from Blackwater Quartet, selection 9

Metaphysical Graffiti

A cold morning decades gone
models this present dawn.
My features accommodate the half-light.

The veined silver of the glass is fogged.
I shave from memory,
plundering the past for impetus
squandered in the mirror’s flux.

The dead reside beyond this alchemy.

The razor at the throat perfects the years,
time and places traded for a life.
I cannot recover my lost longueurs,
the palm tree in the garden, ocean frontage,
the constellations’ carnival cortège.
The speaking parts are taken.

§

The winter sky is tangled in the trees,
a pewter fog among the branches.

On the strand
waders anchored in the tidal lees
occupy a higher ether lost to land—
overhead, a gull’s cut-paper profile,
grey on grey, the estuary a surreal mile
where the Blackwater River forgets the sea
to assume a new identity.

Summer’s relics, smacks in drydock
display a jagged ambience.
On this coast, we cultivate an independence
mirrored in the seaward rock.

§

Remembering West Palm,
the bougainvillaea’s impossible flowers’
oceancalm of colour nestled near the courtyard mango,
the psilocybin afternoons
a sentient kingdom, even now…
ground lapis sky, the summerhouse
sheltered from the heat,
clockwork storms each afternoon reinventing Eden.

The imitation woodgrain plastic shell
pledged syncopated love— reprise of Elvis
deciphered through the crackle.
The flyscreen sieved time to a trickle,
you at the stove, singing "Heartbreak Hotel,"
stirring peas.

Down coast on the Cape
the Apollo mission flexing into upper spheres—
we flew down in the Cessna, ate lunch
in the wing shade, listening to the launch
on radio, the gallery in tears:
that distant firework trail where dreams escape.

The threaded eye anticipates the stitch;
a ratcheting glint instructs the cloth— ordered thus
the turning worlds abide.
In digital streams the satellites ride,
death codes kick and whinny,
leap ages without landing.

The martyr’s bronze, the Hanged Man’s tree
in blossom— this is the habit of desire.

§

I saw my life
in a memory of water, my lucky star
adrift in river stanzas, planet rim fading,
ragged edge of atmosphere the banking plane reveals.

Rising water-shaped blue miles,
the frictionless clouds divide
and England,
crumpledpaper fields
along the twisted ribbon of the Thames,
awakes, the world reborn in our own lives.
Stubborn beauty, this is the high ground,
there is no other.

In water meadows by the Isis, on barges
lit with pinks and roses, a foil of potted herbs
cools the eye, blurs into the margins.
Holding hands, we strolled between the bridges
conjugating Latin verbs.

From no-where towns,
the trace of accent, the provincial gait…
the mannered metre’s bric-à-brac
was Auden’s, the realpolitik
of life beyond our lives: the war in Spain,
the smiling face of Chamberlain.

Expecting Beethoven, preferring Bach,
we settled for Goering’s coelacanthine bars,
the whine of Heinkels over London —
this could be Mars, a restless future
scripted in the smoke calligraphy, sparktrace
geometry of world’s end and no memory,
the mountain of our will resolved
in animal tumulus, fire and sacrifice.

§

Late autumn, a borrowed Galaxy
coaxed to Carolina for a reading,
returning to Lake Worth
and winter sun, I constructed my nostalgia
where future tenses ripen, a burnished
mock exotica, a dusty road, a house let furnished.

Why pine and fret?

Red dust roostertails
the big Ford trails in rust of dawn
redirect the universe.

What is given is given always, yet
nothing has been changed except the unreal,
as if nothing had been changed at all,
the brittle potpourri of planets strewn
carelessly across the room,
time’s gaudy wreckage underfoot.

The speaking parts are taken.

Walking high in peyote light,
seeing what was spoken
when red day broke on lives that break,
I return it to you now, the world
as we imagined it,
and as we said it was.

On Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz was an American writer. His Jewish Romanian family made a life in Brooklyn in the early 20th century, where his father's entrepreneurial skills enabled the immigrant family to enjoy a high standard of living and quite rightly to consider that they had achieved “the American Dream.” However, the economic crash of the 1920s resulted in the collapse of Harry Schwartz's speculative property empire, and with it the family's fortunes. This rags-to-riches-to rags cycle was a sore picked-over by Delmore in his journals and later writings.

He set out to establish himself as an important writer in his own right, publishing stories and poems in many of the principal literary journals. In the late 1930s, under James Laughlin's New Directions imprint, he published a collection of poems and stories, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and as a result of its critical success was touted as the most important writer of his generation, a burden of gold in some respects, but otherwise an impossible weight to bear at the age of twenty-five. In perspective, this was a time when his contemporaries, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Saul Bellow, had published nothing.

Although critically acclaimed, the book's sales were poor, and for several years he made an indifferent and meagre living teaching. In the late 1940s, he published a book of short stories, The World is a Wedding, again critically well received, but with the proviso that the initial great promise of his early writing was not to be fulfilled.

His personal life was unhappy, and, a chronic insomniac, he became pharmaceutically dependent on barbiturates, an addiction compounded later by alcohol abuse. His second wife, the writer Elizabeth Pollett, said, "He had about five jobs, was working his head off, and was increasingly out of touch with reality.” "Being with him,” she wrote, was "like living on the side of a volcano."

Separated from Pollett, and at one time sectioned, his later years found him renting West Village cold-water flats. He still functioned well enough to review for The New Republic, though, and in 1960 he became the youngest poet to receive the Bollingen Prize for poetry.

In 1966, he was found lying in the hallway outside his room, dead. His body lay in the morgue two days before it was claimed by friends.

F. Scott Fizgerald's observation that “there are no second acts in American lives,” was probably as true of Schwartz as of any self-promoting personality in American Life. Schwartz, however, seems to have found a way around the doom-laden epithet, albeit posthumously. His poems were regularly anthologised in American publications, and in the early years of this century a compendium of his best poems and stories was published. Robert Lowell's “For Delmore Schwartz”, from Life Studies, gave credence to a literary life and its times, while his former student at Syracuse, Lou Reed, dedicated "European Son" from the Velvet Underground's first album, to Delmore, and Saul Bellow's novel, Humboldt's Gift, offered a fictional portrait of Delmore that still resonates today.

At the beginning of his biography of Schwartz, Delmore Schwartz: the Life of an American Poet, published in the mid 70s, James Atlas lamented that there was no substantial body of letters from which to glean important and interesting biographical material, comparative that is, to the correspondence of Virginia Woolf or Henry James.

Today, the comment seems quaint. The biography in fact includes dozens, if not hundreds, of extracts from Schwartz's manuscripts and letters. The comment in retrospect places it within a cultural milieu attendant to Edwardian and early Modernist literary tradition, before computer technology, e.g. Internet, social media, Skype, email. One can imagine the difficulties of a contemporary biographer dependent solely on electronic mail to validate a Life.

Delmore's abiding passion, which shone through personal and professional enmity, was James Joyce, and in particular Finnegans Wake, a well-used, well-annotated copy of which remained in Delmore's possession to the end of his life.

In Joyce's first publication, Dubliners, a character muses on a “life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness.” Perhaps, after all the self-regarding, impetuous, inventive, ill-considered, and outright genius of our creative choices, we are all only standing in each other's shadows.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 8

Mirror

A disk of metal, highly polished,
positions the image
at the centre of the imaginary sphere,
a line extending through the centre of curvature
at a point upon it.
This point is called the principal focus.
 
In 16th century Venice, the back
thins to a coating of tin
mixed with mercury— after 1840, silver,
small bits of silvered glass much used in the East
adorning, with little change in their character,
their relationship to one another in space.

The image is called the virtual image,
extensions of light rays appearing to intersect
behind the mirror, the image formed by it
always smaller than the object, never real,
reflected, diverging outward
from the face.

Poetry as a Theorem

In 1967, when I was seventeen, I had been writing poetry for a year or so. 

One of my teachers, Reva Chrisman, encouraged me to continue writing poems, and one day I gave her a poem about the final moments in the life of the gangster, John Dillinger. I remember the poem focused on the point of betrayal where JD, his girlfriend and another woman arrived at the cinema, where a nod from the woman to FBI agents, waiting nearby, began the last, inevitable death spiral of the bankrobber.

Reva was impressed. So much so that she decided to 'fly it blind' to our English Language class. She gave them the Dillinger poem, and also a poem by a well-known contemporary poet, both uncredited, and led a discussion of the poems' merits. As the class ended, she asked them to vote, based on their discussion, on the poem they preferred. Their preference was for the Dillinger poem; it was then that she revealed that the poem was mine. Silence, followed by a few quips, at which point everyone left for their next class.

Now, as a result of this exercise, the best-looking girl in the class (Candice, nicknamed Candy) didn't offer to introduce me to the wonders of sexual experience. Neither did the most popular guy in the class (Marsh) offer to include me as one of the Chosen Few who were from time to time invited to parties at his swanky house (we were poor). 

What did happen, however, is that the geekiest girl in the whole school, Ann, who was obsessed by Lord of the Rings, and could write the faux language of Middle Earth in longhand, page upon page upon page, and who was also something of a whizz at Maths, offered to assist me with my Algebra homework, which had suffered in my poetic pursuit of America's Most Wanted.

Poetry, like pi, is a long game.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 7

Diary of a Has-Been

Others waved goodbye.
 
Slow-motion, shoeshine station
a freezeframe of the ’40s,
I doze in the sidings— dog-latin phantom
riding high to Dixie.

Blue-alcohol lightning evaporates,
near the Gulf Coast highway
knuckles of rolling freight stretched, shunting
miles of track down to Mobile.
 
The neon at The Blue Moon
sputters a scissor-cut geometry
through the ceiling fan’s slow circuit,
teasing layered haze from tables
where the cards are cut.
 
Rough ghosts roll out at closing,
the bootleg precinct of the turning mind, the last breath
the knife blade catches,
a notion of time, of worlds fallen
between minutes, reborn as other worlds,
but not in this place where times are torn.
 
I stand beneath the awning
in the horizontal rains, crazed stucco mottled white
and yellow shutters banging.
 
Winds define the bottleneck peninsula,
the string of traffic lights a testament
to nervous gods we praised.
 
Providence settles in soft light through
broken panes, past ragged palms
and gathered grains of discontent, of losses
not lifted when the highway called.
 
The storms fade into the lower Keys, guttering in Cuba.
 
A lizard basks in the alphabet sun,
jewelled shadow stalled.

The Lost Corvette

Recently, I read that a 12-metre sinkhole (40 feet, in old money) had opened up under the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky, with the loss of several classic cars. 

Sinkholes result when sub-surface limestone (or similar) is eroded by groundwater passing through the pourous rock, leaving small gaps and fissures that eventually connect into larger voids. Beneath its rolling "bluegrass" and rugged woods, Kentucky itself is one big chunk of limestone, the result of the area having been covered by an inland sea several hundred millions of years ago. 

I know this, not because I'm a geologist, but because I was born there, and lived there for more than thirty years. Walk along any country path and you'll find that the stones and gravel beneath your feet are in fact petrified shells and plants from this ancient sea.

One summer, probably around 1958, my family drove down to Mammoth Cave National Park, and stayed in a small local hotel for a day or two, to explore the vast cave system there. It was at that time in its earlier incarnation as a commerical venture as part of the U.S. National Park Service.

"The Park preserves the cave system and a part of the Green River valley and hilly country of south central Kentucky. This is the world's longest known cave system, with more than 400 miles explored. Early guide Stephen Bishop called the cave a "grand, gloomy and peculiar place," but its vast chambers and complex labyrinths have earned its name - Mammoth." So much for the brochure....

The groundwater erosion over thousands of years created the vast system, and I think at one time explorers thought the system linked into a large group of caves in Tennessee. Not sure what happened with that.

A few things come to mind about that visit. As a family, we never had holidays in the sense of contemporary expectations of travel, so it was a big deal to go anywhere. As tourists, we saw what still are unusual things: a long, low (stone) ceiling space set out as a cafeteria, cavernous (literally) spaces that could be described as cathedral-like, an underground river with boats, and small, semi-transparent fish with no eyes.

I also remember walking along a narrow passageway, itself the result of erosion through rocks, the smooth, sheer stone faces rising vertically on either side of the trail. We made our way along, as part of a larger group of tourists, and I suddenly stopped, pressing my hands stiff-armed against the walls either side, shouting back to my parents and sister, "Quick! Go through! I'll hold back the walls!" I noted that both my parents were struggling not to burst out laughing, as their eight-year old son did something stupid, and funny.

The other thing I remember was that as we made our way through the passage into another space, I felt my Father's hand rest on my shoulder, which I registered with a thrill of delight. I can say with some degree of conviction that he was not a physically demonstrative man, apart from punishments, and to have this display of spontaneous affection from him was as strange as rowing along a dark river, a darkness that remained "gloomy and peculiar" unless struck by the light of a guide's torch.

I like to imagine one of the missing Corvettes eventually popping up though some deep fissure, sliding along silently through dark water, and reflected there in its candy-coloured lacquer, a fish, eyeless, through its soap-bubble skin its tiny white heart, beating and beating. 

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 6

Raising Dixie Jesus

Floating weightless
in the focus of the prism, a true believer
balanced in the Brownie’s bubble viewer:
it’s Easter,1958.
The screen door knocks closing.
I stand unruffled,
formal in the formality of the blessed.
 
Mother steadies and the shutter pops.
The two-tone, pink on pink
of our high-finned family Dodge
fades to black and white.
On the morning of the risen dead
I stare into its headlight glare and wait for my release.
 
In the Methodist church at the top of Main,
the organ’s vox humana brocades
John Wesley’s silvery, lowbrow rhymes,
in the nave Christ espalier, the greenstick break of day
born in frantic pastorals
where sops from Proverbs pasteurise the dead.
 
The fallen fall still,
broken in the levees and the jambalaya farms,
Africans hanging lantern-like
from neo-classical façades.
Nothing saves you from yourself.
The panorama of the sky and all below it
perish in a whisper, reborn in Alabama.
 
…I clock in at the factory, chasing overtime on Sundays—
home later in the yard, washing the pickup,
the cherryflake metallic paint
so bright, I could reach right through
to touch that other face, beyond that trick of light
the brother so familiar. 

He comes to me then, in the heat of the day
hard by the axletree, where rebel lords
repair the fierce horizon.