Posts for June 3, 2018 (page 3)

Broken mirrors shroud
shallow waters reflections
deceptive depths drown

Anxious streams surge
transfigured dichotomy
consciousness shimmers

Reality flows
in modulated minutes
chorused waves crashing

Momentary strangers.

A stranger’s danger.

The unexpected danger of my heart awaking. 

Your hand holds mine.

Words have past between us. 

A contagious flame is there, 

I have never seen this, never felt it. 

A nervous giggle makes her presence know.

My heart rushes, but holds true.

In your eyes I see the glimmer of something—

Your smile brings the flame brighter, as I mold to your embrace.

Your arms feel strong and gentle.

Here we are at the beginning, 1-2-3-4—

Music a memory.

My feet tremble to find the forgotten beat. 

I look to you, see you smile and find my place again. 

at the meeting 
of winds and woods
I will remember you

as winds go
from tree to tree
with no small blessing

that I may see 
the wind like flowing
water carrying me back

to sing the goodness
of life from memory
of you

++*Chicago Union Station BNSF to Aurora**++

I talked to an old Vietnamese immigrant for a class assignment. Lack of choice on my part dimishes the artistic rate-of-return on any anecdote. He ran away from his uncle’s farm to Hanoi at the age of ten. He was a Communist at fifteen, small business owner and capitalist at forty. His father died during a Japanese bomber strafing run when he was five. He left Vietnam on a helicopter, from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon, in 1975. He thinks this is a small and relatively insignificant anecdote. He writes poetic essays and calls them “palavers”. Maybe we all think our participation in history is a small and relatively insignificant anecdote.

“I don’t really want the kids or my kids or my children to – to come back or rebuild on anything but I want to create and understand that they have to improve that quality.”

“I love the kids [pauses] like brothers, young brothers, young sisters so I like teaching. but probably teaching is the best uh to me because I have three – three months of vacation”

“sometime I just sit in front of my internet for many hours to look at the history of violence, the history of ISIS, you know um world causes, ISISism, Catholicism, something like that – and the situation like the older man, the Mongolians.”

He thinks the Vietnam War was an effect – historical causality – “bring the seed, plant the seed. what do you get next year? the seed again” – of global colonial imperialism, beginning with the Chinese. Like most old people he is concerned with an ineffable creator-deity. I am growing up at a slower rate than anyone else I know. My friends and peers are returning to belief systems they cast away in their early teens. To them the condition of metaphysical drift is untenable. I am still dyeing my hair and piercing my face, even though I am past the age at which these would be considered rebellious. Trad wife, trad life. Religion is everywhere again. Sometimes I mobilize nostalgia for the early 2000s, when agnosticisms and mall-rat culture were aggravating and not embarrassing, as a petty way to make myself feel better. Young gay men dressing like their straight fathers is either rebellious or a sign of white male queerness deferring to an American norm. I am not a good observer of the human condition (Keanu Reeves, Destination Wedding (2018): “Now I understand why it is called a ‘condition'”). Cynicisms are still valuable, to a degree. Paul Schrader made a good movie this year, for once. No one made a good poem this year.

You can make anything, and
you can make anything
into something else.

Give it a little sweetness,
dab on some different colors:
the cookie is just the starting place.

Watch – a tulip becomes a flame
a stegosaurus a topiary,
Arkansas a Pride flag –

stranger things have happened.

LETTERS TO THE DEAD: THREE

6/3/2018  

Dear Mike:
         I write to you my brother on a clear June day when the wind blows through the four tall pines in the yard with the sound that known souls make when they come to visit. I can hear you asking for and granting forgiveness. And peace.                 
         Between 1970 and 1974 you were arrested three times. During that period you were mad like John Brown – called to do the work of the lord, his special messenger for righteousness and justice. Each time the police caught you, you were naked.                
         After you had been the maintenance man at the seminary where I was studying to become a priest, the Missionary Servants sent you to Birmingham, Alabama to work with “inner city” youth; in other words, help run the order’s new black football program that was tearing up the white league. You had been Brother De Sales for ten years but your erratic behavior made the priests ask you to leave the order. Even though you had not been in college for more than a decade you were able to get into pharmacy school and had started dating a woman from Owensboro, KY. You began to hear voices and have visions. During that time you lived near the railroad tracks and their night clankings made you think the Klan was taking all the black folk of Birmingham to the gas chambers. All night you ran naked through the streets, shouting and warning people about the death camps. You covered yourself with the black mud of a nearby lagoon and evaded capture until a glorious sunrise found you trying to get back into your girlfriend’s locked apartment.                
         Two years later, while you were a pharmacy intern in Louisville, it was the National Guard Armory where you painted peace signs on the Humvees and tanks parked there. In 1974 you were riding your bicycle (in your underwear) all the way from Paducah to the Trappist monastery at Gethsemani to talk with Thomas Merton who had been dead for five years.  “ Just outside of New Haven a state policeman held me at gunpoint and I grabbed his weapon and threw it into the Rolling Fork River, thereby saving my own life and the soul of the officer,” is how you described it when I came to get you out of the Bardstown jail during that April 4th outbreak of tornadoes.                
         Your tumult would not end there but lithium helped to smooth out the rough edges of your manic-depression enough for you to function in your often chaotic world. The ecstatic highs of artistic vision and the down lows of alcohol addiction evened out into a kind of unmentioned grudge against the world. Sometimes you were close to me and other times far away. We communicated by sending poems to each other. I would send one to you and you would turn it over and write one back to me. In a box of old writings I found thirty-seven of your poems, one of which (with your permission) I will reproduce below.                
         Before you died nearly three years ago you had begun to forget certain aspects of your life. But I do not recount these events for the improvement of your memory, but to reestablish the bond of words that carried us through good times and bad. No matter our monumental disagreements (your own family was the hardest one for you to get along with), our mutual love of verse carried us through to an uneasy truce amid our genuine respect for each other’s craft.
See you soon,
Jim

by:  Mike Lally   (4/30/80, 3 a.m.)

                           Wizard

We’ve not yet gotten over
WWII
Much less Viet Nam, Korea or
WWI,
Like Zhivago we must ride
It out on a long winter’s
Train picking and choosing
Between two loves and
Deciding during the night
For a stale mate.
    The ego of safe passage
Versus the superego of winning?
Or does one remember the id?
Pasternak did.

Give a guy a glimpse
of whatever battle you face in a night,
he will go to war for you.
He will also lose for you.

A friend recently told me
that it’s becoming harder to tell
whether I’m in a good mood or not.
Sadly, that’s my point.

P.S.A.
Unless I specifically come to you
asking for help or advice,
keep that shit to yourself.

Life is easier, if lonelier,
keeping my problems to myself.
If no one takes the time to know them,
they sure as hell can’t find a way to fix them.

For an international house of pleasure
this playlist is somehow
going for it. Across the table I watch
a fork gently play itself into
syrup soaked cakes. I was tasting
my own as I looked on. Chewing the way you chew when
you don’t want to finish. I think how? 
I was supposed to be sleep by now. 
Day already into overtime as I count hours
Now 30. Eyes hang coffee cup heavy
Instead I’m here
Observing            longing
Thinking that… 

    Multiple sets of cutlery on cheap plates 
    plays in my head like metal bed frames
    creaking under the weight of hunger

   They had The Whispers knocking a little bit ago

   I’m still getting up at 5:30am

Ten Days in Paradise
 
Vacation home in your dreams?
Perhaps you shun musty smells,
Borrowed beds, icky showers,
Rusty water and the like.
 
So you float a loan, sign your name,
Promise the kids’ education money
And there you are. Another step up
The ‘ole status ladder. Forgive me
 
For I hate to disillusion you, crash
Into your parade and rain on your two weeks.
First, the icemaker refuses to deliver,
The smoke-detector bleeps without pause.
 
The last visitors left dirty rugs, stole
Pillows, ruined towels and linens.
Storm Took the AC and left a 5K bill.
Neighbor broke your knob and door lock.  

Ah, but never fear, you’ve arrived in paradise,
Where the paver work keeps you from
Your very expensive parking place, lays
On your tired back the loads of luggage.
 
The rooms are hot enough to cause heaves,
Plane was late dodging storms and food
Must wait for sunrise. Yet you are here,
Tomorrow must surely bring rewards,
 
After all you’ve sacrificed to have it so. 
The TV is on and the weather for the next
Few days is . . .What? We have to evacuate?
Home, and only one, is where you’d best to be.

Blue-eyed grass hides
shy beside path
Flowers smaller than dimes
agree to open
when sun is high
Their fragile tenacity
pointed-petal simplicity
need no watering
mulching   weeding
But without them
my cup of summer
would be cracked
and chipped
its pattern scratched
and faded