still naked in the day

for Sandra P. Riseman, 1949-2012

 Your fate is in an armoire disguising
the dress to be worn post rapture
your fondness for the kitten is
duly noted the increase of her days to be
spent clawing the furniture the armoire
has scratches on its 18th century feet

somewhere in the deepness of this
celluloid cavern is a cassette of you
reading that scene in Sara Sara Jane
where the freaks from Scarritt pick you
up and you hear those desperate jokes
we wore like hats in them days

I admit I am a little afraid
to look in the armoire and see the
tuxedo I shall be wearing when we
share that dance beyond
I took your chapbook down
last night and walked those narrow
lanes again remembering how badly

you played bridge that time
Jake and Joel beat you and Cheryl
when they were kids and that time 
you and Cheryl went to see
the guy who published Uzzano
and shared some serious "sisterhood"

the days are nights and the nights
are curtains hanging now beside
your armoire its beautiful polished
surface with bright brass fixtures
waiting for the opening now

now it is you, waiting for me
dancing in the garden my memory
the memory of trees the leaves
falling now the fall has come

still naked in the day

your fate is an armoire disguising
the dress to be worn in the rapture
your fondness for the kitten is
duly noted the increase of her days
spent clawing the furniture the armoire
has scratches on its 18th century feet

somewhere in the deepness of this
celluloid cavern is a tape of you
reading that scene in Sara Sara Jane
where the freaks from Scarritt pick you
up and you hear those desperate jokes
we wore like hats in them days

I admit I am a little afraid
to look in the armoire and see the
tuxedo I shall be wearing when we
share that dance beyond
I admit I took your chap down
last night and walked those narrow
lanes again remembering how badly

you played bridge that time
Jake and Joel beat you and Cheryl
that time you and Cheryl went to
see the guy who published Uzzano
and shared some serious sisterhood

the days are nights and the nights
are curtains hanging now beside
your armoire its beautiful polished
surface with bright brass fixtures
waiting for the opening now
waiting for the chance to wear
that gown in the night

peer or imposter

I was still awake, and I knew your painting hides in my attic
(the one Kareco did) above the room you once occupied
and I thought the oil-drawn eyes were lighting the square chamber
of that pyramid, with strong yellow light from what source
I cannot say. And I turned on my pillow, hoping to catch
the occasional machine-gun bursts of typewriter keys in your
private world (the one we never really see)
but the strain in the dark was such I could only hear
mythological burglars and imaginary young men with hammers,
testing doorframes. My heart was a huge Bear on a hillside
paused among the trees, trying hard to remember,
watching the world of its peers & imposters,
almost as if you were really here. And in this house that is not
a pharoah's tomb, and that is not President Lincoln's tomb,
I caught my wonderment, in the midst of a usual insomnia, trying
to feel what you must feel when you awake in your bedroom
in your family's home in Dayton, Ohio.

Gary Davidson lived on Scarritt Street in the period before he went to Virginia to study at Hollins College. Sometime during that period our old friend, Karen Cooper, did an oil painting of Gary that was a leetle bit on the scary side, and Gary left it in the attic on Scarritt. Scarritt's attic was a four sided pyramid in shape, and Tim indulged his 1970s mysticism with several pyramid experiments, one of which that achieved a kind of success (not what I thought, of course). Also during that time a young man across the street, crazed after a five day drug odyssey, went nuts with a hammer and murdered two old men in his building and attacked several other people before being disabled by an elderly african-american gentleman in a drug store who was defending his eight year old grand-daughter. Both Gary and I were true paranoids in the 1970s, and why not? There obviously was cause. My paranoia had more to do with the FBI visiting in 1969 when the people I was hanging with had this sort of weird association with some of the people in the Chicago Seven (Abbie and Jerry, actually). In any case I had no drivers license through most of the 70s, and little of an official identity. This poem comes from a dream. When Gary lived at Scarritt, he would arise very early (5-6 a.m.) and start writing in the dining room before anyone else was up. And Gary was famous in Scarritt circles for his first novel, Stuffed, which was about an animate talking stuffed bear. Clearly, I would have liked to be counted as a peer, and not an imposter.

Cinema Song

Who was that under the marquee?
Who came to me in the midnight sun?
Was it you, wrapped in a blanket?
Was it you, hoping for the dawn?

Who came to me with large watching eyes?
Who watched me shiver in the winter wind?
Was it you in that wiretapped cinema?
Was it you reading subtitles as a child's hymn?

Who was it who wept on my shoulder?
Who watched the heroine disappear?
Was it you, draped in the midnight?
Was it you, sitting with me there?

Were you mercy, my love?
Were you life?
Have I found you, my love?
Have I laughed?

Were you always my love?
And was I not quite close?
Have I known you, my love?
Is this one life enough?

From the 70s during a period where I wrote a number of rhymed and metered pieces. This is more successful than I remembered it. I'm not sure of the movie, but I am thinking it may have been Jean Luc Godard's Breathless. This piece reflects both Leonard Cohen's songs, and Jacques Brel, the Belgian singer/songwriter. Those unfamiliar with Brel should try and find the broadway cast album of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. The songs are dark, funny, bitter, romantic and beautiful phrased.

separated at birth

you think you've got your illusions
wrapt up in your carbondale scene
all your breakers charged and
overloaded with alcohol and
your paranoia hat left
hanging at the front of the house
and its really only one room

but I am busy
traversing the gridlines
on this map just as
if I knew what I was doing
when I understood that this was
all shit some time ago
and I can add up your scorn
and reach in and even
if so many years pass
that I don't see your face
with a name anymore,
I will still know just
how much alike
we are

From 1977, imagining the faceless future. Very cynical about the act of writing ("this was all shit"), but at the end a recognizable point that is somehow actually true. Not that the fact that we are very alike was any actual help in carrying on a relationship, or even a friendship over the many years. Addressed to Alison Gaughan, who's photo (since removed) I found on an old hard drive and include in this post, for nostalgia sake and because I've been asked about images from this period in my life. I have almost none. These that I have found were sent to me as color xeroxes by Pat Smith the spring that Piper was born, 2003. I have asked Ross Hulvey for access to his photos from this time, but he ignores my letters. I have also asked John Ranyard for his photos, but I think John has other things on his mind these days. If anybody out there has any photos from the writing groups that you'd like to share, please email me at tosburn@msn.com. Thanks for the good thought.

By Request

Pat Smith and Steven Alfred Dolgin, circa 1974-75. Pat turned seventy, December 10, in St. Louis. I haven't spoken to her in many years.

By request. Gary Davidson poses for Greg Lakebrink, 1974. 223 East Scarritt Street. Springfield, Illinois.

the angelis

the angelis
the burst of light
the bells ring
the multiplication of lives
words arranged by sound
their meanings
nudging genetic origins
kerouac said life
is pain & drank too much
I am reduced to begging
and even that is ignored
there is nothing to do
but taste this sorrow
it isn't your fault
although it is

the world acts like a disease
friends sing me stories
of innocence and experience
everyone secretly creates fame
my guts are torn open
in expiation I fear my sins
but have trouble defining them
sometimes death seems comforting
usually it is an evil angel


So the high point of this meditation is the line about having trouble defining my sins. Later in my life this is less and less of a problem. That is because I spend less intellectual currency pretending an understanding that supports my ego's small goals. This piece also has aspects of my difficult relationship with the entire Scarritt scene that I promoted and kept going for a number of years for no particularly good reason except that I needed to feel important and have some sort of audience for my own work. This piece also references Blake and Kerouac, proving that I have had some sort of actual relationship to actual literature. And again Alison Gaughan is seen as some sort of dark angel who has left me behind in purgatory to pay for these very sins.

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.

maybe maybe not

these words
this patience
makes me sound phony sweetheart
what really hurts now
are the disappearances
the things we never said
in the intrigue
the bullets of the self
poisoning the blood
and you are the antibody
but you are gone and this disease
sounds phony now with its own
empty circular solution

I am
balanced on the tip of the pyramid
no one will give me the shove
which face will I slide down?
none of the above
all the words accumulate
in the will
a slow poison
the hours crowding
into this house

This piece is strictly speaking about Alison and mine's inability to get beyond the fact that we were in love, but couldn't really be with each other because we both were living off of somebody else and we were not quite capable of dealing with that. So rather than simply say we need to find a way to make enough money to live together, which would've meant spending time not making art (which is truly what we thought we were doing those days), we just hummed our way through a decade of game playing. The pyramid reference is very pointed. Sometime in the late 70s I got into that idea that a pyramid was a way of focusing psychic energy. I build a pyramid and put it in the attic at Scarritt. The roof itself was a four sided pyramid, so I figured it would do some serious focusing. Hey, it was the sixties. People did things like this. I did many. I used it to ask for a specific boon which I actually received. And not a small thing, either. I didn't ask it to work things out between me and Alison, however. I felt that only she could do that. I, for one, was ready to give up everything for her and I told her that on more than one occasion. And she would say, maybe. Well, that's her crime, her sin in this. By and large she wasn't a terrible person, but she kept me hanging on, and herself too. Maybe.

secret arrangement

now that you're disappearing
for another time
my secret arrangement
has begun to collapse

the unspent poems
come out as distillate
the things I swore
not to say
for both our sakes

now that you'll be
in that other land
older with its hints
of your first life
I become free and afraid
your leaves fallen in my attic
your lycanthropic eyes
peering from unused pages
the ones in the white box
which serves as a coffin
for this secret
arrangement


Alison Gaughan went to Ireland with her sister in the mid 1970s. When the chapbook, LNFS, was first printed and put together Knoepfle decided that certain things in it had to be fixed and he had three signatures reprinted, including one for Alison who had thought better about an image that apparently identified her own father ("the amputated man"). These changes were wrought and there was a party at Scarritt to take apart the chapbook, collate in the new signatures, and then re-bind them. Afterward there was a box of the replaced signatures that I couldn't bear to throw away. I put them in the attic on Scarritt where they stayed pretty much until we moved and then I disposed of them, but not in a bunch. I burned them in the backyard at 223 East Scarritt, one sheet at a time, for a couple of hours. Lakebrink was sorely amused.

the eye atop the stones

and we go down a ruin
each verb & image a story
of another chasm
you disappear
(all of you)
in your world(s)

so Gary is right
but I know his losses
are design
and mine are robberies
on a calendar
I made by interlacing
lives

you struggle to explain
I recognize your pyramid
with the eye atop the
stones

for gary d.

old friend you do not write me
you do not show me your books, anymore
Jim is not here to share my stroh's
Ricardo has gone to Sterling for two weeks
but he did not tell me last Thursday when we talked.
Gary went to Chicago today; he made his apologies
for the retreat. He is lying to himself
about Anita. But it is an old lie that
we all survive.
My child has gone to Oregon with my ex-wife,
the marxist, and I have not heard from him
in the last month.
I do not write Janne, for reasons she refuses
to admit; and of course, she does not write me.
Ross suffers in his understanding
but has made a place and will live nowhere else.
That it cannot include us is only normal.
This list goes on, as you know. But it has no actual
point. It is only to say how dark this room
has become. No one answers my letters, but
I will not threaten suicide to evoke a response.
Instead I spend the days questioning myself,
wondering what are the errors.
Knowing this is only a normal human concern.
Old friend, you do not write me.
But this is not asking you to.
I am no longer surprised by the world, just confused.
These words are splits of wood on the fire,
creating light and heat, just as if you were
actually here.


A poem from the late 70s, speaking to my friend Gary Davidson, after the disillusion of the first Scarritt group. I needed response in those days and sought it, extravagantly. It's a good thing I got over that because there is less and less response to my words as I age. Of course, I'm not as much fun, nor as sexy as I was in those days (I'm sorry Paige, but it is the truth.)

From 1978

Wearing the brave white hat
wondering where the hell you went
these days represent stairs
dancing down the choreography
of time and light. The body
decays—drinking again.
No state of grace driving up
outside the door. (I am)
Abandoning the ship with its rock
jazz and other narnian fantasies,
staving off the hollow bell
the locked closet of this fear.
And where the hell did you go
in the midst of that whirlpool of moments?
Why won't you tell even one
secret like the shrouds of your sailor's
warning covering the moon?
Can't you take it any more?
It was your decision: Don't you
see the points beginning to tangle
in what little that is real?
Now the bullshit is like a normal cartoon.
Bullshit just packing this coffin.
Should've known, all the risks you take,
the killing concrete, the six hour bruise
of night, the laughing chance, the odd
gamble with death, this would be
the one time you wouldn't bet.
Anyway, I'm taking off the brave white hat,
that damn hat, and having another drink.
It's 97 outside, but it's an ice storm
in this room.


Alison Gaughan. Not much to explain. She had destroyed me by this point. I admit, I allowed that to happen. The heart is some sort of icon for that which can be lost. This life is so much about losing. My world, though more detailed, becomes smaller as the years pass and I wonder how much of this reflected any actual people. Some, though perhaps not as much as I'd like to believe. I miss you all.

"laughing chance" comes from Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues," which Alison quoted to me in a letter, explaining our losses. "They call Alabama the Crimson Tide..."

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.

nothing

the cards say disappointment
crowley grins ~ flower vanishing in flame
temper rises like the day these hands
control at least this brief life ~
this instant, but the cards turn over
this love w/its abandonment
shadowy silvered wraith of memory
do you sleep in the darkness of your
husband's bed? He switches to bizet
the refrigerator fails; fahrenheit
becomes obstacle. Remember,
remember. Shocked january day
stilled by presence imbedded in
windowglass ~ terrible snow
murderers of anger
the cards are the angel's breath
air to fill the empty silks
of sunday's destructive love

always you who cannnot speak
this same street is the road in the valley
the equation has broken down
my dreams are the enduring photographs
of this grief

it won't work. there is no life
on the red couch for me. your arms
or nothing.


(This poem and the two previous all come from the same dark period in the mid 1970s. These particular pieces were all written sometime during late 1976. Reviewing them and re-working them has been good for me. I can see the magnitude of errors that I made in my twenties. Chief among these was living with Pat Smith, who paid for everything. Also, the desperate need I had for people, which no one could reasonably satisfy. Finally, the warped desire to love someone who, though well meaning, was probably incapable of loving anyone but herself at that point in time. Plus all the drugs, booze, and the need to write important shit that took up all my time and consciousness. In retrospect, I wish I had moved to Oregon to be with my son, and that I had met different people and become a different kind of writer. I believe my initial style of writing was much more workable for me, and certainly felt a great deal more natural to me, than the style imposed on me by my relationship with John Knoepfle. He probably meant well; or at least he meant no harm. I know quite a few people who despise him, though, so I sometimes wonder. In any case, it was myself that chose to try and do what he thought a writer should write and be and it was my mistake.

The cards referred to in this piece are the tarot cards from the deck designed by the great magical thinker, Aleister Crowley. In his evaluation of what happens when you use the Tarot there is an invocation of an Angel, the Hru Angel. The red couch was a significant presence in the living room at 223 East Scarritt. It was a salvation army purchase and was worn to the point of disposal in the four and a half years that I lived at Scarritt. I made love to Alison Gaughan numerous times on that couch.)

Old Mother Midnight

Summer, 1977
Leave it on a rayed day in old mother midnight: her passionate pen in the august 11th coldness in another strange menthol year in a decade on hold with nonsense sometimes a good enough reason & the busted loose mufflerless sound of some kid in his hot car in the cold mother night so like the grave—it races and rambles thru here darling & dearest friends I soon must leave our voices becoming hollow in the telephones because I don't know how to be natural in the midst of this massive morning of night—I don't know how to cool it, make you less than what you are but it's all a blind story anyway & my antique attitude of 'why' and 'now' must be forgiven-understood for what it is in reflection in this stagnant stinking dump of self too tired & forlorn to move but glimmered in the eye of some chieftainess of beauty—Oh I've told you how before come close before but never sang the singing needs a truth like water in a canyon on mars which I don't have and can't fill with my strohs bohemian & only wish I could have once filled for you—you who mean so much I must back off or never live. Your handless hands never coming in the midnight scraping silvered fingernails across tense and angry skin—no re-made music of the cilia fibers no nervous system reapportionments no blown bubles of silvered spit from thin lipped miniature mouth in a room lit by post broadcast day television like a dreamed but real remembrance of a history we once had my fingers not lost in your hair on the pillow head twisted in subtonal moans of kyries and novenas my legs not finding new made self made strength in straining in fantastic ocean movements in the murder of our own centuries my lips not pursed in long understood dialects of breath & gasps I did not ever stand you & me gripped wholly in the other's eyes the well so deep & never dry—no, none of this, one true & lost darling, none of this & never never now—no way but histories—my dreams & novels lead a life we did not have. Never sang. Can't sing now. The seasons evil like the dog's cruel shouting in the fifties air my hands are trembling like you never tembled for me I'd cut them off but the angel won't let me.


From a reading in a spiral bound notebook from the second half of the year 1977. There are a number of pieces from this notebook I will publish on this blog. The summer of 1977 was a seminal period for me. I attempted to free myself from a long-standing and stupid obsession. It didn't work and there are elements in this failure dominant in me even today. I understand, in retrospect, that I should have cut myself off from this person years before this particular series of events. That I didn't is part of the specific downward spiral of my artistic life. But it doesn't matter at this point in my life. The story is entirely past. Only the evil burden of another incarnation could create any kind of coda to it. Hopefully death will relieve me of that particular lapse of judgement.

discarded identity

Now.
(______), you primal sad sack, bald,
still married to the adequate but barren girl,
(barren by choice I am told)
inhabited by what fear she may have known
early on your life a dream of golems and
girls both elvis and lied von der erde
the subtle march of our own deceptions
hacking away in the forest of subconscious
memory who you once were and who
I still am and who twice-born though he
may be is the great wellesian actor who
has claimed your hours as blood across
the decades. Chump you are and, truth now,
did you fuck the witch? and does
your woman know? How many hidden
things are in this picture? Where's Gary?
For one. Where's the monument to the
house burned down on second street
perhaps for fun He played that banjo
badly in that time now he feels the
keyboard swallowing up the remainder
of days, thinking hard about not thinking
about those disappearing leaves of
his previous life. All over, all done now.
Placed in the wooden box, the river
water seeping in, the scratchy pages
not quite right the one on top the Great
American Highway Speech oh the cassette
of that on the back porch on Washington
Street in the spring of 1979 I can still
hear your drunken syllables calling out
for patriotism and fun for the glory of
an American scientist and engineer
as seen from space well you would
know about that wouldn't you? Once
the leader, the maker of decisions. Now
the shill for those who run the business
of education and in this slightly comical
state in this latest absurdist version
of the good old usa. How are you
going to find your way back? I know.
You're not.