Resumption
Before continuing any further, I ought
to describe the hiatus I’ve taken
from this meshwork in which some impressions were caught.
Life intervened once more in the act of making,
as oft becomes the case with poetry.
It was mid-Autumn, and the yard needed raking,
pausing the efforts of this earnest votary
for what should have been a few hours at most.
Then I got lost on my way to the notary,
and before you knew it I was fully engrossed
in a veritable Solla Sollew
on a venture that spat me up onto its coast -
where indeed I had problems, and more than a few.
And then Joe Biden won the election,
removing the cud on which I’d been wont to chew.
Shortly thereafter the Orange Insurrection,
trumping once again satirical verse.
And competition is not my predilection.
America’s plight, though funny, is dire or worse,
even when the most we can do is laugh -
or put down our pens and throw up our hands and curse…
or exit ourselves from life like Sylvia Plath
(whose early poems are genuinely great,
before she unwound into dyspeptic self-wrath).
The line that separates measured contempt from hate
is thin and subject to seasonal drift,
and this risk is what defines satirical fate.
But I take up my pen once more with thoughts to shift
away from the “topical acerbic”
with themes that will elevate, inspire, soar and lift.
In Tens and Twelves
Triumphing in life has always been quite a trick
(to broach again the theme of our Shelley).
Decades just laying a foundation, brick by brick,
negotiating needs of brain, brawn, and belly,
demands of others, of time, age, and place,
reconfiguring each enemy as ally,
polishing one’s faults, but leaving perhaps a trace
of each to preserve what is most unique,
like the vicissitudes of life scratched on one’s face.
Then there are the strategies overt and oblique
we use to hide or promote ourselves
when we’ve plumbed our utmost nadir or reached our peak.
We stockpile the ones we’ve outgrown on silent shelves
or pass them along to others in need.
I’ve pickled mine for the most part in tens and twelves.
Foremost and First
There are so many ways in which we can be freed,
but just as many that lead to bondage.
And there's the dialectic of plenty and need,
want and surfeit, advantage and disadvantage.
On either end there are moats of despair.
By and large, though, most of us manage to manage.
Sometimes it’s better to have little more than air.
Who’d want to end life like Gatsby or Hearst,
with vast chambers of lack-love emptiness to spare?
In my own set point for happiness I’m well-versed.
I don’t need many things at all, in fact.
I list my wife at the top as foremost and first -
a companion of great intelligence and tact
who stands me up when I am out of sorts
and pumps me up for the acts I need to enact.
Venus and Haas (or, Love Lines)
But we’re different. She’s very much into sports,
and my only sports are the piano,
Emily, Kant’s three critiques, and Nietzsche’s retorts.
Yet somehow we ended up in the same funnel,
swirling lifewards in frothy ecstasy
‘til one day we expire as a single runnel.
And if those last two tercets were strained or messy…
well, I get choked up singing of my wife.
That’s me - Venus’s uxorious confessee.
Sweet, you’re the very first principle of my life -
my aim, my desire, my reason, my goal.
For thirty years we’ve been free of Venetian strife.
In the long years ere we met I was partly unwhole,
and redundant in other ways to boot.
But I’ll quit these love lines now before they grow dull.
Stubby and Magniloquent
I’ve no desire for conjugal love to pollute
the flow as I’m paddling out this rima.
Nor can I expect that much in the way of loot
for giving in to some dumb love sonnet’s schema
to dilate on love’s niceties and tact.
It’s been decades since I left my tempus prima
(or primum, I believe that is, to be exact…
Primo tempore’s what I’m looking for -
“prime time” - I’ve zero Latin, though, in point of fact.).
Only so many utterances left in store!
I’ve got to mind just how I pick and choose -
which thoughts to accentuate, and which to ignore,
whether to put to flight my magniloquent muse
or ground her with my stubby metric mole.
Precious few utterances left. No time to lose!
Porcelain Double
Brahms threw his reflection into an empty bowl,
which gathered it up and sent it right back.
The ears on each side of its head were rather droll.
A cleft palate emerged within a porcelain crack,
and the face was blemished with kitchen stains,
each of them corresponding to an inner lack -
some impediment to das Ich, as Freud explains.
He rose and returned to his Streicher grand
to ponder how best to score this new Lied’s refrains -
piano voicings, and how the cadence should land.
He was haunted by that porcelain double,
which showed an alter self incomplete and unplanned.
“Do Heine’s images give him this much trouble?”
He found a cleaner likeness in a mirror,
then calmly shaved his beard to a prickly stubble.
Impetuous Peerer
From Plato to Brahms, he strives to make things clearer,
yet the cosmos confounds his every search.
Everyman! My precious, impetuous peerer,
you’ve flown Hubble then Webb and what’s next from your perch.
Our cosmos now may be one of many.
A feeble excuse to leave this one in the lurch?
And other reasoned creatures? You’ve found not any.
For all we can tell, they may not exist.
An abysmal emptiness, murky and fenny.
Yet thoughts of “one world, one God” still seem to persist.
I‘d like to have a cosmos of my own
and confect an incredulous race from the mist
of men and women who’d toss me off of my throne
if I so much as willed to call them mine.
I’d leave them to themselves and they’d leave me alone.
This Puzzling Void
I fancy, in fact, I’m owed this from the divine.
I’ve been a good boy, I’ve said my prayers,
and my Mars and Neptune currently are in trine!
A crew then, please, of anthropic single-payers.
I’ll dorm them in eternity for free
and demarcate a limited hell for strayers.
I’ll disavow their attempts to acknowledge me
as some father or heavenly savior.
There’ll be nothing like sin or sin’s apology,
and scofflaws will exit Hell for good behavior.
Knowledge and doubt will be nicely alloyed,
with saints to promulgate this like Francis Xavier.
They‘ll have no need for Moses or Calvin or Freud,
in lieu of whom I’ll institute a creed
for making the best of things in this puzzling void.
Ab initio
That’s a great idea…a statement. Yes, indeed!
“I believe in one Void - one empty space
that ab initio possessed nor stone nor weed,
nor dimension, nor motherly-fatherly face.
One Emptiness jam-packed into a speck,
a point that one day all of a sudden - by grace
of some mysterious leftover Omnitech
from a previous collapsed Primiverse -
expanded exponentially from foot to neck,
giving rise to Existence, which we now rehearse.
The Void became Matter to take control
of space and time by having something to disperse
through itself to make it more than a giant hole.
Matter became us when it needed smarts,
but it took us a while to evolve from the mole.
Yes, the chain of being took place in fits and starts
and led to minor fuckups like the roach
and to wholes that would have been better left as parts.
I believe in the non-existence of some coach
who pre-existed us and formed us so,
and if there is such a one, she doesn’t encroach
on our need to make ourselves. She doesn’t bestow.
I believe we find our own way to truth -
that the Matter we are can ultimately know,
can fathom its own heart with empirical proof,
can learn how best to buttress and sustain,
to interrogate our immense celestial roof.
I believe that this solemn creed will make it plain
to ourselves that we live to laugh and thrive,
although we emerged from little more than a stain.”
Serpentine
Wow. Didn’t know I had that much in my carafe!
I like it that I’ve made myself a girl.
I suppose, then, I’ll have to ditch the rod and staff.
What would be fitting…perhaps a ladle and pearl?
Yes, entire faiths centered on mom, not dad,
lineages favoring countess over earl,
sin and guilt for making mothers, not fathers, mad…
a different experience, for sure,
all the way down to men’s suffrage. That would be rad!
I’ll handle the gig as a divine sinecure,
with little else to do but gaze and preen,
here and there scratching in an obscure signature
that will send them off in search of a Golden Mean.
But enough pointless fancies of godhood…
my path through recent tercets has been serpentine!
Bard of Me
There. A working cosmology, duly dotted.
Not too shabby for a half-day’s work…
although I’ll admit it was randomly plotted.
From line by line planning, it’s true I mostly shirk.
I’m similar to Melville’s Bartleby,
who’d “frankly prefer not to” play the routine clerk.
I’m prompted by things that suddenly startle me,
that catch my eye or brush my tympani…
whatever it is that will make a bard of me.
A gust of wind or three bars from a symphony
can knock me out and set me in a trance.
Great songs can make both a man and a wimp of me!
When Terpsichore knocks, no choice but to let her dance.
Such lack of discipline leads to dry spells,
to hustle me out of which I rely on chance.
A Question for Taverns and Kegs
As I guide this rima through the various swells
and lulls necessitated by the scheme,
I’m reminded from time to time to ring the bells
of Shelley’s poem and its sadly unfinished dream
that ends in conversation with Rousseau -
a spirit who Shelley thinks has run out of steam.
(I’ve quite a kinship with Jean-Jacques, I’ll have you know.
I once got busted for reading at work,
and addiction to print was his downfall, I trow.
He confesses in Confessions that he would shirk
all else just so long as his eyes were glued
to the latest Schrift he couldn’t put down. He’d lurk
in kitchen pantries, slavering over the crude
titillations in the latest novel
to challenge the morals of each Genevan prude -
stuff that somehow escaped the Calvinist shovel,
resulting down the line in modern porn.)
Sadly, the narrative breaks off in a muddle.
Shelley, through his Rousseau, appears to want to warn
the 19th-century about the mess
that revolution and its reaction have born.
Why he stopped work on this poem is anyone’s guess.
He asks Rousseau directly, “What is Life?”
after the latter has conveyed his great distress
o’er excess Freedom resulting in widespread strife.
What sort of answer does he expect?
There’s no commentary from Mary (Percy’s wife).
She just says it’s “mystic” and expresses respect
for her husband’s mysterious opus.
Bafflement explains her interpretive neglect,
perhaps. Responding to “What is Life?” is hopeless,
and maybe that’s why Shelley broke it off.
The cosmos may be a wheel, but Life is spokeless.
The question drove Shelley’s rima into a trough.
Horses rarely recover from broken legs,
and I’ll never return a serve from Coco Gauff.
“”What is Life?” is a question for taverns and kegs.”
Thus mused the poet as he launched his skiff.
“It must be fully quaffed from the cream to the dregs!”
The storm clouds thickened as his brow grew dark and stiff,
although with no awareness of his doom.
“The answer is but a hypothetical IF…”
The Deep absorbed a flash and a resounding boom,
as quiet turned to turmoil in the blast.
The poet dragged these thoughts to his watery tomb.
The Triumph of Life (or, An Organ with Innumerable Stops)
The Triumph of Life. What triumph? It doesn’t last!
Or maybe it lasts but doesn’t abide
except as a fable from someone else’s past.
But no. If I’ve said I’ve never triumphed, I’ve lied!
In fact, I’ve had far fewer downs than ups,
and the downs I’ve learned more and more to take in stride.
I’ve built my organ with innumerable stops -
or more than I can count, at any rate.
If I pulled them all at once, they might call the cops,
though laws on noise tend to differ from state to state.
The one I’m in is pretty lenient.
I guess I pose no imminent threat to its fate,
nor would it find my removal expedient.
I have no problem with its sundry laws.
I’m law-abiding and mostly obedient.
Hermity
So never call me a rebel without a cause!
Though it‘s true as a kid I loved James Dean.
Had he lived, today he’d be playing Santa Claus,
long decades after his role as an angry teen.
Ah, those fading Hollywood warhorses.
I rarely venture anymore to the big screen.
The genres in my view have all run their courses.
Narrative has been ruined by high tech
and pernicious ideological forces.
Give me a film with Deneuve or Gregory Peck!
Otherwise I‘ll just sit at home and read,
or watch South Park take down Trump and similar dreck…
or add lines to my own anti-Trumpian screed.
Dammit, why must we circle back to Trump,
who reasserts himself like some cancerous need!
A national embarrassment, an orange stump
of seemingly immortal rotten wood.
A moron with half the IQ of Forrest Gump.
Comparisons are infinite, though none are good
when fools outpace such satirists as me…
and not that Dickens or Swift or Rabelais could!
No doubt Trump’s a fascist, but some of us are free -
yes, still free, if just for these few moments -
to speak on behalf of the poor, or “take a knee“
to protest injustice wherever it foments,
or advocate benign paternity
to all the would-be Fred Trumps and Willy Lomans.
GenXers like me are more and more hermity.
As a cohort, we‘ve ceased to make our Earth
a better place in a brighter eternity.
[Previous: Part One]
[Next: Part Three]