Aubade of the Ghost of Loss

Some perilous joy, algorithm of loving,
of conscious geometry of tide and thigh and sand,
delicious salts of ecstasy,
sunlit, triple-mooned, quivering, solid,
this strand of pearl and praise, islets
adrift and melting, chocolate into ocean.

I quiver at our mutual agony, memory.
But you, you killed me, again and again,
fear creating you into what could not companion.
So lost, that room with one bed and three windows,
so lined with blind curtain and Venetians.
There was a time I wanted you or nothing.

Now this echoing re-emergence, so unfair, immaculate
resonant wipe out everything that ever happened.
We worked hard to retrieve forgiven mutuality.
It doesn't mean to work, this quiet mistrust silenced
and obscured. It means to forget, as though moving,
water like a brush on papyrus and wood, on.

Make it never happened. Make it gone. Demon lover,
I cannot let you back into my life. As though nothing.
It's the morning of a midnight just past. Dark, cold,
mysterious with spirits moving across the face of water.
How can you come back, once given and quit,
except to haunt, this night of a morning unasked.

Aubade of the Dream of Peaches

suffering through a time-change
waking in the middle of the night
moon-silver streaming in gaps
between window-shade and sill

I dream in that last hour before waking
of trudging on winter sidewalks
to an intersection in my hometown
next to an empty snow-covered field

to the east, we all stop, stare, comment,
thin cold clouds pale-centered, dappled
in sunrise, edged in light, I hear
my own voice say, "Now that's true pink"

as if it were the first color of the first
dawn at the morning of the world,
then I am turning the corner
as the traffic light changes

into a stand of stalls, open market
of fruit-sellers and farm provender
an annual peach festival
I make my way along wooden walls

painted fresh white and palest fruit-tone
colors of the living fruit vibrant and true
firm in the hand, brightly lit this early morn
by light-strung tree-boughs and dawn

there are sellers of jams and preserves
and small peach-shaped bottles of wine
intriguing because wine made from fruit
other than grapes is always tongue-catching

my toes are caught by a wooden sill
I stumble through a display window rather
than a door into a fruit stand overwhelmed
with color, scent, a whirl of sound and memory

and open eyes cocooned in warm blankets
arms wrapped around a pillow, knees bent
it's still wan winter morning, no snow left, and
you're not here, you're not here, you're not here

Disaffection: a deconstruction of lyric

I move as slow as geology the morning after a long day of music,
walks, making photos. It's raining, just a little spit on the window,
which always slows and dampens the mood. It's called a comforter
because you curl up in it, get warm, be comforted. But I'm alone.

Which is no comfort. Nobody love me. Nobody wants to. The inane,
almost comical voice of self-pity, as sincere as a five-year-old
that fearful morning before the first day of school. That voice inside,
no matter how old you grow up, still there. We can always revert.

A man says he wants to come meet me, maybe for a sensual date.
When do I tell him the things that inevitably turn them all away
from my doorstep, the truths of suffering and ecstasy
that have become my new daily life? Rejection seems inevitable.

No one wants to play around an ostomy bag. I try not to blame them,
but damnit I do. Now that I have my life back, scarred as it's become,
I have fifteen years of damaged libido to make up for. Freud no doubt
would have something pithy to say, but I stopped listening years ago.

Sexuality and surgery lurk on the same playing field. My skin
is full of holes, meteoric pockmarks, troughs and long grazes
of near-misses of the familiar scythe. I can objectify; can you?
I'm going to spend this morning, like every morning, alone.

It's not that you had to leave so early. It's that you never stayed.
How can I regret last night when it never happens? No chances
to linger over theory. The minute they find out about the scar
and the shitbag they suddenly remember a forgotten appointment.

With destiny, I suppose. It drives them away. Do you expect sympathy?
From most men the most you ever get is mutual temporary lust.
Asking for deepset, durable, rooted emotion, you need a bard.
Or a shaman. Just not that hero, with his thousand faces turned away.

Some monsters he won't conquer. I feel some mornings a grendel,
a wyvern, a manticore. Some cold nights the sensations are more wendigo.
Anything to make the hunger stop. You eat out of the freezer while
there's still time. Hunger become emotional purge, a twisted balm.

Ask a bard. Only someone who's seen the world, and maybe seen my skin
unscarred, can see it that way again. Maybe he can ignore the bag.
It's certain no one else will. I expect to be celibate for a very long time.
It's good I can still love my own skin, despite all scars and meteors.

first morning without

spruce fitful
in long wind weaves
tip torn loose
spattered on window
an excess of robins

northern skies bleak
restless and lonely
at the same time
cardinals pair red on green

where are you
not to be found here
jealousy of highways
ribbons and long drinks
spooling out to the west

I'm tired of the usual
urbane loneliness
that mask we wear to
pretend we're alright

cool restless shade
this morning shut the doors
and windows against chills
shivering anyway I don't
want to get dressed without

you in the tree, in the porch
shadowed garden, in venetian
lines with no torso to shade
your absent touch, your distance

Aubade of the Unfiled Receipts

Every time I walk by the desk where I address my financial duties,
on the way to or from the tall shelf of poetry just beyond, a small
cascade of loose receipts glides off the stack of papers to-be-filed
and falls like big snow to the carpet. A miniature avalanche, a dataslide.
Knocked loose by the breeze of passage, unnoticed while we're nosing out
more interesting reading. The receipts fall slowly, fat flakes rustling
across dried kindling, whisper of paper sliding across itself,
silent in its last resolution on the white rug like a field of late-winter white.

Vacuum abhors a paper avalanche. Have to pick things up by hand,
throw them back on the pile in no order. The file cabinet, gray industrial
enameled steel squatting beside the desk seems lonely. I open its maw so little.
File cabinets appreciate the desire to make order out of chaos. Embody it.
My desks, one in every room, each purposed to unique tasks,
seem to attract disorder, mess, dust, entropy. File cabinets are anentropic.
By organizing these piles of old bills, we slow down the heat death
of the universe. Paper is organized tree pulp, strands of fibrous cellulose
absorbing the ephemeral inks of everything that seems to matter.
Paper trails of relationship, marked with signs that remember who owes what
to who, although rarely why. Actuarial tracks in an open field of flat snow,
white sand, unmarked cotton mats, blind in the hard noon.

I can tell you who you loved by auditing your receipts. Here's one for
dinner and a movie, another for a lapel pin from a state park, one for a visit
to a thrift store marked purely as an "item." You and I were once an item.
Now you're leaving me again. Here, I can track our progress by those visits
across state lines, as though we were parolees who needed receipts for travel.
The condition of a desk reflects the mind of the user, they say. In which case I must
be a mess falling over piles of snow. It's true my heart gets cluttered. But I mostly
don't use this desk; it's just a holding-plane for things I need to put away.
I'd rather take the chequebook to the kitchen counter to write those unpaid bills.
I usually sit at the porch table to fill out applications. Where on hot days, naked
in summer, we served each other breakfast. That long indigo evening,
getting quietly drunk on home-made margaritas, the salt on your skin
sweeter than the salt on my glass, when we played with plastic demons,
silly and sillier. I have the receipts

for the key limes we bought to make a pie, tarter than tart, golden, delicious.
Real key lime pie is dirty yellow, even gold, like sunsets over the Keys.
Only the tourists eat that green crap. I have the receipts
of the shopping spree in town where we came home with bags of books
on psychology, history, sex, and poems. I kept finding books
for you to buy, that you had wanted anyway. You glared at my every archaeology.
I have the receipts for that visit to the Japanese garden high over the valley.
When we got lost in silence under whisper trees, the chaotic world gone distant.
Organization brings an ending. Filing away a kind of killing. I put it off,
not wanting it to end. As long as I don't file you away, I keep us both alive.

I never throw anything away. I have the receipts, somewhere, deep in the pile,
maybe in a box in the basement, for those key lime truffles you served
on your naked flesh for me to devour. A blend of spices and flavors unlike
what most restaurants can imagine. What is it about food and sex, anyway?
I keep all my receipts, against the day I might be audited.
Will they ask me why I saved them, or just how much? I have the receipts
from your bus to the airport, which I picked from your pocket as we hugged
farewell. I save everything of yours. I have all these receipts.

Maybe someday I'll make a bonfire, and burn up every trace of our lives.
Fall of snow leaves off the desk as I pass by.
Remnants I don't try to pick up anymore, a drift of white waves.
Paper trails as memory. More visible than photos.
All that's left of us, when we've said our end togethers.
The file cabinet steels itself against doubt. What I leave unfiled
for now, can be left unfinalized, pretend we're still alive,
an unfiled item holding hands in the last light on the porch
till it's too dark to read these final marks.

Aubade of the Poet and the Candlemaker

The impoverished saint, rising from his bed of love,
walks naked to the shower, sheathed in last night's memories.
Can you start life as a poet? Is it learned? He can at least start the day.
Writing words of love on the fogged bathroom mirror,
finger calligraphy on warm glass. His touch on shoulder,
tracing lines on shin with the poet-calligrapher's loving touch.

To shave or not to shave? Maybe tomorrow.
A day's scruffiness won't kill anything.
Lips feel almost bruised from heavy kissing.
Herons behind those lips taken to himself, taken wing.
Morning rituals. A slight whatever.

The problem is he thinks too much. Turns everything into words,
even before he's finished living it. Thinks of lines while lips are on thighs,
wants to write them down, wants to write them, instead commits them
to memory, while writing ideograms with spit on skin.
At least as sensual as pen, as brush, as tongue.

Last night's candles, some burned down to shapeless puddles,
still everywhere, on every flat surface in the apartment.
Massive clean-up. Some wax on the rug. Dammit.
Shortcut to heating a home: a hundred candles,
and two bodies together.

A Logbook about some New Poems

I wrote an introduction to the current series of new poems, when I first started writing them in summer 2010, in which I included some material I'd written in my journal originally. I had sent one or two poems out to friends, and they wanted to know the background. After all, I had been writing for some time by then how I had turned my back on the last online poetry communities I had been engaged with, and hadn't written a poem (except the perennial haiku) for many months.

When I wrote this introduction, I was down and heading further down. It was a bad time, medically, emotionally, and psychologically. Now, some weeks later, thanks to having started an IV drug treatment program, which has its own stresses and charms, I'm physically better overall, if not exactly cured or emotionally over it. I dodged a few bullets this summer, and I'm still not settled in mind and heart about how close to dying I actually was. It was something like a close approach to an unkempt, unmanaged airport, coming in with one engine on fire and the other stalled, your instruments are failing and you can barely see through the rain. And yet somehow you land more or less safely.

People get very weird ideas about chronic illness and recovery, and how you’re supposed to behave when seriously ill, and recently I've lost friendships over this. Maybe they experienced burnout; I'd been very ill for a long time, and it takes its toll on everyone. Some friends have just disappeared. Perhaps they fear contagion of some sort, the contagion of depression if nothing else, and don't want to hear about it. A few others no doubt prefer not to hear about anyone's problems but their own; there is always a narcissistic component to creating personal drama, as it's often a plea for attention, a call for recognition, a demand to be noticed. I don't pretend to be guiltless. On the other hand, I mostly keep my dramas to myself, quite rightly believing that no one really cares. Or rather, no one cares but those in my inner circle of family and friends who would care no matter what, no matter when, or why. Those are the people one loves, who love you in return. Those are who one relies on, lifelong, no matter what, and those are who one would do anything to help in return. We make our family circles by choice as often as by genealogy.

What follows is an edited, excerpted version of scraps of journal entries, emails, and answers to questions, gathered into a hopefully coherent if non-linear narrative, with the worst redundancies removed. Let this be a summary, then, if not a complete tale, of the inception of the current series of new poems. Actually, that’s still not quite accurate. Since what inspires writing is not always directly connected to mundane events, or literal, or immediately traceable, say rather that this serves as background to when and, perhaps but only perhaps, how the gates of dream reopened. Or let this stand as notes on the current state of the creative process.

•

Early July.

Introduction to the New Series of Poems

I've felt the worst I've felt in a long time, post-colonoscopy last week, and post blood-transfusion-number-two two days before that. Anaesthesia knocked the stuffing out of me, and I am only now feeling even halfway not-crappy. I see the GI doctor in a week so we can talk about my options for ending the distraction of my chronic illness, and getting my life back. He's recommending a course of IV drug therapy (Remicade), which they also use for other inflammatory autoimmune syndromes like rheumatoid arthritis. I don't know yet know what a toll it's going to take on me, but I've already given up most of my summer plans on the probability that I'm probably going to feel worse before I feel better.

There, I've already broken one personal rule, which is to discuss any of that. I'll break the same rule again briefly to say that I believe I have every right to focus on my own needs first right now, and tell everybody to go focus on theirs, without my assistance, thank you very much. I'm too tired and sick to have anything left over after dealing with my own crises at the moment. Keep it in perspective, folks. Life-threatening medical issues trump personal emotional drama any day of the week.

Nonetheless all through this current medical crisis I've been making art, writing poems (surprise! I haven't been writing anything for literally months), and yesterday I woke up from vivid dreams with ideas for two pieces of choral and piano music in my mind, which I immediately sketched out before breakfast.

A few days before the second blood transfusion (and there will be more), I started writing in my journal a series of elegies, aubades, and other longer forms of poems and prose-poems. It's become a series of Elegies, with some Aubades and other poems breaking up the sequence. I never did think in straight lines. The blank pages in my journal are filling up fast with these poems; and there have been a few drawings made, too. I feel the pressure to make art as much as I am physically able, right now.

For no other reason than that it's what I'm supposed to be doing, and I refuse to give into being a total invalid any longer. I figured out, sometime in the hospital last week, something that really makes a difference to me right now:

I am not making art to distract myself from the chronic illness.

The illness itself is the distraction.

Everything I am doing right now is about getting my life back, so I am no longer constantly dragged down by this pissant frakking illness.

And there's no point waiting.

Some folks have been advising me to take it easy and stop making the art, poems, music, etc., till I feel well. They really don't get it. It is not about saving my strength, or marshalling my energy; that’s invalid thinking.

You cannot wait for some possible day when you might feel better; you cannot wait for anything. Anything in life that's worth doing is worth doing right now, and not putting off. Life is too short as it is, to put off the things that really matter. The medical crisis I'm dealing with right now is the distraction: it matters that I deal with it, but it doesn't own me, and I will not let it control my life. Do not let your illness become your identity: I do not identify as an ill person, but as a person who at the moment is ill.

Some days being sick and tired all the time just pisses me off. I have to watch that, because anger can tire you out badly, too, if you overdo it. But frustration-inspired anger can also be used as fuel to keep oneself focused past the frustration, the annoyance, the pain, anxiety, and worry about the future. Folks who haven't had a chronic illness, or been around other folk who did, often don't understand this. Probably on some level it's a spiritual law: "This isn't a waiting room, this is your life." Right here, right now, no waiting, keep it real.

As for anyone else, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

There now, I've broken another taboo. I've spoken plainly enough to no doubt offend some former friend. I've told people I have no remaining tolerance for anyone's time-wasting personal drama. So be it. Life's too short.

Anyway, I've been writing these poems.

I don't know if they're any good, as yet. Some of them are going to need more work, later, when I feel like it. Many seem formless, still fragmentary, just feints towards something new; many don’t even have titles. Some seem to be more like prose-poems, even if broken into long lines. I am typically writing them in my handwritten journal, and only later typing them into the computer.

One or two of these new poems, though, came out of the pen rather at white heat, and seem pretty good. (As often seems to happen when I write at white heat.) Some poems have revealed their titles immediately, and even if they are Elegies they carry other names. One of the Aubades is overtly erotic in a good way, I think. I have no idea where this series will lead me, and no one is more surprised than me to be writing poems again, after a long hiatus and a longer disgruntlement with PoetryWorld in general. The worst dramas and flame-wars and bad attitudes I've ever seen online, without exception, have all been on the online poetry workshop boards and blogs. Steering clear of those is all about not wasting my limited strength on things that don't matter.

What sometimes happens is that you get ignited by an encounter with other art. You become susceptible, when you are open, to all of life that streams by. You respond.

Whenever I read Rumi, for example, I feel the urge to write a couple of short poems in response, and I usually do. Whenever I read Rilke, the same thing happens—which was probably where the first of these Elegies came from. I was reading about translating Rilke, in William H. Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the problems of translation. There on the page was a comparison of several translations of the opening lines of the Duino Elegies. Those poems are ones I have often returned to, finding more in them each time.

And I was reading in one of the great prose-poems of the past 50 years, Jim Harrison's Letters to Yesenin. Originally written back in the 70s when Harrison was in a particularly bad place in life, he began writing daily Letters to the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, who committed suicide in 1925 after writing his last poem in his own blood. What a gesture for a poet! I may sometimes feel like writing has drawn blood, but I've never gone that far. What commitment. Anyway, Harrison's Letters are really incredible; fortunately they were republished recently, and are still in print.

My own new poem, “Letter to _____,” is not an imitation, and it is a response. A response to the past week, to how I've been feeling, and to the Letters. I don't know who my own Letter is addressed to, so I've left that blank for now. Titles can always change later.

Also, I’ve been reading a book of poems by a poet new to me, Oliver de la Paz, Furious Lullaby, about which I eventually wrote a review-essay. There is a fire in this poetry, a supple erotic life-force undertone throughout. The poetry in this book is alive. Many of the poems come at life from surprising and original directions, cracking open the usual ways of looking at things and giving them new life. There are several startling Aubades in this collection, which have reminded me of the genre of the aubade as a poetic form, and has frankly inspired me to write more explicitly and erotically again. I have written morning-poems and morning-after poems before, in some instances inspired by Cavafy, without explicitly labeling them as such.

I am overtly aware at the moment that, during the process of this long illness, that there have been times when the erotic for me functions in its, purest, most fundamental sense: eros as life-force. The force that underlies all life, that powers life and living. Mitochondrial eros, if you will. I have not been feeling personally very interested in my own erotic life, which is a function of not having enough energy for anything, so the erotic for me lately has been an affirmation that I am still alive, a validation that I am still here, a reminder that at its deepest level eros is life.

•

From my journal, late June.

Last night, feeling the need to Make something, feeling that pressure that you’re about to burst, that you have to get something out and down and done; and tired of the toxic glare of the computer screen; I lit some candles on the porch and sat down to write in my handwritten journal. What came out was two Elegies, or the beginning of a series of short elegies, so far no more than two pages in the book; and half of a third elegy so far this morning. I still feel that pressure.

I rarely set out to write like this. The influence of Rilke is perhaps too obvious on these poems. I have to acknowledge it, even though I don’t want to: I want no comparisons, and I want my voice to be in these elegies, no one else’s.

The entire Kestrel chapbook was written as a response to Rilke; of the 24 poems in there, maybe one or two are any good. The ones with the strongest vision, the strongest images. The rest of them are playing with words. Just etudes.

These new elegies probably no more than etudes either. Most often, when I set out to write a set of poems, consciously knowing what I’m doing, they go astray. I’m not a strategic or deliberate, planning writer. The best things I’ve ever written have emerged at white heat, fierce and fast, and with no stopping them. It’s too easy for my ego and its expectations to lead astray anything I consciously set out to write. I respond better than I propose. Trying to force a poem to conclusion always makes for bad poetry; at least that’s how it’s always worked for me.

I don’t know if this creative urge will peter out, leaving these unfinished. Maybe to be picked up again later, maybe to be abandoned. I don’t know if they’re any good.

So I’ll keep my inner ears open, and the journal book with me, and pay attention. If something happens, it does. Otherwise, I have to go back to waiting. We’ll see how this unfolds.


•

From my journal, early July.

I’ve tried, in between everything else, to write some more on the Elegies. But my heart and mind aren’t in it, today, and I’m writing consciously rather than at white heat, and I feel like it’s all going to come to nothing. Didactic, pedantic, polished but dead. I’m not giving up, but I think for now I need to stop. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way. I felt this way writing Kestrel, and most of those poems turned out fairly bland and dull. I just don’t write well when I think about it too much.

I like the ideas coming forward now. But maybe I need to just let them percolate, and come out later. Never try to force a writing practice, never try to force a project. This is why I don’t do what so many head-oriented poets do, which is to sit down and write two or more hours a day; for me all that produces is prosaic, bland work, nothing special, nothing extraordinary. It’s not my own voice when I do that, at best it’s some other writer’s voice I end up imitating. I usually don’t like the results. Some readers I might share such poems with do like them—but I have to wonder at that. I am used to my poems being rejected rather than embraced, I suppose.

Have to trust my instincts on this. Have to stay loose, and let it go.

I really want to focus on music and photography at the moment, anyway. These Elegies just appeared for no good reason. After a long dry spell. Kestrel came at the end a long dry spell, too; and was followed by another short dry spell. If this current moment just repeats that pattern, so be it. We do the best we can, and we abandon what we don’t think is our best work. Meanwhile, plenty of photographs and music to work through.

•

From my journal, early July.

Now I’ve written two Aubades as well as four Elegies. I’ve written something every other day or so, with gaps and pauses, but coming back to them after a day or two of rest in between. I still don’t know where these are coming from, and I don’t know why just now.

No, I do know why now: because the circumstances of my precarious life right now make me want to make something, anything, to create, to bring new life into the world at the edge of my fear of dying. It’s a way to remember I’m still alive, for now. It’s eros rising, the life-force speaking up and saying, no, not yet, I’m not done yet. Here’s more life I throw out upon the stones, see what it is and where it lands. I bleed life, I bleed poems, I bleed music. I need to be filled up with this life-force, to sustain myself. So that’s why.

Are these poems any good? I still don’t know, and I’ve decided that I don’t care. That’s not what I need to concentrate on, at the moment. I need to think about letting it happen, encouraging the flow without getting in its way. The Aubades seems to come smoothly, without feeling forced. One of them has in it the ghost of Lorca. I’ve been reading his Collected Poems again, of course, along with some other poets. I find myself drawn to the ecstatic poets of praise and life, right now, and backing away from the bland and pedantic and intellectual. There is no comparison. What life-force is keeping me going is drawn from the poems of life-force, of the erotic movements of scorpions and owls and trees. Everything alive is making love to the world, and sparkling with energy.

I have no clue if these poems will sustain, or continue, or stop, whenever they stop. I’m not going to try to edit them till later. Just go with the flow, for now. That’s always best.

Aubade with Oranges and the Ghost of a Poet

Aubade with Oranges and the Ghost of a Poet


There are fourteen owls strung along the fence
wire, Federico. Their heads to turn to look
into each other’s eyes, then yours, Federico.

There are pale-skinned farmer boys splashing naked
in the bend of the river where it pools deep as night,
Federico. There are pale boys laughing in the water.

There are ice rings around the bold summer moon
where it spins, Federico. Above the white-skinned
birch it whirls, shedding coins about the small-fruited trees.

There are old scars upon the olive skin of the sleeping
boy, Federico. His lover sits nude beside him,
Federico, and watches his breath, like oranges, like moths.

In the morning, Federico, this will all be lost.
He will be gone from my blankets, leaving but a trace
of his scented oranges. I will breathe in those blankets,

Federico, I will spare them from the laundry’s correctives.
I will rescue his breath, his lingering image impressed
into the mattress. And with my stained hands, Federico,

remember.

Langour and Luxury

Ocatvio Paz wrote in his important book-length essay, In Light of India, on some essential differences between Western poetry and classical Sanskrit poetry, which is the living foundation of Indian poetry. In Western poetry, lyricism is often accompanied by melancholy. Paz writes:

In Indian poetry, on the other hand, there is a feeling that is rare in ours: luxuriousness, that moment in which the body, without losing its composure, seems to waver, enveloped by extreme pleasure, and falls into a delicious swoon. The poem becomes a naked body adorned with jewels, lying conquered. Luxuriousness is an effluvium that glows and vanishes. It is also an agent of metamorphosis: the male body, weakened by an excess of pleasure, twists into that of a woman; in turn, the female body, goaded by desire, leaps on top like a tiger. The transposition adds ambiguity to the erotic battle: Krishna seems at times like a maiden, and the graceful Parvati, in a flash of the eyes, turns into the terrifying Durga. . . . This is the great difference from Western eroticism, which since the end of the eighteenth century has been largely concerned with infraction and violence. Bataille emphasizes that eroticism is essentially transgression: Hindu art proves him wrong. It is not a legal code but a fan: unfolding, refolding, unfolding again, displaying the whole range of pleasures. An art and a poetry that have never known sadism.

Eroticism in Indian art—eros itself, if you will—is often depicted as languorous, as opposed to conquering. Sexuality is not a war between the sexes, but a blurring of their boundaries. Role-reversals are not uncommon: the woman must ride on top, and be dominant. The rigid gender and sexual roles that have become reified by custom and religious dictates in the West are not present in this poetry. Neither is the Western division of soul and body, the alienation of the flesh, the exaltation of the spirit at the expense of denigrating the physical form. Even Indian food is luxurious, a complex blending of scents and tastes that overwhelm and envelope the senses and the soul alike. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that for me Indian food is comfort food, bringing back memories of my early childhood in Andhra Pradesh. (Comfort food has become even more available now that one can find in the USA restaurants that include or even specialize in South Indian cuisine.)

Yet even within the Western poetic tradition there are eddies and streams of langour and luxury. I find them especially in the poets who write in the Spanish-speaking tradition, both in Europe and in Central and South America. I find these characteristics in Federico Garcia Lorca, in Pablo Neruda, in Antonio Machado, in Xavier Villaruttia, and others in this lineage.

I have maintained for some time that the full flowering of Surrealism was not amongst the French and Italian poets who founded that school, but in Latin America. French Surrealism remained a post-Freudian intellectual game; even as it valued the irrationality of dreams and the unconscious, it valued them primarily as sources of imagery that were mined for use by the conscious craft of the waking poet. There are some marvelous games invented by the Surrealists, but they remained games. And there is little luxury in the artistic results. More paranoia than langour, to be honest. The French Surrealists might have wanted to visit the jungle of dreams, but they didn't trust the jungle to provide for them, and so they never fully relaxed into its embrace. And later Western poetic -isms, in their polished intellectual rigor, have often dismissed langour and luxury as soft and not to be taken seriously as Art. The triumph of the rational insists that the sensual be demonized.

Octavio Paz himself is exemplary of the full flowering of what Surrealism could have become, and did become when it was employed by Latin American poets. In Paz as in the others mentioned above, the tools of Surrealism became fully embodied, fully alive. And this is because, unlike the French Surrealists but like the classical Sanskrit poets, the Spanish-speaking poets involved the physical body and its erotic possibilities in their poetry.

In his many essays on poetry and its history and sources, Paz returns again and again to the eroticism of the physical world, of nature, of the body, and the world as the body. Paz of course was strongly influenced by his many years spent living in India; the small selected poetry volume that speaks to this directly is A Tale of Two Gardens, one garden being Paz' native Mexico, the other India. Paz' poetry, for example Sunstone, is deeply luxurious while simultaneously rigorously formal and profoundly philosophical.

For myself, I often seek a more luxurious, sensual, langourous poetry. I seek a poetry of the body, an embodied erotic poetry, a poetry that evokes the senses as much as the mind. I've long stated that poetry written only from the head ultimately fails, and I stand by that. The soma needs to be part of the experience of reading and re-creating a poem in the reader's own self. It can't be always just dry, dessicated, puzzle-box, intellectual language-based heartless mental games, it needs to be full-body, full mind-body experience. The best poetry sings.

•

So it is always a pleasure to discover a book of poetry new to me that is also able to evoke a powerful somatic response in the reader. In this case, it's both pleasure and inspiration. Sometimes the world does give you what you've been desiring.



Furious Lullaby by Oliver de la Paz.
(Southern Illinois University Press, 2007)

I was in the bookstore, browsing, when I came across Furious Lullaby. I had never seen this book before. I picked it up and scanned it, then put it back. After awhile, I came back to it, drawn by some unnamed instinct, and picked it up again, and began to read. I was soon completely absorbed. I bought the book, and took it home, and have now read through it several times.

I had never heard of the poet, Oliver de la Paz, and still know almost nothing about him. I am interested not so much in the poet's biography but rather in these poems that emerged from his life and heart.

And these poems are immensely satisfying to read. They are fierce, intelligent, often surprising, coming from oblique angles at otherwise familiar topics, deeply felt, occasionally funny, and altogether stunning. I haven't been turned on by a new book of poems like this in a long time. (Let's face it, most of what gets published these days is dull, dry, overly thought-out, self-conscious to a fault if not outright narcissistic, and lyrically bland.) De la Paz' poetic antecedents are Lorca, William Blake, perhaps Neruda or Paz or Machado. The poems remind of the suppleness of the Spanish-speaking tradition, both in terms of the surreal juxtapositions of images and objects, and in terms of the erotic language. There is a luxurious use of language here, a frequent display of pyrotechnic technique, but not for its own sake, rather in the service of what is being given in the poem. I feel no words are in excess, nothing needs to be trimmed away, it's all quite precise even in those moments of extremity or ecstasy.

The lyric poem is lately a small thing focused on small moments, small events, personal reflections, too much of smoke and mirrors. All too many MFA workshops teach poets to think small. In this book, to the contrary, de la Paz finds (as did Blake) whole universes in the grains of desert sand that scorpions clatter across. His poems often open outwards, taking in wide vistas, before returning in the end to where they began. Zoom out, zoom back in.

There are several Aubades in Furious Lullaby, for example, Aubade with a Thistle Bush Holding Six Songs, which has as its opening lines:

A man told me that he had wasted his life. I did not know him.
We were on a train moving from one trespass to the next,
the fields in the windows shifting utterly into daybreak.

He told me about the guitar he bought with a little cash
saved at odd jobs, how he could not play but kept the thing
as a symbol for failure.

An aubade, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is 1. a song or poem greeting the dawn; 2. a morning love song, or a song or poem of lovers parting at dawn; 3. morning music. (The latter being the opposite of a nocturne, an evening or night music.) The tradition of aubade in poetry is something one finds more often in the Romance languages than in the Anglo-Saxon rationalistic tongues. Some mornings one lingers, in langourous pleasure, in memory, before arising. Each of the several aubades in contains aspects of morning, of music, of lovers parting. Sometimes it's implied that lovers will rejoin come nightfall, but not always. Aubades can be both praise and farewell, and both tones are struck here.

Many of de la Paz' titles in Furious Lullaby are themselves intriguing enough to mention:

Aubade with Doves, a Television, and Fire

My Dearest Apostasy

What the Scapula Said

Epitaph for the Musculature of the Neck

The art of finding a great title for a poem is one that perhaps de la Paz might consciously work at, but these seem so effortless, so natural and un-mannerist, so fresh they take the breath away. Poems with "My Dearest" and "Aubade" in their titles outnumber the rest here; which itself lends a certain tone to the collection. As though an wordly cavalier, a learned aristocratic lover, was writing florid farewell and hello letters to the body, to lovers, to the Devil, to himself. There is wit, regret, langour, and sharp observation of the familiar here, all made sensual by the sparkle of a turn of phrase. I discussed Sanskrit poetry earlier, and there are connections here to that tradition as well, both sensually and philosophically.

I am taken back to my own childhood in tropical India, for example, by Aubade with Scorpions and Monsoon:

Little sleeper, I mentioned the scorpions
were thoughtless in the rain, as they swarm down

the length of the green skins to the flood, eel-like
with furious tails. Earlier, the sky

had turned a mustard color proving that August
and its rains would soon bathe the desert, making

the whole thing become a dark scar. Water caused
the scorpions to shelter against the cacti

spikes. . . .

Rather than quote the whole poem, I want to give just enough of a taste to inspire the reader to go seek out the rest.

I could go on and on, droning away with insufficient, inarticulate praise, and suffice to say Furious Lullaby rewards each reading.

The highest praise I can give a poet or book of poems is that reading the poems inspires me to write. When I re-read Rilke's Duino Elegies, I want to write. When I read Coleman Barks' luminous versions of Rumi, I want to write. When I re-read Jim Harrison's Letters to Yesenin, or Jean Valentine's Ordinary Things, or Sam Hamill's lucid translations of the Japanese haiku masters, or Octavio Paz, Federico Garcia Lorca, or Odysseas Elytis, I want to write. I don't write in imitation, but in response. Reading such poetry evokes a creative response; I discover that I have something to say back. I am triggered not by every poem, or every poet, but by those who speak most directly to my experience, and to my peculiar mindset or way of thinking about the world. Poems that speak to the whole self, to the soma as well as the mind, are often the most reliable triggers.

I find myself writing an aubade or two, in the current series of poems that have been coming to me this summer, after a long period of writing nothing much; and I have de la Paz to thank for kick-starting me. I also, in this new series of poems, have Jim Harrison to thank, for likewise kick-starting me as I re-read Letters to Yesenin, which are some of the most brilliant and gutsy prose-poems of the last fifty years. Both of these books were there in late June, when chronic illness was dragging me down, depressing me, and gradually wasting me away towards that edge of a precipice that's hard to climb back from. It was reading these two books of poems that opened that door in me that had been closed for many months, and new poems began to spill over the jamb. Now I find myself feeling better, surprised by a new treatment regimen that promises to turn around the downward spiral, not surprised so much by a cautious optimism that doesn't quite dare to assume the best since the worst has so often been the pattern these past few years. And as I feel better, surprised by it, I am equally surprised by the fierce will to make poems, make art, make music, that is rekindled in me. As though making poems were a pure reminder that I'm still here, still alive. And so I go on.

Furious Lullaby made me want to write, in response, and as I say, that's the highest praise I can give a book of poems.

Aubade of the Fireflies, with Lilies

Aubade of the Fireflies, with Lilies

I need to lie here, in the sun, its light waking
my body by warming the quilts. I need to
linger here, awhile, letting the grass dictate.
Your skin last night was soft as moss,
your scent of feral oregano. The tallest red lilies
are almost done blooming; nothing like you.
New pink callas emerge at dusk, waiting till midday
to blush their fullest. I lie in the sun, waiting.

Fireflies made the pear tree shimmer with bottled light.
Staircases of green anemones. Your hair waving
in the evening breeze as though undersea.
An absolute geometry undescribed in any esoteric scroll.
Rhizomatous, matted, fragrant with pine pollen. How tangled
we become with each other, at night, limbs and hair
made one in the soup of our sweat. I am
thoroughly basted in you, you marinated in me.
Not much to do now but roast ourselves into one flesh.

Tonight I'll make a grass pillow for your rest. I'll catch
a lantern full of green-flashing luminaria,
firefly lamps to light your table. And I'll release
each light-kissed remnant before night fails.