MUDLARK No. 3 (1996) ISSN 1081-3500 Copyright (c) MUDLARK 1996 Editor: William Slaughter E-Mail: mudlark@unf.edu URL: http://www.unf.edu/mudlark __________________________________________________ ARS POETICA by Gerald Fleming _The reader is even, the writer is odd_. Contents [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48,49] __________________________________________________ 1 Remember that first car? Not the first day--the day after--when you'd waxed that chrome, that baked enamel to a luster bright as the sky, cleaned the old man's nicotine from the windows, vacuumed, tossed out the under-dash deodorizer, installed the compass... You get in: put your hands on the wheel, fire it up. Coast down the block, wave to Al Sylvester, let out that long deep breath, turn on the radio. 2 _Get in the car_, your lover the poem orders & she shows you a green polka-dot bandanna, & she gently ties it around your eyes & thus folded you two ride in sparse but kind conversation to some distant place far past sounds familiar then to another place where again the sounds are familiar & she takes you into a room & puts you onto the bed & there in that blind warmth makes love to you gently, slowly, long, coming just to the edge again & again then exhausted, joyful, still folded, you sleep and wake. _Stand up now_, she says; takes you to the window. Sound: a throwing back of curtains. Unknots the bandanna: you knew it all along, you're in your own room, so beautiful you weep. 3 _Introibo ad altare Dei_: where there is paper in plenty & the ink flows like honey... 4 The reader steps onto the page. _Take me, teach me_, she pleads, and begins to read the poem. It announces it's about a wrestler, and she's not stupid, she allows it may be even a _rhetorical_ wrestler but she's two lines in & the thing makes no sense, lacks sure feet, but still she's trusting, steps further onto the page, her whole body there now, seeking music, seeking _some_ meaning, _any_ meaning but climbs from line to line in confusion, she wants out, tries to leave but is caught in the web of words, stuck in the thick & viscous silk of ink: she's splayed there on page five and he has her, crawls out from the dark spine of six, big black pen in hand and makes the kill. It is not rhetorical at all: it is bloody, and slow, and sexual. _Another one dead_, he says. (Bones on the bookstore floor.) 5 _Do I deserve to exist_ the abused old child the poem asks itself. It cowers in corners, believes itself unworthy to form even the words of its own name, enters abusive relationships with drunkards & half-wits, believes it deserves its brilliant floribundant bruises, dreams of calling it all quits, presenting itself perfumed in some clean past tense to its son & daughter having left a note saying _This is who your father was_... 6 The poem's hands smell like smoked salmon-- the scent is all over his arms, in his hair. He tried something new in the smokehouse, adding bay leaves & needles of cypress & Douglas fir. Take him in your arms pull him close enjoy. He'll only smell like this today. 7 _Where did this pencil come from_? the poem asks. Eleven black horses ride across its white shaft. A pencil from the racetrack. What words could compete with this grace, this frenzy of jockeys, even their whips visible & sharper than the tip of the pencil in this race toward the eraser. We're riding no words today: this pencil's built for numbers. 8 Poet: If I'm here more or less on the equator are these ants that crawl on this book of yours therefore _equatorial ants_? (They look like the same things that come into the kitchen at home.) Maybe they sting. Let's _say_ they sting: crawl up from the sand across the book past my hairy wrist onto my hand & sting not such a serious sting-- just a kind of reckoning--a bill to be paid for staying against common sense to write this note about ants. Would I be your victim then, involved in something like _the searing kiss of equatorial ants in the wide arena of melanin_? Word vulture, bone collector, owner of cheap intellectual rings: keep talking like this: you alone will drain the world of meaning. 9 The poem is up early: hears a tremendous cough, knows there's been a death in the house, is afraid to get up to see. Faces of his family pass before him: dear verb, little adjective....God, _don't let it be the noun_. 10 _I keep looking for the book, for the poem that will hold for me the words of that Monday-- end of summer--when coming home from work I rounded the corner & there outside the store was my daughter holding our neighbor's month-old baby. It was the day before her thirteenth birthday, & above her smile was a look of concentration I've seen only in certain virtuoso performers just before the music begins_. 11 The poem weeps, prays, crawls on his knees to Chimayo, New Mexico, enters the chapel where he's seized with a vision of words so clear he dashes his superfluous glasses against the adobe wall & lays their twisted frames in the spectacular pile of discarded crutches, braces, prosthetic aids, plaster casts & ill-fitting false teeth; he's past ecstatic, his life rolls out before him, a long rectangular Boschian canvas, each figure absolutely detailed, symbolic; then, standing to go, emerging into the red afternoon dustlight of Chimayo, finds he can't see a thing, stumbles to the highway, hitchhikes home & the next day goes to the doctor, who tosses new glasses his way which the poem puts on/ sees the bill, astronomical, detailed only as: _Price paid: cheap thrill_. 12 Your mother told you: sometimes when you don't understand someone it's important at least to make the effort, & sometimes-- whether it's because they see you care or whether it's the reward of your own labor-- you'll find them open to you, almost as if someone has peeled or sliced open some fruit inconceivably intricate--say _pomegranate_--and you find there fragrance, balance, and a membrane just necessary to hold in those seeds, which you take in your mouth, a few of them at first then many, and one or two drop from your mouth, onto your new white shirt, and stain a stain not to be scrubbed away. 13 _THE ROSE IN THE GLOVE, I'll call it, and right away they'll think A.D. 1260, chain mail: Byzantium, a wide field just outside Nicaea, a black-haired Seljuk woman, skin like cinnamon, and there he threw down his crucifix, dove into the bud, peeled back its glowing petals, found God. But I'll tell them what really occurred: here in this rocky local soil when weeding the old roses and the new, I saw a black tab in the loam and I pulled, and it was a glove--not the gardener's kind, but a woman's: long-wristed, black leather cracked in the nitrogenous humus, and it kept coming, a whole budless rosebush packed & rooted in its fingers, the white root-hairs grown through the digits--simian, albino. I'll tell them how I replaced it, longing to know the woman who must have gardened here, finding a use for the empty hands she'd known_. 14 I see the poem's developed a coterie: smaller poems gather round him & sing. In truth, he's not much taller than they: a few lines, if anything. 15 The poem on the hill went to considerable expense: bought an O.E.D., threw in a big Webster's for good measure, hired a licensed contractor to build a chain-link fence, installed his own hand-lettered NO TRESPASSING signs, & waited in his living room, & looked: joggers with wire-cutters cut tall holes in the fence. Kids scaled it just for fun. Sometimes bums took refuge under the flyleaves of the Webster's & howled weird words, moon or no moon. Lovers would leave used rubbers. And the poem looked on, emaciated, his land occupied by the invading force of the vulgar, wild words echoing in his delicate ears, _I can't call the police_, he said, _I just can't_, wringing his bony hands, _perhaps I'll move to England_. 16 All the people in the country who read poetry and are not writers hold a convocation at a local amphitheater. Later, the three of them go out for dinner. 17 These words are not ours: they are silica: glass, and we place them into our walls, we look through them to the distance, glasses, filled with liquid, drunk from, seen from, seen through, not ours: they are trains, passenger & cargo, over the track/over the track/over the track, Anglo-Saxon-African, Anglo-Saxon-African, Latinate, Latinate...not ours but ships, steady, ballasted in carbon, freighted with our fears, far off shore or near. And wheels. WIND. SOIL. _Teach them about water_, they say. _Teach_. Not ours: TORCH. DRUM. BIRDSONG. CROSS. GRASS. KISS. Who can I give them to? Who? _You_. 18 The poem is a shark: shoots oblique through the obscure grottos of the heart, the shock of shark appears, razor-toothed, smells blood, yours, glides toward that heat, that heart, you sight it, your mouth opens, _strike_. 19 _Let's see: looks like the timing's off ten degrees from Top Dead Center. Get the blue light: we'll see what we can do._ 20 A big American car parked in front of a bakery. Two women sitting in the front seat: sisters, it looks like, each in her seventies, powder-peach complected, the driver's hair gone plain grey, the other's hair tinged with blue. Grey has Blue's left hand in her own hand, Blue's palm turned upward. Is Grey reading that palm? No. She's taking Blue's right hand, and with the index finger of that same sere hand she's drawing letters in the palm, writing out a message so rapid & dexterous it's clear this has been going on for years--no year less intense or less loving than this. The poem walks past that car, recognizes the ceremony there, takes off his hat, nods his head. 21 Love is what the poem wants: not allegiance nor thin filial devotion, but _skin_-- & if not skin then the frayed cable of passion's packed elevator on its last trip down, the ultimate trust that no one--least he!-- will live to tell his secret. 22 The reader visits the museum of the poem's first home: brings in a blanket, finds a closet, waits till closing time, sleeps in the poem's bad bed, wakes at dawn to hear the insane wail of mandrill, cry of hyena, shriek of peacock. _So that's it_-- the reader says: _the poem grew up next to the zoo! Listen--when the wind's just right, you can hear the lions roar_. 23 _Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they_? the reader asked. In the whirling world, in the simultaneous submission of winter to desolation & summer to its surfeit of light they labor, days, nights bent at tables Laplandic, Somalian, Upper Voltan, Czech, a hundred thousand poets at any named moment, stupid with vowels, joyful with vowels, whispering _Now fly, good words--answer the man--unfurl those yellow wings. Go--stand in the branches outside my filthy window. Sing, goddamn you! Sing_! 24 The spaniel wants out: _Sparkie_, or something like that. His habit the last few nights: midnight at the door, not to return till six. He meets his friends, you think, & they romp & hump & return home to sleep. You're alone in the house, awake, pick up a poetry book & read thirty lyrics so smooth they belie the ferocity of their subjects: wild lives & cripplings & a predation so savage you cannot stop reading until sleep takes you, in which darkness you dream of packs of dogs sprinting unrestrained & feral in the watershed. They've _tasted_. They're in chase. In this case it's a buck, which they exhaust, which falters/tangles antlers in the chaparral, stumbles/falls & which they tear piece by piece. Six. You wake before the alarm, sick in your stomach, blame those poems, get up, throw water on your face. As you dry you see him walking south: the spaniel. He scratches at the door, and you, dutiful sentry, show him in. His coat is matted, stuck with brambles. His breath, crimson. 25 The poem doesn't understand what happened. Her mommy told her she was wonderful, her daddy told her she was beautiful, she went to all the right schools, is wearing all the latest clothes, yet she walks through the world as if invisible, and damn it! No one will give her a job. 26 Was that poem one of courting? Praying? Fighting? I loved it, prayed it would stay when it stood to leave double-spaced it with silence, went to the bookshelf, bludgeoned it back into its chair with a cudgel of prose, sliced it into shreds with its own lines, the red knives of what was left of its malevolent intent. Now it's nowhere to be found. It was my own fault. I lost control. I think it was a prayer. 27 The poem never could deal with sex, never did like to perspire, so why not words? The worst words in the worst possible order. _Make 'em sweat, he says, they'll kiss the page that's finished_. 28 The reader enters the humid room: the performance about to begin. People, metal chairs everywhere. He climbs across many knees to the one seat empty: the one beside the famous poet. It's so hot, so crowded, says the reader, I wonder how I'll ever get this jacket off. _Ask the snake_, intones the poet. The reader recoils. 29 There was an asshole from El Paso doing business in middle Italy. _Write a poem for me. Make a poem for me_. There was an asshole from El Paso doing business in middle Italy. Brass hasps, or something. _No: FASTENERS. Write a poem for me. Say a poem for me. I've been lonely in Ancona, bitter winds, winter, Adriatic sea. Write a poem for me. Drunk, regretful in Grosseto, lost, I made a bet with my host, a worm of a man from Viterbo, that I would die before he. I let him win. He needed the money. He had a family: make a poem for me. They converted me in Cattolica they found my sicknesses in Fermo they ground me up in Macereta they learned my life they burned me in Urbino & by the time I got to Ascoli Piceno, banners: _WE WELCOME THE URN HOLDING THE BAD ASHES OF THE ASSHOLE FROM EL PASO. Write a poem for me_. There was an asshole from El Paso, business, middle Italy, ashes, Ascoli Piceno, December 1983. 30 The writer wants to kiss the hands of this suburban resident in his conservative blue suit, head bent, waiting for the bus, reading poetry. The writer hopes he's president of the company. 31 And then he thinks he finally got it right-- it's a remnant from a dream--_no thinking now_-- jumps up from bed, grabs the pen on the bedstand, gets it down: ten jagged lines whose truth makes him shiver from the back of his neck. He walks away, talks with his wife, makes tea, comes back. _No! No! Those kids! Where are they? They tricked me again! That pen with the vanishing ink_! 32 The reader finally gets to meet the writer. It's very awkward: the writer would rather be home writing, the reader would rather be home reading, and while they talk the long soft graphite sky forms a shape like the tip of a pencil, trembles. 33 _Tell O'Neill I need him. NOW_. Overheard. A boss: we've all worked for him. Melancholy alcoholic. The raw material: the poem. Let's change it: concoct something lethal, call it _melancohol_-- not worry about O's or A's but squeeze Crenshaw, Honeydew, Musk, & make a brew that brings on unspeakable sadness, darkens the color of skin. And let's change O'Neill from that rail-thin white-haired wing-tipped automaton to a girl, someone you remember named Mary O'Neill, red hair, radical, very sexy & carrying in her hot pocket a plausible plan to blow up the Pentagon. But Mary talks in her sleep, she's arrested, the Pentagon plans are found, she's sentenced to life, treason, smuggles into the cell those melons, brews her sad juice, invites the jailer for a drink, takes none of it, kisses him in the fading light of his bliss, favors full frontally his calaboose skin (oh how he holds her, that black brooder, deepening shadow come thundering in!) half-kills him in sopped happiness, he weeps, sleeps, O'Neill steals his clothes, escapes. For now that's all the poet wants to do. Further _filling out=filling in_. It stinks? If it does, his own excision heals him, makes him real again. Anyway, there's still O'Neill; the turn of _melancholy alcoholic_; his pen. 34 _In the long starless days in the bitter configurations of clouds it's what I most want to hear. Him, beside me. Lights not out: lights not ever turned on as the weak white sky dims, gas lantern, last vapor, mantle fade-away. And he is near me now: in hand. And loves, if in books I may be so foolish as to say it. We look at each other: look. Two minds one wave that never breaks--never!--or, if it breaks we accede, _we_ break, go down in its roar. Bound. In this acrid desperation. My eye, bound to the page: I who never read last lines, lest I go blind_. 35 _Shut up and fuck_, she said-- _put down that pen & that book in your head & all this talk about USELESS ECSTASY, THE FRAGILITY OF GESTURE & look at me: I've been rubbed with gardenia, frangipani in my hair-- shut up, she said, put down that book, she said, open your eyes, give me your fingers: look_. 36 So: someone has died. For once canšt our silence send him to the other side? 37 (in brogue) _What miner SINGS as he swings 'is rhythmic pick? Who can't believe his good fortune: a vein what gets wider the deeper 'e goes? THE MUDDER-LODE'S IN THERE SOMEWHERE, he knows. Ten hours he's at it already: he's tired, he's gritty, but he won' be stopped for no supper. Whaddya think he's my-nin'? Can we decide on dis tagether? Is it gold? Mala-kite? Silver? Oh, don't go sayin' somethin' like DEATH now-- It's cold out, it's rainin', an this was just a little metty-for anyway_... 38 That hooligan! The poem makes mincemeat wholeagain. 39 They throw the poem's life into the fire: it transforms into a handmade basket, each line a filament like wicker, which glows in blue gas then flares strand by strand. 40 _So what_? 41 So what you see may not be what I see & what I saw may not be the same as what I said I saw, see/saw...nor hear/heard. I heard that Yeats, too, played the telephone game. Once, from the smoke of a pub in Ben Bulben, these words: _And what cuffed priest, his flower bloomed down in the past, crouches in the buttonwood to be horned_? 42 The rapids await. These four are up early to drive to the river's white water: the father whose stupidity is anchored in the averaging force of the wife's constant worry, the big ponderous teenager & the twelve-year old daughter, blossoming in her beauty even at six-thirty. The father won't leave until he finds a book. He pictures himself in a group on a sandbar, bookless, dependent on conversations with strangers, lost. To the big heap of books, then, in the bedroom. Hand goes in randomly, pulls out an old poetry magazine, opens it in curiosity & this is the first line he sees: it's Stafford: _There was a girl whose body was found by a river_. The decision is made: she stays. The girl is called in, sits beside him on the bed, reads the poem, is amazed, but also glad to stay. She can go back to sleep. They go without her, _They were so crazy_, launch out for the distant river. _One day we were supposed to go river rafting_, the father in the passenger seat. _and my dad opened this book_, Auden sure was right, the father thinks: _and he saw this poem and he thought_... poetry makes nothing happen. 43 To hell with the meaning--let's unsuck some sounds! Two fat black & yellow bumblebees rolling like Romans in the poppy's luscious cup, _let's rumble down, reader_-- drown ourselves in juxtapositions slick as the middle of an almond-- let's find old friends--men named Max Memo & that bastard slasher Irishman Cutter Harrigan-- I want to name 'em all again, vowelwise by altered light, want to walk rain-sopped among stone-shearers in sheep-slopped meadows-- Hello? Hello? When will it end and the wild be found: in what wheat & water, what wheat, what water... When the elm whines, longs to lose its leaves? When the beetles and nematodes marry? When our President urges an immersion in Persian poetry? When your friends, raving, set aflame their sharpened staves, run to your rescue in some sundering of nothingness? _What? What friends? Colonel Urinal? Brother Fagus Blunt? Don't kid yourself, kid. They won't_. Then what about that _other_ when-- when the spines of prickly pears are on your lips as you stumble through the rubble of Peloponnesus? When the sherpas smooch your iceburnt cheeks on your return from Anapurna? No--never--not then--not there-- but _here_!--just past the asteroids, under your last blunder, aside your astraddling bride, out in shout's shooting range, your beautiful voice: wild, powerful as sauerkraut, resounding. 44 The reader thinks: _Will this poem go on forever_? 45 The writer thinks: _May this poem go on forever_. 46 The gift book too beautiful for the reader to write in: the white frightened him, and the blankness, and the blank white cover. He wanted to give it to someone who would use it, whose beauty would make of its laid pages a simple emptiness. He gave it to his daughter. 47 The poem wonders what she'll ever do with these lines: she can't fit them anywhere. Cuts them from their page, puts them gently into the grey metal box labeled FRAGMENTS. Years later her son comes upon the box. And what can we say: does he take it into a grassy field, open it, does a sudden rain melt away the opaque papers? No: too corny. Then does the wind come, scatter the many fragments like leaves, each at the base of some tree? Too filmic, too ecological. What really happens, then? An old man with spotted hands takes the grey box to the dump. It's at the bottom of a pile in the bed of a truck, but he gets to it, tosses it into the monumental detritus, it never opens, its papers long ago having passed their balance of cellulose to acid, having disintegrated like so many words. 48,49 Remember the flower you had never seen? Wide as your hand, its white moth-wings open five-petalled toward your face, and its pistils bend toward your nose in a wave of fragrance just verging on the allergic, and for a long time that hot night above the blackness of the Indian Ocean you pass that flower over your face. Which is enough, really, but then you _must_ know its name & ask a native there, a dark-haired girl. Which name she tells you/which name you print primitively, phonetically, and she comes near, leans over you, shakes her head no, says nothing but takes the pen from your hand & in a script which blossoms on the weedy page, on the desert of your scratching, writes _kumbung sanyu_. You start laughing, you can't stop laughing, the words are so beautiful, and preposterous, and true. __________________________________________________ NOTES ON THE POEMS 2. after Steven Bauer 24. for Peter Kunz 26. This poem was born from a quote in Frances Mayes' wonderful book, THE DISCOVERY OF POETRY: "Old wisdom claims that all poems come from courting, praying, or fighting." 28. for Judith Serin 33. for Molly Giles __________________________________________________ A-NOTE Gerald Fleming's poems have appeared in THE AMERICAS REVIEW, FIVE FINGERS REVIEW, INDIANA REVIEW, THE LOWELL REVIEW, MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW, NEW LETTERS, PEQUOD, POET LORE, POETRY NOW, and PUERTO DEL SOL among other places. He is editor of BARNABE MOUNTAIN REVIEW, an annual literary magazine, published in December of each year. (Number One appeared in December 1995.) He has this to say about it: "Only five issues will be published, in a press run of exactly five hundred copies per issue. Perfect-bound, four-color cover, 200 pp., acid-free paper; half devoted to writers of notoriety, half to writers worthy of note. Poetry, prose poems, contemporary translations, short stories, essays (bright, unpedantic), open forms, lit crit if heavy on textual exposition/light on fustian. Seeking work of directness, presence, passion." Subscriptions are $10. Submissions are read from February through June of each year. Subscriptions, correspondence and submissions should be sent to: BARNABE MOUNTAIN REVIEW Box 529 Lagunitas, California USA 94938 __________________________________________________ COPYRIGHT (C) MUDLARK 1996 All rights revert to the author upon publication. Texts distributed by MUDLARK may not be republished for profit in any form without express consent of the author and notification of the editor but may be freely circulated, among individuals, for personal use providing this copyright statement is included. Public archiving of complete issues only, in electronic or print forms, is permissible, providing no access fee is charged.