Reading

When the storm hovered over the house
I read Kazantzakis on Nietzsche. Paris
rain. God’s death. Dionysus embraced.
Good and evil divided. The tree
of life returned to original root,
death vanished, new life the new branch
leafing out as wind blows from off the coast.
Art’s madness curls the skin into paper.
Who says and means the word Auschwitz
who was not there? Or Belsen, Dachau,
Treblinka, endless camps each with a name.
Do not speak poetry, Adorno warned,
Not even prose resurrects the dead
whose agony was more than words can mean.
So many have died since, who can say what
would have spared them, save the dead god . . .
In the night the sounds of falling things.
I read myself to sleep. In the morning
I learned of his illness in Vienna,
I wondered if only Buddha could cure
humanity. Before I read on
I went out to gather the fallen
and wear my skin proudly, still naked
so very far from original birth.

(31 May 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Rain

The next day I called Roberto, who answered, "The Saloon on Bourbon."
I said, I hear the old magic’s back. He thought I was talking about Lelli.
I wanted to talk about the loas, but Bob knew nothing of the loas. I was
not sure I did either. Just because they knew how to make me aware . . .
You know how you call someone from halfway across the world, and I
was thinking I had, and nothing is said but what happens to be nowhere
it was before you called, all you want to do is listen and say as little as
possible, you suddenly find yourself missing something, and maybe it’s
not the voice on the other end but someone you should have called instead.
Leila Shulamit. How she used to make me buoyant just listening to her.

I told him I hoped someday I could hear Lelli say, "Mister Flowers,"
as only she could say it. He laughed and said, You had your chance.
When we finished discussing business, debits and credits, all that jive,
I told him how it was working out here, that it had never been better,
going on at some length so he would not think he might be usurping some
one thing neither he nor I had thought of, at least not to tell the other.
We said our farewells the way no one ever does now, actually saying goodbye
which means go with god as every aging hombre y mujer knows everywhere.
Now you just set the receiver down on its cradle when you’re through . . .
I sat down then and wrote once more about the loas, which you’ve already

read. Rain was falling again. When rain fell I felt a jones for Judy Ewing.
Rain falling into the river I was wading that day I came upon her . . .
I went out and stood in it. I thought it might refresh the skin I wore,
give me a bath at least, feel ready to go inside and get dressed to go
to San Francisco. After a while, soaked, I went inside and called Cathleen,
told her my car wouldn’t be able to make it today, and I didn’t know why,
my skin was crawling, I said, that usually means I better not try anything
involving machines, man, I had that bullshit down pat, I knew what it was,
she said Sure, there’s no need, I’m always here, I just wanted to see you.
I went back out into the rain. I loved living where nobody could see you.

(30 May 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

New Work with the Old

He looked very old.
His back was curved
like a questionmark,
why he was called that.
With his clothes off
in the dark Adore
could see nothing.
I should say, most
could not, she could,
she could see like a cat.
Naked, she was sleek,
rippling, delighting
in all she loved to do.
He was not as old
as he looked. She was
as old as he looked,
and she looked young.
They were opposed
forces and merged.
They made love well.

Juan went out,
went to town.
Had coffee.
Listened.
Paid, left, drove
to San Francisco.
In Vesuvio’s,
more coffee.
Looked over
and eyes met
with a blonde’s.
When he left
she had a man.
The Tenderloin,
then. Research,
Juan liked to say
if asked, which happened.
The night came on
and he sat in a hotel
writing on a legal pad.

Back in Lagunitas
he saw Cathleen’s name
on the machine,
called her, she said,
Come tomorrow.
What’s tomorrow?
He didn’t know.
She wanted to feed him
to end her weekend,
was the way she put it.

Adore hauled his ashes.
That’s how they talked
down here. She fixed
a pallet on the floor.
One of them must sleep.
He talked in fusillades:
Watch the moon split
that cloud apart!
The old sun sinks so slow
it wakes up new!

(29 May 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

　

Among the Living

Are you ready to observe the dead?
Follow me through the lanes of graves.
Fresh dirt piled beside the holes in the earth.
Flowers adorn the dead’s front door,
where the lucky live, never forgotten.

I walk around getting thorns in my toes.
And Cathleen hers. We are on vacation.
From the present. Here we are in the past.
Uncle Clyde said he put up a new stone
on my brother Bobby’s grave, two years
older than I am. Cross Cemetery
up the road named for my mother’s people,
those who took her in when her mother left
to make her fortune. Conley Road.

In Fort Smith all the clubs on Garrison
are full, music flowing into the street.
In a café I tell the waitress
I’m from here, or is it Cathleen
saying, My husband was born here,
and the waitress does her Ooos and Ahhs
as we wash down food with Coca-Cola.

Halloween. The sky shouldered its burden,
weighing on the land, guttering its low
places. What can we do for the dead?

Clyde tells me he had a son his mother knew
nothing of. She would have feared his leaving
her alone in Greenwood, taking care
of his son and her mother in Van Buren.
His mother was more alone in this world
than anyone I would know in this life.

She was dead thirty years before I knew
my only cousin in New York City
was dead. We might have met otherwise.
How far was Yeshiva U. from Amsterdam?
And now he too is gone into the earth:
Dale Roy Campbell got fat, his heart quit,
his father remembers Ruby Campbell,
his mother, reared him to be a writer.
He interviewed Errol Flynn, Clyde recalls.
Clyde’s gone now. Errol Flynn was first to go.

In the morning we leave in a rainstorm
all the way to the Panhandle, where dust
gathers in the rain streaking the windshield
all the way to Amarillo. Cathleen
explodes, I roar back, the cafe hushes,
we eat our meal of the day in undertones.
Why marriage is so hard is the reason
we love. One another. We could have died
not knowing how much we live when we come
out of anger’s trance to caress the other . . .

(29 May 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

　

Made to Order

Encourage, . . . Peradventure etymology?
Endocrinology is apt contextually,
hopefully.

You know something’s there when you feel
what you can’t see before you can then
because it shows.

You were saying: You can do it,
you already showed you could . . .
keep going.

We were driving around, well you were.
They had my cabaret license,
now take the other . . .

We were thinking of words like notes.
What’s minor sounds like coming up
from under,

majors were already there, like white keys
but sharps or flats are black
like words.

I coulda asked Nellie to come.
She likes the sun more than me.
The sun was shining when I was born.

Who started this? all the nonsense
meaning, Look it up and hope
the word fits,

like playing before and after turning
in your usual circles
to feel what you could hear

if you go back and play some more,
so you do,
it doesn’t sound like anything means

more than keeping time.
You lay down the beat, find the rhythm,
let me do melody.

This’s been your primer on origins, now pull
over, I want to tell you what
Gus said:

It was a golden and sunny Southern California
afternoon, and with the top down
Monk and Diz were driving along the coast.

"It’s always night," Monk said,
"because it is only light when the sun’s up."
Addressed to no one in particular.

Diz looked at him for a moment.
"Monk.
You are a deep cat."

(italicized passage courtesy of Gus Blaisdell [1935–2003],
"Lewis Baltz: Buried Silk Exhumed,"
Artspace: A Magazine of Contemporary Art, May/June 1992)

(27 May 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

　

Farmboy in the Big City

Once the mass burials were complete,
the green-shingled slab of door sealed
the grave, the hard dirt shoveled over
and numb he walked off. He was fine,
the animal kingdom was like Tarzan’s,
but he didn’t like the books, the movies
were better for his head, they looked real.
The cats were bigger in Africa, though.

I was thinking how I’d fucked up my life.
I remembered the girl reading "Daddy"
in the cab with O’Hara and his friends
Richard and Mary. I wished I had Crow
memorized. God, I was alive! The girl
took her book and went off from O’Days.
(That’s how I remembered the name now,
knowing it was O’Leary’s really.) She had
been there while Richard was giving hell
to a librarian on the phone asking him
to bring back the book he checked out
many months ago . . . He let loose hell’s
own smoldering anger building the fire
word by word, like gas poured on wood.
The girl said she loved no poet but Plath.
You had to read the savage Hughes if not
for the poetry, then for the sake of loss.
She snuffed herself in her oven, her kids
grew up hating their father, some said,
and he remarried and his wife suicided:
it was like a tale of Hansel and Gretel
snuffed out in the witch’s cast iron stove.
Only Hansel was free. The witch dead.
Gretel limp without life, so young to die.

Then Mary came in and said, Richard,
Stop! and he hung up, said Let’s go eat
and drink, it’s the weekend! They did
what they could to give Manhattan life
it did not need. At least he was free!
He didn’t have to drive the tractor,
milk the cow, prune and pick grapes,
but read books and write poems, teach
no one who didn’t want to know what
he knew and pace while he recited what
he had just read off the page: the words
addressed to the Western wind to blow
the small rain down can rain and he
with his love and in their bed again . . .

That was the night O’Hara kept him
from getting beat to death in the bar
where he met the London cancer nurse
and loved her a full three days the first time,
after that who knew what would happen?
New York City was always his familiar . . .
Amsterdam he loved, even the name . . .
Cathleen was being Irish up in Springfield,
he returned to Amherst in four days time.
He had the itch to write a poem and make
it playable, like his late teacher once said
to do, talking to himself in prose on a page
in a book, not unlike the animal he liked
to think he was and grew a beard to be
what he imagined was possible in the mind
never corralled anyplace on the actual farm.

(26 May 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
　

Daytime

Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.                                                          Beckett, Endgame

To see her die was spared me.
When she first saw me, the day
she came home, sitting on the bed,
I looked in, she filled her eyes
with a hundred pounds of joy,
or so I read them. She slept there
before the others jousted with her
for place. She lost. There were
too many. Why go on but to say
how she loved the whipped cream
Karen Lee served with desserts
and waited until she was called,
then indulged herself on the floor.
Long ago she had given birth
after those who brought her in
to town and left her in the snow
with ice one night and drove off.
I called her Little French Whore,
Karen Lee saw her in bobby sox
sipping sodas at the city fountain.
The day after the doctor called
to say she had passed away
last night, we took the other eight
to hospital.

I recalled the leukemia
my friend’s young daughter had
in Berkeley. A stack of pages
on the table, beer on the veranda,
and after she died long fights
over who was blaming the other
for her young life gone, not theirs,
but lasted out the storm of nerves
and lived again in New Orleans
where his brain gave up poetry
and she went back to the church.
She went to where her son was,
the next and only other born.
She was there when Katrina
spilled over back home, she said,
like wearing out a welcome.

There are birds
more common than Audubon’s.
There are other cats, Ophelia’s,
Shakespeare knew nothing of.
Prospero is back in Milan
with Caliban, his bane.
Hamm and Clov look out
and see what they feel.
Oliver, Ali, Pedro . . .
three Tolstoys, two Rostovs.
Eight are left to live
out all Socrates, Miranda
will miss now.
See that one? Crouch
and scrunch up back feet,
but the window won’t give,
don’t leap. The eyes spring.
There’s another, get ready.
World outside: CAT TV.
In here life ends, grief begins.

(25 May 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander