hello little one

sabrina welcome home to oregon now
I knew your dad when he was little
I held your sister in her infancy
the world turns every day
the light greets you
hello little one
can you hear the music?
they tell me you will sing in reply
how I would give anything to hear you

welcome to oregon
your dad was always a good son
welcome to 2010, a good year
now that you've come

from Outtakes

off on this
morning's El my
last glimpse of
you today/maybe
I'll live through
this afternoon
chasing personal
demons of the kind
that wire you
up/maybe I won't
but I am wired here
and lonely/glimpsing
you/through this
borrowed machine
your hair/spread out
blonde corona/walking
away to the world
which doesn't deserve
to share you

From a series of short poems written in Lincoln Park in the fall of 1973 and mailed to Alison Gaughan. She showed them to Knoepfle and he used them to start his chapbook series, based on money from a donated fund he was able to get out of the university. The poem is one of many poems I wrote to Pat Smith. Although she was thirteen years older than me, with two children and a professor husband (not to mention a professor lover, John Knoll, who was married to her best friend), we seemed to get along quite well. The first several years of our relationship were mainly based on sex. Joel's mother, Becky McGovern, was not very sexual. Or maybe I was very sexual. In any case, Pat had lived with Larry for fourteen years and they hadn't had much sex, and she was not happy about it. So she would be available essentially any time I wanted, and this maintained through most of our relationship. She also was somewhat more adventurous than Becky McGovern, who had pretty strict rules as to what was okay with her.

When I eventually split up with Pat I still slept with her for about another year while living with Bradway. Bradway was not a giving person, shall we say, and getting sex from her was always a certain amount of work. Unless she wanted something from you; then she would do whatever it took to get her way. At least that is how she was with me. Hopefully that has nothing to do with how she is now.

I did love Pat. It was only after I came to understand the contempt she held my work in that I had to separate from her. She loved her vision of me, not the me that actually existed. Maybe that is always the case. Kimberly seems to know the real me, and forgives me that person, and so I trust her more than anyone else.

Illiniwek

Truth can be stolen
My son defends the arching
Need, tradition writes its
Version of history, notes
Our respect for the defeated
On the court the sophomore
Dressed like Irving Berlin’s
Sitting Bull, “he’s an Indian,
Too,” jumps in song the
Kally-yope. In Oklahoma
My friend’s child lives
In her mobile home
Her food stamps gone
Her television blurry She
Goes nowhere
Sees nothing
Aches constantly
Orange or blue
Not in this assembly

One of the dark realities of living in Champaign-Urbana are the proliferation of stickers on cars, The Chief Forever, as if anything truly lasted forever. But the local university's long time mascot is a white guy dressed up as a native american (what nation? what tribe? well, certainly not the Illinois nation, and not the Potawatomi either, and not the Lakota; they just don't say) who comes out at half time and prances around like a straight guy trying to be gay and failing. The worse of it for me is that my son, usually a logical person with a science background, will make a great (he thinks) case for why this symbol isn't anything like the Atlanta Braves, or the Washington Redskins. It just shows you how blind we can make ourselves. And yes, I know I have my blindness too. In any case, I don't expect the Chief will ever go away, although his "ancestors" are pretty much dead and gone or living in poverty not in Illinois. Ironic, eh? Oh, and orange and blue are the local school colors. I'll be glad to live in an earth tone town again, some day. The Kallyope is from a Vachel Lindsay poem. Irving Berlin's "I'm an Indian Too," is in the musical "Annie Get Your Gun." Kimb and I did a production at the Springfield Theatre Centre in the late 90s. I have a wonderful picture of Kimberly dressed as a native american. Utterly unbelievable. But certainly in keeping with the actual Buffalo Bill show. I played Pawnee Bill.

Piper

Again I hear the silver bells
Lindsay’s words remind me
We all are faeries when we start
And you Sweet One are
Certainly a Faery child
Coming, as you do, from the
Lady’s laughter
Your mother’s honest smile
Upon your face
Your eyes clear windows
To the Land of our peace
The energetic knowing of
Your smile, ancestral lips blowing
Bubbles in the morning
And then you howl in your
Italian crib, time to rise
Time to Rise
Tim Rise
The Piper must be paid
With the coin in this
Never hardened heart

I remember Joel in his crib
I remember Paige in her crib
I remember Piper in the morning
True Child of Our Lady’s Love.

3/2004

Vachel Lindsay's Tree of Laughing Bells still haunts my vision. Lindsay was an american poet of the first part of the last century. Now out of favor with the academics because he was (at least overtly) a xtian and a rhyming poet, few people remember his work. I lived in Springfield, Illinois for very many years and that was his hometown. I have pretty much read all of his stuff and that is a feat, for a great deal of it is dreadful. But much of it is magical. Particularly the Tree of Laughing Bells. For Lindsay the laughing bells signify the wild and true sense of being alive first felt before consciousness lays meaning on it all. The heart, laughing. There is also a dark side to this concept, but for the sake of this poem I dwell in the innocence of my child, first awake, smiling at me and at the tapestry of the Lady that hangs above her bed. The best part of my life has been the time I have spent with my three children. I have had a very different life than most. And the gift of this life is the fact that I have been allowed to spend thousand of hours with my children when they were first here. Despite failed relationships and failed marriages. Despite lack of funds and loss of jobs. I have been honored with so many hours spent with these new humans. You learn more from the babies than from any other source. At least, I have.