Autopsy ... Detritus

Her scattered remains trailblazing a failed journey across
The planet’s surface; no diseases, only the same pale flatness.
It’s subtle red charter a cold glaze of blood from out of time.
Her hand lays gleaming pale disastrous flesh upon the rocks
The great canyon disguises her hair's yellow strands,
Cracks in the legendary strata of this Martian heart. Across
The endless plain archaic tin whistle singing lures the fool
To his forgotten chaos. He waves a wry grin
Disappearing in the tiny-grained sand, its very essence
Her lost bloody child. Hidden, Hidden, Shallow, Numismatic.
Is she ever going to be found? The child in her, the thing that
Stands for something else? Will he wonder where her coffin
Is delivered? Will he walk down Seventh Street, unasked? Will
He … climb out of … the Great Martian Western Sea with
Any piece of her in hand? The yellow man does not know.


Recently discovered another Keye Luke poem, or a poem at least in the genre of the red planet poems. Once again this remarks upon the discovery of the dead girl's corpse in the sand. I note this is an ongoing theme for me: Miranda in Strange Sins, any number of poems about BB discovering her hidden death (sexual abuse) at the hands of her drowned father, that other girl again and again, talking murder and death. What is it with this particular part of my psyche? I have to really wonder. I know the relationship with that girl was particularly destructive. At the time we both had the spectre of her husband's anger and his overt violence (he once tore the guttering off of a house at a rugby party after having gotten quite drunk and become violent and jealous). It is remarkable that he never tried to kill me (well, he did threaten me once, but it was over the phone). As for how she dealt with him, she controlled him. I think that was one of the things she liked about me. Although she could exercise a certain control, there was always that sense of taunting me to do the most extreme things. She liked that extreme, in the physical. That was where we ran that possibility of doing something we both would regret. Do I regret it now? I regret not having gone even farther. I only regret not having called her bluff. Whatever the fuck it was.

broken mirror

codeine thickens the fog
the city wears a skin of rain
menthol nicotine eats holes in the tissue
theology occupies love's normal spaces
politics hides words
in places soon to be explored
old friends live on mars
having lost these maps

I am not sad, nor keen
the definitions multiply
the borders
beyond the possible interface
poems splice the weeks
photographs echo the car wrecks
it comes to me:
magic is desire

shadows of the winds tracing topography
like fingers across her flesh, an ordinary
sweet design the day sees its image
in a broken mirror

is there someone else in there
with me?

I smoked benson and hedges menthol cigarettes for maybe twenty some odd years. This piece also mentions the keye luke sequence. There is the concern for cartography. Also the sense of loss is presented as an average understanding. I have long felt that the price of consciousness is the ability to mourn.

the vernier is shot

winds of these prayers paint the flatland of my fathers
my words chill me; no one comforts me
Keye Luke is back on Mars, & the lunar was explored last year
there are no angels in the snow of my front yard
only a photographic image of last year's wings

my hands are finally pale this season
the noise has become interference
it has lost its purity
there is no wisdom in the static
no messages from the yellow man on the red planet

the plains spread away from this door forever
no moon, no stars

When the vernier is shot on an old radio it means the ability to tune the signal has been lost. This poem lists all the conceits from the 70s: Keye Luke, the lunar explored, the snow angel. Photography is represented. The idea of wisdom hidden in the static is an old one. I first used it in the novel It Seems So Long Ago. There was a character in this post nuclear holocaust america who claimed to see the future in the snow on his television. There was no signal to pickup, just the white noise. That character was meant to represent John the Baptist in a novel built on the fifteen mysteries of the rosary. In this piece it represents the abandonment of the author by his muse/partner, Keye Luke. This was written long before Luke's demise, of course. So, this piece is primarily about my relationship with Scarritt, the group, and the idea. People left. People gave up. There is usually a retreat in every campaign.

dead yellow friend

keye luke you hibernating
yellow sonafabitch
you better do a lazarus
or make room in the catacomb
I don't even got an anabel lee
here this time
baseball's on strike
saturn's in retrograde

keye luke
you gotta throw me a line
or I'll go down like
peter lorre
all this damn baggage
at my throat

you mentioned perishing once
but I thought you meant the food
we backpacked through a fuck of
a lot of sand, number one son

you'd do those illustrated quadrants
over the campfire, ruining your eyes
deimos is worth less than memory as a moon
or a source of of light and anyway
the martian women are centuries dead now

bet that's why
you died, isn't it you sneak?
getting some dead alien pussy?
foreign sex for foreigners

& me I'm stuck worthless in honkyville
trying to peddle useless maps
of places people don't want to go
not even my friends

This is a very late Keye Luke piece. I believe the baseball strike was in 1993, which explains the tone of the piece, that being the fall that Bradway left me. Long time followers of this series will recall that Keye Luke, the actor who played Jimmy Chan in the Warner Oland/Sidney Toler Charlie Chan movies, and myself went to Mars and mapped its surface over a series of expeditions. As a metaphor, of course. Thus the useless maps refer to poems. The idea that these pieces contain a metaphorical map of actual emotional reality, but it acknowledges that nobody really wants to go to those places. Even today this is mainly true. The actor Keye Luke did die around this time.

ghost hope

Mars has gone around the sun
the world pleads for comfort
inside me is the ghost of a yellow man
telling stories
the locusts have returned to us
in our cramped mutilations
what you would have us know
my friend is dead on another world
they call this metaphor
they explain these things
as a well-mapped psyche
I am still at odds out of a job
on this lincoln-earth
twice in transit around our star
the martian ghost gives me
hope but is
dead dead?
or is it a story of the locusts
dreaming?

no communiques

winds of these prayers
paint the flatlands of my father
my words chill me
and no one comforts me
keye luke has returned to mars
and the lunar was explored
last year
there are no angels
in the snow of my front yard
and only a photographic
image of her wings
my hands are pale this season
there are no excuses for drowning
the noise has become interference
it has lost its white purity
there is no wisdom in the static
no messages from the yellow man
on the red planet
the plains spread away from
this door forever
no moon, no stars


More private language. Besides the Keye Luke figure this poem also uses the reference to the Lunar Explored, a manuscript of poems written in the mid 1970s. The lunar in the title referred to the female principle, the moon being the ancients direct icon for the female. For me there was always a sexual, or at least genital reference in the word lunar. The snow angel reference is once again to a poem of Alison Gaughan's about making snow angels ("our angels never touch"). Later Gary Adkins used it as the title for a novel he wrote that took the Maltese Falcon story and retold it in contemporary Springfield, using Bill Lambrecht, the journalist, and his partner, Sandy Martin, as two of the main characters. The reference towards the end to static and wisdom come from my first novel manuscript, It Seems So Long Ago, which is set after a nuclear holocaust in the american southwest. There is a character in this book who watches the static on his tv (no broadcast signal) and imagines he can see things in the snow that give meaning to his existence. You can see the cross reference to the snow angel at work in this. I had a period between the first and second Scarritt groups where I felt completely abandoned by my friends. This piece comes from that period.

You Again

Everybody else left a long time ago.
Keye Luke owns a mexican restaurant.
His toothpick thin ivory bones
lie on the sand of Lowell's sea.
His disembodied voice
barks of tortillas, frijoles.
He knows enough to feed the living.

The Wind Blows in at Wrigley Field

Keye Luke,
you once led an army
defending the heart
of me.
Why are you gone now?
You have left Wrigley Field
to return to the plains
of the Martian western continent
where no rivers run.
Oh Yellow Man of Love,
there are no homers
in today's steady wind.
My heart is an anxious muscle.
I cannot sleep.
The ghosts of last year's exploration
haunt me. And I think of your
sure smile and steady hands,
sifting the red dust
in the spring wind,
a gauze of memory,
remarkable these days.


When the wind blows in at Wrigley Field it is bad for the hitters and good for the pitchers. It means a long, intense game where one team will win by a run or two. When the wind blows out the scoring is legendary. In my life I watched entirely too many cubs baseball games and back in the old days when they were mostly in the afternoon as Wrigley didn't have lights. This poem appeared in the Lindsay centenary Village Magazine, the was organized and published by Sangamon Poets in the fall of 1979.

Coke and Sympathy

"You will kill yourself over these thoughts,"
Keye Luke told me this morning.

He is right,
but the taste of the Martian soil
is in me and will not let me
see anything else.

It is not dishonor
that worries me.
My fear is my own.
I hope to awaken some day
and you will be standing
in the door and you will
understand me you will let me
hold your hands and have you.

Keye Luke will only smile
at this vision.
"Damn it," I tell him,
"this will all be true
or I will have to die,
you know this."

He is usually a good friend.
He reassures me.

Caption on a Photograph

Keye Luke
reminds me about you
when I see him
on Sundays
during Charlie Chan
when I force myself
to watch

He reminds me
of our maps
He traces West Lake Drive
across the Martian Sea
He points to the
Grand Canal
and says
You are there

West Lake Drive is the road around Lake Springfield. It was the road to Alison Gaughan's family home on Greencastle Drive. Also one of Alison's poems, Going 40 Over the Bridge, is set on this road. We drove it together many times. The Grand Canal references Lowell's theory that there were canals on Mars that had been built by another civilization. Part of the metaphor, here.

No Exit Strategy

Keye Luke—
Does it ever ease up?
I think these are true questions,
not like zen commercials.
We can't afford to be
alone, anymore
yellow friend.
I know you would rescue me
from the sands in lower plains,
but what can you do
about the human losses?
So much has spoiled
in my vision—
The failure now seems inherent.
At least I am a cartographer
of this heart.
These maps are as accurate
as I can make them.
I will hang one on the wall
beside your picture.
I will write you these notes.
I miss you my friend.

Keye Luke on Mars

It was me
helped Keye Luke
map Dawes Continent
in 1975.

We were in the northern hemisphere.
Keye Luke told the worst jokes.
It was us who charted the afternoon's
progress among the psychotropics.
I remember the sand ate at our eyes.

The last day
I told him,
"There can't be any theories left,"
"Match you for the tab,"
He joked.

I turned the page
for that day's chart
and it read
"Next five exits
Lincoln shrines".


Beginning of the series of poems that marked the second half of the 1970s for me. Keye Luke was the asian-american actor who played Lee Chan in the the Warner Oland/Sidney Toler Charlie Chan movies. The conceit of these poems is that Lee Chan and myself are somehow in a 1940s Hollywood movie, where we are exploring Mars, as if it were a desert sand planet. The metaphor, not to get too obvious, comes from David Bowie's song, Life on Mars, where daily life is understood to be as alien as life on another planet. The idea that poetry is cartographic in nature has been with me fairly constantly since my teen years. I like the idea that metaphors are functionally equivalent to the symbological representations of reality that appear on maps. There are quite a number of these poems. Read in order, or in the group, they can amount to a fairly good look at my emotional being in those years, so long ago now. Keye Luke died a few years ago (1991).

Forensic Habit

I stole her fingerprints
like you would have
mad oriental friend.
I hid the glass,
carefully wrapped in a handerkerchief
behind the files of old letters.
Later I watched the cubs
lose to los angeles
knowing you would have
cheered the Dodgers.
Ah, there was magic in your voice
in my dream, there were women
and words and rice wine
and the sweet red calligraphy
of the martian seas
and its your exploration now—
I can only watch.

but I will keep the fingerprints
for your analysis
should I prove lucky enough
to live to see
your return.

She disappeared
in the central highlands anyway.
I've no wish
to convict her.

It's just
we always
preserve the clues
even when we do not know
what they mean.

(For a great deal of the later 1970s and early 1980s the figure of Keye Luke, the actor who played Jimmy Chan in the Charlie Chan movies, remained a major icon in my poems. The conceit was that we explored Mars together and mapped its surface. This poem also has many elements taken from Ross MacDonald, the remarkable mystery writer. McDonald's classic story inevitably had a current mystery and a mystery from the deep past that was involved with the main story. I sought this structure in my own life and never quite found it. But I know that it is there.)

griddlecakes

Sometimes she is the mirror, bright!
But oh what might lie behind her silvered
laughter? only the dissolution of the
mission, only the one chance to run
from the final dismembering of who
we were originally. Smells like buttered
toast here today. I yearn for sausages
bursting with fat, surrounded by the
pickled cabbage, a strange bread
the manger for this sacrifice. I see
clearly the way I hid this entire time
with smoke and bourbon and too
much vodka, too many years. Nothing
remains of that once possible cartographer;
he threw his compass away and watched
the woman's graceless destruction.
Which one you ask, the mirror bright?
No that version of myself became
someone valuable in her own game
and so divined her place outside
of time and space. Lucky bitch. Or
worse now, living with a child but not
the one that was to be the gate, does
she know the memory of her plan
detailed in dream song the redhaired
woman below the tree and me still
screaming as I bleed and burn,
the harvest king returned to her
in the night, where she can still
feel my face and know the minutes
passing? Or, rather, past? And is
that howling the blank recognition
of our banal and ordinary pain?

This piece, as turgid and obtuse as it is, is still one of my favorite poems. And it does talk about a sort of romanticised longterm vision of being. There is a concept at work here that certain people in my life have been in it before, over long periods of time. An old idea, but one that seems truer and truer to me as I go on, sorting out the universe and discarding most of Phil Dick's ideas for my own. Certainly the "woman's graceless destruction" is meant to refer to Alison Gaughan's destruction of me, romantically. The cartographer reference also means me, by way of the Keye Luke on Mars poems written twenty years before. The child that was meant to be the gate means the child I thought I was meant to have with Alison Gaughan. She did eventually have a child, quite late in her life (43).

the long abandoned self

plumping on the noise,
recognizing her deception; thus it was
a royal screwing and not just the
story so far the fingers of dead
friends twitching in the bad dreams
our confrontations fallen to the wayside
you were the spring, and summer too,
I'm going out to search for you...
my inter-planetary journeys caught up
in the storm of modern disaster
I've been to mars on a
scholarship from a hidden source
left the maps and noise behind
the booty dredged
through sand and wind and I am here
regarded as a clown, no smokey
robinson not beautiful, but envisioned
as he who would finally break
the trunk-lid, discovering his long
abandoned self. Are we all like this?
grown silvered in our coverings the
words just lies a fabric of regard
layering years and meanings into
a shroud meant to deny the only truth
that matters: who am I?

A truly remarkable statement, he says, proud of his ancient self. The quote in mid-poem is from a song done by Joan Baez, "North" on the album entitled "Joan" which originally appeared I believe in 1967. The piece references the Keye Luke poems. The reference to a scholarship from a hidden source merely means that I was living off of Pat Smith at the time. Stealing my writing time from someone else's labor. If I hadn't done that I probably wouldn't have written nearly as many things as I did write. I felt guilty about that and attempted to rectify it by creating as a good a situation as I could for Becky Bradway to write. I know now that this was a mistake. I was stupid to give up the work, but I was overwhelmed by the guilt I had over the fiasco of 1979. And over my guilt for being with Pat but seeing other women. It was the sixties though and we all professed not to be "possessive". As it was most of my regrets about the 70s are about the women I didn't actually have sex with. A typical male evaluation, based on the biological impulse no doubt. In any case, the self that is abandoned in this poem is clearly the writer that I actually am. I may have fucked it up. I may have let it go for too long. But that fact is that writing these poems is a central part of my being and always has been. If in fact it is is essentially a detective story, and I see it that way, then this is the work that I hid in the trunk for all those years. The abandoned self.

But, yes, I don't really understand the first line.

Martian Crime Scene

Her scattered remains trail-blazing a failed journey across
The planet’s surface; no diseases, only the same pale flatness
It’s subtle red charter a cold glaze of blood from out of time.
Her hand lay gleaming a thin disastrous fleshtone upon the rocks
The great canyon disguised the yellow strands of her hair,
Cracks in the legendary strata of this martian heart. Across
The endless plain archaic tin whistle singing lures the fool
To his unremarkable disassociation. He waves a wry grin
Disappearing in the tiny-grained sand, its very essence
Her lost bloody child. Hidden Hidden, Shallow, Numismatic.
Is she ever going to be found? The child in her the thing that
Stands for something else. Will he wonder where her coffin
Is delivered? Will he walk down seventh street, unasked? Will
He . . . climb out of . . . the Great Martian Western Sea with
Any piece of her in hand? The yellow man does not know.