winter's loss

damn cold afternoon's penance
sweating here in the privacy of a self-imposed hell
my dreams are a kind of excrement, like mucus
filling this soul (there is)
no breathing allowed this late in the year
birds slit the dying sky with territorial swords
that fucking tree you know the tree
tree of laughing tree of bells
tree of the place where there is no sin
so we lay beneath that tree and you told me
about your dad and now the aorta explodes
too much excrement in the system
no survival no spring expected
this year

From December, 1979. The tree is once again the enormous cottonwood that grew behind the house on Washington Street. They cut it down about ten years ago and I went and stood on the stump and it was like six or eight feet across, or maybe I am just remembering it that way. Vachel Lindsay did a mixed media piece about what he called the Tree of Laughing Bells. There is a wonderful poem, also, that goes with it. It posits a time in the morning before rationality cuts in, when we are still pure in our passion. And even a little scary. So, it seems clear from this piece that on some level I understood how stupid that relationship was. But it is also clear that for me this was about the heart, however unrealistic.

haunting the self

if memory could reduce, or expand the slide show
the multitude of voices turning phrases out in lyric sheets
if the fact of this memory were only more concrete

instead the days are ghosts:
the people I don't see
the women I don't fuck
the children now become adults

what has become of me
hidden with Lindsay's ghost
imagining a unified field theory
in the mist of these memories


Einstein spent the last part of his life attempting to posit a "unified field" theory. He could never get it and no one really ever has been able to say it "all" in the equations that are the language of the theoretical physcist. Lindsay refers to Cousin Vachel, whom all Springfield poets must at least acknowledge if not honor. I honor him, though, having spent entirely too much time in his shoes. He had a hard road to how and it sounds like it might've been even stupider than mine on the subject of the romantic liaison. Enough theory, I need it to be real in some specific fashion.

the city of the future

the city of the future
nurses open sores plays
elect a mayor watches
legislators spit under their
desks and vote against
the ERA like it wasn't
really baseball

the explosions tear me up
I feel Vachel's despair
come hopefully out of the
high school across the street
each afternoon and I cannot
help but think this Mars
and these creatures aliens
that do not know the bells
that ring within them

it is so easy to call these avenues
streets of sin and graft
but that stove-piped scarecrow
still walks here still
rings his heart in the prairie
wind still knows that even
time does not divide us

and I love this city of the future
for in my own backyard
grows the tree of laughing bells
and I can just hear them
in the early morning their music
fey and dangerous and impossibly
bright


Another tribute to Vachel Lindsay. Both his poem about Springfield, the City of the Future, and the poem, the Tree of Laughing Bells contribute to this statement. I lived in Springfield for so very many years, and part of me remains there to this day. It is a wondrous and magical place, so incredibly profaned by money and power. But in some ways that makes it so very fascinating. Ghostly, though, for me. Alison once said that every time she came to Springfield it seemed there was a ghost in every house she saw. And of course she wrote the magnum opus statement on Springfield, "stillborn" that was published in the Lindsay tribute, The Village Magazine in 1979. It's a great statement on escaping the City of the Future. I stayed and tried my best to bring Springfield a little closer to Lindsay's vision. I did know some wonderful writers and artists while there, and I got to act on stage with some great and talented folks. I don't regret living there, though I may regret many of the things I did and said in those years.

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.