Moon / River

Moonset with Partial Eclipse
Atchison County, KS
26 June 2010, 5:42 am

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Sunrise with Cresting River

Missouri River at St. Benedict's Abbey

26 June 2010, 6:20 am

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Missouri River

River Road, Atchison, KS

26 June 2010

I am not Salvatore Scibona.

There is something too familiar
about his portrait:  hairline,
eyes, the glasses, nose?
Maybe it's the ears.

He will turn 35,  four
months before I do,
less one day, but
who is counting?

His story with the boy
lost in the airport is being
read right now by hundreds
(is that too few?). My story
about the lost girl never went
very far, though I did finish it.

I have not read his novel
about the Italian immigrants
of Elephant Park, Ohio,
which I think is a made place,
but my maternal grandfather
was Angelo, born in a mining
village in Crawford County,
Kansas in 1911. There is a story
that is his life. I will not write it.
I would not hurt my mother.

The novel will begin with my

grandmother milking a cow.

My grandfather was a track

star, deathly afraid of submarines.

This saved him from WWII. 

These things deserve to be told.

His novel has been translated into 

French, German, and Italian. No one 

wanted my translations of Reverdy.

He is a Guggenheim Fellow.

I have several close friends.
I think it must be the ears;
I would never comb my hair
that way.
                 I might have been
a concert pianist, had I been
born somewhere else, and
with someone else's name.


[In case you want to know.]

Guilty, Conscious

I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty. 

(Thoreau, Walden “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”)

Is the waking, then,

not, also, a little death?

Moving back to time

from the elegance

& lawlessness of sleep-space,

rousing weary guilt

from the richness of

indolent & wayward thought,

petty desire.

The mind is as quick

to absolve as to place blame:

It’s only dreaming.

Knowing the richness

of absurdity only

temporarily,

dream melts away to

both regret & thankfulness.

Leaving only a

wakeful emptiness:

the familiar poverty

of consciousness.

[It's late. I should be sleeping. Everyone else here is. But something kept nagging. So I went ahead and wrote this. I may take it down in the morning, but for now, here it is.]

[Note: It was written in three line stanzas and then rearranged. Those stanzas were significant to the design of the poem during composition, but it reads more easily divided as it is now. Forgive me, I am trying to get out of my normal way of writing. Feel free to criticize this and the prior posts as well. Finally, good night.]

A Return to the Poem as Daydream

Reportage. Confession. Complaint. I know these modes best; that is, I employ them most often. More memory than imagination, a puzzling of word, line, break, emphasis, image, figure of speech, end, revise, fail to edit well enough… But even these apparent truth-tellings require the strategic lie: the replacement detail, the memory with différance.

In this most digital of ages, boredom is difficult, with or without a smartphone. Piles of books stack up in walls around me, articles, both cyber and print go unread, television episodes, seasons, and series remain unwatched, movies (the good and the bad) remain to be seen. Two books of poetry arrived in the mail today. The World Cup has begun. A recent vacation, 2000 miles, four major destinations, three bear sightings, and  multiple river crossings yielded  hundreds of pictures to be examined, deleted, posted, printed, and filed. And on top of all this (and two sons and a wife), last night I dreamed uncontrollably.

But a lack of boredom, apart from being overwhelming, can also be stifling. After all, it is a “heavy” boredom that makes an achilles out of Henry and J.B. both at once. In dreams time and place are differed; we move freely in time and space.  As in poetry: “It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not […]” (Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”). Following this double advice, and trying to survive the most recent bout of poetry self-doubt known as artistic honesty,  the next poem (not here yet) will be full of lies, will be more imagination than memory, will try to reconnect with daydream and not be limited by wakeful vision. I am through with truth (for now) as I find that I'm not that good at it anyway.

Reparation

[Still on vacation, but the hotel has wifi, so I thought I'd get one in. This one happened quickly this morning as I am up early (Stafford-like). It needs editing, but here it is anyway--a dispatch of sorts from the road.]

At a streetside corner of what was the slave market in oldtown Charleston, a beautifully long-lived woman weaves herself into a tidal pool of sweetgrass baskets.  A son or grandson beside her works carefully and contentedly through what seems to be a long apprenticeship, he is no longer young.

Simple paper tags tied with white string are marked exquisitely in the hundreds, and I am oddly happy not to be able to afford one. And happier still that there are plenty, both tourists and locals, that can and do open wallets and purses and pay up.

Each corner of the market and many of the stalls are filled with similar craftspeople at their work while we watch, admire, and occasionally fret or regret. Like history itself, I was not here when they arrived and I had already moved on when they loaded up supplies and surplus for the next day’s wage and headed home to a part of town I may have driven through on my way to a middle-of-the-road hotel.

The symbiotic economy of this market seems to work for many on this peninsula that was once at the heart of the heartbreak of a nation. Though I am not bringing a basket or even a bracelet home to my mother as a souvenir of my travels,  I am bringing home for myself a memorial portrait of this matriarch in water reeds who remakes history by hand, without needing to sing, and teaches a lesson that never seems to be reported in the schoolbooks & tourits' pamphlets quite honestly enough.