Posts

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Advancing into sleepless woods

This entry is part 12 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the first poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

Getting Older
by Paul Zweig

Advancing into sleepless woods,
Each year the ice getting thinner,
And the trapped waters darker . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 9-05-05]

* * * *

Getting Heavier
    for SB

Prematurely grave –
sentences delivered with a note of finality,
syllogisms grasped & held in the mind
the way excess skin from a facelift
vanishes into a crack beside the ears –
I stretch myself over the same
mattress of bone, morning & evening.
I go on as if nothing happened,
as if I were free on my own recognizance
& this growing heaviness simply means
I need more sleep.
I’ve become adept at ignoring
the jagged piece of sky pressing down
on the back of my neck.
Since I stopped following the news,
my dreams supply all the missing details
of earthquake, torture, & mass starvation.
Ask me anything.
Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night
& pretend it’s morning: shower, drink coffee
& look for poems in the ready-made phrases
I think of as inspired, because breath belongs
to everyone & no one
& I am trying not to give undue weight
to the new reports that claim
it is oxygen, stripping the electrons
from other molecules, that slowly
reduces this body to a swamp of light.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

To greet the quietness

This entry is part 11 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the eleventh poem of the first section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. (I’m planning to skip the twelfth and last poem in that section, and move on the second section from here.) See this post for details.

Self and Soul
by Paul Zweig

The dwarf tears at his clothes
To greet the quietness.
He nudges me to show him what I write . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 9-05-05]

* * * *

Scarecrow & Farmer

Right at dusk, as always,
I overhear myself: a drone note
audible in the lull
between shifts of crickets.

Darkness rises from the ground
between the corn stalks,
which are anything but still.
I step deliberately, one season

on each foot. Today left a crust
of salt around my collar,
lifted now by a passing breath
of wings. I don’t look up.

Four quick cries & a pause,
then two more: Estiquirí­n.
The hoe handle digs
a furrow in my shoulder

while above me, outlined against the stars,
the one wearing my old clothes
shivers under his straw,
his cross of sticks.
__________

“Estiquirí­n   Great Horned Owl; a spirit in the form of a Great Horned Owl (onomatopoeic)” – Glossary, Seven Names for the Bellbird: Conservation Geography in Honduras, by Mark Bonta

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Meditation on the via positiva

Space and time can bend into a vanishing point: we know this, or think we do. Light disappears like water down a drain; from this inverse star, no visions come. We have only the words, black hole, and the idea of suction, the horror of no-place and its irresistible gravity. But doubt still clouds the imagination, and we clutch at whatever flotsam our worldy experience can provide. Surely it is a portal, we say – the same kind of logic that leads us to become entranced by the orifices of the beautiful. How could such a perfect mouth do more than sip or nibble? None but the thinnest of ties can bind its owner to the earth. Surely this is no gaping maw, no staring eye, no ravenous sex. The gaze is hidden behind sunglasses, the flat belly flaunts its false window and our eager glances cluster, like the flies that crowd the eyes and mouths of starving children, walking in and out with impunity. But no, it isn’t like that. The blank at the end of space and time refuses nothing, like a bull’s-eye that’s impossible to miss. If it were a doorway, it would have just one side, and if it were a mouth, one word: Yes.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The art of the unuseless

Years ago, when I was a student of Japanese literature, I loved the blog-like Tsurezuregusa, by the 14th-century monk Kenkí´, which Donald Keene translated as Essays in Idleness. “What a strange, demented feeling it gives me,” Kenkí´ began, “when I realize that I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.”

A similar spirit of nonsense animates the inventions of Chindogu founder Kawakami Kenji. Kawakami has invented such indispensable devices as duster slippers for cats (get your house clean while your kitty pads about), the hydrophobe’s bath body suit (for people who want to bathe without getting wet), and beginner high heels, complete with training wheels.

A new article in Japan Focus points out the serious side of Kawakami’s farce. “If people laugh, that’s fine,” Kawakami tells the author. “We need more of it. I believe in rejecting society by laughing at it.” Though pictures of his wacky inventions have been a staple of widely circulated, jokey emails for years, the subtler points of his consumerist critique have been lost on those who arguably stand to benefit the most from it – Japanese and Americans.

“I despise materialism and how everything is turned into a commodity,” says the 57-year-old inventor, while chugging on the first of an endless supply of cigarettes. “Things that should belong to everyone are patented and turned into private property. I’ve never registered a patent and I never will because the world of patents is dirty, full of greed and competition.” …

Murakami’s anti-materialism appears genuine: He has the casual everyman look of an off-duty corporate worker and has not changed the oversized glasses he has worn for years. He is not married and has no children to send to private school. The only apparent concession to bourgeois luxury is the old 7-series BMW that sits outside his office, but a thick layer of dust makes it clear that the car has not moved in years. “I’m not much of a driver,” says its owner.

Definitely a man after my own heart! Though Kawakami’s inventions may strike many as the apotheosis of all that is Western about modern Japan, his critique is firmly rooted in the native thinking of eccentric aesthetes like Kenkí´, who, seven centuries before, was already convinced that the world was growing steadily more tawdry. “A house which multitudes of workmen have polished with every care, where strange and rare Chinese and Japanese furnishings are displayed, and even the grasses and trees of the garden have been trained unnaturally, is ugly to look at and most depressing,” Kenkí´ wrote. In Chapter 72 of the Tsurezuregusa, he enumerated “Things which seem in poor taste: too many personal effects cluttering up the place where one is sitting; too many brushes in an inkbox; too many Buddhas in a family temple; too many stones and plants in a garden…”

It’s strangely comforting to think that the mania for accumulation was just as mindless then as it is now.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The elephant

In partial response to Dale’s objection to my anti-creed. Generally speaking, though, I think the two of us resemble the blind men in the old Sufi fable, arguing about the nature of the elephant. I’m really not thinking about an elephant, you see.

True teachers always say, Beware of desire. Not because desires are bad, but because they are insufficient. You can’t will your way into heaven; you almost have to surrender willfulness along with every last personal ambition. Surrender to what, to whom? To the Beloved.

For the sake of love – this is tricky – you have to relinquish love. But this may not be such an unreasonable thing, because from the beginning, true love isn’t something one can cling to. It is – as Blaugustine learned in her thirteenth interview of God – not so much a feeling we have as an energy we can tap into, or generate. (At least, it feels as if we’re helping to generate it. But maybe it’s already there, like background radiation left over from the Big Bang.)

Who, then, is this Beloved? S/he can be anyone, any being, I think. The widow and the orphan, of course, and that rank-smelling homeless guy down on the corner, but also the CEO and the sea cucumber, the demagogic president and that squirrel in your bird feeder.

Can it really be this simple? Hell, no! It’s just that, underneath the thin intellectual veneer, I am really a simple person, albeit one enchanted with the complexity of human culture and natural systems. And I have neglected to mention the problem of idolatry, which is enormous – possibly insurmountable.

There’s a reason why the ancient Hebrews put the commandment against idolatry first: it encapsulates all other sins, if by “sin” we mean “separation from the Beloved.” Idolatry is what happens when we allow ourselves to feel that our desires are sufficient, that life is no more than eating, shitting, fucking, drugging, birth and death.

But of course it doesn’t work to just say, “Well, then, I will believe that there is more to life than that; I will call that more-ness heaven, nirvana, moksha; I will relinquish this and pursue that.” Relinquishing desires can be more dangerous than their pursuit; anorexia kills you a lot quicker than over-eating. Here comes the State, for example, saying, “Ennoble yourselves! Sacrifice your beloved son!” So it turns into an idol: our own desire writ large.

The same thing happens with personal wealth or power, however much we may tell ourselves it’s all for the Beloved. An idol begins as a mirror and ends as a mouth, a bottomless pit. We dream of falling – a nightmare at first, but soon a thrilling plunge, an amusement park. In the whirl of excitement, our encounter with the Beloved gets reduced to a brief, wild firing of ganglia. Energy of a sort, but hardly that still, small, inexhaustible Presence whose existence we intuit in between the myriad throbbing things, in the presents they make of themselves to each beloved other.

YES! we are supposed to exult at every egotistical triumph, pulling the lever on an invisible slot machine with our fists. The challenge, some say, is still to find God in the slots.

That may work for you; but knowing myself and my addictive tendencies, I say NO. I will neither aspire nor relinquish. Like everything in nature, love comes on its own schedule, if at all. I will be neither saved nor spent, but simply give thanks for the present of this hunger as well as the food – thanks for the poverty as well as the comfort – thanks for this unquenchable desire that reminds me I am alive.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

That great invention

This entry is part 10 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the tenth (and title) poem of the first section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

I am trying to refrain from critical/appreciative comments here, but folks, I think you’ll agree that is one magnificent f—ing poem. I might risk leaving this one up permanently.

Against Emptiness
by Paul Zweig

      I
Whatever surrounds the raw body of wind
And rolls over me in silence;
Whatever I am this screaming body for . . .

I want to climb to you, foot by foot,
Along the prayer ladder:
Dusky flower,
Gloom tree in the nerves,
And then my body rigged with magic,
Crying to fill that great invention, your emptiness,
Your tricky silences between stars.

      II
The prophet casts his life upon the water;
Upon the waking fish and those, asleep,
Who interpret their solitude without end.
They ascend by their teeth,
By the cell rot of unaccomplished days,
Each small death tidied into words, until
The walls of death enclose them, and they are
Grateful to be remembered by their failures.

      III
Know these words: demon, angel,
And they will follow as you climb
From pit to pit, leaving behind each day
A cell of your rage, a life,
Until, exhausted into wisdom,

Your face will ease you into death;
Your wise face, shedding its peacefulness
Like a lie upon your angry children,
Your patient devils, and the intricate
Joy of the angels you never named.

* * * *

Underfoot

I leave the house, & right away a mosquito finds me & starts weaving a nest for my ear with her shrill petition. This time of year, I can hardly take an unencumbered step. Piles of bear shit, pudding-full with half-ripe black cherries, litter the path. A garter snake turns my airborne leg rubber with vertigo six inches from the ground. Caterpillars rappel from the treetops, & spiders – legions of the solitary – work to enclose every last cubic foot of open space. My hands are in constant motion, wiping the silk from my face & clothes, but no exorcism holds against the hob-nailed micrathena, her collection of mummies & her soft yellow nebula of eggs. Emptiness is a mirage; an architect would go mad. The other morning I fled to the former clearcut, where deertongue & panic grass dripped with dew. My feet were soon swimming in my boots. Where is this outside, this fabled refuge? Home for lunch, I gaze inquiringly into a bowl of steaming soup.

Sky-blue petals in
the wet grass. I crouch down,
my mind blank as a cloud.

Back home, I look it up, chagrinned:
forget-me-not.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Green plague

This entry is part 9 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the ninth poem in the first section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after one week to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

Pastoral Letter
by Paul Zweig

I will name nature’s poisons. . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 8-31-05]

* * * *

Pastoral Spell

1.
I dreamed I drove a sprayer truck
slowly along the berm of a road
in prayerful silence.
Behind me, the red letters of sumac leaves
turned brown
& my rubber gloves shone
like the udders of a cow,

all for the crown vetch
& its hateful pink.

2.
I name the invaders:
buffel grass, barberry, knotweed,
kudzu, privet, leafy spurge.
Cursed be houndstongue & snakehead,
stiltgrass & tree-of-heaven.
A plague on every scourge
of purple loosestrife, hemlock
woolly adelgid, cane toad;
the European rabbit down under,
demonstrating its fabled gift
for multiplication in the wrong abode;
Australian eucalypt in California
stretching resinous leaves toward
the redwood’s portion of the sky;
medusahead rye.

Far from their native countries,
free of restraints, the immigrants
do not swarm; they mob.
They lodge in the earth like shrapnel.
When they sprout,
they are already in full uniform.
The Greeks called them Spartoi,
the Sown.

The only way to get rid of them
was to pit them against each other.

3.
I dreamed of skinning feral cats
& selling their meat at auction:
Fresh mutton, I chanted.
They were slick with the fat of tanagers.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Waiting for the detonation

This entry is part 8 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the eighth poem in the first section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after one week to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

America at War
by Paul Zweig

      I
I work at night, carried
By conveyor belts from one sex to another…

[Remainder of poem removed 8-30-05]

* * * *

The Servant

Even the godless
generals speak
of mission. The way
maples spread their
seeds, we
scatter love:
by helicopter.
Our transmitter has to battle
sandstorms, weather
terrorist strikes.
Each night,
I tune out the filth
& jabber – which
otherwise make
all my follicles
pucker up – & press
my ear to the radio’s
D-cup speaker.
Try it:
in the empty stretches
between stations
you can
just hear
the whisper of dry
sticks being rubbed
together. The crackle
of that
first flame, its
parched little tongue.
I am the light,
it sings.
Nations that knew
thee not shall run
unto thee.
Lord,
if you need
more fuel, say
the Word.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

This I don’t believe

Recently, a couple of the blogs I read featured statements of personal belief. Rachel Barenblatt of Velveteen Rabbi wrote what she described as a personal credo, although with a few caveats:

I don’t want to risk misunderstanding, or to lose nuance in the attempt to speak too plainly about matters which don’t lend themselves to language. At the same time, I don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good; just because I can’t be sure of expressing myself perfectly is no reason not to try. My final caveat is that I’m not sure it’s possible for a credo to be comprehensive — otherwise it would take lifetimes to write, let alone recite!

Then Tom Montag at The Middlewesterner, in a break with his unwritten rule against personal essays that aren’t related to the blog’s Middlewestern focus, published a somewhat darker statement, the greater part of which seems to consist of caveat.

I believe this as firmly as a righteous Christian believes in Christ, that some twenty-five billion years from now the universe will collapse back upon itself, will congeal and compact and become again the speck from which the Big Bang erupted, and everything that we know, everything that we have cherished, will be lost. That I have lived will mean nothing then. Nothing I have written will survive. Both the good I have done and the pain I have caused will have evaporated as surely as the wind blows away my spoken words, blows away the scent of the decaying world.

I was reminded of National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” feature – not that we are likely to hear views as challenging as Rachel’s or Tom’s on the airwaves any time soon.

Much as I enjoyed reading these statements of belief, however, I felt little inclination to follow their lead, and at first, I wasn’t quite sure why. Rachel’s “Credo” had been sparked by a post at not native fruit, where Karen Mattern penned what could only be termed an anti-creed screed. Karen talks about her strong impulse to escape what she considers the excessively credal focus of her native Catholicism. In my case, though, I can hardly claim to be reacting against my upbringing. My parents always encouraged us kids to think for ourselves, in an environment that was neither hostile toward religion nor favored one religion over another. We took turns reading and discussing the Bible and (eventually) other sacred texts at regular family religion meetings, and all views were welcome as long as we could argue persuasively for them. (I remember how much this used to bother my conservative Methodist grandmother. “Why don’t you take those kids to church and teach them what to think?” she once snapped at my mother.)

The upshot? One of my brothers had a conversion experience and joined a Christian church, while the other remains indifferent to the claims of organized religion. For my part, as readers of this blog may have sensed, despite a strong interest in religion, I have never been able to commit to a single one. To me, this is like going into a Baskin-Robbins and being told that, whichever of the 32 flavors you pick, forever after you can only order that flavor.* I’ve become something of an intellectual chameleon: I change colors to match whatever I am reading at the moment. “Via Negativa”? Perhaps it’s to preserve my own psychic health that I prefer to let my most strongly held convictions take a negative form.

Negative propositions have played a pivotal role in my thinking since at least the age of fifteen, when I read Masanobu Fukuoka’s lyrical book about natural farming, The One-Straw Revolution, with its central insight that humanity knows nothing. Armed with this conviction, the author says, he was led to pioneer a productive and ecologically sound method of farming which, in contrast to modern industrial agriculture, approaches each problem by asking, “How about not trying this? How about not trying that?” Following nature meant, above all, cultivating one’s mind to appreciate the way things tend to happen on their own, and making as few modifications to these natural processes as possible. As an enthusiastic vegetable gardener who had recently published an article in Organic Gardening magazine entitled “An Experimental Garden,” I was enormously surprised and impressed.

The translator’s footnotes led me to Daoism, in the form of D. C. Lau’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, and the opening verse changed the way I thought about metaphysical questions for good.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.

Though I might now prefer a slightly different translation – one that treats Dao more as a verb than a noun – Lau’s translation still seems designed for maximum impact on the worldview of an essence-obsessed Westerner.

Shortly thereafter I discovered some of D.T. Suzuki’s writings on Zen, and began my acquaintance with the Buddhist theory of the self (or rather, no-self) – still the only psychological tradition I can claim any familiarity with. Seven or eight years later, a chance reference in another book about growing food (I think maybe one of Wendell Berry’s, but I can’t recall for sure) led me to Peter Kropotkin, and the great, sadly misunderstood and under-appreciated tradition of Western anarchism. Kropotkin’s views dovetailed with, and greatly expanded upon, political insights I’d gleaned from philosophical Daoism. Along the way I also grappled with such books as Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. Once I got beyond the shock of realizing that “the emperor has no clothes,” I started turning the questions back on myself, trying to get to the root of our shared assumptions about how the world works, or ought to work. Eventually, I even rejected anarchism, reasoning that as an anarchist my first duty was to free my mind from a subservient relationship to a set of received opinions.

I resisted making a systematic study of any of these influences, believing that insights imported from others are never truly earned. The point is not to be able to claim ownership of an idea, whatever that might mean, but to be able to appreciate its full impact. Plus, I enjoy playing around with ideas; I am far from sharing Buddhism’s disdain for the “monkey of the mind.” Given any new idea, I tend to immediately consider its antithesis, and then try to judge how large the apparent gulf between thesis and antithesis really is, and whether it might be bridged. That virtually reflexive impulse to counter with “How about not?” has proven to be enormously useful to me. I thought it might be fun to list a few of my favorite contrarian stating-points, to give my readers a better idea of where the heck I’m coming from.

Here’s the caveat. Just as the articles of faith in a regular, positivist credo are things one aspires to realize more fully in one’s day-to-day thoughts and actions, so are the non-articles in my anti-creed. The fact that I list them here doesn’t mean that I have fully absorbed their impact or worked out all their implications. They are non-articles in the sense that the form they happen to take here is completely arbitrary. In fact, merely allowing them to coalesce in this fashion may damage their utility for me, because, above all, I view these as starting points for reflection rather than objects of intellectual assent. In no particular order, then:

I don’t believe that “life” has “meaning” in the sense of some knowable purpose. To think otherwise is to reduce a multiplicity, which at best can be experienced as a gestalt, to a limited and tool-like shadow-life.

I don’t believe in the idea of progress, whether in personal, social or evolutionary history. In the long run, as my friend Tom points out, we are all a null set. Salvation occurs in the present or not at all (see next-to-last non-article, below).

I don’t believe that coercion, punishment or retribution can ever be anything but regrettable. Killing wild animals for meat or killing another human being in self-defense may be necessary, but imposing one’s will on another is never of any benefit to the other. It is a criminal’s empathy for his/her former victim, not punishment, that brings about remorse and (with luck) efforts at restitution. True justice works to restore harmony, not to perpetuate disharmony.

I don’t believe in hierarchies. While they may sometimes serve a limited, heuristic purpose, hierarchical structures, methodologies and ideologies are little more than extensions of ego, and work to hamper the freedom (political, intellectual, and spiritual) of those who use them as well as those whom they seek to define.

I don’t believe in ownership. The ultimately fruitless attempt to possess is nothing but an enlargement of ego, harming the would-be owner as well as the being, object, idea or portion of space over which ownership is asserted. (The concept of God is most useful as a way of conceptualizing that portion of experience which is fully sovereign and beyond ownership: to a faithful monotheist, virtually everything.)

I don’t believe in essence. “Being” is a falsely reified byproduct of an Indo-European grammatical construct, the copulative verb. This is not an argument for nihilism, because “is not” is simply a derivation of “is.” (The Buddhist concept of Emptiness is most useful as a way to remember the contingent and provisional nature of all things.)

I don’t believe in a unique and singular self. The quest for liberation becomes immeasurably simpler when one realizes that there is nothing to liberate (see also next-to-last non-article below). Whether or not we experience ourselves as unitary individuals is conditioned by culture: many traditional societies have the belief that a person is made up of multiple souls and spirits, for instance. For psychological health, probably only the experience of wholeness is necessary.

I don’t believe in the alienation of subject from object. While discriminatory reasoning is a powerful tool with many obvious applications, those who employ it should beware against its unlimited extension; they risk becoming the sorcerer’s apprentice. (By contrast, the “logic of participation” at the root of magical/animist views is vital to the creation and appreciation of art, music, love – everything that makes life worth living.)

I don’t believe in a mundane level of reality. Life may appear mundane much of the time, but that is because we are not fully awake to it – and/or because we are unwittingly conspiring to perpetuate collective delusions and multiply suffering, our own as well as others’, in the pursuit of ego-gratification. (The non-mundane may take the form of sacrality, comic absurdity, or anything in between.)

I don’t believe in proselytization. For persuasion to remain non-coercive, it must stop short of explicit or implicit threats aimed at the other’s spiritual well-being. Invitations to join a faith community should only ever be offered in a spirit of genuine friendship; otherwise, efforts to increase the numbers of the faithful amount to little more than empty power plays (and will lead to endless schisms).

I don’t believe in the pursuit of personal salvation, liberation or enlightenment. If you make your own advancement a priority, your ability to empathize is fatally compromised – and without empathy, there can be no true understanding. Besides, advancement – a version of “progress” – is an illusion: there is nowhere to advance to beyond the present moment. Liberation seems to be a natural human instinct, just like the instinct for food or sex, but as with these other desires, until we are willing to abandon it at any moment to serve others without a second thought, we remain imprisoned, mired in egotism.

I don’t believe in static creeds, ideologies, or other self-consistent systems of thought. A god that requires assent to propositions as a pre-condition for salvation is no God, but a tyrant. And even for the godless, I think, when the pursuit of intellectual consistency starts to feel compulsive, it’s time to stop. Abstractions are masters incapable of mercy. Repeat after Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I embrace multitudes.”

O.K. that’s enough! I could probably split some of these up or think of one or two others, but these are the monkey bars on which my thoughts most often play.
__________

*Although, in point of fact, I always do get the same flavor of ice cream wherever I go: mint chocolate chip.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Written by the vanquished

This entry is part 7 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the seventh poem in the first section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details. Zweig’s poems will be removed after one week to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

Anyone who has been following this project should be especially interested in today’s effort, which I think showcases my first serious failure of imagination so far. I am not sure whether this is due to the length of Zweig’s poem making sustained focus difficult, or some other factor, but I am struck by the contrast between his lines, which seem so urgent and necessary, and mine, which strike me as dilettantish and ultimately disposable. I’m not fishing for compliments here, and you’re welcome to find things to like in my poem (or to dislike in Zweig’s). I simply want to remind myself that there is no such thing as a failed experiment, as long as one is clear about the design and honest about the results.

The Natural History of Death
by Paul Zweig

      I
I decided at birth to go on living,
Not even my parents convinced me I was wrong. . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 8-26-05]

* * * *

Life History of a Stunt Double

      …Those who were in no hurry to live. – P. Z.

1.
I used to have such a horror of turning back.
The about-face offered two
equally frightening alternatives:
that everything would be the same,
or that it wouldn’t.

Thus muttering, I fix my gaze
a few inches in front of my feet.
While the real actor is off somewhere
rehearsing his lines or stroking his little double,
I strap myself to that perpetual
motion machine they call the horizon.

Even in the womb, I refused to turn.
When my mother tried to evict me, I mooned the world
& the doctors had to pull me out by my ankles.
I started to wail & didn’t stop
for twelve years – or so they tell me.
It sounds like the kind of melodrama
I’ve since come to hate.

But the bad actor in my skinny frame
loved the feel of warm saltwater
coursing down my cheeks, the way it dissolved
the hard outlines of things,
& in the belly, that twist of heat.

2.
The first nonfiction book I read on my own
swarmed with monsters – the kind
that stalked around in scientific skeletons
dragging heavy Latin names through the swamps.
The book had a green cloth cover
& taught a stark, almost Biblical lesson:
that the dinosaurs went extinct because they were slow,
they lived too slowly.
Our quick-thinking ancestors the rats ate all their eggs.

The book’s barbs pointed
in one direction: we can’t go back.
But that summer, my brother & I made a periscope
by mounting mirrors in a cardboard tube,
& we stuck it through a hole in the side
of a huge, empty carton. We crayoned in
all the necessary knobs
& sat in that box for 200 million years,
going back & back
while my brother described everything he saw.
My job was to believe it.

Lush jungles on the other side of history
hid reeking punji traps on legs.
A twig snaps & skyscrapers with teeth
roar into motion.
Where? My god! Where?
My vision seems permanently blurred –
not that I would’ve noticed on my own.
My brother administers a homemade eye exam.
In the next frame, I’m sitting
in an optometrist’s waiting room
squinting at pictures in a magazine
about the fall of Saigon.

Later comes the idea that one big collision
could’ve finished them off – I don’t know.
At the close of the Mesozoic, all over the earth,
flowers open their sexual faces
& for the first time the sun itself has shadows.
I want to believe all that unthinking growth
could be eclipsed by filigree: petals,
feathers. The delicate leather
of a bat’s wing.
A sea of grass.

3.
In the meantime, I have settled
into my body like a stone
at the bottom of a pond.
Sometimes there’s wind, but the leaves
don’t talk. I lie on my back with
my toes chastely touching
& fold linked fingers over my gut.

In the Middle Ages, before
the Black Death teased the skeleton out
of its cage of flesh, & before
that grinning scythe grew wide enough
to split the laugh from its belly,
the mean time was thought to be reached
at the age of thirty-three.
Anyone who could afford it paid for a portrait then
so that when they died, whoever carved their tomb
could capture for the ages
their closest approach to
that fragile equilibrium the Church called Christ.

Churches were true sanctuaries then, beyond
the reach of the state. One knelt
irredeemably on the flagstones, which were also a roof
for the temporarily vacated bodies of one’s predecessors.
But here in the middle of the woods,
in the dead center of my life,
I’m napping. The action is elsewhere.

4.
Growing up on an isolated farm, no TV
meant that I never learned from Mr. Rogers
how to get along.
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?
Is this what you really think, or merely
what you think you should think?
Are you digging a root cellar here,
or a hole for a privy?

I also skipped Kindergarten, reputed source
of everything one really needs to know.
So instead I consider the lilies of the field,
which having escaped their former confines
in the now-abandoned dooryard garden,
extend their dominion up & down the slope.
Each summer their rhizomes double
& double again, strangling the sunlight
in a few more square yards of meadow.
Velvet petals that close after a single day,
pliant leaves that weep mucilage when bruised:
they are part of a clone that might live –
who knows? – forever.
Its loving hope is to make the world
One.

5.
I went wild with obedience, I believed
everything & nothing until belief itself seemed
the most heretical of self-indulgences.
I stopped talking to ghosts, including my own.
Maybe that’s what happened.

Once rid of the madness called youth,
I begin to relish the return journey
as much as the beginning, because
things seen from one side only
seduce the eye. There’s no contest any more
between depth & surface. Let the bones
stay housed, the seed incipient in the bloom.
To hell with life.

I want whatever comes
in its own time, translucent
or wholly opaque, here
& gone.