weather division
(or, Towards the Condition of Muzak)





          "let me live here ever,
          sweet now, silence foison to
          on top of the weather"
                -- Louis Zukofsky, "A"-22

          "Devant le papier, l'artiste se fait."
                -- Stéphane Mallarmé


green rounded grille
five-leafed dogwood budded
left, and before
lavender rose chrysanthemum
evergreen, and box
crucified espaliated apple
and the whirr of traffic
         beyond the fence
static of a deep-voiced dog, 
         barking an obligatto
to chattering crows, barking
         squirrels

I took this upon
myself, accepted it all
perhaps too freely
         certainly, for resentment

morning a time for reconcilement

another man's detritus
unread books, marshalled
         according to alien
intuitions -- 
the voice finds itself
sticking or sinking
here, striking arms 
out to nothing 
         but words, water
deep-voiced box, wings
clipped and growing
bitten nails a sorry manicure

who would be like Cotton Mather,
owning the largest library
in colonial 
America -- who himself
wrote "444 bound
volumes" motives, celebrations
writing as outgrowth of
need, Benjamin's anecdote of
the schoolmaster, himself writing
         the books when titles
         in the catalogues
intrigued him -- and Mather
wrote for the same reason
he writes, the same reason
you write;

one posits poles, alternations
pitched over against each
other:  passion, duty; fine
frenzy, obligation; a crazy
little thing called "love,"
tepidness; Mutt, Jeff;
Van Doren, Stempel -- 
         (footnote to the above:  a confrontation
         which replays, with all the vulgarity
         capitalist America in the Fifties could
         muster -- and in its film recreation,
         hypercapitalist America in one's own
         Nineties -- the confrontation, forty years
         earlier, at Columbia University, of Van
         Doren's father's colleague Professor
         John Erskine and Louis Zukofsky, yet
         another bespectacled, nervous,
         know-it-all Jew -- an indubitably false
         parallel, but one that one cannot
         forebear bringing to attention)
he was rabbiting on about why Cotton Mather
wrote all those books when 
she came in the room, dropped
         her jacket, threw her arms
around him, pressed him to
         the bed -- came in the 
room, dropped her arms, threw 
         her jacket to the bed, pressed -- 
came in the jacket, dropped
         the keys, pressed his forehead
to his hands -- threw -- 

some sort of leprous orange
without a name, I guess

                           
.
      
         they re-established them-
selves on some former
footing, some friend-
ship he hoped -- division,
stormy weather, tempest
that bids fair eventually to scuttle
         the ship
days pass princess proved
fraud and legless, pruned
of his extremities like some
power-line-tangled tree, the
'Bama dies -- his speakered voice
another country, rhythm blues
and funky beat notes
and what could I have
done or said?
         division his theme,
and mine -- at odds with
pain and anger

.
      

cool day, cool tide
unwind the mass of committings, entanglements
domestic and foreign,
appointments forethought
or thoughtless -- to write,
not paradise, but a bare
minimum
         a Memorable Fancy, perhaps
of Blake & his wife, naked in their
garden, rejoicing, down among
the primroses, day-lilies, crocuses,
nasturtiums hydrangeas & tulips,
in the day the lord 
has made
         weather division, how
is that? to weather, to bear 
through the weather, to show
clemency in inclement
moods of sea &
sky -- whether, born, poise
         shot letter version
national small romanticism
high fable one awarded
swallow hard
         count to ten, over
and over
         again
              starting in
the light, watching the
         words walk
forward tapped out
moving with deliberation
when division itself becomes the weather
tempest without respite, wholly
natural, without magic
or sleight of hand -- 
         I gather
         these leaves for
         a centerpiece -- 
         of pumpkins and 
         squash -- only the nicest,
         brightest, red and not
         too dry
         dryness the absence
         of powerful lust,
         dryness the weather
         of static and
         brittle
mind clouds you
can be lord you
         can be
like Jesus

.
      

         starting over, purging
the "lyric," how to de-
racinate the self in favor
of some utopic social
 -- excuse me, sir, but one self
in the hand is doubtless worth
a dozen social nexuses in
the bush -- numbering ahead,
as if that would encourage
the painful, hobbled
stammering voice that bears
no trace of the interpretive 
         gods -- his gods by rights
are Jesus and Jehovah, soft-
voiced son and Kafka's
father, and even the shiny
genitalled marble of Apollo,
pink breasts of Aphrodite,
are beyond his ken -- to shout
out "Heathens!" (or as one's 
mother would have it, "Heatherns!")
only reduplicates a Puritan past,
a lifetime of staring down the New
Covenant, furnished with the Old
as children's scene-setting.  My friend
the older poet came to the Church
of Jazz just as he was, but
true religion lies in those broken
Ozark voices, autoharping "Bright
Morning Stars" or trembling at
the face of an angel band

         the weather 
refuses to turn, others' letters
and no savor to a broken
dish

.
      

         chop the nuts finely, mashing
them beneath the flat 
of the blade, then turn
and pound them into the 
cheese, the basil, the stinking
garlic -- pesto, a paste, not
a sauce -- in despair at 
the body politic, leviathan's
choice of heroes, and aware
only too well of one's own
insulation, that rage and
cynicism are somehow by
proxy, removed from the 
"true" sites of "pain" and
"loss"
          -- that is, one's own
chair, however strait, is not
endangered by this latest
stopping of the music, scrambling 
         to sit down
lowering weather, clouded
         brow

.
     

cramped seat, straitened chair, the
unavowable discomforts of having
made one's own bed, and now
facing the lying therein -- I chose
I said, would choose again?
To knock down and drag out,
dig one's heels and fingernails
in, to pull up by the roots
what one can neither part
from nor abide

.
      

personalities seem small
on the bus, on the 
subway, in the social
or political where identity
is not discarded but
simply drawn back,
like a snail's horns 
into its shell -- 
trading freedom &
movement for an enforced
(uncomfortable) society

.
     

         should one, as Creeley
does, play upon one's own
marginality?  does the name
"poet" confer on one some
metaphysical blackness, some
enabling minority
                   can't talk
for more than five minutes
without blundering into
a fight, racked nerves, mis-
understandings and missed
cues -- and what about
dreaming of another, to dream
making love with some
one else, a forbidden or
shameful conjunction, not
to be admitted, but leaving
him with an inner warmth, a
(for no reason) satisfaction

.
      

Mediterranean weather -- the first day
warm and sunny, the second cool, with
frosting of clouds, slight sprinklings
of rain -- indeed, the best possible
city is the city apart from screaming
from anger, resentment, distrust
         does the laughing man,
         addicted to buffoonery,
         the shaggy dog, preclude
         the poker-faced critic?
         Does one's face outweight
              one's words?
movements behind the shades
in the windows opposite -- the
curve of flesh, buttocks beneath
blue underpants

.
     

So much seemed to be looking
out of windows, wondering what
lay behind other windows, whether
actual contact were possible in a 
         day when the sky seemed
always about to rain, when rain
spoiled everything that lay about
half-done or undone
         and even the sun could not
cut thru palpable chill, a 
column that penetrated
leather and wool, slowed
down atrophied all signs
of passion, spontaneous
affection or thoughtless 
affirmation -- and what the
         hell does a "mamboid
eschatology" mean, the forcing
of cheek-by-jowl James Brown
and Jacques Lacan into Alexander
Pope's measured numbers?
I want to return, again and
again, into remembered or perceived
moments, dissolving or eroding
traces of some copulation,
witness to something deeper
or more immediate than
language itself, "jeep calling
unto jeep"

.
      

decades pass as swiftly as
nights, sons & daughters
of man wither as grass
before the sun is high

how to chart the weather 
of eleven years, trace a 
gradual slide into nothing 
more than a forced
complacency, bonding or
bondage where promise -- once
so green -- now bodes little
more than continuance?

.
     

deracinate the lyrical, screw
up the onward motion of
the music, as if one 
could somehow bend the 
voice away from singing,
from the oratorical
function that obscures 
pain and bone-breaking
chill -- as if one could 
sing about what 
freezes, say, the writing
shoulder, bends the 
back into shapes the
"heart" cannot countenance
defrayed, fraying, texture
weaving and unwoven
Penelope's poetry or a 
sonnet torn to pieces
As if a Ouija board would
somehow pull us back 
together, James and David
chatting their gay chatter
into a sounding void where
deep calls unto jeep, the cruelty
of kenning more than one 
knows, of hoping that
laudanum and poteen
will somehow call back
that fair thin boy, black-
eyed diamond, my own
aisling -- 
see how it happens?  how the song,
resisted by the singer and the singing
hand, returns to spite the poem?

.
      

Froissard Philippa of Heneault Albina
Wales Brand Bruce Graves Land of
Women Imayne Gynocentric Garden
Paradise Goddess Muse Pilgrim
Poet Marvel Midst World of
Women Mount Snowden Mists
Sublime Guillotine Corinthian
Columns Resting Place of
Merlin Drawn In Again Celts
Gardens Maps of Essex English
Gardens Wall Behind The
Flowers Grey Lavender Hazy
Pox Sprung from Bark Step
Outside Step Beyond Muse
Transformation Water Bearer
Lake of Star Burn Vision
[that figure later seen as the muse]
[wrong terms] [a well under the
lake] Parable Pilgrimage At
Some Length Seventeen Years
Typography Roman Road Great
Cedar One Thousand Years
Oberon and Titania Illustration
Theme Synthetic Moment Glide
Manifestation of Truth Equated
Well Moan White Graves
[riding] Residence Western
Country Stanford Rivers
Provident Long Ago Abbots
Dark Evensong American
Field Walls of the Garden
Rights of Way Splendours Traced
Voyed over the Atlas Light
Poem Land of West Western
Edge Warm Stone Griffins
Centuries Nettle-Grown Edge
Salmon Deeper Waters

.
      

he carries a wailing wall
within himself, a whining
wall of love and heady
anticipation -- rapture of
love and new-found
love, a breaking of long-
cherished vessels &
discovery of new -- a new
version, somehow international,
that would replace or dis-
place the old version, trans-
lation from a tongue
the translator barely follows
to read and question words, to
tear translations apart from
originals, enter into a zone
of surfaces and reflective
free-play mirrorings, asking
whether one's self has only
a too too unsolid, all-too-
sullied, flashing ground
         as if to add to a growing
stack of phosphorescent leaves
would somehow add up to 
more than just a stack, summit
graver than its diasporic
partitas, centrifugal
fugues -- he asks for shape,
a tangible thigh or haunch
he might grip, leaving red
finger-marks, white pressure-
texts, an object, however
strung-out or hung-
over, something more than
the inevitable series, one mis-
shapen camel following an
other young ass

         stolid blanks of academic
         buildings, black, faceless
         windows, humanized
         by stacks of papers,
         leaning books or great
         almost-toppling towers
         of manuscript beside
         desks

familiar grounds, stumbling
over familiar flaws 
in the pavements, familiar
winds that cut and buffet in all too-known
ways
         an exile's return,
not with the cries
of homecoming, but
to an excess of 
breakage, splinters of
memory and nostalgic
reckoning
a struggle between
wills, or between one
will and the lack
of wills -- some basic,
bedrock inability to do
what must be done,
to take upon oneself
responsibility, to follow
thru on duties taken
on -- the door shines
with an uneven finish
in the morning sun, the 
downstairs toilet is
mounted on cardboard -- 
and neither do the words 
come tumbling as they
ought to, as they used -- 
         the stacks of books,
reams of printed paper,
movements of discarded
words & sentences

.
     

the trees are almost 
frosted by a pale 
green crust of leaves,
wan in the convictionless
morning light -- glints
on the magnolia 
leaves, but even thru
the window, seems not
to warm the air -- 
combed concrete, worn
leather, acute syntactic 
inertia -- or was it
semantic inertia?
word has it that many 
things are possible, but
that few of them are
truly "expedient" -- that a long poem
         necessarily included much that is
         strictly speaking not poetic, that the
         singer finds himself descending from
         the aria to deliver the recitative more
         often than he would like (tho some
         of us, it's true, can't abide arias)
meaning, the lines
fallen short of song
qualify only as filler?
particle board behind 
the mahogany panelling?
Prometheus's bones beneath
the coating of tasty suet?
 --  what's needed is a good
joke, something to break
the insufferable leaden
gravity here -- two old
guys passing a storefront
church... "is that all you
people think about?" -- "number
42!" -- leaden silence  -- 
"some people just know how
to tell 'em, that's all"  -- 
puttering at this, and at 
that, accomplishing one thing
to delay another, the poet
accused turns his collar 
up at the winds of the world,
tempests of lovers' division,
and decides that, after
all, there may be more
to do than he had essayed.
         But when isn't that the
case?  When don't things, with
their mute reproaches, silent
scorn, convict him of his 
thoughtlessness, laziness,
his nonexistent moral
spine?
Things certainly speak, if not in
the sense Rilke imagined  -- 
the archaic torso spelled a life-
changing imperative to him,
but nothing will change this one's
life, nothing will deflect him
from this numb, aching, down-
ward spiral, this frost-
bitten frozen gale, so stiff
it brings tears to the eyes over
and over again
               how do you tell
a story, when the story refuses
to end, compells you into unco-
fortable, agonized repetition, the
foot asleep as the banquet, the neck
cramped, pinched at the driver's 
head restraint?  income and 
outflow, statements of credit
and cashdown abruptness, "rising
tide of red ink," the deficit 
without attention, disorderly but
conducted with exquisite
training -- entering data, entering
a lover, love itself perhaps
as a particular configuration
of data, of one's memory files
and folders, as if filing papers
wear a simulacrum of the
activities that establish intimacy,
as if love were somehow more 
than a case of first in, first
outed -- they file through the
rank, they draw bonds and
filiations, in some brown hope
of establishing the kinship
relationship that separates
out the kith from the kine,
the carbuncle from the em-
erald, the hunchback from 
the gypsy.  Monk from lecher,
Trane from automobile, Tex
Ritter from Duke "John 
Wayne" Ellington, Cole Porter
from Macbeth's porter
Washington Irving        Irving Berlin
Booker T. Washington     Booker T. and the MGs
Krazy Kat           Krazy Glue
the Great Pyramid of Memphis, TN
for that moment -- when the King
be witnessed -- in the room

.
    

blood, blood, too much blood --
how could he ever wash
his hands of those stains?
         & the skies darken &
the head slumps as if against
a cross or shoulder -- the
condition of muzak
         time changed into
extension, motion
thru time really not
motion at all

.
    

It's as it were some astonishing
dance, where the partners come
together as in a tango, pressing
cheeks, thighs, closer parts,
then spin apart in angry 
rejection -- dancing on egg
shells, Chaplin on roller
blades coming nearer &
nearer the sheer drop 
of the department store's
second floor -- he was
that girl, watching the 
little tramp, and at the same
time he was a figure
in a second- or third-
rate APR poem, the semi-
digested image of an over-
educated reading public's
middle-class (but cinematically
sophisticated) fantasies
         :we read what we
write, we are what eats us,
Auden:  "I'm afraid there's many a spectacled sod
         Prefers the British Museum to God"
post-Auden:  "I fear there's many a preposterous smart-alec
         Prefers Donald Justice to Joan Retallack"
or:  "I'm afraid the American mind's gone rotten
         When chaps prefer Vikram Seth to Barry Watten"
or even:  "And most I fear, with barely-repressed anguish,
         Maya Angelou's probably more popular than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E"

         and so he drifted,
precipitate, by scattered 
islands in the blood, a lance
lukewarm from a tepid
tap, scratching out mediocre
         comic verses meant
to prick the sides of the great
         slumbering leviathan (or to
substitute for crosswords
         (Auden's other passion

.
      

is the mockingbird 
mocking me? the rain
falls for me, modulates
the rhythms of my
sympathies -- if it falls
over Virginia generally, if
it is snow on Michael
Furey's grave in the County
Clare, sees the ships come
in at Galway Bay, blurs
the outline of the Cliffs
of Dooneen, fills the San
Fernando Valley with mud
deeper than the sludge
through which one picks
the kernels of truth out
of The Washington Post's
seven-section, interlinked
horse-turds, is that 
only mindless Walter
Patter, approaching the
condition of muzak -- hey,
bub, I remember when 
that shapely tune, modulated
now on Gerard de Nervals's lute or
Kenny G's spermicidally
lubricated soprano sax, was
spat out by a 19-year-old
Briton with spiked hair, a
safety pin thru his cheek, &
deplorable halitosis -- and
did MTV commission Hier-
onymous Bosch (& Lomb)
to paint that logo with its
bat's-wings and dangling
severed veins?  Some poor
schmuck cut off his
putz trimming a guitar's
neck -- put it in a Tupper-
ware, mailed it to Kate Moss
with a love note Van
Gogh would have envied,
perhaps, if he weren't so
busy decorating dormitory
walls for undergraduates with
rings thru their navels and
heads full of 3rd-generation
Kerouac

    
.

the only thing that stays
the same about the weather
         is its changing -- from
wet & chill to bone-
         clenching cold sun
to an everyday warm that must
         somehow be deceptive