syntax, unbetrayed

there is neither a shuffling nor a memory here
the rain is in spain or the basement
the narrowness of my vision doesn't funnel truth
no one keeps track but the women speak
in the next room of forms, or format, or the formula
that requires everything to fall into its place

the grass whispers of the betrayal
sometimes romance is a dark plot
the bodies kept in the basement are
disinterred for my humiliation
I see no rules that govern, no sentences
with syntax unbetrayed. no plan for this
survival. we are falling from place

where are my angels?
I see your angels, but where are
my angels this day? where is my peace?
where is the snow that replaces the acid-eating rain?
where is the angel in the yard
her arms swinging into wings
her chicken legs spread wide in welcome
where is the love I fell into
the book claims
no rules. no blame.


As in the previous poem there is a sense working here that is pretty much outside the boundaries of rational discourse. Particularly in this one I can see the emotional elements at work. At war, really. With the intellectual portion of the program. Of course the betrayals spoken of are both Alison's promises to me and my promises to myself. The bodies in the basement refers to the story element in Strange Sins, my reincarnation novel, of finding the mummified corpse of the main character's previous incarnation, Miranda, under the front porch of a house that had been covered with sand at the dunes in Saugatuck, Michigan. I had numerous recurring dreams about Randy's body in the sand and I became frightened of the basement at Scarritt and at Washington, associating them with acts of criminal violence. I believe this poem was written during the period I worked at SIU School of Medicine in the early 1980s, in the records room. Of course the women speaking is always in western literature something of an echo of Eliot in Prufrock. "Fall into place" refers specifically to Ann Beattie's novel, Falling Into Place and once again places the poem in the early 1980s. Becky Bradway brought Beattie to read at the literary festival the year she was grad asst. in literature. I was also a grad asst., but jumped ship after the terrible betrayals and destruction that took place in that department primarily at the behest of Norman Hinton, but with the help of Mike Lennon and Rich Shereikis. Nothing was ever the same after that. I believe they succeeded in totally ruining John Knoepfle, but that is a personal theory which I have no interest in arguing for or against.

Arise

Trying to remember,
when I die will there be doves?
The thick cloth is covering me.
I remember
the chocolate, remarkable in the cup.
Everything is beatitude.
Memory isn't film,
the various disappropriations
of day, hour, minute
catalogued, but not precise.
(I am) trying to remember
which experience awakened this need.
Which day did I telephone the saint.
When did I do that tarantella,
confusing each of you,
this feeling for that.
And this life seems only
time noticed, mercy spent.
Outside, an awful noise.

Arise asshole
shake the dirt from the box lid
you're kidding yourself again
this isn't the way out
just the usual awfulness
and you know it doesn't have to
be this way.

I am buying a ticket
for another ride on the carousel
another painted pony
rising and falling
with my breath

making us live

the hidden poem of my pale death:
so catholic in its rationality
that body in the snow you never saw
me rend this flesh
w/scissors, razors
—unable to demythologize you
though I dearly wished to
arrest you & take you out of
purgatory to a very brief
hell

and your prediction:
fear is the beast
we all are
desire is the enemy that
makes us live

An early concept of mine was that the two motivating forces of human emotional life are simply fear and desire. I have spent a great of my life attempting to live in desire, but suspecting that fear is often the more potent force. Gary Davidson told me so many years ago that this was my real problem: I was afraid. Afraid of finding out whether I was a good writer, or had anything to say. He has always been a good friend. I wish I had lived in my desires. They were always holy.

in my trance

the air conditioning is on
the cigarette is greying in my palm
the red marks are the burns
you left last year
I am not being taken seriously
I have made these notes for some time
I never expect to see you again
Alison in Ireland you have more of my soul
than you may wish, but if you would kill
me in sleep or in my trance or on
the island as I hold my words in
the remains of these hands
you know the final anger would not be your's
but it would be the fell thought of the time
I left trails of myself upon your
cheeks

From the manuscript Fresh Wounds, circa 1975. I have changed this poem considerably in an attempt to make it more understandable. This would've been just before Alison married the boy from Williamsville, who represented a middle class existence for her. A successful, safe life. I knew at the time that this was an act of giving in to her family and all that was expected of her. Something I would never have asked of her, knowing her intimately, as I did.

thief

tight in your eggshell
relentless you paint out
your memory no days
with me no jagged
scenes with your dad

you steal your hours
from your self
from me from the great
blue curved sky
triangles cut out
revealing black night

you stole my life
my daughter my one true friend
gone now taken by the tortured
little girl intent
on glueing the shell
back together

This poem is about Becky Jo Bradway and what happened when the memories she had ignored and suppressed about her father came on and destroyed her that terrrible year that she left me, 1993. Although I had some familiarity with incest and its damage, the arc of this story was so very much worse and it included me in its effects. Because I became the father of a girl I became linked to John Bradway. Thus what romance may have been left in the relationship was completely displaced by what happened twenty five years before. And I had sympathy for the woman and the girl that lived in her, but she took my child and she left me, something she swore she would never do. And I suffered too. For what I did not do. Nor could ever do. Mistakes I have made, but the deliberate destruction of your child, for whatever reason, is beyond my imagination. So call this Humpty Dumpty. No one could put it together again.

tattoos on the Yi King

okay. We stop and inhale,
though this monster breathing apparatus
should've been left in the graveyard.
we knew better. That's an old joke
on me. You got cards and I got cards;
but this created an illusion:
that terrible dream in which
we could see what the other held.
And the balloon grows
not like crosby but like hope, ba-ding
its skin is getting transparent.
Our vowels rising off the register
our fluids running skimpy in these winter months.
I remember surface tension, the formula
escapes me. It's hidden, mutable, terrific.
It's the movie chalicing all the laughter,
taking the chances. Though the horses run,
each lovely in its context, mainly they do not win.
But ~ they don't lose ~

ii.
eXcept we see position
and we throw our tickets down.
You own the Yangtze.
I live in Reykavich.
Win lose die burn.
Imagine a promise that is true,
believe without submission.
No can do. Inadmissable evidence.
System of opposition.
Syntax error.
No blame

iii.
have you seen the tattoos on the Yi King?
he knows less than we do
but is honest in his selfishness
and his ignorance
I throw the three coins
they turn like stars in the dance
never quite finishing the
circle never quite
falling
down

Among the most obscure things I have in the stacks, I can tell this piece references lessons learned from Jacob David Felt, my old friend from St. Louis days who has left the planet now. Jack was heavily into horse racing; he loved horses and he loved gambling. He gave me a great book on the subject, then he stole it back. Typical Felt behaviour. When I first knew him he was great friends with Jack and Nora and a committed marxist-leninist. By 1972 he had turned into a proto-conservative boy. He still smoked a great deal of dope and drank like a fish. He bought dope for John Knoepfle several times in that period when John was doing most of his writing stoned. See the Sangamon Poems for many examples of this disability. I should talk, of course. The piece above evidences psychedelics in both language and logic.

The I Ching (Yi King)is the Book of Changes, a chinese book of fortune telling and arcane wisdom. Many of my close friends were deep into it at one time. What I remember, looking back, is the phrase "no blame" which appeared in numerous readings taken from the Ching. You consulted it with either coins or sticks. I preferred the coins, myself.

Worthy of noting this was written well before I knew anything about computers, so that syntax remark at the end refers to the use of language, as in English, not Basic or C++. Interesting side trip, there.

kite

my life is turning into a kite
I tie cloth in strips
attached upside good god down
its hallow's eve tonight
this kite is too light
its paper stiff-it regroups in
balsa'ed frame; it does
r's in the sky/u's, 3's
in flightpath, 365 days last year
I flew, straight up into the final
bubble, air dead, flashing through
the paper silhouette.
I feel the grain the paper the wood
turned to stone, ten thousand hours
thick with clotting blood
on the kite's long string
flaking off in pieces
like my eyes undone in the
photograph of her face

1980. The period of time where I attempted to recover from my failed and doomed relationship with BF. I remember those days too well. Sometimes I literally hid myself in a closet in the front part of the apartment on South Grand. My emotional life was truly cruel at the time. I had come to realize that Pat really didn't like my work, the raison for my being there. I knew that Becky Bradway was a seriously fucked up person. I was only too clear about how stupid the relationship with Alison had been. And Alison was carrying on with Tony Kallas and seemed to have abandoned me when I needed her. She did however go out of her way to show me I could still get hard for her, if she wanted me to. I guess that was meant as an act of kindness. Hard to say, really.