Soundtrack for a Recurrent Dream

Freelance Whales' self-released 2009 album Weathervanes is quite good. I've found myself coming back to it many times (during a summer with a lot of new music to listen to), but it wasn't until I listened to the following acoustic version of one of the best songs on the album, "Ghosting", that I realized that it might make a great theme for the film version of my recurring dream. (See previous post: The Triggering.)

I Dreamed I Was Saint Augustine

It is not the dreamer who longs for a heft of pain

to come & give life meaning or take it away.

It is not boredom either, but a breed of anxiety

born in doubt that desires that touch of disaster.

But the levees hold the flood.

The June rise was gone before July arrived.

It wasn’t sadness exactly, but a bit of secret disappointment

when the benches rose up out of the river once again.

Still, there are no ducks and no leftover bread.

Only driftwood birds bailing to the bridge

at that instinctual instant, the last,

though there is never really any danger.

It’s too early to still be sleeping. Wake.

The day will make its pain, or shake it.

This is what I was talking about...

(...in the previous poem.)


Meghan O'Rourke on Anne Carson's Nox:

Carson has always been interested in pockets of experience that can’t be approached directly but must be courted obliquely. This style is peculiarly suited to capturing grief, which is irrational, physiological, mutable—and, often, mute. As Iris Murdoch once wrote, “The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.” Because the dead person is absent and voiceless (the word nox both rhymes with the Latin word vox, or voice, and contains the English word “no”), the bereaved is always experiencing the lost through other things: books, ideas, language, memory. A sense of this is what Carson’s memory book provides; its process of assemblage dramatizes the way the mind in mourning flits from pain at the specific loss to metaphysical questioning about what, exactly, constitutes a mortal life.

Read more:  THE UNFOLDING by Meghan O’Rourke


Interestingly, Carson's book was not the impetus for the poem however; McCann's was. I do have Carson's book and have been enthralled by it, but I put it down a month and a half ago and haven't come back to it yet. I guess my mind was/is still processing it. I will open it back up tonight.

In Praise of Friends Who Know About The Dying

"He talked about the spirit being triumphant in the body's fall, and how we must learn to recognize the absence of the body and praise the presence of what is left behind." 
(Colum McCann, Let The Great World Spin, 144-5)

An ease more akin to shared expectation than experience,
but deeper than both: somehow more honest because mostly unspoken.

The things that require the most assumption:
gift-books, recommendations, condolences,
somehow come easier & settle well.

And there are those you'll never know
more than to read the stories they send,
but something in the way they send the words,
more than a matter of selection & syntax
suggests that they too know what you've seen,
memorized, forgotten, re-collected.

What you've hidden away, they lay bare,
and the feeling goes beyond expectation,
like looking in a mirror and actually seeing yourself
and not a vaguely unfamiliar reflection.

That's why you told me about the book, isn't it?
And that is certainly why I gave it away as well.

On Patience

Patience isn't always just waiting:
             sometimes it is moving forward anyway.

Patience, sometimes, is expecting an answer
             even though you can no longer pray.

Sometimes falling asleep takes patience,
             you can't catch sleep while waiting for it.

Dreams are neither patient nor impatient,
             sometimes they stay, sometimes they don't.

The dead must be patient, all that waiting,
             sometimes I don't think of them at all.

Being alone used to make me very impatient,
             now, sometimes I grow impatient for loneliness.

Thank you, love, for being patient with me,
             it's just that sometimes I can't help myself.

Writing a poem should be an exercise of patience,
             often it is a hurried push & turn away.

In the Basement

Things collected wait below me,

wanted & unwanted,

trash with treasure, 

much of it treasured trash.

There's been talk of gathering stardust,

but this dust just gathers over the waste 

of our hidden space & runaway time. 

Words stick together in forgotten books:

shelved, boxed, stacked, & falling. 

Photographs bend and frames break. 

A cheap print of Brady's Whitman sits double matted 

but unframed near a copy of Hungry Mind Review, 

inked by A.G. (11/5/94), a generous gift from years ago. 

A broken-backed & illustrated Treasure Island 

loses its color & tells its age in rings near several 

copies of Call of the Wild that won't survive long. 

Slumped in a stolen milk crate near The Eagles & The Cars, 

my first garage sale purchase (at eleven), 

a fifty cent copy of 52nd Street shows the warp of a collector's life, it's mine. 

I won't describe the boots & cleats & sneakers chucked in boxes, 

or the mountains of camping gear & sleeping bags left waiting, 

but I did count five different locations for baseball cards. 

But it's the toys I am most worried about as they conspire to save one another. 

They pile together as boredom condemns them to boxes & tubs. 

Occasionally, I swear I can hear them crying for help. 

Too much of a life is spent gathering dust like interest or the loss of it. 

This is not the sum of a life, but it adds up to quite the remainder. 

Something more than this poem must be done.

Moon / River

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

________________________________________________________________

Sunrise with Cresting River

Missouri River at St. Benedict's Abbey

26 June 2010, 6:20 am

________________________________________________________________

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.