He would go back to the Thames,
or failing that the Seine,
even the Hudson
would be better than nowhere,
where the Mississippi flows
very little, pushing itelf along
like a coiled serpent inching
through the grass by the bank
of the great river DeSoto said
he had discovered, slitting throats
of infidels who dared object.
They could hardly wait to kill
what they could never understand.
Was it on the way back he lost
and was he the same, white skin
and all, by the Rio Grande . . .
He wanted only to understand.
Times were better than in Spain
or Italy then. He quoted Scripture
when he got in a tight place,
knife against his throat, hushed
anger in the room saying, Do it!
It was the river you made your own.
First you had to learn to swim,
then fish with your bare hands,
then hang from hooks all day,
all night, but that was over there,
they used rifles to defend themselves
and I take up my bowl
in downtown Los Angeles
and walk where I want to go,
my laptop covered with oilskin,
my shoes in sandals from the bin
behind Piggly Wiggly,
enough to make a saint throw up
just smelling what I’m wearing
and no woman in all the time
my feet have searched for love
in the Book’s origins, O where
do I go now and why do I go,
when once there were alternatives,
there was Isabel, there was a life,
scarred as it was, and on this day,
Sunday, she would have awoke
teasing my body into arousal’s
fountain welling up from earth’s
witching wand, and climbing on,
rocking and pushing her nipples
against mine, asking me to come
into her and make her a child
worthy of our anguish, her hips
were large enough for two boys,
she knew this was another poetry
we shared and why not get born
what was rightfully our legacy
after all I had endured, all she
wanted, and no, I said no, please
and called her darling and loved
her the same way as ever, my cock
withdrawing from her cunt before
I orgasm’d, and she knew why
now she would have to go back,
go home, try again what she knew
was her river, the one flowing under
Mexico City, the river that was lake
above, turbulence below a surface
Cortes navigated leading his men
across the causeways to bargain
with the man named Moctezuma
for what he had that was not there
and destroy what was there to own
for Spain everything the New World
promised and would surely give up
once the harquebus spit fire, horses
under spurs, mail clanking, bloody
cascade of bodies falling everywhere
he led them, and Tenochtitlan died
its quick, then slow, then final death,
Cortes choosing the wench Malinche
saying in a language she did not know,
You will give me Moctezuma’s spawn
and tame him to my body’s rhythms
and no one will stop me then. Then
after centuries there has been no end,
no beginning, nowhere in the river
the current returns upon itself. Whirlpool.
That’s why he loves this life of discovery
and follow the impossible where it goes,
and who knows? maybe it will take him
thousands of miles south of Los Angeles
to the city where his true life began,
his real death ended, not London, Paris,
or Vicksburg again. He has his riddle
for the day. The dark skin of Augustine
in the rosy brothels, mother Monica sad
as God’s tears, soothing her prodigal son
back to sleep, where he dreams he tells
everything to a voice that folds him in.
(12 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Saturday, December 11, 2010
The Scene Before You
Chandler Brossard edited a book with this title in 1955, a kind of taxonomy of American culture notable then for its sociological acuity but now barely remembered, though still highly regarded for its time, among his own novels, stories, and essays, both journalistic and personal. I have the good fortune of being reminded of his work through the unexpected friendship of his daughter Iris, who is living in St. Cloud, Minnesota, a few hours south of Bemidji, where I live; she is a doctor lured to the region somehow, but lucky for me as well as those she serves. In the sixties, when I was living in Seattle, I found her father’s novel The Bold Saboteurs (1953), and still have that copy inscribed with the name of one of my oldest friends, Anthony Lehman of Berkeley. Returning to the book now, I am reminded of a tone similar to the voice running through Louis-Ferdinand Celine and his Journey to the End of the Night (1932) as well as his Death on the Installment Plan (1936). Yet the comparison is misleading: Brossard evokes a very different temper–a humanity that exhibits a greater care for his fellow creatures, setting himself the difficult but necessary task of any ambitious writer, to imagine himself entering into his characters’ condition (attempting, that is, to get as near the core of that condition as humanly possible)–what the philosopher Edith Stein called einfuhlung, the subject of her 1917 dissertation for Edmund Husserl (its 1964 translation by Waltraut Stein, her grand niece, entitled On the Problem of Empathy). After converting from Judaism to Catholicism, and becoming a nun, Edith Stein was sent by the Nazis to die at Auschwitz in 1942; an informative essay on her by Patricia Hampl appears in Martyrs, edited by Susan Bergman (1996).(11 December 2010)
Brossard is a rarity in American literature, unsung but, for me at least, the author of prose that still evokes not only great vitality but a street wisdom that must be compared (and more favorably, in my opinion) with Mailer’s fifties and early sixties period (particularly as presented in his Advertisements for Myself of 1959) as well as Kerouac’s body of prose fiction, especially the original scroll version of On the Road finally published a few years ago and a stand-alone gem in the light of the 1957 book edited by the nevertheless great Malcolm Cowley. Those infatuated with that recent comet named Jonathan Franzen might discover a new sign in the sky, one aloft a long while, simply from reading Brossard’s books, which include, in addition to The Bold Saboteurs and others, his first novel Who Walk in Darkness (1952), as well as Over the Rainbow? Hardly: Collected Short Seizures (compiled 2005), both edited by Steven Moore, and the Chandler Brossard issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 1987).
I am mourning the death of the poet Ai. She died in her sixty-second year in the spring of this year: March 19. Her eighth and final book, No Surrender, has just appeared. I cannot recommend her work highly enough: Cruelty; Killing Floor (1978 recipient of the Lamont Poetry Award); Sin (1986 winner of the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award), Fate (1991), Greed (1993), Vice: New and Selected Poems (1999 recipient of the National Book Award), and Dread (2003)–the seven books she was alive to see through publication. For those who wish to know more about her–and she is like no other poet–send a check for $7 to the Cimarron Review, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, and ask for a copy of issue no. 173, the Fall 2010 issue dedicated entirely to her, and published where she was teaching at the time of her death from breast cancer. I can recommend three websites where Ai (Japanese for "love") receives worthy attention: Poets.org, of the Academy of American Poets; Modern American Poetry of the University of Illinois; and This Black Sista’s Page, out of Wisconsin (or so I gather from the page’s posting of gas prices in Madison).
I had the luck to meet Ai at the Bisbee Poetry Festival in 1983. We were both coming off failed marriages at the time and met the night both of us arrived, and days later shared a gratifying afternoon on the deck of the Copper Queen Hotel. She spoke with gracious admiration of my long poem "Bellocq’s Daybook," which I’d read on the same bill with Robert Duncan the night before she shared the stage with Philip Levine to close the festival. I told her the story of the fallout from my reading of her first book, Cruelty, published in 1973. I touted it to everyone I knew in Amherst, where I had come to do the MFA at the University of Massachusetts. One afternoon, walking into Cronopios Books (named for Julio Cortazar’s Cronopios and Famas, whose translation by Paul Blackburn gave it the cachet it deserved in the United States). I was greeted by the owner Jon (whose surname I no longer recall), exclaiming jovially: "Cruelty is selling like hotcakes!" And in my last reading in Amherst I prefaced my own poems by reading Ai’s "Cuba 1962," which she told me in Bisbee was the poem she considered her breakthrough piece.
Cuba 1962
When the rooster jumps up on the windowsill
and spreads his red-gold wings,
I wake, thinking it is the sun
and call Juanita, hearing her answer,
but only in my mind.
I know she is already outside,
breaking the cane off at ground level,
using only her big hands.
I get the machete and walk among the cane,
until I see her, lying face-down in the dirt.
Juanita, dead in the morning like this.
I raise the machete–
what I take from the earth, I give back–
and cut off her feet.
I lift the body and carry it to the wagon,
where I load the cane to sell in the village.
Whoever tastes my woman in his candy, his cake,
tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane;
it is grief.
If you eat too much of it, you want more,
you can never get enough.
Finally, I doubt the work of the late poet Deborah Digges needs my imprimatur, but I discovered it only recently and have read it carefully and deliberately, and consider it among the best poetry of the last two decades. Before she fell to her death in Amherst in April 2009, she had composed a body of truly powerful work, a highly accomplished poet whose poetry possesses a frail but unmistakable beauty and has the kind of staying power that will endure, I’m sure. Her posthumous collection of poetry, published this past April, The Wind Blows through the Doors of My Heart, followed four books of poems, Vesper Sparrows 1986), Late in the Millennium (1989), Rough Music (1995), and Trapeze (2004). She wrote two memoirs, Fugitive Spring: Coming of Age in the ’50s and ’60s (1992) and Stardust Lounge: Stories from a Boy’s Adolescence (2001), the latter concerning her experience as the mother of an antiauthoritarian son whose farewell to his mother ends the book: "Thanks for a wonderful childhood!" She was born and raised in rural Missouri, in a family of ten children. At her death, an apparent suicide at age fifty-nine, she was a professor of English at Tufts University, near Boston, though she lived in Amherst. Here’s a poem from her final book:
Write a Book a Year
Well the wild ride into the earth was thrilling,
really, scared as I was and torn and sore.
I say what other woman could have managed it?
My life before then
picking flowers against my destiny
what glance, what meeting,
who was watching, what we don’t know we know,
the hour we chose and we are chosen.
And suddenly the dead my mission,
the dark my mission.
He’d find me pounding out the hours.
Spring is for women, spring clawing at our hearts.
We are pulled forward by our hair
to be anointed in the barren garden.
I want the dark back, the bloody well of it,
my face before the fire,
or lie alone on the cold stone and find a way
to sleep awhile, wake clear and wander.
Brossard is a rarity in American literature, unsung but, for me at least, the author of prose that still evokes not only great vitality but a street wisdom that must be compared (and more favorably, in my opinion) with Mailer’s fifties and early sixties period (particularly as presented in his Advertisements for Myself of 1959) as well as Kerouac’s body of prose fiction, especially the original scroll version of On the Road finally published a few years ago and a stand-alone gem in the light of the 1957 book edited by the nevertheless great Malcolm Cowley. Those infatuated with that recent comet named Jonathan Franzen might discover a new sign in the sky, one aloft a long while, simply from reading Brossard’s books, which include, in addition to The Bold Saboteurs and others, his first novel Who Walk in Darkness (1952), as well as Over the Rainbow? Hardly: Collected Short Seizures (compiled 2005), both edited by Steven Moore, and the Chandler Brossard issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 1987).
I am mourning the death of the poet Ai. She died in her sixty-second year in the spring of this year: March 19. Her eighth and final book, No Surrender, has just appeared. I cannot recommend her work highly enough: Cruelty; Killing Floor (1978 recipient of the Lamont Poetry Award); Sin (1986 winner of the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award), Fate (1991), Greed (1993), Vice: New and Selected Poems (1999 recipient of the National Book Award), and Dread (2003)–the seven books she was alive to see through publication. For those who wish to know more about her–and she is like no other poet–send a check for $7 to the Cimarron Review, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, and ask for a copy of issue no. 173, the Fall 2010 issue dedicated entirely to her, and published where she was teaching at the time of her death from breast cancer. I can recommend three websites where Ai (Japanese for "love") receives worthy attention: Poets.org, of the Academy of American Poets; Modern American Poetry of the University of Illinois; and This Black Sista’s Page, out of Wisconsin (or so I gather from the page’s posting of gas prices in Madison).
I had the luck to meet Ai at the Bisbee Poetry Festival in 1983. We were both coming off failed marriages at the time and met the night both of us arrived, and days later shared a gratifying afternoon on the deck of the Copper Queen Hotel. She spoke with gracious admiration of my long poem "Bellocq’s Daybook," which I’d read on the same bill with Robert Duncan the night before she shared the stage with Philip Levine to close the festival. I told her the story of the fallout from my reading of her first book, Cruelty, published in 1973. I touted it to everyone I knew in Amherst, where I had come to do the MFA at the University of Massachusetts. One afternoon, walking into Cronopios Books (named for Julio Cortazar’s Cronopios and Famas, whose translation by Paul Blackburn gave it the cachet it deserved in the United States). I was greeted by the owner Jon (whose surname I no longer recall), exclaiming jovially: "Cruelty is selling like hotcakes!" And in my last reading in Amherst I prefaced my own poems by reading Ai’s "Cuba 1962," which she told me in Bisbee was the poem she considered her breakthrough piece.
Cuba 1962
When the rooster jumps up on the windowsill
and spreads his red-gold wings,
I wake, thinking it is the sun
and call Juanita, hearing her answer,
but only in my mind.
I know she is already outside,
breaking the cane off at ground level,
using only her big hands.
I get the machete and walk among the cane,
until I see her, lying face-down in the dirt.
Juanita, dead in the morning like this.
I raise the machete–
what I take from the earth, I give back–
and cut off her feet.
I lift the body and carry it to the wagon,
where I load the cane to sell in the village.
Whoever tastes my woman in his candy, his cake,
tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane;
it is grief.
If you eat too much of it, you want more,
you can never get enough.
Finally, I doubt the work of the late poet Deborah Digges needs my imprimatur, but I discovered it only recently and have read it carefully and deliberately, and consider it among the best poetry of the last two decades. Before she fell to her death in Amherst in April 2009, she had composed a body of truly powerful work, a highly accomplished poet whose poetry possesses a frail but unmistakable beauty and has the kind of staying power that will endure, I’m sure. Her posthumous collection of poetry, published this past April, The Wind Blows through the Doors of My Heart, followed four books of poems, Vesper Sparrows 1986), Late in the Millennium (1989), Rough Music (1995), and Trapeze (2004). She wrote two memoirs, Fugitive Spring: Coming of Age in the ’50s and ’60s (1992) and Stardust Lounge: Stories from a Boy’s Adolescence (2001), the latter concerning her experience as the mother of an antiauthoritarian son whose farewell to his mother ends the book: "Thanks for a wonderful childhood!" She was born and raised in rural Missouri, in a family of ten children. At her death, an apparent suicide at age fifty-nine, she was a professor of English at Tufts University, near Boston, though she lived in Amherst. Here’s a poem from her final book:
Write a Book a Year
Well the wild ride into the earth was thrilling,
really, scared as I was and torn and sore.
I say what other woman could have managed it?
My life before then
picking flowers against my destiny
what glance, what meeting,
who was watching, what we don’t know we know,
the hour we chose and we are chosen.
And suddenly the dead my mission,
the dark my mission.
He’d find me pounding out the hours.
Spring is for women, spring clawing at our hearts.
We are pulled forward by our hair
to be anointed in the barren garden.
I want the dark back, the bloody well of it,
my face before the fire,
or lie alone on the cold stone and find a way
to sleep awhile, wake clear and wander.
Three Poems
THE ROOMS
to L. A.
Of all worlds, this one is yours.
Not the sunny world of laughter.
Nor the dour world sad to the core.
No. This one is yours. You are love’s
miracle. You live where light floods
your body. Your dark eyes buoys.
Your body a hymn to the Jerusalems
there are, as many as are inhabited
by words. And this is my room.
I rent your heart without a lease.
Soon these pockets, threadbare,
will lose what I carried there.
A pagan with too little care
for his own heart’s core.
(11 December 2010)
SATURN’S CHILDREN
after Goya
Look how he devours his spawn, ravenous father:
Clutching his child’s body with both hands
shoving what remains into the maw
of corruption. The dead child’s blood
dripping from his gulping, wheezing, gasping stare . . .
Eyes crazed. No portals there to soul.
How you survived, my love, I do not and can
never know the pain that haunts the light in your eyes.
Goya balancing his bent body on two canes,
white hair flourishing, eyes alert, in search
of monsters disguised as reason,
in the year of his death: "And still I learn."
again, to L.
(II: 11 December 2010)
YOUR BOWL
L.,
is your way of learning to live,
from blood to bone to flesh to breathe
your one way, and if love fills the hollow
this vessel holds all you are on your own
amid the melee, the city in ruins.
I, late for my baptismal, chose to run
with wolves. Prodigal, who would tend,
nurture the calm that feeds your solitude?
Having asked, I stir the fire, till the earth,
broadcast our seed, water the air we breathe
–only when the line between life and death
is frozen in my tongue, hot on my face,
mouth empty with fear, do I fill your bowl
with one word forsaken by all others.
Drink long. Remember me. My love for you,
yours for me, remain long after you go
to be what you are, were always, will ever be
in the moon’s ghetto, the sun’s bright garden.
When we disappear, what there was of us
that was true will appear in our shared dream.
(III: 11 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
to L. A.
Of all worlds, this one is yours.
Not the sunny world of laughter.
Nor the dour world sad to the core.
No. This one is yours. You are love’s
miracle. You live where light floods
your body. Your dark eyes buoys.
Your body a hymn to the Jerusalems
there are, as many as are inhabited
by words. And this is my room.
I rent your heart without a lease.
Soon these pockets, threadbare,
will lose what I carried there.
A pagan with too little care
for his own heart’s core.
(11 December 2010)
SATURN’S CHILDREN
after Goya
Look how he devours his spawn, ravenous father:
Clutching his child’s body with both hands
shoving what remains into the maw
of corruption. The dead child’s blood
dripping from his gulping, wheezing, gasping stare . . .
Eyes crazed. No portals there to soul.
How you survived, my love, I do not and can
never know the pain that haunts the light in your eyes.
Goya balancing his bent body on two canes,
white hair flourishing, eyes alert, in search
of monsters disguised as reason,
in the year of his death: "And still I learn."
again, to L.
(II: 11 December 2010)
YOUR BOWL
L.,
is your way of learning to live,
from blood to bone to flesh to breathe
your one way, and if love fills the hollow
this vessel holds all you are on your own
amid the melee, the city in ruins.
I, late for my baptismal, chose to run
with wolves. Prodigal, who would tend,
nurture the calm that feeds your solitude?
Having asked, I stir the fire, till the earth,
broadcast our seed, water the air we breathe
–only when the line between life and death
is frozen in my tongue, hot on my face,
mouth empty with fear, do I fill your bowl
with one word forsaken by all others.
Drink long. Remember me. My love for you,
yours for me, remain long after you go
to be what you are, were always, will ever be
in the moon’s ghetto, the sun’s bright garden.
When we disappear, what there was of us
that was true will appear in our shared dream.
(III: 11 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
Friday, December 10, 2010
Cartographer
O where is your bowl, romero?
Here’s the old boot. Hits bottom when the heel
touches earth. My element. Jar up dust,
ashes everywhere. My dead. Who did not
ask to be buried. Throw the shovel in
the sea. God damn the fury of a God
who can’t forgive Its abandoned people.
I wanted only that my flesh be soft
when warm and laced with yours, Gamine. I flee
no one. I pick up my bedroll and take
leave. I run the street with eyes that see all
they have ever seen and more, with the stakes
so much to forgive. The ravens. The gulls.
How they fly without warring in the blear
skies, colliding, falling–how do I make
contrition here where I do not believe
and where would I go, how tell the rabbi
of one night so long ago how I wished
to be free by going where I could not
be seen or heard. When he asked why, I said
a litany of woes, each one from heel
to toe, my words an awkward pas de deux.
Through the glass, ravens tracked the snow. And east,
I knew gulls were searching Atlantic shores
for winter food. I wanted them with me.
Go south and they are gone when you get there.
Always. There’s no time to dawdle, Pilgrim.
Sleep in Cynosure, North Star bright enough
to light the long way. If I’d gone. I’m here.
Still. The dust, the ashes fog. I know where
I go next. But can’t see. Good thing I stayed
this side of the equator. Good thing. Breath stays
beyond leavetaking. I’m where I could weep
but won’t. I would laugh but why? How summon
either extreme, I know the way is long
and the flesh weighs its bones. All I know is
I want you, Gamine, I can’t weep or smile.
I shake with desire. I lift the bedroll,
lighter than before. Where is your pillow
for my head between your breasts. I lose all
if you go. I have no needs. My body
is a sieve, my mind a net. So many
bowing East, South, West, North . . . Not me.
I take a stick to put under one arm
and walk that way, best I can. You would think
I could find a way out of where I am,
I was here a long autumn. Is it you
stirred my bones? Was it your map I found here?
I need to find a place to sit, to work,
to love, to sleep, to work again, to love
again, but how do I to eat? How do you?
Where to sit, how to stand, go where we move:
What would it be to relive what it is
to be alive. Over there. Let the waves
shift the tide. Or signal the change, breaking
the opposite way, taking us along,
if only in our imagination.
There is also the Center. It is where
the binding together of all our wounds
takes place. Think of how it will mend our hearts.
Inside, through us, runs a river our own.
Cartographer, your lips on my lips burn.
I hold your hand and trace the river’s flow.
(10 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
Here’s the old boot. Hits bottom when the heel
touches earth. My element. Jar up dust,
ashes everywhere. My dead. Who did not
ask to be buried. Throw the shovel in
the sea. God damn the fury of a God
who can’t forgive Its abandoned people.
I wanted only that my flesh be soft
when warm and laced with yours, Gamine. I flee
no one. I pick up my bedroll and take
leave. I run the street with eyes that see all
they have ever seen and more, with the stakes
so much to forgive. The ravens. The gulls.
How they fly without warring in the blear
skies, colliding, falling–how do I make
contrition here where I do not believe
and where would I go, how tell the rabbi
of one night so long ago how I wished
to be free by going where I could not
be seen or heard. When he asked why, I said
a litany of woes, each one from heel
to toe, my words an awkward pas de deux.
Through the glass, ravens tracked the snow. And east,
I knew gulls were searching Atlantic shores
for winter food. I wanted them with me.
Go south and they are gone when you get there.
Always. There’s no time to dawdle, Pilgrim.
Sleep in Cynosure, North Star bright enough
to light the long way. If I’d gone. I’m here.
Still. The dust, the ashes fog. I know where
I go next. But can’t see. Good thing I stayed
this side of the equator. Good thing. Breath stays
beyond leavetaking. I’m where I could weep
but won’t. I would laugh but why? How summon
either extreme, I know the way is long
and the flesh weighs its bones. All I know is
I want you, Gamine, I can’t weep or smile.
I shake with desire. I lift the bedroll,
lighter than before. Where is your pillow
for my head between your breasts. I lose all
if you go. I have no needs. My body
is a sieve, my mind a net. So many
bowing East, South, West, North . . . Not me.
I take a stick to put under one arm
and walk that way, best I can. You would think
I could find a way out of where I am,
I was here a long autumn. Is it you
stirred my bones? Was it your map I found here?
I need to find a place to sit, to work,
to love, to sleep, to work again, to love
again, but how do I to eat? How do you?
Where to sit, how to stand, go where we move:
What would it be to relive what it is
to be alive. Over there. Let the waves
shift the tide. Or signal the change, breaking
the opposite way, taking us along,
if only in our imagination.
There is also the Center. It is where
the binding together of all our wounds
takes place. Think of how it will mend our hearts.
Inside, through us, runs a river our own.
Cartographer, your lips on my lips burn.
I hold your hand and trace the river’s flow.
(10 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
Thursday, December 9, 2010
My Vallejo
If I lived with a bowl beside me here,
where I do live, and had little more
to eat but the crow plucked over a fire,
needs only stirring and smoldering
rekindles and the searing enters meat
so succulent by then I can only eat
your burnished, aging but beautiful
flesh, You would be my bowl, crow,
and I would look for you everywhere,
not wait, not think, not wince or sigh
about my condition, like what I am,
on fire with words, and one woman
works without end giving her love
to my survival, while you wait . . .
Do you know the story about how
Vallejo died, Georgette by his side
and Cesar’s lover on the other side
of his final bed, letting the rain serve
as metronome to words that remained
unsaid, gone swirling with his ashes
into sky and its attendant beloveds,
the clouds, do you know how they
came to be there and why they stayed,
I will tell you, Gamine, when I see you.
I would eat crow to fulfill a promise
or two, those I have made to her
and kept so long through the fire
and this to you, my banked fire.
And on a Thursday, raining, black
stone next to white stone, a yoke
between all the bones not shoulders,
and the soft bone this lover clothes
with your flesh, and Vallejo speaks
words no one can English, but hear
like church bells in Cuetzalan, Mexico,
ring out above a cemetery rich with
peonies, the other cathedral spired
by Cuauhtemoc drawing his spear
back until those bells stop, the others
continue, followed by Beethoven, Bach,
or were the year I climbed there to die.
The doctor lives in the center of jungle
and there’s one path only. Why he was
named Vallejo God knew, his brother
in prison in the City, their namesake
buried in Pierre Lachaise Cemetery,
in Paris, or so I hear. He invites me in
and says I may stay a thousand years.
(9 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
where I do live, and had little more
to eat but the crow plucked over a fire,
needs only stirring and smoldering
rekindles and the searing enters meat
so succulent by then I can only eat
your burnished, aging but beautiful
flesh, You would be my bowl, crow,
and I would look for you everywhere,
not wait, not think, not wince or sigh
about my condition, like what I am,
on fire with words, and one woman
works without end giving her love
to my survival, while you wait . . .
Do you know the story about how
Vallejo died, Georgette by his side
and Cesar’s lover on the other side
of his final bed, letting the rain serve
as metronome to words that remained
unsaid, gone swirling with his ashes
into sky and its attendant beloveds,
the clouds, do you know how they
came to be there and why they stayed,
I will tell you, Gamine, when I see you.
I would eat crow to fulfill a promise
or two, those I have made to her
and kept so long through the fire
and this to you, my banked fire.
And on a Thursday, raining, black
stone next to white stone, a yoke
between all the bones not shoulders,
and the soft bone this lover clothes
with your flesh, and Vallejo speaks
words no one can English, but hear
like church bells in Cuetzalan, Mexico,
ring out above a cemetery rich with
peonies, the other cathedral spired
by Cuauhtemoc drawing his spear
back until those bells stop, the others
continue, followed by Beethoven, Bach,
or were the year I climbed there to die.
The doctor lives in the center of jungle
and there’s one path only. Why he was
named Vallejo God knew, his brother
in prison in the City, their namesake
buried in Pierre Lachaise Cemetery,
in Paris, or so I hear. He invites me in
and says I may stay a thousand years.
(9 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
The Bowl He Fills
for Isabel Fraire
He moves from place to place, one lair of angels
to another. His laptop goes everywhere. With him
the bowl is hollow because he has not much time
to unriddle the truth of the Coptics come Shabbat,
all the unknown integers that pass through to stay
when he burrs up the processor to go Googling
and now Binging–bonging will be next on line,
after goggling–as he keeps going until he must
move again.
Los Angeles is warm at least. When smog lifts,
as it does now, the sun gives solace. It shines
down on him and the other angels whose houses
have a basement or an attic where he can sleep,
work, be alive like he needs to be. He does not
ask much. Always gets more. Time to work
through another link in the chain going back
to the beginning, year 1, and beyond.
Beggar bowl. Hollow? Only if you have patience
for no one. What year is this? They cadge smokes
and wheedle what they can out of empty pockets.
It’s okay, L. A., I put in my time, paid my fines . . .
I get by, but I’m holy with poetry. I once wrote
the stuff, and like all saints am glad I suffered,
if suffer I did. I no longer write poems, I eat
when I have a little food. I’m like Blanche,
surviving only on the kindness of strangers . . .
Or so the little devil in my head would have it.
It’s 2000. MacArthur Park is always open, yes.
The cops break up the manifestaciones, like
Mexico when last I lived there. No need to be
remembering. I lived it. I want to figure out now
how Jesus, born Jew, became the revolutionary
and everything else under the mythology grows
thick as jungle, to be cut through with machete.
But don’t remember. Pack up. Move again.
He won’t shave his head. He cut off his beard,
rather the interrogators did, part procedural,
part humiliating. What was the difference?
Don’t worry it. It stays. You didn’t want it to,
but it does. You go back to the laptop, to work.
He does what he can the rest of the day inside.
He goes out. Wilshire is what it always is, busy
with the damned looking for a way out of hell.
This guy wants to do a book if I can write down
the people I knew. My life lately, since I died
surviving a river of a lifetime’s ink. Hence,
What Ever Happened: "In 1965, in Harper’s,
Kenneth Rexroth asked ‘a dozen poets
of unquestioned ability and of the most
disparate tastes’ to name poets under thirty-five
whom they considered the best. ‘The names
that occured most often were Gary Snyder,
Tim Reynolds, Adrienne Rich and Thom Gunn,’"
reads the book’s back cover.
Go buy it, Pasquale, and read it for yourself.
Keep it stocked, Abner, even if books are passe
and encrypted to ensure they all be mass produced
and on line only, where I am now, translating
again. How I began reading classics in original
Augustine, say: I was a sinner and wanted to sin
until God prevented me from pursuing my shame
and why it followed me, giving me my bearings,
helping me slide through the clashing rocks,
the breeze off these calm waters abiding me now
where my mind goes on searching for the storm’s
origin.
It’s all I can do to make myself clear in the vain
hope I am another. Somewhere. Even the world
will go dark, and after that where will we be?
Between the temple and synagogue, the church
and the desert? All this I still do not and may
never know but want what I never knew I missed
until the days of my life left filling a hollow bowl
began.
(8 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
He moves from place to place, one lair of angels
to another. His laptop goes everywhere. With him
the bowl is hollow because he has not much time
to unriddle the truth of the Coptics come Shabbat,
all the unknown integers that pass through to stay
when he burrs up the processor to go Googling
and now Binging–bonging will be next on line,
after goggling–as he keeps going until he must
move again.
Los Angeles is warm at least. When smog lifts,
as it does now, the sun gives solace. It shines
down on him and the other angels whose houses
have a basement or an attic where he can sleep,
work, be alive like he needs to be. He does not
ask much. Always gets more. Time to work
through another link in the chain going back
to the beginning, year 1, and beyond.
Beggar bowl. Hollow? Only if you have patience
for no one. What year is this? They cadge smokes
and wheedle what they can out of empty pockets.
It’s okay, L. A., I put in my time, paid my fines . . .
I get by, but I’m holy with poetry. I once wrote
the stuff, and like all saints am glad I suffered,
if suffer I did. I no longer write poems, I eat
when I have a little food. I’m like Blanche,
surviving only on the kindness of strangers . . .
Or so the little devil in my head would have it.
It’s 2000. MacArthur Park is always open, yes.
The cops break up the manifestaciones, like
Mexico when last I lived there. No need to be
remembering. I lived it. I want to figure out now
how Jesus, born Jew, became the revolutionary
and everything else under the mythology grows
thick as jungle, to be cut through with machete.
But don’t remember. Pack up. Move again.
He won’t shave his head. He cut off his beard,
rather the interrogators did, part procedural,
part humiliating. What was the difference?
Don’t worry it. It stays. You didn’t want it to,
but it does. You go back to the laptop, to work.
He does what he can the rest of the day inside.
He goes out. Wilshire is what it always is, busy
with the damned looking for a way out of hell.
This guy wants to do a book if I can write down
the people I knew. My life lately, since I died
surviving a river of a lifetime’s ink. Hence,
What Ever Happened: "In 1965, in Harper’s,
Kenneth Rexroth asked ‘a dozen poets
of unquestioned ability and of the most
disparate tastes’ to name poets under thirty-five
whom they considered the best. ‘The names
that occured most often were Gary Snyder,
Tim Reynolds, Adrienne Rich and Thom Gunn,’"
reads the book’s back cover.
Go buy it, Pasquale, and read it for yourself.
Keep it stocked, Abner, even if books are passe
and encrypted to ensure they all be mass produced
and on line only, where I am now, translating
again. How I began reading classics in original
Augustine, say: I was a sinner and wanted to sin
until God prevented me from pursuing my shame
and why it followed me, giving me my bearings,
helping me slide through the clashing rocks,
the breeze off these calm waters abiding me now
where my mind goes on searching for the storm’s
origin.
It’s all I can do to make myself clear in the vain
hope I am another. Somewhere. Even the world
will go dark, and after that where will we be?
Between the temple and synagogue, the church
and the desert? All this I still do not and may
never know but want what I never knew I missed
until the days of my life left filling a hollow bowl
began.
(8 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
Isabel at Dawn
(beginning a sequence, The Hollow Bowl)
She dreams she is a peasant girl
taught to do what her mother asks,
her father smiling across the table.
She takes the pitcher empty to the spring,
brings it back full, pours it into the place
her father says, mother looking on.
It is still dark when she fills the pitcher,
dawn when she follows her wet feet back.
Light divides. She wakes, remembers.
She puts both feet over the bed. He sighs
in the Spanish he is learning faster
than the Greek, Latin, French, Italian,
Russian he already knows. It is she
he sought all his life, he knows now,
her small round face with its soft skin
drew him to the hall that night filled
con aficionados de la poeta Octavio Paz.
He saw her brush by, felt her small body
before he turned and laughed at himself
as she, startled, met his eyes with her smile.
They listened together to Paz say his words
precisely yet warmly, building poems
until they climbed down the other side
and up again as far as the flesh.
Paz said later he recognized her face
from the back cover of her Solo esta luz,
uttered the worn refrain of critics about her
and Emily Dickinson. Now next time
they could meet like old friends, he chuckled.
And this gringo? Southern boy, says he,
once from Natchez, Mississippi, grew up
along the river, saved up money catfish
crawling, worked the town with a wiry body
under his head bursting with words of light,
and went north, where I learned English,
he laughed. Paz nodded. Isabel looked
at his face and how it grew out of his body
as small as her own. Paz gave him un abrazo,
she una abraza fuerte. They went into the street.
A Mina y Buenavista, en hotel Londres,
she slept with him after she, trembling, told
him of her two sons living with their father,
the only time until years later he would hear
her voice break, this powerfully quiet woman
who stayed with him in that box of a room.
So small she dreamed she loved this gringo
so much she waited while the federales beat
him raw in Lecumberri nine days and nights
until convinced he would never speak again
of this, they put him on a plane that flew him
out of Mexico. Never to return. Isabel arrived
finally. Her mischievous smile had grown equal
to her need to love this man proudly, completely.
He talked endlessly then. It was not like him
to talk and talk and talk. He said, I’m teaching
Aristophanes, the play I translated last summer
in our room, The Peace. I’m writing this poem,
Que . . . She wanted to make love, feel his body,
know the depth of hers now. He quit his job,
the one he had many years. Told Bill Arrowsmith
what he had to do, how he’d miss learning
more from him, the finest Englisher of all,
said he, loving Austin, the only place in Texas
he did not feel estranged from America,
not like a Mississippi lad with nothing but words
for passport, learning from cab drivers, bartenders,
Verzcruz putas. Met people, listened, imagined
his skin a hollow bowl desperate for dinero
and learning a language of demand, el pueblo
and their voices, la manifestacion de la exigencia,
heard their tales and filled in what was left out,
but couldn’t stop the choppers raining down fire,
granaderos bursting on the plaza of Tlatelolco,
extracting death as usual to have their way,
sons of Moctezuma they aped, no Xochimilco
floating with flowery kisses and Chapultepec
impervious in its lovely facade to the misery
of the people of a Mexico always somewhere else.
Oaxaca? Merida? Guatemala, where the gringa
with her fluent tongue passed by border guards
with a passenger with forged papers who let her
do the talking as she drove and having arrived
he took his case from under the car and waved
as she drove home and he went to oil his weapons.
No, none of this now. They agreed upon London.
Lived there happily, mostly. They wrote all day,
living on what she could make dispatching English
life back to D. F. in Spanish, for by then what only
Paz once knew even norteamericanos could recall–
her names the name of her mother and father’s
whose dinero filled a hollow bowl and emptied,
her heart went home to see her sons and her book
through its birthpangs and its christening there,
Poemas en el regazo de la muerte, where she stayed.
for Tim Reynolds
(7 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
She dreams she is a peasant girl
taught to do what her mother asks,
her father smiling across the table.
She takes the pitcher empty to the spring,
brings it back full, pours it into the place
her father says, mother looking on.
It is still dark when she fills the pitcher,
dawn when she follows her wet feet back.
Light divides. She wakes, remembers.
She puts both feet over the bed. He sighs
in the Spanish he is learning faster
than the Greek, Latin, French, Italian,
Russian he already knows. It is she
he sought all his life, he knows now,
her small round face with its soft skin
drew him to the hall that night filled
con aficionados de la poeta Octavio Paz.
He saw her brush by, felt her small body
before he turned and laughed at himself
as she, startled, met his eyes with her smile.
They listened together to Paz say his words
precisely yet warmly, building poems
until they climbed down the other side
and up again as far as the flesh.
Paz said later he recognized her face
from the back cover of her Solo esta luz,
uttered the worn refrain of critics about her
and Emily Dickinson. Now next time
they could meet like old friends, he chuckled.
And this gringo? Southern boy, says he,
once from Natchez, Mississippi, grew up
along the river, saved up money catfish
crawling, worked the town with a wiry body
under his head bursting with words of light,
and went north, where I learned English,
he laughed. Paz nodded. Isabel looked
at his face and how it grew out of his body
as small as her own. Paz gave him un abrazo,
she una abraza fuerte. They went into the street.
A Mina y Buenavista, en hotel Londres,
she slept with him after she, trembling, told
him of her two sons living with their father,
the only time until years later he would hear
her voice break, this powerfully quiet woman
who stayed with him in that box of a room.
So small she dreamed she loved this gringo
so much she waited while the federales beat
him raw in Lecumberri nine days and nights
until convinced he would never speak again
of this, they put him on a plane that flew him
out of Mexico. Never to return. Isabel arrived
finally. Her mischievous smile had grown equal
to her need to love this man proudly, completely.
He talked endlessly then. It was not like him
to talk and talk and talk. He said, I’m teaching
Aristophanes, the play I translated last summer
in our room, The Peace. I’m writing this poem,
Que . . . She wanted to make love, feel his body,
know the depth of hers now. He quit his job,
the one he had many years. Told Bill Arrowsmith
what he had to do, how he’d miss learning
more from him, the finest Englisher of all,
said he, loving Austin, the only place in Texas
he did not feel estranged from America,
not like a Mississippi lad with nothing but words
for passport, learning from cab drivers, bartenders,
Verzcruz putas. Met people, listened, imagined
his skin a hollow bowl desperate for dinero
and learning a language of demand, el pueblo
and their voices, la manifestacion de la exigencia,
heard their tales and filled in what was left out,
but couldn’t stop the choppers raining down fire,
granaderos bursting on the plaza of Tlatelolco,
extracting death as usual to have their way,
sons of Moctezuma they aped, no Xochimilco
floating with flowery kisses and Chapultepec
impervious in its lovely facade to the misery
of the people of a Mexico always somewhere else.
Oaxaca? Merida? Guatemala, where the gringa
with her fluent tongue passed by border guards
with a passenger with forged papers who let her
do the talking as she drove and having arrived
he took his case from under the car and waved
as she drove home and he went to oil his weapons.
No, none of this now. They agreed upon London.
Lived there happily, mostly. They wrote all day,
living on what she could make dispatching English
life back to D. F. in Spanish, for by then what only
Paz once knew even norteamericanos could recall–
her names the name of her mother and father’s
whose dinero filled a hollow bowl and emptied,
her heart went home to see her sons and her book
through its birthpangs and its christening there,
Poemas en el regazo de la muerte, where she stayed.
for Tim Reynolds
(7 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
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