Wheat like Air

"The wheat," one said, "they always say that is the main thing. No, it isn't the main thing. Ah, no, indeed! That is just the point. Of course it is necessary. Of course it is exactly like the air you breathe. If you stop breathing, you can't keep it up a long time or you'll die. If you have nothing more to breathe, you die; we know that. We know the beautiful, great, powerful value of wheat. Who says any different? Nobody. We least of all, because we are the ones who know it best. But it must be exactly like the air we breathe. We ought to use wheat as we use air. We ought to use it without thinking about it, mechanically, involuntarily, like something without value. That is just the way to put it. Exactly that, like something without value, like the air. Like something inexhaustible that you take and swallow and there it is, with no value, absolutely like air. Because you would not need to devote so much time to this food that you swallowed, and that was an end to it. I don't say it is not agreeable; certainly I know it is pleasant to eat. It is a joy. That is what makes blood. That counts. But what I mean is that it doesn't count for everything.
   "I mean that when one has only one single joy, it is like when one has only one lamp or an only child. Suddenly all might go out, or even, I mean, that a single lamp, although it is lit, sometimes isn't enough if it is all alone in a big room. For the fact is we have many needs and not only the need of wheat. If you consider, look how many things we want which seem important to us, and if someone said to us: 'Give up eating to get them,' we would willingly give up eating. But it is as necessary for us as it is to breathe. And so, let's make it so it doesn't weigh us down, so it isn't hard for us, but very easy, and then we'll have time for all our other needs. When all is said and done, things are simple if you go about them with a good will."
    "Yes," said Carle...
    "Joy and peace," thought Bobi. "Joy must be tranquil. Joy must be a habit and quite peaceful and calm, and not belligerent and passionate. For I do not say that joy is when one laughs or sings, or even when our pleasure is more than bodily. I say that one is joyful when all the habitual gestures are gestures of joy; when it is a joy to work for one's food; when one is in an atmosphere that one appreciates and loves; when each day, at every moment, at each instant, all is easy and peaceful. When everything that one desires is there." And unfortunately, there was Josephine; and the sound of the loom and all the voices could be a roar fit to burst one's ears like the roar of the torrent, yet what he heard plainest was the sound of Josephine's breathing. And the dull blows of the loom could be repeated by the echoes beneath the earth and the foundations of the house, and make the soles of his feet vibrate; what really made him shudder from head to foot was that warm little shock of Josephine's breath as it struck against his right cheek. And he knew that she was beside him, that she was looking at him with her green eyes. He knew that her mouth was full and hot. He knew that her breasts were just the size of his hollowed hands, that for him she was full of joy, which, when he felt it, was more than a bodily joy. He was aware that henceforth for him joy would not be peaceful. And he stood there fighting and struggling because joy is nothing and is not worth the trouble if it is not abiding.
     "We might first...." said Bobi.
     "Listen."
     "Be quiet, Barbe."
     "What?" shouted Barbe.
     "Stop a minute, we can't hear ourselves talk."
     Barbe stopped working.
     "This is what we might do," said Bobi. "This year, since it is too late, we will start, if you like, by having a common harvest. We'll cut each field, but we'll tread all the wheat on one threshing floor, on the floor of all and every one of us together. We'll put the grain in a single barn. It will belong to neither one nor to another; like the stag. It will belong to all. As much to Randoulet as to us. And next year we'll choose a field where we'll all sow our wheat together. We'll have a little more time," he said with a grey little smile, "to spend on what we want to do."

Prose: Jean Giono, from his novel, "Joy of Man's Desiring." 1935. 
Photo: J.G.  

this moment / Sonnet

this moment

it's a farce, the great actors, the great poets, the great
statesmen, the great painters, the great composers, the
great loves,
it's a farce, a farce, a farce,
history and the recording of it,
forget it, forget it.

you must begin all over again.
throw all that out.
all of them out

you are alone with now.

look at your fingernails.
touch your nose.

begin.

the day flings itself upon
you.


Sonnet 

One who speaks of the multifariousness of voices
one through whom the voices speak speaks twice
one through rapt inflections breath on fire
once as metal fathers rising in the blood
the voice becoming wire and things said through it
thinner still so that
one who standing on the outside of a logos looking in
is one who sits within and reaching for the phone
arrives at speech his own by way of voices
he but replicates and theirs ventriloquized in him
are later written down: tundra, reindeer
permafrost that lives beneath the breath
all Spring partly vocable and partly simply cold;
the witness is unspeakable someone dead
who speaks the name a footstep leaves ahead.

Poem: "this moment," Charles Bukowski, from "what matters most is how well you walk through the fire." 1999. 
Poem: "Sonnet," Michael Davidson, from "Post Hoc." 1990. 
Photo: "Vegas Hustle," Tony Rohrbach

...the air shook with a colored ferment.

"Today I investigated the whole villa from nearby. For weeks I have been hanging around the crested wrought iron gate. My opportunity came when two large empty carriages drove out of the garden. The gates were left wide open and there was nobody in sight. I entered nonchalantly, produced my drawing book from my pocket and, leaning against a pillar of the gate, pretended to draw some architectural detail. I stood on a graveled path trod so many times by Bianca's light feet. My heart would stop still from blissful anticipation at the thought that I might see her emerging in a flimsy white dress from one of the French windows. But all the windows and doors had green sunshades in that house. The sky on the horizon was overcast; there was lightning in the distance. No breeze moved the warm rarefied air. In the quietness of that gray day only the chalk white walls of the villa spoke with the voiceless but expressive eloquence of their ornate architecture. Its elegance was repeated in pleonasms, in a hundred variations on the same motif. Along a blindingly white frieze, bas-relief garlands ran in rhythmic cadenzas to the left and right and stopped undecided at the corners. From the height of the central terrace a marble staircase descended, ceremonious and solemn, between smoothly running balusters and architectural vases, and, flowing broadly to the ground, seemed to arrange its train with a deep curtsy.

"I have quite an acute sense of style. The style of that building worried and irritated me, although I could not explain why. Behind its restrained classicism, behind a seemingly cool elegance, some other, pointed, too full of unexpected adornments. A drop of an unknown poison inserted into the veins of the architect made his design recondite, explosive, and dangerous.

"Inwardly disoriented, trembling from contradictory impulses, I walked on tiptoe along the front of the villa, scaring the lizards asleep on the steeps.

"By the round pool, now dry, the earth was parched from the sun and still bare; only here and there, from a crack in the ground, sprang a tuft of an impatient fantastical green. I pulled out some of these weeds and put them into my drawing book. I was shaking with excitement. Over the pool the air hung translucent and glossy, undulating from the heat. A barometer on a nearby post showed a catastrophic low. There was calm everywhere. Not a twig moved. The villa was asleep, its curtains drawn, and its chalky whiteness glared in the dullness of the gray air. Suddenly, as if the stagnation had reached its critical point, the air shook with a colored ferment.

"Enormous, heavy butterflies coupling in amorous frolics appeared. The clumsy, vibrating fluttering continued for a moment in the dull air. The butterflies flew past, as if racing one another, then rejoined their partners, dealing out in flight like cards whole packs of colorful shimmers. Was it only a quick decomposition of the overripe air, a mirage in an atmosphere that was full of hashish and visions? I waved my cap and a heavy, velvety butterfly fell to the ground, still fluttering its wings. I lifted it up and hid it. It was one more proof..."

Prose: Bruno Schulz, chapter XXIII of "The Book," from his short story collection "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass." 1937. 
Photo: Robert Doisneau "Saint-Germain-des-Pres, 1951- #371" from his collection "Doisneau Paris."  Artsy Page on Doisneau

In This Life Like Weeds

"The science of mathematics applies to the clouds; the radiance of starlight nourishes the rose; no thinker will dare to say that the scent of hawthorn is valueless to the constellations. Who can predict the course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who can measure the action and counter-action between the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the play of causes in the depths of being, the cataclysms of creation? The cheese-mite has its worth; the smallest is the large and the largest is small; everything balances within the laws of necessity, a terrifying vision for the mind. Between living things and objects there is a miraculous relationship; within that inexhaustible compass, from the sun to the grub, there is no room for disdain; each thing needs every other thing. Light does not carry the scents of earth into the upper air without knowing what it is doing with them; darkness confers the essence of the stars upon the sleeping flowers. Every bird that flies carries a shred of the infinite in its claws. The process of birth is the shedding of a meteorite or the peck of a hatching swallow on the shell of its egg; it is the coming of an earthworm or of Socrates, both equally important to the scheme of things. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision? You may choose. A patch of mold is a galaxy of blossom; a nebula is an ant-heap of stars. There is the same affinity, if still more inconceivable, between the things of the mind and material things. Elements and principles are intermingled; they combine and marry and each increases and completes the other, so that the material and the moral world both are finally manifest. The phenomenon perpetually folds in upon itself. In the vast cosmic changes universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, borne by the mysterious flow of invisible currents, making use of everything, wasting not a single sleeper's dream, sowing an animalcule here and shattering a star there, swaying and writhing, turning light into a force and thought into an element; disseminated yet indivisible, dissolving all things except that geometrical point, the self; reducing all things to the core which is the soul, and causing all things to flower into God; all activities from the highest to the humblest- harnessing the movements of the earth and the flight of an insect- to the secret workings of an illimitable mechanism; perhaps- who can say?- governing, if only by the universality of the law, the evolution of a comet in the heavens by the circling of infusoria in a drop of water. A machine made of spirit. A huge meshing of gears of which the first motive force is the gnat and the largest wheel the zodiac."

Prose: Victor Hugo, from his novel, "Les Miserables" 1862.
Painting: Keibun Matsumura (1779-1843) "Drooping Cherry-blossoms and Pigeons"

How Alive are Beasts, are Men!

Woodsmen

1.
climbing
toward the mountain forest
to build flames
inside this living self,
this buoyant mind
2.
toward this hillside forest
I climb,
treading the snow,
shining, frozen hard
3.
these men and women
on their way
to fell oak
growing toward this light
under this sky
4.
groups of men
groups of women
felling
these trees
under this broad sky
5.
cutting wood
in bright daylight,
they sang the erotic songs
of men
6.
one last flash
of that ax,
and slow the swirl of air
from that huge tree
in its fall
7.
clouds
above the mountain,
these woodsmen
wielding axes
and their eyes aglow!
8.
all these breathing men
wielding axes
in this world of nature
in order
to live!
9.
by the man
wielding his axe
against wood,
the other sang
of the woman he took in bed
10.
ruddy,
all these faces
of men at work
hearing bird song,
listening to mountain streams!
11.
that woman
walking over snow
and singing,
a baby on her back
and the day's rice balls
12.
fire
on the snow
slowly flaring,
that baby began
to suck those breasts
13.
far
from the shining metropolis
have I come to see
how enfeebled
my mind is?
14.
the sadness I felt
approaching
the cedar
and finding
red resin oozing from its skin
15.
a long long way
have I come,
my mind in sorrow
as I draw near
the cedar's red oil
16.
eyes
on this shining snow
in the distance,
my stream of urine
over the saw dust and beyond
17.
on Zao's
mountainside
deep in the north,
how alive
are beasts, are men!

Tanka Sequence: Mokichi Saito from his book Shakko (Red Lights)
Painting: Unknown

Hell's Wind Staff

Mantis

[martial arts movie sample]
The technique, depends mainly
on arm and finger strength
Once you've that, then the next step
is to learn how to pierce stone
Well you might as well start practicing now
Do you-Do you-Do you-Do you
Do you know, mantis legends?
How it was it all started?
It was fighting off this blackbird
Although it was only a tenth of the bird's size
it was a very valiant insect
And that's why the technique, needs a brave man
And a strong one, who isn't afraid of birds

[Bobby Digital]
Welcome back to the temple of hip-hop and Sword Kem'po
Lyrical rhyme nympho, b-boy Bob Digital
Diamond crystal ring solid gold bone rituals
We be the humble most calmest individuals
Hard to spot microdots, we Sasquatch
Stomp MC's, third eye Cyclops lazer beam shots
being fired once the father get raised up
We John Blaze up, abrasive heat, from the phaser gun
Never left for a stun Dunn, Atilla the Hun
type Killa Park Hilla, eighteen wheeler Mack's
in the truck lanes, from the rugged grains
of Shaolin soil, the red wolves be prowlin
Howlin over the shit that got the whole world bowin
We spoiled, one thousand swordsmen
One thousand recordings, one thousand Wu stores and
One thousand rap tours and global insurance
Not your everyday occurance
My rhyme torments MC's with the fear of God
You'll be cursed like Farad, and struck by the iron rod
Tchka-tchka-tchka-tchka-tchka-tchka-POW

Chorus: Tekitha

Hell's Wind Staff, the wrath of Black Titans
Niggaz battlin, sword swingin
Cutthroat women, whirlwind given save the children
Escape the poverty for live and, let live
Die by the mic, shadow skill by night
(repeat 2X)

[movie dialogue]
Man-Mantis style isn't easy to learn
A mantis is small, but powerful
With it's arms, it can lift up many times it's own weight

[Masta Killa]
On behalf of the Wu-Tang Clan I'll display
the Hong Kong, Shaolin King Kong poems
Slaps niggaz in half from Kwan'tan
Ten tigers scratch like Allah math, the Hell's Wind Staff
Watch the eight diagram strike the diaphragm
Pierced lung minute from tongue double-edged
sound the drum, here I come as predicted
Holdin the raw seal, all heads kneel
7th Degree black mic skill is ill, listen to the guns holler
Swallow the shell, East New York terrorist
Break fool to this, madness, crazy low-hand
grabs the mic stand, smooth as water
Spat Seven Seas you've not yet mastered
Breathe and lungs wheeze, Earth kills
I'm wreckin MC's, blood spills, meadow is round
The piercin sound of silence deafens ears
Fires fears, wood sharp eagle claw tears
tree from bark, hard to maintain control
When you leakin I stand with the strength of Jobe
and hold pressure that'll bust your head, while I'm teachin
civilization, one havin Knowledge
Wisdom Understanding, culture refinement
Knowledge savage in pursuit of happiness
Thunderous mantis, all chant this

Poets: RZA/Bobby Digital, Masta Killa, Tekitha

smell you later

soft winds

start without you knowing

and when they're done you

wish you saw them sooner

but no surrey on top

despite miles' many allusions

leave it alone

while it can be handled easily

the trick of waiting is

not wanting

but who does that

without running yourself over

twice

blow Hank blow

so the breeze

will pick me off my knees

chin raised in triumph

of urge over efficacy


on transience

They change,
though you don't see it
in the color of their faces
these blossoms that are the hearts
of the people of this world.

Poem: "smell you later" Robert Lescatre
Poem: "on transience" Ono no Komachi
Photo: Jennifer Mapes

Salvador

So Perfect in All Ways

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=765SbIGneFo
(the bastards won't let me embed it; copy, paste and enjoy.)

Salvador with eyes the color of caterpillar, Salvador of the crooked hair and crooked teeth, Salvador whose name the teacher cannot remember, is a boy who is no one’s friend, runs along somewhere in that vague direction where homes are the color of bad weather, lives behind a raw wood doorway, shakes the sleepy brothers awake, ties their shoes, combs their hair with water, feeds them milk and cornflakes from a tin cup in the dim dark of the morning.

Salvador, late or early, sooner or later arrives with the string of younger brothers ready. Helps his mama, who is busy with the business of the baby. Tugs the arms of Cecilio, Arturito, makes them hurry, because today, like yesterday, Arturito has dropped the cigar box of crayons, has let go the hundred little fingers of red, green, yellow, blue, and nub of black sticks that tumble and spill over and beyond the asphalt puddles until the crossing-guard lady holds back the blur of traffic for Salvador to collect them again.

Salvador inside that wrinkled shirt, inside the throat that must clear itself and apologize each time it speaks, inside that forty-pound body of boy with its geography of scars, its history of hurt, limbs stuffed with feathers and rags, in what part of the eyes, in what part of the heart, in that cage of the chest where something throbs with both fists and knows only what Salvador knows, inside that body too small to contain the hundred balloons of happiness, the single guitar of grief, is a boy like any other disappearing out the door, beside the schoolyard gate, where he has told his brothers they must wait. Collects the hands of Cecilio and Arturito, scuttles off dodging the many schoolyard colors, the elbows and wrists crisscrossing, the several shoes running. Grows small and smaller to the eye, dissolves into the bright horizon, flutters in the air before disappearing like a memory of kites.

Prose: Sandra Cisneros, from "Woman Hollering Creek"
Video: Spike Lee, "Crooklyn"

Ghostface Killah on Art

"I don't give a fuck if you don't know what I'm talking about- this is art. When you go see a painting on the wall and it looks bugged out because you don't know what the fuck he thinking, because he ain't got no benches, no trees there, it's just a splash. The nigga that did it know what the fuck it is."

-from "The Wu-Tang Manual" 2005
Ghostface Killah on art

this poem is scratch and sniff

first day off without a plan
in the sometimes
no baseball to watch either
and searching I go
to find substantial entertain
meant for mental me and
the beastly competition craving
before I get four blocks
"Can I take that for you?"
a Mailman with hair invading
his face impolitely
from the north and in rank
but this stranger in blue shorts
took my Netflix returns and made
the rest of my day a complete disappointment
who peaks before 10 a.m.
and lives to tell about it
and why haven't I read them
this poem is scratch and sniff

Poem: "This Poem is Scratch and Sniff" Robert Lescatre
Photo: Jennifer Mapes

watching dog star man / 'pressed

watching Dog Star Man

desirelessness by rule
most deem unattainable
I won't argue
because I don't desire
small gains or certainties
the desire I maintain
is that of true existence
surrendered to the cause
of making as much of
this as we can
but not for ourselves
individually
but us, we
there are mere formalities
of constructive thinking
that shield many from
reali\zing their true tangible
tenuous relationship with
each and every object
they sense solely


'pressed

a smile under blue eyes
on the constitutional course
one of a multitude missiles
whose meaning I'd prefer to
remain in self-insistant mystery
for revelations read like
new sets of rules or possibilities
while my pose ping-pong's 'tween
placid and 'plosive
or orgones gone soaring
so far from somewhere
and yet found readily
through reflections
soulward
that is to say
back and forth forever
so just smile back
splash without rocks
on each shore as if it
were an undiscovered land

Poems: "watching dog star man" "'pressed" by Robert Lescatre
Icon: "Kateri Tekakwitha: Icon of Otherness" by Robert Lentz

For Poems for Robin

Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest

I slept under rhododendron
All night blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck in my pack
Hands deep in my pockets
Barely able to sleep.
I remembered when we were in school
Sleeping together in a big warm bed
We were the youngest lovers
When we broke up we were still nineteen.
Now our friends are married
You teach school back east
I dont mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.

A spring night in Shokoku-ji

Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.

An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.

December at Yase

You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
“Again someday, maybe ten years.”

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I’ve always known
where you were—
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.

I didn’t.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.

And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.

Poem: "Four Poems for Robin" Gary Snyder, from "The Back Country" 1968.
Painting: Han Meilin, "On a Moonlit Night"

3M7 Ages

Almost There

When I relax with thoughts, then my brain
hovers New York, my third eye glides with the view like a hawk
Defined, my mind is automatic, rhymes are tragic
Fount in the attic, lost you in Asia, Minor, find you in amazin
beams I'm supreme my mindstate is like a dream, stargazer
Scarred from the radar, beyond Gods and bombs and airwaves
and channels; desert rats and camels, reptiles and mammals
Stand wisdom Daniel, and man who is Samuel
Ezekiel's gonna overthrow in trees in hills and mountains
Fountains rivers lakes brooks and ponds
Inhabit by rabbit snakes and swans
Energy is solar life barreling beyond the sun controller
over Jehovah through the days of Noah, tremendous speed
I ride the octavus seed, black seed, Sea of Caspainian
Persian Gulf all the way to the Mediterranean
City of Atlantis, skin is gettin tight as a mantis
Styles organic, mechanic seagulls, swings over the eagles
Soars over the cathedral built durin the medieval
Shall remain in the ordained Byzantine Empire
Take you higher one stage is a mass of fire, but sting like
Niger your archrival Constantine, Dark Ages got sparked
through the stages, 3M7 ages
Constantinople ruled mobile seeking global filled with
motion over the odds of oceans, scan the land, every inch
of the sand, never bring plans, animals woman child and man
Beasts and fish every inch length and width
come through the abyss, over Egypt..
This odyssey, more angles than photography
More exotic pusses erotic like pornography..
I'm a space cadet from a tape in the cassette, player
By fasting and prayer, I'm passing the ozone layer
I meditate in the mere, top of skyscrapers
Grew through a nature, droppin blew through a vapor
Then there's paper, the wind that take ya, quiet as
the breath in your nose appear in the cold from the depths of my soul
which has no weight, constant rotate at a slow rate
Through the black hole, purple rainbows in Kuwait
Destination operation alternation of the sun
Circuit stars positions seasons that weigh a ton
And mortalic through galaxies I'm burning, it's like
the accomplished, plus the comets keeps turning
Beautiful virgin release every burden, I travel when I preheated
the urban, hit the firmament and shock waves are permanent
Rays of children gaze and stand amazed, so long I'm gone
to the place Paul apostle was born
which is in Tarses, small city in Solicia
Then I move South, all the way to Nigeria, golden tigers
travel all the way to Syria, Mesopatamia
all the way to Syria, Euphrates to the urban child these
of the high land located near Iran
Fertile crescent, til I reach a section, from each direction
From East to West and, from North to South
All over the equator, Neptune from the womb
of the creator; Killah Priest dyin sheep from the Middle East
I'm almost there so prepare I say peace... peace...



Rap: Killah Priest, from his album "Heavy Mental" 1998.

Tom O' Bedlam Among the Sunflowers

To have gold in your back yard and not know it...
I woke this morning before your dream had shredded
And found a curious thing: flowers made of gold,

Six-sided—more than that—broken on flagstones,
Petals the color of a wedding band.
You are sleeping. The morning comes up gold.

Perhaps I made those flowers in my head,
For I have counted snowflakes in July
Blowing across my eyes like bits of calcium,

And I have stepped into your dream at night,
A stranger there, my body steeped in moonlight.
I watched you tremble, washed in all that silver.

Love, the stars have fallen into the garden
And turned to frost. They have opened like a hand.
It is the color that breaks out of the bedsheets.

This morning the garden is littered with dry petals
As yellow as the page of an old book.
I step among them. They are brittle as bone china.

Poem: "Tom O' Bedlam Among the Sunflowers" Thomas James, from "Letters to a Stranger" 1973.
Painting: "Fog Horns" by Arthur Dove, Oil, 1929, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

September

When self contradiction creates a chasm between perception and reality, when action performs without a sense of premeditation, when the gulf between you and it becomes a mere gully, when the animal instinct is raw and uncontrollable:

Come elegant autumn and court my imagination, flirt with perfect poesy and stir summer’s drowsy waft. Not a fall day forgotten, nor a cool evening gone to waste, moonshine, starlight, streaming thoughts lost in the fathomless eons of space, the canvas on which knowledge and creativity combines, the palate on which colors swirl and new pigments are born. September tolls, the summer lolls and all that was sanguine feels winter at it’s heels, only during a Colorado September do the seconds feel like minutes and the minutes feel like hours and the hours, as they turn from green to yellow to orange to brown, feel like days- and what days they are! Days of ago when life was simple, life without distraction, life with the drunkards wit and the mistresses eye. Life, as autumn lingers this near future like a hanging Getz note, that resembles a strong, distilled liquor, it’s potent days and their lasting effects, their dizzying provocations, their intoxicating sights and smells and sounds. Ah to be drunk with life this September ere, to watch with beating blood the migrating birds’ flight south, to enjoy the familiar fall constellations as they slowly creep, smoothly slide, confidently crawl, across the night sky. The foothills a symphony of sound like Fitzgerald prose- awaken, take flight, capture the wild wind called fall, float about and spy, carefully consider her nature, her pigments, find her ticklish places, breathe in her perfumes sweet, tongue her flavors, paint her idiosyncrasies. September in all of her golden arcadia, dressed in her formal glitter, aspen leaves dancing, shivering, hymn singing, rhyme, September secretly secreting sappy syllables that slip slowly down your tongue, that slide in symphonic sounds out your mouth, that silently sink into the leaf laden ground and rattle against waterless roots. The evening air that cools like menthol and satisfies like a woman, September, a patient woman who knows exactly when. Hale moon light, crisp raspberry air and pennant races, its fall and the city poets will daydream at the bases of towering buildings, they will smell the stone and glass, they will hear the sun’s glancing reflection, they will feel the taxi horns and the pedestrians passing words, they will see rhyme braiding and slanking itself down the avenues and alley ways, all the literature, the beautiful poetry swirling, the language of the seasons changing- take wing, find flight and soar above the drowsy drones ! From this familiar vantage autumn cathedral bells peal from within, the smell of paints, ink and dusty novels, the taste of coffee roast mingling, rising, exploding the senses, overwhelming, sprint towards the setting sun slipping behind Pikes Peak, chase the season that’s so quick to fade, fade, fade into the snowy winter near. Sketch September with careful charcoal smears and fill in the gaps with warm colored crayons. Sweet seasonal inspiration! Take hold of this pen and move it as you like, fill these pages with smears and colors, address the fall constellations, whisper to the preparing animals, hark to us, the dreamers and poets, for your voice is tantalizingly right on time, and your song that encourages with subtle notes, that inspires with natural beauty, that seduces with a fall scent sweet and simple, sexy and soft. Alleluia!

And remember this September
who is the voice of her that you hear when you are dreaming
that no matter the weather
which is turning cool and gathering strength and energy
spend every evening
that are still plenty long and lasting and orange above mother Peak
writing poetry
that is the scent of the soul, the keeper of peace, the bearer of all that one needs to thrive.

Poem: "September" James Gagnon
Painting: Charles Partridge Adams, "Looking Across South Park" 1897

The Messenger

There is some sentry at the rim of winter
Fed with the speech the wind makes
In the grand belfries of the sleepless timber.
He understands the lasting strife of tears,
And the way the world is strung;
He waits to warn all life with the tongue of March's
bugle,
Of the coming of the warrior sun.
When spring has garrisoned up her army of water,
A million grasses leave their tents, and stand in rows
To see their invincible brother.
Mending the winter's ruins with their laughter,
The flowers go out to their undestructive wars.

Walk in the woods and be witnesses,
You, the best of these poor children.

When Gabriel hit the bright shore of the world,
Yours were the eyes saw some
Star-sandalled stranger walk like lightning down the
air,
The morning the Mother of God
Loved and dreaded the message of an angel.

Poem: "The Messenger" Thomas Merton, 1944.
Photo: JG

Colorado's Children

You children born on this land wild and vast, bare-feet calloused, disheveled hair, rags, dirt, always that reddish dirt, you’re the lucky ones. Your forefather's campfires burn within you- spark- your lineage is life, full and hearty- flame- your stock is proud pioneer- smoke. Oh my children, on certain moonlit nights when, through the valleys and across the rolling hills, you hear the cantabile of the train whistle, the fiddle of its wheels on the track, the opus of its heavy load chugging along, when you smell the starlight in the caller of the Colorado air and you take a deep breath and feel the infinity of space stirring within your lungs, when you feel small and dizzy, when you breathe in and look about, when you breathe out and understand that the breadth of wilderness surrounding you is you, that the frost-shattered peak that made up your first horizon is you, that the rolling, capricious expanse of trees and rocks and wild is, all of it, you and you are it and it’s tangled and inevitable, it’s measureless and consuming, it’s elementarily simple and elegant. Oh my children, that's when you will begin to live! And the trees will no longer just be trees, nor the rocks rocks or the clouds clouds or you you, everything will be pregnant with meaning, with purpose, with will. This land called Colorado produces, dwelling unconsciously within all of us, a deep, deeper than the deepest mine shaft, soulful yearning, a powerful plea, a call to arms and adventure, a tug and pull, an undeniably necessary gravitational attraction towards all that is free, rebellious, untamed, towards all that is impossibly distant, high and buried, towards all that is unique, precarious and not recommended, towards all that is invisible, inopportune, and in-the-way. The yearning, the plea, the call, the tug. Oh my children, you providential sons and daughters of this wilderness, you are the valuable veins of gold that weave through the quartz and granite of normal existence, you have the precious strain of rebellion and reverie channeling through your souls, you dare to be what others can only dig for, you are the rarest of tellurides made up of concealed intellect, ruthless wit, instinctive awareness and feral resolve- this land is your land- oh my young ones, my lucky children, you will grow up with a mysterious sense of awe always hanging about- St. Elmo's fire, a mountain summit sunrise, a summer snowstorm, a crack of dry lightning, a looming gallows frame in the fog- you will befriend all of the animals, you will name the rocks and trees, you will follow the spring snowmelt and bathe in her bubbling pools, you will find the fragrant shade where the elusive herbs hide, you will have vast collections of fossils, bones and bird feathers, you will hear the distant Ute drum beat, feel its stir and heed its call. Oh passionate children, you are the lucky ones, you are the true bearers of verve, you are the archetypes, you are the kids who love life and whom life loves, you children can attain the heights of human zeal and confidence, you children have the esteem, wits and rarity necessary to be as untamed, striking, and enduring as the wildflowers- natures inherent impulse to emphasize beauty beyond strict necessity- that unfold themselves and spread across the endlessly reeling, fantastically fertile hillsides of a life lived fully.

Poem: "Colorado's Children" James Gagnon
Painting: Charles Partridge Adams "Spanish Peaks" Oil

Spirit That Form'd This Scene

Written in Platte Canon, Colorado

Spirit that form’d this scene,
These tumbled rock-piles grim and red,
These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks,
These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,
These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own,
I know thee, savage spirit—we have communed together,
Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
Was’t charged against my chants they had forgotten art?
To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse?
The lyrist’s measur’d beat, the wrought-out temple’s grace—column and polish’d arch forgot?
But thou that revelest here—spirit that form’d this scene,
They have remember’d thee.

Poem: "Spirit That Form'd This Scene" Walt Whitman, from "From Noon to Starry Night" found in "Leaves of Grass" 1900.
Painting: Charles Ragland Bunnell

Bushed

He invented a rainbow but lightning struck it
shattered it into the lake-lap of a mountain
so big his mind slowed when he looked at it

Yet he built a shack on the shore
learned to roast porcupine belly and
wore the quills on his hatband

At first he was out with the dawn
whether it yellowed bright as wood-columbine
or was only a fuzzed moth in a flannel of storm
But he found the mountain was clearly alive
sent messages whizzing down every hot morning
boomed proclamations at noon and spread out
a white guard of goat
before falling asleep on its feet at sundown

When he tried his eyes on the lake ospreys
would fall like valkyries
choosing the cut-throat
He took then to waiting
till the night smoke rose from the boil of the sunset

But the moon carved unknown totems
out of the lakeshore
owls in the beardusky woods derided him
moosehorned cedars circled his swamps and tossed
their antlers up to the stars
then he knew though the mountain slept the winds
were shaping its peak to an arrowhead
poised

And now he could only
bar himself in and wait
for the great flint to come singing into his heart

Poem: "Bushed" Earle Birney, 1974
Photo: JG

Courage Which Will not Quail

"But our courage did not quail. We would not allow ourselves to be depressed by the snow-drift, trailing past the window, any more than if it had been the sigh of a summer wind among rustling boughs. There have been few brighter seasons for us, than that. If ever men might lawfully dream awake, and give utterance to their wildest visions, without dread of laughter or scorn on the part of the audience- yes, and speak of earthly happiness, for themselves and mankind, as an object to be hopefully striven for, and probably attained- we, who made that little semi-circle round the blazing fire, were those very men. We had left the rusty iron frame-work of society behind us. We had broken through many hindrances that are powerful enough to keep most people on the weary tread-mill of the established system, even while they feel its irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did. We had stept down from the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had shut up the ledger; we had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp. It was our purpose- a generous one, certainly, and absurd, no doubt, in full proportion with its generosity- to give up whatever we had heretofore attained, for the sake of showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than the false and cruel principles, on which human society has all along been based."

Prose: Nathaniel Hawthorne, from "The Blithedale Romance" 1852
Photo: JG

Sonnet 4

First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string
With feathery sorcery; muzzle the note
With hurting love; the music that they wrote
Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing
Threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing
For the dear instrument to bear. Devote
The bow to silks and honey. Be remote
A while from malice and from murdering.
But first to arms, to armor. Carry hate
In front of you and harmony behind.
Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.
Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too late
For having first to civilize a space
Wherein to play your violin with grace.


Poem: "Sonnet 4" Gwendolyn Brooks, from "Children of the Poor"
Photo: Jennifer Mapes

Heap Stones

When creeks are full
The poems flow
When creeks are down
We heap stones.

Poem: Gary Snyder, from the poem "Civilization" found in Regarding Wave, 1967.
Photo: Jennifer Mapes

It's the Languorous Ecstasy...

"The wind on the heath
Abates, holds its breath".
Favart

It's the languorous ecstasy,
It's the lovers' lethargy,
It's the rustling woods: the trees-
Branches, leaves, zephyr-caressed-
It's the dusk's gray-shadowed nest:
Hushed choir brustling in the breeze.

O that fragile rippling, whose
Whispered mutter trills and coos
Like the supple, tender sound
Wafting from the grasses, ruffled...
Or the river's pebbles, muffled,
Tumbling, soft, over the ground.

Ours, that soul lamenting, weeping
In that plaintive murmur, sleeping;
Ours it is, no? spirit twain-
Yours, mine- gently soughed and sighed
Low, this balmy eventide,
In a humble, soft refrain.

Poem: "It's the Languorous Ecstasy..." Paul Verlaine, Ariettes Oubliees, I, 1874.
Photo: Laurel Gagnon

Men of the High North

Men of the High North, the wild sky is blazing;
Islands of opal float on silver seas;
Swift splendors kindle, barbaric, amazing;
Pale ports of amber, golden argosies.
Ringed all around us the proud peaks are glowing;
Fierce chiefs in council, their wigwam the sky;
Far, far below us the big Yukon flowing,
Like threaded quicksilver, gleams to the eye.

Men of the High North, you who have known it;
You in whose hearts its splendors have abode;
Can you renounce it, can you disown it?
Can you forget it, its glory and its goad?
Where is the hardship, where is the pain of it?
Lost in the limbo of things you've forgot;
Only remain the guerdon and gain of it;
Zest of the foray, and God, how you fought!

You who have made good, you foreign faring;
You money magic to far lands has whirled;
Can you forget those days of vast daring,
There with your soul on the Top o' the World?
Nights when no peril could keep you awake on
Spruce boughs you spread for your couch in the snow;
Taste all your feasts like the beans and the bacon
Fried at the camp-fire at forty below?

Can you remember your huskies all going,
Barking with joy and their brushes in air;
You in your parka, glad-eyed and glowing,
Monarch, your subjects the wolf and the bear?
Monarch, your kingdom unravisht and gleaming;
Mountains your throne, and a river your car;
Crash of a bull moose to rouse you from dreaming;
Forest your couch, and your candle a star.

You who this faint day the High North is luring
Unto her vastness, taintlessly sweet;
You who are steel-braced, straight-lipped, enduring,
Dreadless in danger and dire in defeat:
Honor the High North ever and ever,
Whether she crown you, or whether she slay;
Suffer her fury, cherish and love her--
He who would rule he must learn to obey.

Men of the High North, fierce mountains love you;
Proud rivers leap when you ride on their breast.
See, the austere sky, pensive above you,
Dons all her jewels to smile on your rest.
Children of Freedom, scornful of frontiers,
We who are weaklings honor your worth.
Lords of the wilderness, Princes of Pioneers,
Let's have a rouse that will ring round the earth.

Poem: "Men of the High North" Robert Service, from "Ballads of a Cheechako" 1909.

the World's FAIR / The Nimbus

the first strains of
three to get ready
saw the other two go
to sleep because
and me awake from the
multiple conversational bumps
and these sounds Brubeckish
I scribble to definitions
not unlike bullets to the moon
in hopes of irrefutable inanity
and maybe you'll just
kill some unsuspecting
life
and then in the near future
you bite it
makes sense
longsy'allspeakittoo


The Nimbus

To dive for the nimbus on the sea-floor
Or seek it in the sun
Calls for a plucky steeplejack
Scaling the sky's giddy ocean
Or dolphin-hearted journeyman
To swim from the foundered sunburst's roar
With lost treasure on his back.

Ocean that slovens and sidles in vast
Indifference, hides
In its sludge a wreath of drowning bells.
Who in those tricky tides
Or up the slippery daybreak's sides
Can grapple the spices of mornings fast
That waste on the listless swells?

Smothered beneath a lowering ceiling
All cock-crow crispness dies.
Bleary hordes are afraid to wake
Into the mists that rise
From a palsied swamp where a marsh-bird cries.
Stranger, reconquer the source of feeling
For an anxious people's sake.

Plunder the mind's aerial cages
Or the heart's deep catacombs.
O daring's virtuoso, tossed
Where the furious sunlight foams
Or through the instinct's twilit glooms,
Return with the sunburst's glistering pledges
As a garland for the lost.

A bittern rusting in the reeds
Is startled, and through the mist
Whirs screaming. Now, if now only, come
With the nimbus in your fist.
Strike, strike the rust like a rhapsodist
And burnish gold each throat that pleads
For dawn's encomium.

Poem 1: "the World's FAIR" Robert Lescatre
Poem 2: "The Nimbus" Douglas Le Pan
Photo: JG

John Ashbery: Words to Live By

Deer Among Cattle

Here and there in the searing beam
of my hand going through the night meadow
they all are grazing
with pins of human light in their eyes.
A wild one also is eating
the human grass,

slender, graceful, domesticated
by darkness, among the bred-
for-slaughter,

having bounded their paralyzed fence
and inclined his branched forehead onto
their green frosted table,

the only live thing in this flashlight
who can leave whenever he wishes,
turn grass into forest,

foreclose inhuman brightness from his eyes
but stands here still, unperturbed,
in their wide-open country,

the sparks from my hand in his pupils
unmatched anywhere among cattle,

grazing with them the night of the hammer
as one of their own who shall rise.

Poem: "Deer Among Cattle" James Dickey, from his collection "Falling" 1960's
Painting: James Gagnon 41"x 28"

XXVI

Infinities away already
are your very slender body
and the tremendous dark of your eyes
where once beyond the laughingness of childhood,
came a breath of jessamine prophetic of summer,
a sudden flutter of yellow butterflies
above dark pools.

Shall I take down my books
and weave from that glance a romance
and build tinsel thrones for you
out of old poets' fancies?

Shall I fashion a temple about you
where to burn out my life like frankincense
till you tower dark behind the sultry veil
huge as Isis?

Or shall I go back to childhood
remembering butterflies in sunny fields
to cower with you when the chilling shadow fleets
across the friendly sun?

Bordeaux

Poem: "XXVI" John Dos Passos from "Winter in Castile" found in "A Pushcart at the Curb" 1922.
Photo: Tony Rohrbach

living for the weekend

walking through weirdtown
two gallons of 2 percent
around the corner from Hawthorne Strip
for some reason I wanted to
scribble that
still walking ten minutes later
and the connection comical
what a pair of jugs
and hearing the crack of a can
beer being opened by a bearded man
then within a powerplay's time
an eerily similar bearded man
imbibing with a bottle in a window
two bearded beer drinkers
what a pair of mugs
the world handed me these silly things
and so I give them back
like trading rugs

Poem: "living for the weekend" Robert Lescatre
Photo: Tony Rohrbach (Rider: Matt Olsen)

Keep not Fix'd and Rooted

Keep not standing fix'd and rooted,
Briskly venture, briskly roam;
Head and hand, where'er thou foot it,
And stout heart are still at home.
In each land the sun does visit
We are gay, whate'er betide:
To give room for wandering is it
That the world was made so wide.

During my first years in the Sierra I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite. He seemed as serene as a sequoia, his head in the empyrean; and forgetting his age, plans, duties, ties of every sort, I proposed an immeasurable camping trip back in the heart of the mountains. He seemed anxious to go, but considerately mentioned his party. I said, "Never mind. The mountains are calling; run away, and let plans and parties and dragging lowland duties all 'gang tapsal-teerie' We'll go up a canon singing your song, 'Good-by proud world! I'm going home,' in divine earnest. Up there lies a new heaven and a new earth; let us go to the show." But alas, it was too late,- too near the sundown of his life. The shadows were growing long, and he leaned on his friends. His party, full of indoor philosophy, failed to see the natural beauty and fullness of promise of my wild plan, and laughed at it in good-natured ignorance, as if it were necessarily amusing to imagine that Boston people might be let to accept Sierra manifestations of God at the price of rough camping. Anyhow, they would have none of it, and held Mr. Emerson to the hotels and trails...
...In vain I urged, that only in homes and hotels were colds caught, that nobody ever was known to take cold camping in these woods, that there was not a single cough or sneeze in all the Sierra. Then I pictured the big climate-changing, inspiring fire I would make, praised the beauty and fragrance of sequoia flame, told how the great trees would stand about us transfigured in the purple light, while the stars looked down between the great domes; ending by urging them to come on and make an immortal Emerson night of it. But the house habit was not to be overcome, nor the strange dread of night air, though it is only cooled day air with a little dew in it. So the carpet dust and unknowable reeks were preferred. And to think of this being a Boston choice! Sad commentary on culture and the glorious transcendentalism.

Poem and Prose: John Muir, "Forests of Yosemite Park" from "Our National Parks" 1901.
Photo: Sand Dunes, Colorado: JG

beatific

silver on ivory
que pasa
big toes keep time
thoroughly comme un citroyen
and films not fantastic
realite
listening and watching
earlier, to petit jean
in his mother's tongue
still adept of mind
but poor nonethless
full perhaps only of purpose
and for that pure
like the rippling solo
of Roach
coming up broadway
like a cannonball Adderley
star falling

Poem: "beatific" Robert Lescatre
Watercolor: James Gagnon

Happy May Day!

For Karl Marx, socialism is not an impoverished return to unnatural, primitive simplicity. It is rather the first real emergence, the genuine actualization of man's nature as something real. Socialism, for Marx, is a society which permits the actualization of man's essence, by overcoming his alienation. It is nothing less than creating the conditions for the truly free, rational, active and independent man; it is the fulfillment of the prophetic aim: the destruction of the idols.

That Marx could be regarded as an enemy of freedom was made possible only by the fantastic fraud of Stalin in presuming to talk in the name of Marx, combined with the fantastic ignorance about Marx that exists in the Western world. For Marx, the aim of socialism was freedom, but freedom in a much more radical sense than the existing democracy conceives of it- freedom in the sense of independence, which is based on man's standing on his own feet, using his own powers and relating himself to the world productively. "Freedom," said Marx, "is so much the essence of man that even its opponents realize it...No man fights freedom; he fights at most the freedom of others. Every kind of freedom has therefore always existed, only at one time as a special privilege, another time as a universal right."

Indeed, one can only understand the concept of socialism only if one understands Marx's distinction between the true needs of man, and the synthetic, artificially produced needs of man. The principal goal of socialism, for Marx, is the recognition and realization of man's true needs, which will be possible only when production serves man, and capital ceases to create and exploit false needs of man.

Prose: Erich Fromm, from his book, "Marx's Concept of Man" 1961.
Bronze: Starr Gideon Kempf, currently on display at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

pixotic

sometimes they smile
and I see chains
ready to encircle me
invitations to inconceivability
consequences well defined
not incongruous or illegitimate
but equally uninteresting
bothersome as punctuation
in spelled out matters
v-e-l-o-u-r-i-a

Poem: "pixotic" Robert Lescatre
Painting: "San Francisco" James Gagnon

My Beatrice

While I was walking in a pitted place,
crying aloud against the human race,
letting thoughts ramble here and there apart-
knives singing on the whetstone of my heart-
I saw a cloud descending on my head
in the full noon, a cloud inhabited
by black devils, sharp, humped, inquisitive
as dwarfs. They knew where I was sensitive,
now idling there, and looked me up and down,
as cool delinquents watch a madman clown.
I heard them laugh and snicker blasphemies,
while swapping signs and blinking with their eyes.

"Let's stop and watch this creature at out leisure-
all sighs and sweaty hair. We'll take his measure.
It's a great pity that this mountebank
and ghost of Hamlet strutting on his plank
should think he's such an artist at his role
he has to rip the lining from his soul
and paralyze the butterflies and bees
with a peepshow of his indecencies-
and even we, who gave him his education,
must listen to his schoolboy declamation."

Wishing to play a part (my pride was high
above the mountains and the devil's cry)
like Hamlet now, I would have turned my back,
had I not seen among the filthy pack
(Oh crime that should have made the sun drop dead!)
my heart's queen and the mistress of my bed
there purring with the rest at my distress,
and sometimes tossing them a stale caress.

Poem: "My Beatrice" Charles Baudelaire, included in Robert Lowell's book, "Imitations"
Photo: JG

what she said

longish friday dougin'
curious what I'll be charged
but warm welcome and wary
on normally neutral ops
casual can only capture
so much in this low light
asked about authorship
and ample asuasion afforded
so I can finish fiddling
with my ultra fine tip

Poem: "what she said" Robert Lescatre
Photo: Robert Gagnon

Sing Like the Striken Swan

"Don't like that at all," says Jill. "Neither do I," say Jab. "I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection. Jill's got one inside her too... it's sprouting and sprouting. Can't stop it. Yesterday it was a tadpole, tomorrow it'll be a honey-suckle vine. Can't tell what it's going to be yet... not eventually. It dies in the nest every day and the next day it's born again. Put your ear on her belly... you can hear the whirring of its wings. Whirrrr... whirrrr. Without a motor. Wonderful! She's got millions of them inside her and they're all whirring around in there dying to get out. Whirrr... whirrrr. And if you just put a needle inside and punctured the bag they'd all come whirring out... imagine it... a great cloud of soul-worms... millions of them... and so thick the swarm that we wouldn't be able to see each other... A fact! No need to write about China. Write about that! About what's inside of you... the great vertiginous vertebration... the zoospores and the leucocytes... the wamroths and the holenlindens... every one's a poem. The jellyfish is a poem too _ the finest kind of poem. You poke him here, you poke him there, he slithers and slathers, he's dithy and clabberous, he has a colon and intestines, he's vermiform and ubisquishous. And Mowgli in the garden whistling for the rent, he's a poem too, a poem with big ears, a wambly bretzular poem with logamundiddy of the goo-goo. He has round, auricular daedali, round robin-breasted ruches that open up like an open barouche. He wambles in the wambhorst whilst the whelkin winkles... he wabbles through the wendish wikes whirking his worstish wights... Mowgli... owgli... whist and wurst...." "He's losing his mind," says Jill. "Wrong again," says Jabber. "I've just found my mind, only it's different sort of mind than you imagined. You think a poem must have covers around it. The moment you write a thing the poem ceascs. The poem is the present which you can't define. You live it. Anything is a poem if it has time in it. You don't have to take a ferry-boat or go to China to write a poem. The finest poem I ever lived was a kitchen sink. Did I ever tell you about it. There were two faucets, one called Froid and the other Chaud. Froid lived a life in extenso, by means of a rubber hose attached to his schnausel. Chaud was bright and modest. Chaud dripped all the time, as if he had the clap. On Tuesdays and Fridays he went to the Mosque where there was a clinic for venereal faucets. Tuesdays and Fridays Froid had to do all the work. He was a bugger for work. It was his whole world. Chaud on the other hand had to be petted and coaxed. You had to say "not so fast," or he'd scald the skin off you. Once in a while they worked in unison, Froid and Chaud, but that was seldom. Saturday nights, when I washed my feet at the sink, I'd get to thinking how perfect was the world over which these twain ruled. Never anything more than this iron sink with its two faucets. No beginnings and no ends. Chaud the alpha and Froid the omega. Perpetuity. The Gemini, ruling over life and death. Alpha-Chaud running out through all degrees of Fahrenheit and Reaumur, through magnetic filings and comets' tails, through the boiling cauldron of Mauna Loa into the dry light of the Tertiary moon; Omega-Froid running out through the Gulf Stream into the paludal bed of the Sargasso Sea, running through the marsupials and the foraminifera, through the mammal whales and the Polar fissures, running clown through island universes, through death cathodes, through dead bone and dry rot, through the follicles and tentacles of worlds unformed, worlds untouched, worlds unseen, worlds unborn and forever lost. Alpha-Chaud dripping, dripping; Omega-Froid working, working. Hand, feet, hair, face, dishes, vegetables, fish washed clean and away; despair, ennui, hatred, love, jealousy, crime... dripping, dripping. I, Jabberwhorl, and my wife Jill, and after us legions upon legions...all standing at the iron sink. Seeds falling through the drain: young cantaloups, squash, caviar, macaroni, bile, spittle, phlegm, Iettuce leaves, sardine bones, Worcestershire sauce, stale beer, urine, blood-clots, Kruschen salts, oatmeal, chew tobbacco, pollen, dust, grease, wool, cotton threads, match sticks, live worms, shredded wheat, scalded milk, castor oil. Seeds of waste falling away forever and forever coming back in pure draughts of a miraculous chemical substance which refuses to be named, classified, labelled, analysed, or drawn and quartered. Coming back as Froid and Chaud perpetually, like a truth that can't be downed. You can take it hot or cold, or you can take it tepid. You can wash your feet or gargle your throat; you can rinse the soap out of your eyes or drive the grit out of the lettuce leaves; you can bathe the new-born babe or swab the rigid limbs of the dead; you can soak bread for fricadellas or dilute your wine. First and last things. Elixir. I, Jabberwhorl, tasting the elixir of life and death. I, Jabberwhorl, of waste and H2O composed, of hot and cold and all the intermediate realms, of scum and rind, of finest, tiniest substance never lost, of great sutures and compact bone, of ice fissures and test tubes, of semen and ova fused, dissolved, dispersed, of rubber schnausel and brass spigot, of dead cathodes and squirming infusoria, of lettuce leaves and bottled sunlight... I, Jabberwhorl, sitting at the iron sink and perplexed and exalted, never less and never more than a poem, an iron stanza, a boiling follicle, a lost leucocyte. The iron sink where I spat out my heart, where I bathed my tender feet, where I held my first child, where I washed my sore gums, where I sang like a diamond-backed terrapin and I am singing now and will sing forever though the drains clog and the faucets rust, though time runs out and I be all there is of the present, past and future. Sing, Froid, sing transitive! Sing Chaud, sing intransitive! Sing Alpha and Omega! Sing Hallelujah! Sing out, O sing! Sing while the world sinks...." And singing loud and clear like a dead and stricken swan on the bed we laid him out.

Prose: Henry Miller from "Black Spring", 1963
Photo: JG

notes on messengers

to search is to find nothing
or live
semantics, ce soir
or do you wake soon
'neath nearly nine noons
the thumped chest of
cartoon macaroons
tuned to swoon on solo
bassoon bah duhm duhm
sell my soul to Gerry Mulligan's muse
but save these outlines for
firey fittings at best
there are so many ways
to end up right where you
started, and you spend all your time
getting there
welcome

Poem: "notes on messengers" Robert Lescatre
Photo: JG

Romantic Movement

to Nancy

The boat tilts on your image on the waves between a fire of foam and the flower of moon rays, these the flags of your dreaming lips. I'm watching Venus on the ogre sky and a continent in cocoons.

Soon all the butterflies of desire shall manifest o prescience of life becoming poetic... and poetry the incense of the dream. A street and a forest interchange their clothing, that tree of telephones, this television of nuts and berries - the air edible music.

King Analogue
Queen Image
Prince Liberty...
... Garden of imperious images, life is a poem someday to be lived: the feast of our hearts on fire, the nerves supplying spice, blood coursing a glow of insects, our eyes the dahlias of torrential ignition.

The whisper of the inter-voice to wrap you in the mantle of marvelous power, with the secret protection of the forest that falls asleep in fire whose ores become transmined only for love - all your steps will lead to the inner sanctum none but you behold, your shadow putting on the body of metaphoric light.

The stone I have tossed into the air of chance shall come to you one great day and exfoliate the original scarab, the carbuncle of delights, the pomegranate inviolate, the sonorous handkerchief of the Comte de Saint-Germaine, all the reinvented perfumes of ancient Egypt, the map of the earth in the Age of Libra when the air shall distribute our foods, the sempiternal spectrum of sundown at Segovia (the stork carrying the golden egg from the Templar's tower) Chief Seattle's lost medicine pouch, our simultaneous presence in all the capitals of Europe while traveling Asia and listening to the million-throated choir of tropical birds, your lost candlewax empire, a madrone forest to live inside of, which we can wrap in a set of "secret bags" and open on our wanderlust, the turbulent cry beneath the oceans, the extinct bird calls in a magic vessel Christian Rosenkreutz dropped on his way out of the Damcar, beads of coral dissolving the last motors, the redolent eyes of the first born seers, the key to the bank of sanity, the ship of honey at the height of storms through which we sail to new islands rising from the sunken continents and the bridge between sleep and waking we will traverse in constant possession of "the great secret" become transparent as a tear drop - with no other work but the genius of present life.

Poem: "Romantic Movement" Philip Lamantia
Photo: J.G.

John Muir on Mt. Ritter:

After scanning its face again and again,
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
There would be a moment of
Bewilderment, and then,
A lifeless rumble down the cliff
To the glacier below.
My mind seemed to fill with a
Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
Forth again with preternatural clearness.
I seemed suddenly to become possessed
Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
The rock was seen as through a microscope,
My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
With which I seemed to have
Nothing at all to do.

Poem: "John Muir on Mt. Ritter" Gary Snyder
Photo: Jennifer Mapes