Notes from an Open
Channel
1
These are the gauchos roaming
the pampas and those are the Gauleiters
gliding through a series of Zoom meetings
like those Hollywood squares we loved
as kids with everyone glugging
down jeroboams of Pouilly-Fuissé.
Some early glimmers of fame;
a few islands of camaraderie.
The tempo of August is quiet, even monastic
I may be able to communicate
by going through the correct channels
or communities of practice.
The interesting coveys of city poets,
their speech acts and interrogatives
into the nature of existence
bonds between kinsman or kinship,
mutual exile--momentarily acquiescing
the limits of choice--Wayfinding--
I hit rock bottom in Philly in 03,
then again, there was no bottom--
or as we say here, Fluffya,
13th and Locust, tops & bottles--
sudden bright eyes--
green otherwise so ordinary.
2
Teacher’s son. Read Kerouac.1 Dream deferred--
you must change your life. rinse, repeat.
Attended grad school in Philly. Should have stayed.
I was sleepwalking through life
until the act of a blind magician
stopped me in my tracks
Spring birds in flight
orient themselves and correct
for drift by listening to a chorus
of peepers in a pond far below
and rock lobsters scuttle from
head to tail in tandem conga lines.
The state of being lost
is a kind of vertigo--Not all
who wander are lost.
I think of the enlarged
posterior hippocampus of taxi drivers--
in NYC the 24/7 lure of accessibility
ties us to our gadgets as in a spell
of an addiction. Self awareness
of distance and direction like the genetic
imprint of an ant--
A cloud mirrored in a painting
by John Constable without even
a view of what actually is the silt
brown Bristol Channel between England
and Wales. Why can’t I explain
the irrepressible dialectic of history
( two steps forward and one step back)
American democracy has
always reinvented itself.
The Wyoming frontier was once
stitched with Buffalo grass.
To reach the nearest city
just follow the rail line,
our permanent zone of transit--
a train, an ark--a fleeting vantage point,
slow to pass, yet still we rocked
in their wake as boats on the sea.
That one wouldn’t be able to cope
without spending at least three consecutive
days in the city was the unintended
complication of having a home
in the suburbs to which one could return.
A sovereign surveyor abruptly
ended his term looming above
a mountain of contending theories
about how our institutions
came to be inculcated in the dark
expressive waters of white supremacy.
The polis at the bottom
of our existence, the bottom
of the sea masks all civility,
relieving idlers of all
their convictions. The scapegoat
is dead in their lifetime
of some public darkness.
He may be ugly, but he is not
stupid. The moon is now a tangent,
an opacity on someone else’s
distant horizon, yet one need
not travel to Niagara Falls
to feel the impact of falling water.
4
They say SCOTUS is the eye
of the storm, the branch of
government least swayed by
partisan politics-Gorsuch,
Kavanaugh, Garland
impressions fading into
the background, yet the obscenity
of President Trump belies all our
efforts to write or paint.
A push for a conservative
seat after R.B.G.‘s death as if
Roe v. Wade could be overturned
through some hydraulic pressure.
Already storm bands of rain
and churning wind tear loose from
the roving eye of the hurricane.
Skirts of rain unhook tiles from rooftops.
Lampposts sputter out and trees bow
back and forth like converts
to the winds. An armada of shopping
carts file back towards the edge of the parking lot
Yet the next day the color of the sky
was exactly like the tints of glass shards
from a broken jukebox.
Lincoln’s hand is clasping
a fasces-a leather thong that
tightly binds all thirteen rods--
one for each of the original colonies--
but there is a twist--
a bald eagle head sits atop the axe,
an American touch,
“E Pluribus Unum”,
or Out of Many, One
5
Fifty miles North East
of Charleston, SC where
350,000 acres of former
rice plantations were bounded
by the Ashepoo, Combhaee and Edisto
rivers it was rumored that the Lumbees
were the last descendants
of the lost Roanoke colony
their names obscured by the mist
swaddled cotton fields of Robeson County.
Take the swing away from
Swing Low Sweet Chariot
and what you have is a suicide
note--the slave’s supplication
to the Lord for deliverance
For white audiences
it was hard to spell
or swallow “Oedipal” (as a tucked-in grief)
by reactivating its meaning
like a structure of buried
racism in the past. The table of contents
of African-American history is a
fusillade of facts:
(The Sugar Route sagged
under its own weight,
The Fugitive Slave Act,
The Tuskegee experiment,
the Birmingham church bombing
& black creativity Phillis
Wheatly, The Sugar Hill Gang,
Jesse Jackson, James Baldwin
reading from F.D.R’s Four Essential
Freedoms, never have I heard
such musical talking, a waltz
really )but despite
the turnings of this
400 year gyre there’s little
evidence of an arc bending towards justice.
6
Roger Williams sought
to make head or tails
of the language spoken
by the Narganset
A brief observation of
the costumes, manners
and worship etc, a little key
may open a box wherein lies
a bunch of keys
In the farmer’s market
cherry tomatoes are sold out,
but cobs of corn are sold
just before rotting.
Half empty tour bus
passes by. I write
the Great American
tour bus epic conjuring
cities of farmers
markets with fresh bread
and sassafras tea
At the metal railing
of the bridge I vent by throwing
the peanut shells on
a passing tugboat, the memory
sticking like rough honey.
In duet:
hogsuck, Pigsuck
Swine Swine,
Mantnowawtawate
we understand not one another,
Toyusquamo?
Is there a bridge
7
My Aunt Frieda and Uncle Charlie
fled a war-torn Europe the way
a fly escaped the swatter.
All their problems were sent
back to the old country like weary orphans
who must buy back all their toys
for a nickel each. They settled
in the Lower East Side on Avenue C
now overgrown with the ghosts of gardens
where other American boys congregated
and smoked cigarettes in hard times of yore.
Wasn’t there an easier way to live
in the city where long standing grudges
got in the way of the sky?
As a child I conceived
of the city as something
behind a border, somewhere
abroad. Whenever someone
in my family drove on
the Autobahn to the city
I would imagine crossing
the border to a place made
famous by Rabelais4 who in 1523 wrote
“You shall have the rest
of the story at the next Frankfurt
Book Fair”
At first glance the city
seemed to without its secrets.
It was a tension in breadth
and height, nothing else.
In the evenings, walking the streets
or sitting at my desk
working by lamplight, I write and dream
I will reappear within the city
of my own making.
8
Everything in the fall of 1987
re-converged on this still point
of the turning world where at
the age of 15 I chanced upon meeting
a Parisian/English girl named Katie Follain
My roommate Peter Matheos and I
went with Katie and her friend Oria
to an Indian restaurant, where once
we were all settled in and had gotten
acquainted with one another, a strong feeling
overcame me: the faint crackling of feathers
under finger-tips & opium tea.
While we were walking in the rain near
the ugliest landmark in Paris with its
one pyramid eye casting a street lamp onto someone’s
head I asked Katie Follain what she thought of me.
There was a droning sound of a blimp above the cars
that streaked past as pressure built up
in my forehead.
-Well, I’ll tell you very honestly,
she said: I felt like taking you by the arm
and talk and talk with you for ages and
for the first time I felt grounded
like when Newton took the moon from the domain
of the poets and lassoed it to the earth.
Then you channeled Robert Smith: How Beautiful You Are
by The Cure I nearly melted! Maybe I really
shouldn’t really tell you this because
you will start thinking things,
but on that day I was very happy
9
The DSM or book of woe
has proved inexhaustible
as if the bloody circumstances
of my life had been shrink-wrapped
until the words were colorless oxymorons
like “affordable housing”,
the evanescence of vapor, hard water,
beauty of drifting trash,
spare cigarette lit
against the wind behind cupped hands
How can you map yourself
in the gaze which does not
judge but falls asleep
on you from time to time
as Roger Lehman did during therapy--
I walked down Holzhausen Strasse
where we used to meet
Once during a re-consultation
Roger said, “he hated that office”.
Roger that strangely productive power
of the imagination produces infinite
ways of seeing the world, yet at times
it is as if we were living under the guise
of democracy--unintelligible though that may be--
Friends will confirm that I’ve been
going on about Bernie Sanders
forever without realizing how long
it would take to get out of Dodge
or that so much would happen before we did:
counting down the days until the end
of President Trumps presidency,
not to say that work wasn’t involved
or fun wasn’t had for that matter
under the left wing darkness of the 80’s
Autostadt, with its two immense towers of cars
10
Some fish in a pond or reflections
of the countryside in the opposite window
of the train--grand old houses hidden
by a thick cross-hatch of leaves
and dappled by sunlight, yet today
despite a preference for things one
can’t quite see, I find myself circling
back to the promenade painting
with Friedrich Hölderlin’s face
in the clouds, which my parents bought
at an art Bazaar in Frankfurt, Germany,
circa 1985, here-to-fore kept
secret and thus far developed in
the theme of a crumbling tower.
Rather than wanting to see beneath
the surface, I wanted clarity
instead of things suggesting
something else. Admit it, the Gods
aren’t dead, wrote Hölderlin.
There are people who enter into one’s life,
but for a fleeting instant then are lost.
They seem to provide what is needed
in that moment and then like clouds
they pass or recede into the background.
I don’t like the day’s ending so early.
The sky going pale, then dark.
I look up to find the moon’s brilliance
set in the lighted clouds lurking behind
water towers and through trees and I am
reminded, even here, of the promenade
where I am and where I need to be.
11
If somehow I was like the boy
who cried wolf and survived, what then?
Wouldn’t I stick out like a sore thumb,
or a fallen angel, not majestic like Satan,
but as some angry environmentalists
know, the end justifies the means.
No shit. The wolf was real
and nobody came to help as a result
of his checkered past with a merciless
hoosegow of villagers. Maybe it
was an act of self-preservation.
Couldn’t the boy just cry out mulligan
like they do in golf? Lately he goes
by camel light or the grey old lady.
Herd immunity no closer to just
around the corner than prosperity
was in 1930. Now nearly fifty,
the illusionless 50’s, the girls
are so pretty, and I was no closer
to being the boy I was than to
the man I thought I’d be.
12
Should I have stayed
in Central America happily ensconced
within its leafy parenthesis,
even though the most one could
seize was some sliver of light
from that magnificent jungle
edifice, the famous submerged cathedral
Carib Islands defined by the warm water.
Words too surround a thing.
An upside-down squeegee
wedged up against the roof
of a tropical aquarium.
Coral reef sharks orbit the tank
as though it were a parking garage
with many levels.
To hold a golf club very loosely
was like holding wounded birds.
On one of these islands lived wild pigs.
Let it be known that old age
is a kind of Circe and nothing could
revise her sentence even by a day.
13
The two reflecting pools glitter
like jewels at the bottom of a cave
where the North and South Towers once stood.
The eye extends rapidly and in a straight
line to the plane opposite the Oculus-
a wedge of light tightly bound like the
finest white feathers of a bird in flight.
Then gradually the eyes do adjust
as if stepping from a dark theater
into the bright afternoon and you see
a vast plaza amid the dense tangle of streets
and light reflected off the Hudson
vaulting into the site, soaking up space
with a watery glow. My art teacher
once asked me to draw what it was like
to be at the theater-I drew a dark square before
the show began. That same month,
during the summer of 2007,
we lost two great directors in one
fell swoop, Bergman & Antonini,
two birds with one stone.
14
To wander was to discover
in the process a love for cappuccino
and Pellegrino water and Poinsettias
everywhere on tables at restaurants.
Everything I saw I drew toward and into myself.
The idea was to crowd out the ambiance,
confining it to Sunday morning,
so that the afternoon would proceed
as a juncture of collapsed routes.
We walked past the Trinità dei Monti
and passed the Spanish Steps, one of the infinite
number of tourist focal points and
then we continued through a deep tangle
of winding backstreets, stands of urban
lemon trees, narrow pedestrian
ways and small spigots from which quiet
streams of water falls into basins.
The whole time in Rome, I’m quaking
with holy awe at the very mention
of Shelley, ( who in the last section
of Adonais gave a trisyllabic trembling,
a shiver of slacks).
As in confessionals and theaters
secrets emerged that belonged
to the graves of Shelley and Keats.
Church bells rang along w/ burglar shop alarm,
the fragrance of rain on the paving stones.
The seeds of my undoing had been planted
in my mind right from the beginning,
with words made serviceable, but at the
edge of understanding. As if one could
whittle a person down by simply lingering
in the fabric of their clothes.
15
Paul Valéry published sparingly
then quit writing poetry altogether
for twenty years to study how the mind works
also he spent time explaining the difference
between Pushkin and Lermontov
In Russia Pushkin is the sun,
but Lermontov felt nearer to the moon
Tolstoy’s War and Peace was a meteor
that fell into mid-19th century Europe.
I prefer to sleep rather than to read.
If I wiggle my toe an entire foot crescendos
In the room where women come and go
Chagall chat chat just autumn and endangered
Candles Cher Queer snow
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