems to come out. It finally did, in the spring of 1966. A courier delivered a copy to me while I was at work. I looked at it with indefinable curiosity. Shortly thereafter, I quit my job

Paint It Today

The two poems, “I am glad I am not what I look like” and “We bathed in clothes” began as a single draft, written this past Monday in the Coffee Obsession in Woods Hole. Like many of my poems, they arise from how I respond to a specific place.

Unlike when I was young, I now frequently, and sometimes extensively, revise. Revising makes a poem feel more like a process. I sometimes can’t say I like one version of a poem better than another. I like the idea of process, though, selfishly, I don’t want it to keep me from remaining famous (and worshipped) well into the twenty-fifth century (to speak conservatively).

Needless to say, I wouldn’t like to revise if I thought I wasn’t improving a poem. Increasingly, however, the process of composing anticipates that of revision, so I often think of a draft as a set of notes for a poem. I also like the idea of selecting materials and objects that happen to be lying around and organizing them into a work of art.

In this instance, the stanzas and individual lines in the original draft would read like a shuffled version of the two present poems. I was attracted by a woman in the coffee shop and about half the lines I wrote were about her. The others were more miscellaneous. A couple of days later it struck me that I might place the lines about the woman together and see if they would work that way, and then see what, if anything, I could make out of the other lines.

While many lines in both poems describe my surroundings, usually with an attempt at faithfulness to appearances (almost always problematic, of course), there is another important factor woven within and between them. I was reading H.D.’s unfinished novel Paint It Today and had it with me at the time of writing. In the (autobiographical) novel, “Midget” is the character H.D. based on herself. Trying to imagine which eight-letter word the woman in the coffee shop had deleted, I found suggestions by flipping through the novel’s pages. There are less literal allusions to the novel in both poems. Both titles are quotes from its dialogue.

There is nothing marvelously new or unique about any of these procedures.

We bathed in clothes

Witches are expected to grow up, she wrote
make a volte-face

A yellow visor, soft nose, spherical shirt tied at waist
rolling downhill at a good clip
Another cap and another
A "Welcome" sign so I should feel welcome

Scientists are coming to the party
which is really nice
One bottle of wine doesn’t go very far

Reflective blue lenses hide eyes
a reflective blue casque

The driver is past middle age
his skin loose below jaw and below eyes
he traces a route on a map

A spirea’s browning flowers, a wordless white rectangle
silver reflecting muddied sunbeams
The tree has too many arms, all raised
The bridge deck rises, revealing lesbian graffiti
Half the tree is seeds, a baby croaks like a heron

In pink flip-flops and green crocs there is always an Other
always music, simultaneously urgent and dragging
like an old woman’s instability, not often beautiful
but applicable to a multitude of circumstances

I am glad I am not what I look like

A dark-skinned person at work
aggressively focused beyond street and coffee shop

Inky disheveled hair falls to the middle of her back
clawlike hands, like Midget’s, poised to clutch
to not let the keyboard escape
or to let the meek thoughts escape
thoughts that must be accurate and pertinent

An annoyed hand quickly brushes the chin
More thoughts, more escapees

Pale lime unbuttoned cuffs are pushed up to elbows
Is she thinking in complete sentences?
Is she writing a diary, elaborating a thesis?

She quickly hits the delete key eight times
Is “intimacy” gone, are “blossoms” defeated?
Are they about to “separate,” is “girlhood” over?

Done by noon, it almost has form
camouflaged form
dark green floral embroidery
on her shirtfront

So so twins

Sheets of paper
wrinkled after many wine spills
lie on a clean wood floor like Hesse’s Augment
or a stack of papadums
and are blown through the room by the corner fan.

As they age and still seem to last
an order of time much deeper
arrives at the lip, where a woman’s portrait
in paint that still sticks to the wood
is ornamented with gold and pearls.

Her dark eyes avoid the artist’s,
dilated nostrils hint embarrassment and anger,
her nearly hexagonal mouth
that could be stoic or pouting
is certainly purple and mute.

I fall in love with her voice immediately
and remember it
for as long as I last
or seem to last.

My sketchbook

My subjectivity and my emotions
taste bitter, a thin arm, too thin for the sleeve
of the teeshirt, in my sketchbook

Falling over themselves like roses
all a special case, weightless
dolls and other toys, counted, put away

*

Sketched sleeves of green shirt
An arm, a length of arm, ogre-green
lapses, beads, walking slowly
as if afraid of falling
no greeting, aware of eyes

French natives generate French accents
yellow complexion
economical use of hands

*

A boy in orange long-sleeved tee
dribbles, holds basketball away
from smaller boy who swipes and misses
Shiny girls, green balloons, a June party

*

A wall that makes no sense
so think of it as a canvas
unwieldy, deceptively heavy
dangerous during thunderstorms
and noisy under fountains

*

Cross-hatched winds
sheer and waves
A tiny boy sprawls in rectangular clothes

Devising instructions
designing software
a string mower
a wilted hill
divebombing robin
a lewd insult

Air is set in motion by the sun
My arm is numb, asleep
Nocturnal ants crawl over tiles

*

Retelling the way something fried
registered difficulty
when something’s quiet
another golden rolling dog
with a curled tail

*

Yellow daylily dingbats
Hair straightened with an iron

She lies on grass on cellphone
checking in for the feeling
or searching for good restaurants

By mistake I board a plane for Chicago
after searching through New York debris
for a bicycle that is really
locked throughout the winter
to a parking sign near Harvard Sq.
just uphill from a medieval town
its streets lined with casement-windowed shops

I meant to go to Miami

A dry refreshing breeze
is screened for a small audience
An invited pink rose