failing to indict at 58

you didn't know my intentions
I never saw you lose
the daylight sheds my different skins
the river holds your skeleton as
daguerrotype in prehistoric times
we were lover and no one had
the patience for words

I still carry these fingers in a peanut butter jar
the same fingers that once lay in the shallow of
your shoulder blades while I thought about
learning to write (and your eyes stare out at me
from the length of the river always reminding me
that I only claim to be Osiris)

and it's weird the sun keeps coming up
I write the same movie rehearse your face
give you names through the decades
the small death comes and then with wings
leaves me once again like the flickers
of a strobe light or the dawn and the dusk
in the time machine

(are you really Isis? do you really whisper
to me from the river? your eyes penetrate
however many words I put between us and there
is no rock and roll your hands cannot stroke
out of me please not again don't tell me
that I am only idealising you we were once
lovers)

you don't know my intentions (I suspect myself)
I never saw you lose (I often thought I was your loss)
I changed my hands today they were worn
you crossed yourself in the river as I walked past
(you don't really believe it you just do it to bug me)

you know I've suspected you for years
I've the evidence the design
all I lack is the motive

Again another attempt to understand what might have been going on in my personal life. I like the business abut Osiris and Isis, though it switches the story around a bit. But the treating of "hands" as instruments that can be removed and replaced is using metaphor as it should be used. Hands denote the very act of writing these words. Wearing them out means this process has sucked the person dry and he desperately needs to get new hands, do something different.

I've decided that since no one reads this blog (seriously, very very few hits at all) I can pretty much say whatever I want. The chances that someone I know who's emotional reality will be hurt is almost impossible because they would feel constrained to read my poems, and that is a step most human beings will not take. Now perhaps GD will skip to the commentary and read it first. But most people will assume that you need to read the lines to get into the commentary. I am not sure anyone needs to read anything. That is how it is in this universe.

Meanwhile I go through these pieces and clean them up again, and try and find a happy medium between making them comprehensible and keeping that which I find beautiful in them, the lyric aspects of the language and its constructive music.

I particularly like the final lines because they resonate that which was in me at that time. I truly do not understand why * did this to me. Why could she possibly have gotten out of it all? I am sure that GD would say that she wasn't that aware, and that she played the game on a day to day basis. And there would be some truth to that. But I have those hundred odd poems, and there is a great deal more there than can be accounted for. It seems a stupid game from this temporal distance. So, I guess I wasted a significant portion of my life, evaluating it that way. That would be no surprise; in certain terms I am clearly a terrible failure. Yet, I ask the Lady for Her mercy and She brings it to me every day in the hugs and kisses of Kimberly Britton and Piper. Life goes on, despite your confusions. An important lesson and a useful one.

ritual suicide

come share your sorrow with me
I am looking for the edges of these days
I hear your whisper
your arrowed sadness in this quiet
I dawdle on your precipice with you
but we are both afraid of heights

it's amusing
we two reactionaries
scorched by our own eyes
several times now
I say, always, it will make a poem
or a chapter in a new book
I pass my words on and save the letters
reading them years and days later

and you with your secrets and me
with my secrets and both of us
twining images to surround the melancholy
and the past
the edges of these days
are polished sharper by the poems
it is as if they are the knives
we'd like to throw ourselves upon

The title is a reference to the Japanese, Hari Kari. Ritual Suicide. Usually carried out to save face. I think we always needed to save face, and that certainly kept both of us from delivering and facing the truth of our relationship. I haven't looked at this poem in many years, so it was interesting to encounter it. Yet it sounds like everything else from that period. So, I ask myself, if this relationship made us both unhappy why did we pursue it for so many years? Because, I think, we could make each other laugh, and because the physical intimacy was singular. I never felt that way with any other women. Perhaps Alison did with other men, though she said she didn't. But, what can I trust to be true in all this? Only some of my words, and certainly not many of her's. Oh well. Time to dig in the midden some more and see what other chert and pot shards I can come up with. I worked for archaeologists for a long time, you know.

Elegy

Bitter lips, for me; you spoke so sweetly
of other men and other times.
Your words cut in stone, your steel bursting
into flame. You could have been this life's rose.

But I remember you where you have never lived.
I could have told you many things, the aegis of your dreams
the child we'll never have, the song we lost that spring.
But denial is its catholic pose, against all natural light.

Alas! The lines I gave you cut me now.
And sometimes well meant lovers never meet.
I cannot understand the figures in the shadows.
You lie in a languid pose I seldom saw,
gold threads of waterfall cast round
those eyes with worlds now locked inside.

But in your many other Queendoms
the flags and roses rise together,
in stories I may know when I am only old
and just remembering.

Give me one last kiss, this lifetime
Darling, on your altar in this photograph
I'll keep. I'll remember you as long
as I can stand it. I'll tell another story
into another cup of wine.

I wrote this quite awhile ago, as an experiment about how I might feel as time went along and I no longer knew Alison, or I might have heard she had passed on. It will eventually happen, of course. AG had a very fine poem in her chapbook, LFNS, which had the line "I might be old and just remembering" in it. She already had a certain horror of aging, and yet an infinity for it. She was good friends with Jane Morrel, who was in her 70s most of the time we knew her. Alison also had a singular relationship with her grandmother. She later wrote quite a good poem based on that, using her grandmother's life as a way to explore age and death. Being a catholic girl Alison had an unnatural interest in death. Not a fearful one, of course. Part of her charm was an insane courage. This poem is nearly classical in its structure. Yet, it feels like it might break free at any moment.

revenge in broken glass

I remember it now:
your stupid revenge that time in Canada
with the green silk stockings
I was your grotesque for that hour

funny how we march through these pictures
imagining we are in a hall of mirrors
you were never much for telling me names
and I always had a list somewhere

none of it makes any sense
except for your revenge that time
but then, you already know this

I'm living those seven years bad luck
and green silks has turned to gauze
the focus slipping away

An Alison Gaughan poem from the 1970s. The pictures represent memory, and the notion of the hall of mirrors is meant to say we deceive ourselves with our memories, thinking we are still that person. The use of the term "grotesque" is homage to Leonard Cohen ("Avalanche"). The concept is that facing the real situation shatters that mirror of self-image, and the superstition about shattered mirrors is "seven years bad luck". At the end, the focus slipping, refers to the loss of information that aging causes in the brain's information retrieval system. This is another radical re-write of a poem about my relationship with the irish girl.

Damask of Patience

"There's just some things
I could never understand.
Some of the sick things
that a girl does to a man."

—Mick Jagger, 1966

Astride the beast
Casting cards again
Why must everything imply solution?
The hours pass in the damask of patience
Creating liaisons with stars.
The Queen of Swords, bluejeaned,
Her eyes painted with pessimism,
Her values recovered in time,
Her soul beset with cancer,
She'll have said (something)
You'll have known only too much.
No explanations granted.
No lucky twist of the great wheel.
The Charioteer is just,
Given the hands of blood, the Beast
Is catalyst of this fate.
The shower of many conceptions is
The key turning in locks, blindly but
Purposefully. The World is paradox,
The Shaman is sham.
Science is the child of faith.
Air currents circulate through electrical wire.
Someone starts to explain.


From one of several periods in my life when the cards of the tarot seemed to offer explanation and meaning. Similar in nature to all divinatory systems. Enough symbolic detail that there seems to be some answer or explanation lurking in the pictures. One of the true things I know about using Tarot cards, or the I Ching, is that the subconscious manipulates the imagery and often in ways that are essentially deceitful. This goes along with my idea that the hardest untruths to discover are the ones the self has convinced itself of in the name, usually, of ego. Witness right wing bloggery, and romantic self-appraisal. So this piece is a response to feeling manipulated in a romantic relationship and having had the experience of the tarot encouraging me to stay in the relationship. Undoubtedly the tarot, as interpreted, told me everything would be great after a certain amount of strife. Of course, that was my subconscious desiring what it desired. This would be why I spent fifteen years honking around after the irish girl, through all sorts of scenes and stupid exchanges of poems and conversations. Not to mention a certain amount of intimate behaviours. What a waste, what a waste. My life has been a waste. No one will read these words, but if they do they will know what a fool I have been. It is only now, and only because I have come to the Lady, that I have anything approaching a successful relationship. Without Kimberly I would probably have moved on to a more serious level of self-doubt and dissolution. I would probably drink myself to sleep every night. But, I truly believe the Lady sent Kimberly to keep my head above water. And I am good for her, also. I bring an intelligence and a care to her life and to the life of our child. I guess this is where I will be blogging now.