C’mon Back Café

It’s 96 degrees

iced coffee, early afternoon

diligent millennials inside at their laptops

I’m outside in the warm shade

of a large sycamore, a wilting, tired angel

barely able to breathe

some of her leaves

collapsed into themselves crisp as dried out bats

but she’s hanging in there.

How I depend on her! Her massive splotched

trunks cantilevered over the sidewalk

hold.

So long as she stands, I can make it

in this heat, blissfully peaceful, in spite of it

practicing my listening:

a workman intermittently tosses torn-out sinks

and old fixtures into an echoing dumpster

gutting a defunct barber shop, in this strip mall,

an older one, that somehow

manages a homey feel, a sort of plaza — its shabby ivy

twists up the wood posts of the overhang testifying

to its tough struggle—

there's a nail shop, a dog-grooming salon, even

that endangered commercial species, a used

bookstore —all

within range of this silent sycamore’s presence.

Where do sycamores come from?

Where do angels come from

where have we all come from

blown into a strip mall like scraps of paper

clustering together

on our devices, separately

at the C’mon Back Café?

The demolition sounds

irritate me until I let them go

into the surf of passing tires

into the silence suddenly reverberating

when the motorcycle stops.

Strange, I hadn’t even heard its throbbing idle

until it stopped.

Every moment’s a culmination.

John Cage would be all for it.

I have docked at this space-station

on my way to the far reaches of the universe

my wife back home on earth, perhaps

doing laundry or reading. Heaven help us

if strip malls keep proliferating.

This wasteland’s so literal it’s worse than Eliot’s.

Have architects all lost their imagination?

Of course, it’s fiscally driven,

integrity’s out the window. Amazon

and Walmart have us so hooked on convenience

and price, to be a local now

is to be a refugee

in a lower-middle class strip mall—souped up

but temporary and insulting and hideous

as immigration detention centers, not as horrendous

of course, but similarly degrading—all of it

created by international corporations.

It’s a bloodbath. But you know all that.

I am visiting my daughter and grandsons

who were able to buy a house on this planet

a little too close to the sun for comfort.

Thank God it has a Y, with a great pool

protected by very expensive fighter jets breaking

the sound barrier several times a day.

You always know there’s a war

going on somewhere, even as I sit here

poised in solitude, I’m surrounded by rehearsals

for war—that are supposed to make you feel safe!

I’d feel a lot safer if they’d just give me whatever it costs

to fuel one of those jets for a week.

To think we’ve been at war since 1990—

Twenty-eight years!

This is apparently an indifferent

chaotic universe, but I bet

there’s an underlying order

I imitate by temporarily sipping iced coffee

in peace. There’s a core of peace

at the center of this universe. I can feel it

just sitting here in the warm shade. It’s paid for

by my small breathing

that in turn attracts a weak breeze

that causes you, my uncomplaining angel, a bedraggled tree

to ache and lift the whole

garbage-producing population of human beings

with your burning wings.

I had to get out of the house.

The Trump pimp, federal circuit court Judge Kavanaugh

in the Senate Supreme Court Confirmation hearings on TV

was slaughtering language with phrases such as

enhanced interrogation techniques (meaning torture

used by Bush administration in Guantanamo)—

compared to that, writing poems

even if they’re mediocre or shitty

is a way of sharing the shade of a sycamore tree.

Now a garbage truck’s backing up, it’s beeper going

the guy on the ground

beckoning it back with his hands, says

C’moan back . . . moan back, now, that’s it, keep comin’ . . . moan back . . .

that’s the news for the day

from the Moan Back Café.

A few words to my itinerant audience

Preamble to a Reading at The Camptonville Community Center on 09/22/18

I just want to say thank you for coming out tonight, to hear me read some poems, loosen up a bit, and share some communion with each other. I also want to thank Yakshi, and Will Staple, for setting up this reading series and organizing our group of local poets willing to voice the wonders and experiences they feel going through them, even if they are miserable, isolated and dark. It may be odd to say, but poetry like that often makes me feel better, the work of Vallejo, for example.

 I’d also like to say a word about whether this or that contemporary poet is great. The tendency toward hyperbole as a medium of celebrating Our Gang distracts us from enjoying what we can of each other’s work. We’re too close to it for a long-lasting estimate of it’s worth. We can always go to the masters, the giants of literature who have come before us, who have humbly marked the way. But we face the dark forest on our own. It’s good to encourage each other but why get hung up on being Great or not. We ought to be glad we’re here to play at all, and put our desperation aside. Great things can come through all of us, myself included. But Buddhism warns us against the realm of comparison. Fuck that.

I like the way the Dali Llama looks at our current situation. He says the next Dali Llama may not even be an individual at all. He may be a Sangha. By analogy do we need another Great Poet or do we need a community of poets who convey truth and beauty as it flows through us?   It’s a joint venture done in solitude. We know real poetry’s aways been matter of life or death, now more than ever. It’s not a luxury, it’s not a word game. To exalt an individual over the rest of us turns poetry into a spectator sport. Poetry arises to make our spiritual kinship, and the responsibilities that go with that kinship, visible. It’s a shortcut to the genius of the race, as Roehtke pointed out. I’ve seen children come up with lines as delightful as any André Breton ever wrote. “I’m a bear sliding down a glacier picking roses”, for example—written by an eight-grader. We need to sing to see ourselves, to make our Sangha of poetry visible. Readings and creative organizations such Yakshi and Will are creating here do that. Aspen rise from the same root system. And Whitman reminds us of  this circularity: “To have great poetry there must be great audiences”.

So as far as the realm of comparison goes, let’s realize we all won the race when we reached the egg. I saw a Nova show once, that miraculously filmed, not only the sperm darting out of the testicles like blind hummingbirds, floundering a bit in the seminal vesicles before  being picked up by a surging tsunami wave from the prostate, propelled up through the penis to leap like jubilant water drops over a falls into the vagina—a blood-drenched atmosphere which, for her protection, is a cauldron of deadly acid. The film shows alkaline strands the female body generously lets down, for the sperm to swim up in. Without those vines sperm would die. Mortars whistle and explode on all sides, acids hiss like snakes, a lethal rain of tracer rounds ricochets around them, randomly zinging tails that fizzle like fuses as they all swim for their lives. Finally, several sperm make it into the womb and bump their heads against the egg. She requires a chemical key, a courtesy you might say, to be unlocked, that one of them works out somehow, to finally wiggle in. That’s us. We all wiggled into the egg. We’re all winners, we’re all alive.

And what did the losers do? Hang their heads and mope? Not at all. The film shows they surrounded the now fertilized egg and, in unison, began to spin it, with their tails, spin it like a top, giving the new being the ride of its life! They set that baby off on a Dionysian dance, whirling like a dervish. That’s us. The circle of poetry we feel running through us continues that spinning dance. So let’s get to it. In a spirit of gratitude. Glad to be here.

When we went to Ontario

we often saw Adirondack chairs

at the end of a pier that extended far

into lake after lake

they didn’t make you feel sad exactly

they were kind of a blues note

that stirred a yearning

for another life, or for something

that may never be

sometimes two people

would be sitting there

looking out on the lake

not saying anything

but mostly there were just

the chairs, at the end of the pier

then the lake

and the changing light

the chairs were waiting

people not making it down to the water

as often anymore

sometimes only one, angled

to suggest the favorite perspective of a spouse

who had become part of the view.

It seems irrefutable that we die alone

even after a long life together

but those chairs made you uncertain

as if everything were poised—

boulders in a boulder field—

we drove by each lake

piers carrying chairs would float into view

glide along the side window

slightly more slowly

than cars we were passing

contract in the mirror

and disappear.

Then they beckoned us from memory

their solitariness corresponded to our own

afflicted us with their forlorn being

tempting us

not to leave them behind.

But it had to be

like young forced to fend for themselves

we knew we couldn’t yield to their call

we had to leave

or we’d never be able to keep going

through those birch forests

that got shorter

and shorter as we drove

toward the top of the world.

We wanted to say goodbye

to the polar bears.

When she washes dishes

she takes her time

squirts in the dish soap

adjusts the nozzle to spray

the handle to hot to create

a bubble bath in the sink.

Suds lift in a meringue of quivering peaks—

she slides the plates in

leaves them to soak. 

Returning, submerges her hands

in a kind of exploring

surrender to luxurious sensation

feeling heat change her

within, rinses the glasses

turning them under the faucet

inspects them in the light

places them in the drainer to dry.

Working calmly, full of instinct

she begins gently to sing:

we are pearls . . . we are pearls

born little grains of sand . . .*

* from Ma Muse’ song, pearls