Originality and Imitation: The Dynamics of Poetry

Gary Sange

Virginia Commonwealth University

INTRODUCTION

I remember devoting a weekend to writing a parody of Emily Dickinson; I was newly learning about prosody and rhyme and wanted to do everything in my poem that she did in hers. I started by counting everything--lines, syllables, stresses; then listing rhetorical devices, patterns of imagery and sound, anything I could spot that made her poem only her poem, or, more precisely, made her poem only itself. For instance, I tried to imitate the horrifyingly calm regularity of "As freezing persons recollect the snow / First chill, then stupor, then the letting go." Imitate how the first line is a single, subordinate clause, a syntactic unit, that takes one breath to say, that has a vague caesura between "persons" and "recollect," and like the line that follows it, has exactly five iambs and ten syllables. But what's delectably different about the mates in this couplet are those inexorable caesuras between "first chill, then stupor, then the letting go," each of which offers a space for the sensitivity to numbness to sink in. Though I've lost my attempts to own an Emily, what I remember most about that weekend were the limits on my attempts at thoroughness.

And though this was humbling--the poem was more than the sum of its parts--I had the chance to participate in a kind of physical homage to the experience of reading her. And though I fancied my parody was a product, really what I came away with was all process. I had participated in Emily's moves: used her ear, her breathing to warm up my own. But the best result arrived when I realized I had taken off the premium and, consequently, the pressure our culture places on us to always seek originality. I'm convinced it can't be sought. We read our way toward its arrival. And once it arrives, it grows by further letting go--no protection, no preservation.

IMITATION AND ORIGINALITY

There are many interesting instances of it in literature: instances of poets needing the same word, almost like security blankets or yeast, to engender freshness in most any context. James Wright had to use the word "DARK" in almost every poem he wrote; there's Yeats's obsession with "that" which may have revolutionized the potential in this little demonstrative article. Obsessions with certain subjects: James Wright's need to write about down&outers, Frost's burnt-down-farm-

house-with-nothing-but-a-chimney-standing poems are everywhere in his Collected. Then there is the nearly conscious collaboration of Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver who were not only lovers, later husband and wife, but genre-swappers, she nominally the poet and he the famous writer of fiction, style-cross-pollinators, so that the lines between their fiction and poetry blurred, while each created a more complex hybrid while being open to the forté & style of the other. For instance much of Ray's poetry is made up of musical, very rhythmic dialogue, while Tess's prose has taken on his extraordinary plainness. I know this is a glib, skimpy comparison, but I want to lightly touch on a few exemplary instances of IMITATION AND ORIGINALITY before I try to explore my own lineage, especially the progressive influence of Yeats, Roethke, Plath, & Kinnell upon one another and to suggest something of their influence upon my own work.

To give more focus to what I'm trying to do here, I want to sieze on two, often connected literary devices, Invocation and Incantation, to set up a basis for comparison. And before that, it may be well to ask what invokers and chanters do, and how invocation and incantation may be connected as literary conventions.

Combining dictionary definitions along with my own awareness of usage, an invocation/apostrophe is used to face up to; take aim at; grab by the lapels; to seek the authority of; to seek more intimacy from; to exalt; to situate, to orient; to characterize by essence; and often to assume a posture of obeisance.

TO INVOKE IS TO CALL FORTH BY INCANTATION: TO CONJURE shouts my Webster, which, of course, suits me just fine.

Again according to Professor Me, chanting makes words more actual; makes words seem, at least, gestures, maybe even actions; makes words percussive, makes them into lunges of subconsciousness, shaking up rhetoric, makes words seem to move as in a dance...

So the INVOKING CHANTER is one who knows what or to whom he's looking, appealing to, but also one who makes his appeal happen; who turns away from what he's been saying by means of the APOSTROPHE (which literally means the act of turning away), so it might be said that during the moment of APOSTROPHE, the speaker appears to be turning his back on the reader, turning away from any audience for a deeper privacy on stage: an instant soliloquy. Thus the INVOKING CHANTER is one who is seeking more authority, more intimacy, some large reckoning, and one who brings about change by means of the chant...

Obviously these theories are crying out for instances--so here goes:

Opening the ODYSSEY, we hear right off: "Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel...." And shortly hereafter we hear: " From some point here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak, and bring our story...."

I don't know whether it's meant to be funny, but I'm immediately struck by how unimportunate this speaker is: Like a barely veiled rhetorical question, the speaker commands the muse to listen up; then proceeds to tell the muse what he's presumably asking for; the muse instantly seems like a useful contact, the speaker a director, who uses his power of imperative to set the stage and manage the content of his own inspiration: "From some point / here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak and begin our story." Of course elsewhere in both the ODYSSEY and the ILLIAD, HOMER IS TRULY IMPORTUNATE, calling out for inspiration for his poem, help from the Gods, establishing the lineage and status of the authority he's appealing to: "Son of Laertes and seed of Zeus, resourceful Odysseus...."

As with much Anglo-Saxon poetry, especially Beowulf, it should be said that the typical Homeric apostrophe is often, likewise, a kenning: "Circumspect Penelope," "Poseidon, Shaker of the Earth," "Gray-eyed Athene," etc.

And now I must leap to the first four lines of Keats's great ODE TO AUTUMN:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

Aside from being quintessential Autumn, what's wonderful about this opener is how gracefully Keats glides us into pleasure: how those "m's" in "mists," and "mellow," "bosom," and "maturing" all make the momma-sound which, according to John Frederick Nims, is the sound of pleasure in all languages; but what is equally wonderful is how organically Keats strings out his sentences among their rhymes: how the moment of acknowledgement and conjuring is equally the moment when the opulence and ripening of Autumn takes place: through the invoking and chanting and run-over third line, the sentence, itself, is already twisting like a vine--is undulant and elusive as the Season itself.

Ok, I wanted to get that straight before we go on to Yeats, who half-rhymes with Keats, but whose ladies, and icons of poetic arousal, wholly rhyme: MAUD GONNE AND FANNY BRAWN. Of course this epiphany has not been elsewhere documented and, as such, is waiting to be siezed upon as an original topic for a Ph.D. dissertation. (Please keep it quiet unless you know a very hard-up candidate.)

Before I reach our Willy, I shall say nothing in passing about "O WARM WHITE LUCENT MILLION-PLEASURED BREASTS!" because it's embarrassing and none of our business--and Keats and Fanny should be left alone with this invocation. Besides, it is, indeed, Willy time--pardon, my familiarity--but anyone who's augmented his genitalia with monkey glands has got to be more a Willy than a William!

But let us go then not to the Lake Isle of Innisfree but to the last stanza of AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN:

Labor is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music,O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Such a question! Clearly we can't. But what's really AWESOME here--and I wish to reclaim from the kids that once ample word--is so much at once: Putting aside that the whole stanza is a microcosm and capsule summary of the whole poem--all its themes are here--and, perhaps, saying as little as I quickly can about how some of the stanza's chanting is bouncing off Yeats's cunning balancing of whole and slant rhymes--where, despair, blossomer, and soul, oil, bole, glance and dance--and landing , as I surely want to, on the splendid strangeness of Yeats's delayed invocation.

O CHESTNUT TREE, GREAT ROOTED BLOSSOMER is a sudden and exciting interruption of the thought-flow--is truly an APOSTROPHE because it not only turns away, turns its back on the previous content, but emphatically turns toward a voluptuous, muscular organic presence. The whole poem telescopes at this point of delayed invocation, the whole poem has got to come down to one thing--to go from all its rhetoric and vivid imagery to be as thingy, palpable as possible. No sooner are we beholding this singular Chestnut Tree than it is instantly manifold, progressively multivariate: GREAT ROOTED BLOSSOMER / ARE YOU THE LEAF, THE BLOSSOM, OR THE BOLE?--inherently whole in every part--at once a living object and symbol of Yeats's idea of UNITY OF BEING.

But we haven't hit the mostest invocation yet: "O BODY SWAYED TO MUSIC, O BRIGHTENING GLANCE" is as good as poetry can be, it seems to me, and likely anyone else who's put the line in his mouth and ear--moved with it--would agree, because it's simultaneously embodying and disembodying, gives us voluptuousness and Spirit at once; and though a dancer has suddenly eclipsed a tree, she's also absorbed within the movement of the line the composure, balance, poise and swayability, if you will, of a tree. In other words, the invocations and chanting here are so welded and dynamic, kinetic, more accurately says it, that the moment of appeal, the moment of question--which are normally static, rhetorical postures--are instantly actions, answers--a ShaaZaam!--a conjuring that doesn't have to wait for its magical results to take place. I don't care if I can't solve Yeats's koan--can't know the dancer from the dance--I'm already dancing!

Certainly one of the best teachers of poetry writing ever, Theodore Roethke, told his students--among whom were such future luminaries as James Wright, Richard Hugo, Jack Gilbert, Tess Gallagher--LEARN TO WRITE LIKE SOMEBODY ELSE. Roethke's University of Washington workshops were preoccupied with students doing just that: it didn't matter how gifted and original these incipient geniuses already were--most of the students I just mentioned would go on to revolutionize poetry for the next half century--Roethke believed that one had to imitate first before one could even presume to be an original poet. And it was Roethke, himself, who wrote in his sequence, FOR SIR JOHN DAVIES: "I take this cadence from a man named Yeats; / I take it and I give it back again." So our moving from Yeats to Roethke / Roethke to Yeats was exactly what Roethke, himself, did many times over his career, especially in his later development. ELEGY FOR JANE, though not as Yeatsian as the "For Sir John Davies" sequence, is exemplary for its inventive use of invocation. After synesthetically communing with Jane's sensuousness--"I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils / and her quick look, a sidelong pickeral smile," Roethke goes on to conclude:

My sparrow, you are not here,

Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.

The sides of wet stones cannot console me,

Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

I, with no rights in this matter,

Neither father nor lover.

The progression of invocations from "My sparrow" to "My maimed darling" to the concluding trope of "my skittery pigeon" would suggest an inelegant metamorphosis of Jane in the speaker's mind--somewhere between the pathetic and the ludicrous. In fact each invocation, each successive manifestation of Jane is more a tentative stopage, a groping, halting of the speaker's grieving imagination than the chanted, exalted flowings we heard, for instance, in AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN or in ODE TO AUTUMN. It's almost as if the invocative tropes are used to demonstrate the inadequacy of poetic flights--that "skittery pigeon" being somewhat of a sad, crash landing, that leaves the poet with nothing but his own words. Because the dead can't really be called to, the poet is left here with merely aphoristic statement, in a nearly inarticulate silence--the poem after "skittery pigeon" and "damp grave" runs out of imagery and figurative language. This is a long way from the poetic confidence, even the "chutzpa" of an invoking Homer, invoking Keats or invoking Yeats....

Sylvia Plath, on the other hand, who has often claimed Roethke as one of her Poetry Dads, has given us a chanting, invocative poetry that has much pizazz and chutzpa, and may be the most reader-confronting, reader-assaulting poetry of our time:

CUT

What a thrill--

My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of hinge

of skin,

A flap like a hat,

Dead white.

Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,

The Indian's axed your scalp.

Your turkey wattle

Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.

I step on it,

Clutching my bottle of pink fizz.

A cerebration, this is.

Out of a gap

A million soldiers run,

Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?

O my

Homunculus,

I am ill.

I have taken a pill to kill

The thin

Papery feeling.

Saboteur,

Kamikaze man----

The stain on your

Gauze Ku Klux Klan

Babushka

Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled

Pulp of your heart

Confronts its small

Mill of silence

How you jump------

Trepanned veteran,

Dirty girl,

Thumb stump.

"Little pilgrim ... Homunculus ... Saboteur ... Kamikaze man ... Gauze Ku Klux Klan / Babushka" and then "Trepanned veteran, / Dirty girl, / Thumb stump." is such a zany progression of invocations, a series of giddy, macabre throbs. Unlike anything we've seen so far, Plath makes her words crop up with onomatopoeia, nearly burst their meaning with sound, meanwhile, stealthily, carrying on the momentum of an impish, running conceit. Her usual, ironic and embracing collisions of assailants and victims attains a cute ghoulishness that may seem to neutralize the positive and negative values of these invocations and turn the words themselves into veering bumpity-cars that could go anywhere all along the poem, but somehow settle into their own confident chanted patterns, hold composed within symmetrical stanzas. Plath gives us a sense of dangerous wittiness that may handle the most terrifying content only for our aesthetic delight. So when we hit "the stain on your / Gauze Ku Klux Klan, we're swimming in a savorable "ooooo" sound; we can't tell what's important because the hateable Klan have become so interesting and the "awe" sound in "Gauze" has immediately absorbed all sinisterness within that impish, endearing "Babushka." It's as if a game of marbles has turned into fencing razor-blades and this gallop of metaphorical handles can keep anything playful. No where is Plath more brilliant at this effect than in DADDY, where she uses her chanting of that "oooooooo" sound to keep our responses writhing between the "ooooowe" of nausea and the "oooooooo" of orgasm: "YOU DO NOT DO, YOU DO NOT DO / ANY MORE, BLACK SHOE... / WHERE IT POURS BEAN GREEN OVER BLUE / IN THE WATERS OFF BEAUTIFUL NAUSET. / I USED TO PRAY TO RECOVER YOU / ACH, DU.

The gloss phrase is within these lines: Plath wishes to beautifully nauseate, to croon and chant us into the pleasure-pain sonorities, the heaven-hell of the masochist:

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN SCARED OF YOU,

WITH YOUR LUFTWAFFE, YOUR GOBBLEDYGOO.

AND YOUR NEAT MUSTACHE

AND YOUR ARYAN EYE, BRIGHT BLUE.

PANZER-MAN, PANZER MAN, O YOU--

That "O YOU" is so cooingly indicting, obscenely seductive, just after the polluted innocence, the deranged silliness of "GOBBLEDYGOO!" No poet has ever used more weird right words. Gotten us to tap our toes during dismemberings, asphyxiations, bloodbaths, and to leave us with only the wherewithal of wit and rhythm.

Galway Kinnell, in a l972 interview, has said "In my early twenties I thought Yeats was not only the greatest of all poets, but in a manner of speaking, poetry itself. In everything I wrote I tried to reproduce his voice. IF MY POEMS DIDN'T SOUND LIKE YEATS, I THOUGHT THEY WEREN'T POETRY."

Perhaps the originality of Galway Kinnell has as much to do with the fact that he could fling his receptivity, egolessly in his twenties, not only at Yeats, but shortly, thereafter, at Whitman and Rilke as well. In other words the quintessential Galway was already absorbed in his obsessions with Willy, Walt, and Rainer--so much so that, whatever was inherently Galway, was kept unselfconsciously strong enough to hold its essence, while always being subject to growing and transformations within the increasingly complex compound, stylistic amalgamation of these great masters. Kinnell was always going to school to greatness, even learning to be bardic when he must have been still a kid. And best of all repeatedly giving himself the chance to forget himself--to hear what he found to be an impersonal voice--and spokesman for us all--speaking through his own. In other words, IMITATION of these three great writers AND THE CONSEQUENT AMALGAMATION OF ALL THREE WITHIN HIS OWN STYLE, TAUGHT KINNELL TO DARE IMPERSONALITY:

A child, a little girl,

in violet hat, blue scarf, green sweater, yellow skirt, orange

                                                socks, red

boots,

on a rope swing, swings

in sunlight

over a garden in Ireland, backfalls,

backrises,

forthsinks,

forthsoars, her charmed life holding its breath

innocent of groans, beyond any

future, far past the past: into pure present...

                      ("Secret Hiding Places of Snow")

Although it happens that Kinnell is speaking of his own mother as a child, it's obvious that this little girl could be any little girl. But what's remarkable is the degree of vividness and immediacy, vision of mingling colors, Kinnell generates from his conjuring chant, from the objective delight that is evoked from his playing off spondaic long lines against the poising short ones, how he gives us tonally and imagistically a sense of calm equilibrium against any kid-swinger's need to kick for more height, dare to lurch against balance. Kinnell does this through his delicate chant, a kind of musical score that gives us strategically placed breath-stations, pauses for conserving and revitalizing the sentence energy.

Of course this weaving of the sensual and the philosophical is equally reminiscent of Willy, Rainer, and Walt....

Speaking of Walt, our own Terry Hummer has just published a book called WALT WHITMAN IN HELL...

It's a HUMDINGER--and I only lightly apologize for my corniness--because this 50's Americanism may suggest to you something of the boldness of the hearable Terry Hummer assuming the Personae, voice, cadences of the Great Gray Bard, while allowing that Barbaric Yawper to stroll through our later 20th-century, decadent Manhattan and to keep on changing long after his own death:

........From here I can see,

Like a skyline, the obvious contour of all

My error. O I freely confess it now: America,

I was wrong. I am only slightly larger than life.

I contain mere conspiracies. What do I know?

There is no identity at the basis of things, no one

Name beneath all names. There is no more than this

To remember: It is not god-like to die. It is not even human. Refuse the

honor, no matter who tells you its conquest is sublime.

I may have mumbled that old lie myself once.

I have confessed too many things. Maybe that is why I am

The only one dead here. Maybe that is why I have to suffer

Everything I can. Maybe that is why--

Over the unconscious roofs of your living

Beauty shops, sweatshops, pawnshops, printshops, meatshops,

Warehouses, bathhouses, crackhouses, penthouses, card houses--

Once and for all unhearable, and for all I know unthinkable, I go

                                              on

Sounding my doomed eternal bodiless goddamned

I,I,I,I, I.

For even a sophomore coming up out of LEAVES OF GRASS, this Hummer-Walt is clearly growing up. Of course we've got the grandiloquence of that once larger-than-life famous man, "I contain mere conspiracies," (which has to be an ironic spin-off of "I AM LARGE, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES") and we certainly have his chanted litanies, but in a voice not so serious, a little self-mocking--"I am only slightly larger than life." And what is a following up of the voice and psyche and style of Walt, is also a fully imagined humbling, a kind of dignified bitterness and even self-loathing that undoubtedly the second half of our beloved century would have submitted him to. This poem allows us to both remember Walt's famous enthusiastic optimism and also to sense the spiritual jeopardy our time puts everybody in. "Sounding my doomed eternal bodiless goddamned / I, I, I, I, I" chants at us, inflicting and definitive as driven in spikes, a huge, gnashing sarcasm--a flamboyant tantrum against the idea of self.

Let me offer you my montage of the nervy words Hummer uses in his WALT WHITMAN IN HELL: "perpetual dysfunction ... biochemical flashes ... regions with designations, attributes, and enumerations" ... "noxious oblivion" ... "epiphenomenon" ... "holographic projections" ... "vastation of souls" ... "the enormity of my multitudinousness...."

No doubt sterile, technical jargon: huge glubby words, or skeletons of language shot through with our hardness, anemia of feeling. These are words poets aren't supposed to use. How does the poem survive such tone-killing words? (Let's face it: much of bureaucrapese kills relationships and embalms our lives because it is toneless.) How does what seem, sometimes, a trash-compactor of language all fit Terry's design? One quick answer is that the GREAT HYBRIDIZER, WHITMAN, HIMSELF, also did some trash-compacting in his time: was often singing up against and through his own worst words. But we also know that same stubbornness, nearly willful tastelessness in Walt, himself, was often the source of his originality: outrageously strange and unforgettable coinages: "STUCCO'D WITH QUADRUPEDS AND BIRDS ALL OVER!" So when we read and hear "vastation of souls," and later "the enormity of my multitudinousness," we can't miss seeing the respectful wink in Terry's poem.

It is as if Hummer's borrowed the muse of the GREAT GRAY BARD to play with the pompousness of Whitman's lexicon perhaps even more than Walt, himself, could. Terry's ENORMITY OF MY MULTITUDINOUSNESS doesn't kill the speaker's tone, mostly because the poem is such a confluence of voices, where the chanting brings out naturalness, where Terry's complex Walt blends his often lofty rhetoric with the plain utterance of Hummer's usual talk and song: "NOW AS THE VOICES OF THESE MY EMANATIONS BARK AND BLEED / IT IS THE INTENSE STRANGENESS OF THE WORLD I WANT / TO REMEMBER HOW TO LOVE...." This is such a credible and tender moment in Terry's poem, the passionate wholeness of his personae welds together all differing levels of diction. Especially when a voice seeks to be that of Everyman, it's hard to tell who's the impersonator and who's the impersonated: ventriloquist and voice are as seamlessly merged here as dancer and dance.

But what makes this poem Terry's poem and much more than a mere parody is the constant impression we have of the flexible, soluble voice of the poet, Terry Hummer, speaking through the massive, famous, transcendental MEGAPHONE OF WALT as if to reveal the even chummier voice (and no Bard has ever sought to be chummier than Whitman) Walt, himself, might have had in person, in his own throat, under all the oratory of his poems....

O HUMMER! O HOMER! O HUNGE!

(My chance to alliterate; our name in Odessa)--

I must say one more thing before I go on to myself: As an l88 pound Fullback on the Piedmont High football team--circa l957--I not only hated poetry, I particularly hated that poetic "O!" It was just too uncool for a square with a flattop, rolled-up, bicep-exposing sleeves on his t-shirt, and a '54 chopped and channeled, four-barrel carbed Ford with ass in air and nose on the ground.... That went around everywhere going bla-bla-bla ... bla-bla-bla...

So the origin of "O's" in my poetry, I can't really explain, except to say the poets who would later teach me could use "O!" with humor and credible heat, and no concern for being uncool. What I can explain is my need for chanting and drums and the dance. There was a full set of drums behind our diningroom table and Dad often went wild on them after supper, tapping pedals on the base and cymbals, and grinning as he'd lean way over, swirling brushes on the snare. My Dad also owned a dance hall in howntown Oakland, California, where one night Little Richard, who could no longer bear his own wiggling, stripped down to a zebra-striped jockstrap and kept on shrieking LUCILLE! in the dark. Though the cops had turned off the lights and shut us down, that moment keeps on being one of the great wonders of my life...

But whether I'd watch my Dad dance and paint at once, or do my own little, wooden Rock&Roll, or sprint on our high-school track with knees prancing ridiculously high, or keep up my many gaspings through Richmond on a long distance run, I'm still always going for the beat... And though I'm a klutz, and would rather be a dancer than anything else, I suppose I've had to learn to chant instead... Here goes:

TO CACTUS, MY VERY OWN

O uptight growth with a prickly fist;

I hate your defense,

your niggardly thirst.

Eke out on a desert

bombarded with sun;

practice austerity--

quick-kill of lizard and shrike.

Why are you on

my windowsill;

have you come for torment,

to watch my leaky watertap,

see how little sun

you can get and still survive?

O be vulnerable!

Wet your pants!

Oversleep!

Stop surviving so well!

FOR THE PERSONALS

A pale Jewish male with much umph,

some pizzazz, good quads,

an openly growing baldspot,

orange wooly-bear mustache, holey underwear,

a love of rivers, bikes, legs, and sails,

a love of naps, illumination, face-to-face

babies that hoot back...

A wan Yiddish kid with "schpilkas,"

whose favorite word is "zjuge,"

who prefers "schtupping" to coitus,

listening to his operatic cat, Ellie,

giving "pipicks" to dog, Lila Hoot.

An observer of the eyes of owls, daisies,

blur of hummingbirds, whales...

disciple of light,

moderate, but not-too-heavy

petting: kissing "kepels," napes--

especially the sternum;

who must travel to Ireland, Greece,

all over the Walkerton pond;

who's learning to homemake, garden, take care of his back...

A chronic optimist who daren't be depressed;

who keeps claiming his loneliness

is a mine

picking at it, holding up

nuggets of solitude...

Marooned ballyhooer,

oracle out of a job,

turned-up diary whisper,

stripper apparition, ad of self!

If you're likewise non-descript,

transparently shapely--

a raunchy confidant?

please contact at once

that neglected spectacle

ecstatic over the sunset with nobody to tell.

O wooable crooner!

Voluptuous Buba!

"OY-VEY-OY-VEY-OY-VEY"

is the comical, grievy joy I'd have you chant.

Or to well with quiet;

touch me out of all instruction--

love me any way you want.

SOAPBOX DERBY

Each day mom drove me to her dad's workshop.

But I made it myself.

One whole summer so carefully built

out of hand-sawed plyboard

strips glued

to laminated angles I sanded it

to such a curving smooth teardrop shape,

Lori-Kay said,

"if you're first,

I might give you something you might just want alot."

Squinting under the visor

of that peacock-blue official Akron helmet,

with even its sweatholes taped for resistance

to wind,

snug in my own cockpit,

I watched her lips in the urgent gloss

of my long black hood.

Moments to go my gnome

Gramps squatted to oil

my wheels, rub

my hunched-over streamline back--said,

"you'll do good, kid."

When at the gun the hill was gone,

I leaned and leaned till I was sleeker still,

lost my eyes between my knees, swerved,

bounced off a curb and kept on coasting...

right on through the finish and over the next hill...

GROWING BALD

                  For Nick, Bryant, Maurice, Bill, and me

With only comb and pomade,

your fashion the sheerest

concentration camp; nudge up

frail bulwark, wispy bridge,

and lock up all the aliens.

From sky-leaking ceiling

to cringing pink,

you put your whole head on alert;

try to flip all under

before someone sees you

waylay those gaping inlets,

remove your obedient part.

Why spook yourself

with skulking tactics

and daintiness--

let it frizzle up in lightning bolts,

or vanish down the drain!

In little clumps like buffalo,

what's left of it goes wild

over prairie, swale, and butte,

till moon-remote, the years stampede,

the thinness circles

a fogbound fort,

this widening, glossy,

no-man's land

of your skull.

BAGGED DADS

In the Eating Court of the Mall,

among potato skins, gulping adam's apples,

inside a giant TV,

Scuds and Cruises are preempted,

vanish to a giant RAGU ad,

the blond hunk announcing

"WHAT A SAUCE!"

Tom Brokaw says, "the war's

entered another dimension";

Cronkite, "that we oughtn't to be

too euphoric, or too

despondent...yet..."

And now tilting and swooping his hand,

with hailstone glee in his eyes,

the retired general, Richard L. Dupuis,

shows us

how we'll carpetbomb the dessert,

Saddam's elite corp,

until it's all softened up.

Under the towering, too thin screen,

a legless 'Nam vet

sits in his wheelchair,

trying to recall

whether it was the Gulf

of Tonkin or Mei Li...

He gapes at the turquoise,

Nintendo-zapped nightsky of Baghdad,

the Zorro-caped, almost unseeable, black jet that fades

to a baby under a gasmask, a plastic sealed-crib,

what has to be a baby's

real cry.

DEBRIS

             Amtrak--between Delaware & Baltimore

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

THERE'S BEEN SOME DEBRIS...

POSSIBLE FATALITY--

WE'LL BE DETAINED

TILL FURTHER NOTICE...

With lights off and our heads

against cold squares of black,

installed in furry, reclining seats,

none of us knows if it was a child,

tight-roping along a rail,

a wandering addict caught

in a ravine, one man,

looking for something

heavy and furiously fast...

At over a hundred-and-twenty-miles-per-hour,

the fatality could give no hint;

above the gasping abyss between our sides,

the hacked-off shriek of the other-way train,

the conductor hollers over the intercom:

SOMEBODY'S TAKEN OVER

THE CONTROLS... THE ENGINEER

REFUSES TO GO

ANY FURTHER... WE MUST WAIT

FOR A BACK-UP TO ARRIVE...

A yellow-hooded baby sleeps

on a breathing lap;

the shark-skinned rapper next to me

throbs with the whispery yells

leaking out of his earphones;

the woman in front of us

gapes and swears at her watch...

We hollow-out in the dark of a passed-through train

till cow-catcher, thump, engorged cry,

charges with such stillness each seat between stops,

the gone-one gnaws on sparks like wheels that can't grip,

the gone-one keeps missing in every face.

WHY I NEED A DONKEY

To be my beast of non-burden, bulk for hugs...

To gentle up against my own obstinance:

Tendencies to sulk, balk, snort, lunge...

So carefully kneel down to slope

Into a warm boulder, be an island

Taking place in the middle of a pen...

Or Yak-shaggy, bunny-eared, goofy-toothed, himself,

To play our solo on his long neck,

Puffing out Dizzy Gallespie cheeks;

Or on the strangled accordion of his lungs,

To wheeze, shred, flog, keep on pumping out

Gurgling hurricanes, gasping song...

O moody-Buddha, Jesus-taxi, clippity-clop Donk--

Teach me to roll over with the rollicking dust.

I'm not likely to bray; won't ever shudder off flies;

Am not at all inclined to stand

With one hoof-heel raised,my muzzle over a fence.

Keep me to outlive: drift inside a trance:

To wander our aging out all during the end...

"MOUNTAIN'S OUT!"

 
                            Rainier l993

While a car-alarm screeches

around a corner, down alleys,

over a man swinging slowly

in his hammock,

shaking off mists,

and floating on its base of cloud,

a gigantic, flat diamond--

sun-singed, snow-capped,

granite silhouette--

is all there is

before the mountain's out

and the whole sky...

Just behind the city,

l4,000 feet straight up,

less than dots and out of sight,

a group of the blind

clutch and tug and feel along a rope--

climb all the way to the top.

SPECTACLE

                     
                        California Redwoods, l992

Above folded-up,

empty,

safety-pinned

trousers, a man

sits parked

in a wheelchair

gazing up

at the towering stump

of the world's

tallest tree.

From his planted torso,

he sits upright to think

how you might grow as you stood

for a thousand years;

then loosen at the roots, at the tops of boughs,

a wavering long enough to choose

one, whole, huge, shivering of the leaves

before you'd topple, crash,

go silent on the ground.

Whether felled himself,

or almost in half,

he's pinned up the dangling ghosts

of no limbs;

wheeled himself here to behold

the shooting altitude in a wad of roots,

its earth-packed

starburst...

BREATHARIAN

There's nothing to suspect me of

but what you do every moment.

I am a Breatharian.

Though anyone can be one, too,

I have no wish to proselytize.

Breathing air is all I'm about...

I have no longer need to eat...

Vegetarians think me a bit extreme.

One offered me a turnip once

because she said it was hardly

a vegetable: was no more

than a crimson, crispy, white-skinned stone.

But I said no because there was air

that moment and air

the next...

Should a Breatharian want to fast,

one could hold one's breath long enough to know

there's nothing else...

Otherwise I watch candles

whisper

or splurge on hurricanes...

Sometimes, though, I crave anything

a little else...

till I guzzle nothing

and would lick sky...