Another draft

Temptation,
after Chagall’s Temptation (1912)

My God, you know, how temptation sits
  in the belly of the world,  red fruit, round, 
  already bitten.  

You know it is not all that matters. Small, hooved creatures,
 tiny birds, Eve’s several glances, and the canopies 
  of  red and blue leaves matter as well.

The real fall will be to believe in Pablo.
 Apollinaire will love you, your round house and the herring brine
  on your father's hands.

Bella loves you, even as you grieve for the Shtetl, for the pale Christ.
  
I understand, my brother, the desire to pare a body 
 into something that will serve beauty.

You understand, my brother, how the world 
 revolves around the edges of the world.

Let the others  eat their fill of square pears on triangular tables,
 suckle at the circles and the cones.

I want to eat, together, whatever we’ve been given.
 The moon behind the garden will be green and will disappear quite soon.

I want, as well, to thank you for this: I woke today  
 and was surprised, like you, to see that I am still alive.

A couple of notes on process in regards to this poem.

1) Earlier this summer, I read Jonathan Wilson's biography of Marc Chagall. Wording of some lines, as well as some of the context of 1912 in Chagall's world have likely been stolen from this good work.

2) Apollinaire wrote these lines for Chagall: "your round house where a smoked herring swims in circles . . . a man in the sky / a calf peers out of his mother's belly" (See Wilson, p. 51).

3) "Let the others eat..." is an adaptation and extension of Chagall's own comment about Cubism: "Let them eat their fill of square pears and triangular tables." He also announced, later, that as Europe was going to war he thought: "Picasso, Cubism is done for!" Picasso often said disdainful things about Chagall, though the two were able to have a semblance of companionship at points in their lives.

A draft from yesterday in St. Louis

Anaphoric Confession, after  Mark Rothko’s, Red, Orange, Orange on Red

Baby, Monet rhymes with cliché but nothing, 
 nearly nothing sounds like Rothko—
  blood or light, believed to be silent 
   pound in the temples. 

I lied to you when I said I had been in the Rothko chapel.

I have not been surrounded by abstraction, by beauty.

I have not known Fra Angelico, or Signorelli, or Orvieto.

In Venice, for two days, I only loved the gelato.
We posed on the bridges for ourselves.

I live in the saturated, sentimental blood
 of my own loud head—hard
  amens and blunted blows.

Monet and his light. Degas and his dancers
 have no real home here—nor the Germans expressing
  themselves in the other room.

You have heard me cursing you when I should have stood silent.
You have heard my language resound in empty temples of  bone.

Here I would like to bleed across the room—light, color—like Klee—I pray,
 or come into you without a word, 
  like this Rothko—repeated, blessed, 
   parallel, and unrhymed.

Hey, John Keats

River Goddess, India, 8th-9th century, Berkeley Art Museum

They can knock off your nose
 lose your makara, your tortoise,
  but they cannot undo the curve of the Yamuna in your hips,

Or the globes of the world, two worlds
 that are your breasts, and the Ganges of beads 
  running between them.  

Your children are silent and moving with you.

Oh, John Keats, I am here to tell you,
 you should see what she keeps in her red sandstone urn.

Day 29--A little less sad

A little less sad*
(or, the young male songwriters all have higher voices than you’d think and seemingly darker lives than I could manage)

But still a moan, a whine
you’ve learned to do in time
and so it’s tune, a line
strung over water, a fine
high string of voices, mine
included, honest, mine
if I’m honest, I find
hidden in yours, mined
from the psalms. Behind
Absalom, the dawn, skylines,
branches, bones, refined
and sad, though less as you remind
us then, with hands aligned
on keys or strings, your spines.


*Steve Slagg introducing a song.

The singers here in mind: Slagg, Byram, Comstock, RiCharde and, if I’d been able to stick around, Barringer and Ketch.

Day 28--Pantoum and Variation on What Wondrous Love

What wondrous love is this, O my soul,
to cause the Lord of bliss to bear
a verse and cast away, to cause, a sole
cascade of syllables to mean. I fear

to cause the Lord of bliss to bare
the sacred harp we carry in our breast,
casacade of syllables too mean. I fear
la la so mi so la so mi la la so rest.

The sacred harp we carry in our breast
beats a particular meter, simple tune:
la la so mi so la so mi la la so rest.
and I am sinking down, sinking soon.

Beat a particular meter, simple tune
where millions join the theme,
and I am sinking. Down. Sinking soon.
And still I sing a round and ride a stream

while millions join the theme:
and when from death I’m free
and still, I sing around and ride a stream,
beyond my bliss, my need.

And when from death I’m free,
what wounded love is this. O, my sole
beyond, my bliss, my need,
averse and cast away, my cause, my soul.


Enjoy several versions of this tune:

1) An authentic Sacred Harp Sing

2) An NPR feature on Anonymous 4 that includes their rendition of this hymn.

3) Wheaton College Men's Glee Club

4) A 1960 archived folk recording of Almeda Riddle in Miller, Arkansas.

Day 27--After David Hooker

After David Hooker

I am trying right now--
 this very syntax, these terms-- 
  to make a cup  

a stranger might put in his mouth
 the way I have put cups,
  have put art to my lips,
  
and the glazed lip of art on my tongue
 for mornings, for years.
  If this endeavor sounds strange,
  
imagine the shock when I damaged
 my back moving around my studio
   a few hundred tons of language like new clay.

Consider the loss when I broke to pieces
 and reclaimed the dust of twenty-three old psalms 
  with still water and refashioned them

as a letter to my congressman, a bulletin announcement 
 for church, and a song I sing my son at night.
  And the pain--you must know this--I endured

when in my own inattention to the natural
 signs of my materials, the vessel cracked
  of its own accord and I burned 

my hands with liquids so hot that I swore,
 in the name of art, never to try this again.

This is a number of months in the making, after I took students to David Hooker's ceramics studio last fall and they wrote poems in response to his work and his commentary about making art. In class, we called these poems, affectionately, our Hooker poems. For this we are truly ashamed. I urge you also to read David's blog and check out samples of his work.

Day 26--Flailing Away

Thrashing on Troeger Farm, 1886--Revision/Burning Away the Chaff

Thomas Hart Benton could have covered a post office wall
 with you all, made your lives an allegory of horses v. steam.

I  will make no parables , nor will I feed the thousands. 

The bread I eat comes to me whole. The crusts I break
   by hand and dip into cool, pasteurized milk. 

I buy loaves as large and distant as your relative heads.

Thrashing on Troeger Farm, 1886

On the post office wall, you appear to have stopped for a mural.

Thomas Hart Benton would have colored you, 
 my brothers, my sisters, your horses in sepia and autumn.

He would have coursed his allegories and training
 all across the regions of your faces and your fields.

The small, tough world of your love turns up for the thrashing 
 you give to one another and to the earth in 1886.

A few beasts walk the circle and grain separates
 away the straw that breaks as it should;

you know from memory how to burn the chaff, 
        and how to grind and bake grains to sustain 

a body of work I have never been in.  Belief 
       for me comes easy,  without gnarled limbs or crooked and curved spines. 

I have made no parables, nor have I fed the thousands. 

Most of my bread comes to me in perfection. The crusts I break
   by hand and dip into cool, pasteurized milk. 

I buy it in loaves as large and distant as your relative heads.

Day 25-prose poem 2 yrs in the making

Sitting in the Grass Near a Library, on My 40th Birthday

The air fills with blossoms and bees. I would like, now, to be Monet, to see these blossoms twenty more times in twenty different lights. I would like to be O’Keefe, to see one blossom and its red center as my red center. I hear the bees and would love to be Charles Ives, of course Bach, or even Paganini. The bee on this page knows I bear, nor will I bear, no blossoms. I have not played my scales, nor have I sketched a few thousand flowers in a book. The creature alights. I do nothing of interest. No blossom. No paint. No tune in my hand. No light. Painters, bumble bees alike have stained themselves yellow for love. I have loved them.

I would like, for a wish, to carry this scent home to you, love, who hovered above me this morning like a flower over the bee. That, though, is Georgia’s view, through her eye, not yours, not mine. I suspect my scent, at 40, is my own, as your scent is yours. It is only on occasion, this unheralded spring day, or on a page, or in the folds of our linens where such scents may be mingled, tangle one another as stamen and nectar and sting. I am no great maker of things, but I aspire, like a tune, to grace the humming, fragrant air.

Day 23: I swear I use no art at all

I labored for days over the mould, modeled 
  on the sacred bust we keep by the copy machine.

I melted and poured. He congealed. And I waited 
 for my Shakespeare to cool. 

In a leather chair near my office window,
 I unpacked my heart with words

I suspected he would love. I tried to sing
 an iambic birthday card for the bard,

to rhyme antic-disposition with something—
 though manic-precision was off.

I am lost and unable to weep, am an ekphrastic 
 poem of my own sorrow.

I am soothing my inner Iago, Gertrude, Goneril,
  am nothing more than a fishmonger 

with a little plastic genius in my pocket.
 The hole, though, I left in his head,

large enough to hold a candle, has healed
 over. And we are singing at the film festival 

on his birthday, watching Hamlet for hours
 on a screen as vast as the globe.

Note: I'm grateful to KJ for the challenge to make an ekphrastic in response to his lovely birthday poster of the bard. Tomorrow, I will also post a blog entry on my evening at Ebertfest, where I really did see K. Branaugh's 4 hour Hamlet in 70mm glory.

Day 22--One of Several Hymn Riffs

All Saints Sunday, 2 Nov. 2003

“Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer
who makes the wounded heart to sing.”
--Schönster Herr Jesu!

Every severed but still beating muscle,
each incised or punctured chamber—

We know these sorts of hearts,
the central, bursting metaphor

grown tender, corroded with age.
The dead have lived through an uneven

song, a vicious singing that tears
pulses from the signature of time,

from habits so far from pure.
Every heart we have is blemished

by the everyday beating we take
and give to ourselves. What other

kind of figure but the heart
would need to be made, to be wounded,

to ache its way through its own
hard, clotted hymn?

Day 21--Rejected Lyric for a New Setting of the 23rd Psalm

Selah, lah, lah, lah, lah, lah

The Lord is mine, shepherd and word,
divine, I shall not rot.

He bleedeth me inside and the leaden
waters besides which have fled.

I will shear no evil. You plod
and you laugh to comfort me.

You prepare a label to bore me
in the presence of mines, beloved empathy.

You surround me with harp and with lyre,
keep away the barbed liars

all my days, all the shadowed grays
of my slow, grazing life.

And I will chew on the grass,
alas, the Almighty's grass,

on the lawn of the Lord, or never. Again.

Day 20-Some Prayer

Some Prayer
(an iconoclast longs for several friends)

"The icon is a song of triumph, and a revelation, and an enduring monument to the victory of the saints and the disgrace of the demons." --John of Damascus, On Icons, 2, 2

Someone tonight believe
 in a healing song
 in the hands and their oils
  on the flesh of our brother.

Some hand, tonight, burn
 not as fire
 not as flame
  but as a fierce salve on the skin.

Summon out the venom
 of the cells,
 of the body in the world
  that decays of our own weight.

Some God open, oh icon of yourself,
 open, as a wound, take into yourself 
  my brother at his merest. 
 
Summon him, or raise him, 
 or return him to us clean 
                as a new stone, as a verse in Revelation if you can.

Fourth of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

Rembrandt Addresses the 1960s and 70s

You will move from black
 and white to color, 
  from an etched world

to an urban landscape of vivid oils
 that will scare and stun
  everyone already

drawn in her best grays and blacks on paper,
 line and outline of a leg,
  her covered curves so clear.

Look back, I think, rather than ahead
 to the glossy magazine and the Soup Cans,
  and the neon Dutch Masters

on the billboard just outside the Queens Tunnel.
  You will find your way into photographs
  and acrylics, and will paint

so fiercely at times that your arms
 will go numb. This will go ahead and happen.
  So you’ll need your rest. Lie down.

I will come to you in a series of dreams and whisper
 die meeste ende di naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt 
  and you will believe until you wake

that I really did see Christ being lifted from the ground,
 heavy as a plastic sack of seed, fallen from a truck,

that I really did see his guards (like the men
 in the grainy video of Vietnam, Munich, 
  Selma, El Salvador, the Moon)

confounded by the sudden appearance of flesh and color,
 that I knew their desire to return to a world 
  of shades and shadow rather than this one,

its ridiculous deaths and resurrections everywhere, 
colored in a television light so harsh I cannot begin
  to find it in a human eye.

Day 18--The Third of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

J. M. W. Turner on the Qualities and Causes of Things

O voi ch'avete l'intelletti sani,
mirate la dottrina che s'asconde
sotto il velame de li versi strani. Inferno, IX, 11. 61-63

No one living will love you as you need
 to be loved, and I am talking about
  the sturdiest minds.

Blow into the gallery with a daub
 of red lead and trowel or skip 
  it like a shilling on the gray sea. 

Say nothing. They will write or call 
 and want to know why paint palpitates, 
  feels less than the world of trees and seas.

I tell everyone that light is color
 and the world is a veil of poems.

I remind them to rub their pictures 
 with a very soft silk handkerchief 
  to remove the blue chill of new varnish.

I tell Ruskin everyday how disappointed
 I was to discover that the Sun
  was not God, that my forte and my fault, 

the indistinct, belonged 
 to God and not to me.

He tells me that the Dean of St. Paul’s refused  
 to bury me in Carthage, wrapped in a rotted canvas,
   in my own shroud of lead and light.

Day 17--The Second of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

Braque on Progress and Mimesis

You are making a fact, pictorial fact
 and no one cares how many times 
  the violin in fact has been played.

Do not imitate the thing. Make the thing.
 From this, Christ made loaves 
  and enough fishes for thousands.

You must be more primitive, brother, 
 paint with only one brush 
  and smaller palette you crush 
   from the foods you have failed to eat. 

Oh, I am falling in love with fish, and with birds.
 See the black fish, the birds I have made,
  the new surface I have improvised for the world.

Day 16--The First of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

Manifesto One: Van Gogh on the Possible and True*

Even here there is no blue
 without yellow and orange,
  and color must still do everything.

My bedroom (precisely as I have always seen it,
 flat tints and a thick impasto, lilac doors, the green-citron
  pillow and scarlet coverlet, the pale violet 
   walls and floors of red, the basin blue
    which requires, as I’ve said, other colors)

Is heaven. I smoke my pipe in bed
 for days on end and live
  in paintings I never have to make.
                    
And there is nothing in my mirror.

*A number of these lines are cribbed/adapted from Van Gogh's letters, as included and translated in Herschel B. Chipp's Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book. As far as I know, Van Gogh wrote no letters after his actual death.

Day 15--Rachel's Plastic Chalice

As good a temporary
home for blood as any
human vein or glazed
and fired potter’s art.
The facsimiles, replica
and curve of the grail,
matter little in the dark.

Faithful lips and head
thrown back to imbibe
the wholly impossible,
these form the open
road to the belly,
before belief can
make its way back
to the head, to the eye.
Praise this plastic,
its emptied hollow,
like a body, a head,
ready to be filled.

Day 13--Tim Coe, His Hat, and Touluse-Latrec

Tim Coe, His Hat, and Touluse-Latrec

He was no Renoir, no lover
of malleable light and its glimmer.

He loved the actual women, their skin
their stares, and the grimmer

pimps, and the bends of dancers
old enough to know better.

He was 20; you, my clever friend
have a 19th century hat and 20 years

of being no Toulouse-Lautrec.
So how have you tilted his frame

toward your hatted, rounded, believing
head where a band with no name

plays the greatest hits yet to be written?
And in your poem, the one behind

your bowler, you will love the green
woman, you will be the mostly kind

man on his elbow, with a wall
between himself and the painted

women for whom he longs. Turn away.
That man’s moustache has been tainted

with beer so bitter he tastes it in his sleep.
Go to the gift shop. Get a postcard you can keep.



Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin de la Galette 1889, Oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Day 12--Poem on a Quilt Pattern

Confession: The Prairie Queen

I am in love with the Prairie Queen,
 draping her over my torso at night.

I trace her every single stitch in the dark
 and remember her color from the light.

I turn her in my eye and she becomes
 in turn my eye, and my sleep

comes slow under her bosom. 
 Some patterns of sky I fold

and keep in a box: the tornado, the spring,
 the wild geese in flight. I told

my wife we could not spread you here
 on our bed any longer 

as I am ashamed of my skin beneath your
 cotton flesh. But she names, stronger

than either your woman’s art, or my simple lust,
 a map of deep, unseen rivers, of a root we can trust.

Note: A bit of history & info on the Prairie Queen quilt pattern.

Another note: The actual quilt on our bed is a wedding ring pattern made by my wife's mother. I feel no guilt sleeping beneath it.

Day 11--Mulready's Secret Sonnet

The Sonnet, William Mulready (1786-1863) 1839 Great Britain, Oil on panel 35 x 30 cm

Mulready's Secret Sonnet

A moment in this landscape with your heart,
the brook, the grass, the scent, late flowered air,
could make a simple man of lesser art
than necessary pick up pen. Beware,
my flow’r in velvet red of autumn dress,
I’ll spy you as you read, and, if you bark,
the echo of your high-voiced silliness
will prove me as no Dante, no Petrarch,
and show no Beatrice or Laura pure
has joined me in the genre of rough land.
We came here on our own and, to be sure,
this sonnet I have offered to your hand
is scattered in its rhyme, but not its tone.
I’m glad we’re here alone, no chaperone.

note: I think I'd like to write an annotated set of interlinear responses to this hackneyed sonnet. that's a benefit, I guess, of cranking out even the most unfinished piece for now.