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FROM
CAUGHT IN THE NET - FEATURED POET - WILLIAM HEYEN
(Part 2)
Guest Editor - Dan Masterson
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Introduction by Jim Bennett
Hello. Welcome to CITN 29. In this edition we present a
further selection from the work of William Heyen.
We are privileged to be given permission to
publish William Heyen’s epic poem “To William Merwin”.
This is a first publication for what we consider to be a very
important poem.
Dan Masterson is currently sitting in as
guest editor. In addition to his academic work Dan runs a
professional critiquing service which many poets both new and
established have benefited from over the years. I have no
reservations in recommending it. Details can be found at
Dan's website - http://www.poetrymaster.com
__________________________________________________________________________
You find a selection of books by Willam Heyen
on-line through Amazon at Poetry Kit's Bookshop - http://www.poetrykit.org/howto.htm
i. William
it’s winter here below as the schoolkids call them forming from aerials to wheels every thaw
& freeze rereading The River Sound & The Rain in the Trees letters from you pressed in their leaves remembering first meeting you 1968
your reading at my Brockport before the MFA production line before everything that got drafted got rushed into publication you read
a single revelation I’d returned after the “terminal degree” your intoning in that voice-to-be as I’ve come to know it over years
I sensed indwelling power there a long poem about your being son of many fathers I’ve looked for again how many palm strophes written spoken
once & then forgotten light in the rain friends preceding into revivifying presence or nothingness Bill Ewert fighting cancer three years
long enough for light to bless two posing almost manic with them his last production a sumptuous boxed quarter leather
John Updike’s Bech: His Oeuvre
& twenty years of poetry holiday cards for me could letterpress no further than you under Pacific starlight can fathom
Pennsylvania Princeton Majorca your life
on as you’ve translated it to be we stood in Time in line for coffee
in this continuum you told me your poems lately sought the mystics I’d mentioned my dissertation on Roethke who
studied seminal
poem of union “The Abyss” your voice the last time I heard you Buffalo winter years ago reprised the vowel sound that lamented
the makers of song you’d needed skipping the Creeley party afterward driving home through driving snow I had books you’d inscribed for me wondering
our sudden mortality “You, sir, are trivial” caustic Berryman wrote of Creeley— “relentlessly mediocre” a critic
wounds our memory of MacLeish his decades devoted to responsibility his classics amber in our anthology I hear Bill Ewert’s last words to me fervently he told me
Promise me keep writing poems,
we’ve little else against the abyss Time which no one
should pronounce by name warned who kept
writing though few poets into old age noted Snodgrass most aspirants interrupted deadened
by comfort politics booze &/or family morass RPW when I was young wrote me
praise from the empyrean about my poems in Poetry I kept his card in my shirt-pocket
over my heart where I
have the last section of his Audubon after passages of violence & beauty Red
remembers himself a boy in
a dirt road at dusk unable to see the great geese overheading northward there being no moon he hears them their sound
thrilling him beyond the dark
wood the word
as when William Meredith stayed up with me burning soft birch & hard oak in our fire his home
above the when I was
thirty he told me stories of Frost whom he once served as apprentice-secretary himself like Robert he said kept secrets
from even his personae beyond us under stairs in the flickering hallway file cabinets of letters maybe some from
you since
some from Archie as the famous man insisted I call him who wrote for my Guggenheim who believed in & befriended me
who once said he’d awaited me that Yale doughboy in the artillery lost his brother Ken to WWI then son Ken to cancer
beyond any ars poetica I reached the boulder with his name
in bronze at a steeped
in
I’ve maybe sixty maple-missives from him including how one season I’d awaken into yearned-for sound heard as my own but not found sooner I hadn’t listened
he’d chosen Meredith’s first book news that reached that Navy flyer in the Pacific my copy is inscribed by both
whose truth still warms me from William’s hearth where we drank scotch & then went out into his rimed yard to piss on leaves & see stars
over the valley until back inside to the fire again John Berryman in our minds hurtling from us during days of addicted incandescence
who wrote me in his loneliest lyric he could think of his “Old Man Goes South Again Alone” decades later on his bridge with Mariani & Levine
we consoled we didn’t we Mr Bones I’d dream-walked December Belsen dazed among crows & erika mounds where Anne Frank died was maybe bulldozed
iniquity’s victim thousands I once listened near David Ignatow a student found his reading so good but dark, dark, she said, & he asked her Feel better now?
Yes, yes, she said Berryman in my home saying no one had done the perfect as had Richard Wilbur who wanted more “voltage” from later John who drank to his irreversible loss of power
in a late interview JB said in the future he’d look forward to cancer or some other awful malady
to which he could sacrifice his poetry Saul Bellow answered me his friend died because he prayed to the ruined drunken god of poets
& don’t forget it Etheridge Knight another shade through the bars of his addiction his drum
vibrates
the mud keeps hearing him hears Fred Exley obsess football who wrote A Fan’s Notes as though for me then wrested just two others from alcohol
he inscribed all three soberly for me acceptance & sorrow above those boulders William was sotto voce & Archie in his Brockport interview asked who can say
what killed Hart Crane or the dreamsonger or Sylvia your friend whose blood-jet poems the perfect one described as “free, helpless, and unjust” they razed me
how she had seized them writ with quills of Ted Hughes’ feathers but childhood entwined with ether flowers Robin Morgan said straight out he killed her but verity expires when & where
at the end for about six months as Ted eulogized her Sylvia wrote “with the full power and music
of her extraordinary nature” &
it’s coldflat love fame poetry conjoin speechlessly in Ted’s triple-entendre
“It was her or me” all this a gut- & mind-twister either for goddess of secrets Hecate or Yankee catcher Yogi Berra who says he
never answers anonymous letters Wilbur’s young Sylvia seemed “immensely drowned” after electro-shock therapy
but crow’s eye-pupil cannot be burned who senses his own sufficient inner resources against his soul’s abyss while two wives treble his darkness garland themselves & a daughter in gas
I both drive & garage within me the car you loaned the young couple for wherever they were going
on love’s petrol with despair’s battery with a Vesuvian novelist at dinner a colleague of mine who’d had a few too many said she must have been a clone like the
sheep Dolly to have published so much he’d had a dream explored a Victorian mansion she quilled in every room
ream after blackening ream he said he’d worked ten years on one story to get it right & still didn’t have it he asked if she would read it
she told him to consort with Dolly or something to that effect I told him shit or get off that plot he knocked his whiskey down & lurched out
such dedication to his drinking art the next day he didn’t remember much he chaired our tenure committee apologized for leaving dinner in a rush
said he’d been awfully busy that was decades ago last month soused he ran a stop sign struck & killed a woman friend of mine
who left behind her husband & four children I’ve truncated his story maybe he’ll finish it in jail or write a second one to let his victims
drive a reaper over him
a line in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth
Plantation “a weatherbeaten look lay upon the land”
spring would come but human devastation against humans cannot be undone no lilac can loose the hold of Thanatos when dead drunken years are driven by a widower-maker
a long poem about your being son of many fathers I’ve looked for again how many palm strophes written spoken once & then forgotten
Sylvia lay her head down in her posthumous oven as did Anne Sexton in carbon monoxide
Plath’s I-have-been-her-kind-of-suicide who maybe had lived half so long if poetry hadn’t been Circe for her who binged on transforming song
which for a while she could hear all afternoon in a Brockport bar martinis & straight shots before her reading we got out of there half snockered
she sobered as she read she asked “why can’t we have some fun?” inscribed a book for Al Poulin “Dear Al, this book has been between my legs /
Love, desperate Anne” her friend John Brinnin had known her kind before with Dylan Thomas who in his Laugharne shack copied
hundreds of others’ poems in longhand William you’ve no doubt seen them where I doubt I’ll ever be I’d like to see especially Wordsworth in Dylan’s hand
to feel how nature’s intoning voice chars or greens into sounded meaning Brinnin gave me a book Dylan inscribed to him
after the death of Norman Cameron almost forgotten now as almost all will be as the decades devolve into that one necessary anthology
forged from reluctant love to those few we can’t get rid of as Robert said with Archie there to hear that contrary farmer’s
off-the-cuff planned riffs & patter I slept an hour or two in William’s guestroom where I’d opened several Frosts in which the master had holographed poems
how did I not steal those rare editions hide A Boy’s Will & North of Boston in my suitcase get them home & fondle them guilty & in shackles from them
I’d have had to destroy them I’d memorized “Stopping By Woods” “Dust of Snow” “To Earthward” “After Apple-Picking” “Fire and Ice” in awe of him but sensing also
something missing if only as Louis Simpson said Frost had caught fire broken through but the west-running pragmatist knew he hadn’t been invited to
as Louis had when traversing fields
at the festering to clarity in his mind
through bedlam & the zen beyond at my local mall chemically- preserved palm fronds sprout from thirty-foot trunk amalgams
of fiberglass & urethane I sometimes write in my journal there the sparrows nest on I-beams overhead
they seem happy trapped in the same weather Christmas or Easter once one alit on my table my visitor two feet from my eye
chirped its sparrow satori I had some apple fritter crumbs for it could it remember how a boy sent BBs into it so often
I pretend myself forgiven but Emerson says nature remains hidden this has & has not been my experience the sparrow stayed/stays with me
no more no less transparently Yeats passed fifty when alone suddenly
in a crowded his body blazed beyond his empty cup he’d been gazing at the street
in the mall doo-dad voices gleam chrome in the money of time maybe
heaven’s no longer
I try to write refraction down Simpson warns us from separation the poet’s tribe shops here I’ll sip caffeine communion in this mall temple my journal feeds on vacillation
v. in
William’s office that I’d taken down The Walks Near Athens inscribed with praise to William “only whose minimizings
I do not believe” by Hollis Summers my teacher Goedicke’s Plumly’s Piccione’s at Ohio U so humble himself always shy &
helpful but never enough
passion to inspire me he’d leaf through Yeats haphazardly it seemed to me remarking on this & that maybe Cuchulain or swans or Major Robert Gregory
while skewered rhymes drove Jane crazy at my defense he’d asked me characterize rhyme in the “North American Sequence” what did I know except that in Roethke’s ear dissonance
gave way eventually to a wall of sound like Phil Spector’s to josh with you here guffaw I’ve
since slept in Ted’s childhood bed in
heard the same oak clock he heard the same one when the brokedown professor returned from the academy to himself to bathe in the country of the Tittebawasee
where minnows sang on his kitchen shelf I stayed there that one overnight alone prowled from cellar to attic only a pecker-high rail outside his upstairs bedroom could keep
that son from plunging into nightmare “The Abyss” opens “Is the stair here?” even as a lumbering high-schooler
he must have trembled there for girls’ perfume & orchids the way they reached for him bulbs & fingers in his dream
a misstep he’d be dead will the real Roethke please stand up chided Creeley of the Collected should we say like Housman usurp
just one voice of Psyche no matter Creeley has a point I hear more often than not if I’m eclectic among too many stars & raptors
writers can swoon thus Stevens kept reading himself his own harmonium not distracted into Archie’s early Eliot or Roethke’s dominant Yeats
whole decades of formal aphorism “but what has this to do with spring?” asked James Wright quoting E.A. Robinson a singer’s catbird infusion
means to praise not mockingbird the dead Annie & Jim stood overnight with Han & me slept downstairs it was summer milk had soured in their creamer for early crucial coffee he was sorry
to have to wake us his trajectory edged with hysteria his later AA years the four of us picked high-bush blackberries
rain glistened in his beard Bill Ewert published Jim’s This Journey the only Ewert never signed the country boy lost tongue before
colophons reached his city door his best poems are pipes above the river
in with phrases of song & shit
he had his own Ohioan for it in what passed for a Scots accent Jim often recited William Dunbar’s “Lament” when I am feeble with infirmity
may fear of death not confound me he translated Trakl’s “blind hands against midnight” for him as for Frost Time
neither wrong nor right twenty-five I wrote John Ciardi asking him about death in his poetry I was thinking of my master’s thesis he replied
death was everything & nothing in a love poem he said why bother the flies about me let them buzz & do when I marry you a great door swings shut against fear
I have Ciardi’s own copy of Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel inscribed twice by translator Kimon Friar first
in & filled with Ciardi’s voluminous gists & queries underlinings in four colors a friend found this treasure
for six bucks on a bookstore floor I was nine in fourth grade I remember that classroom our single bookcase for free reading time I found a green-covered book of illustrated stories
out of the olden Time the wooden horse & the wanderer the one-eyed cave-dwelling ogre who ate men but some fooled him
he couldn’t throw rocks accurately to sink them on rainy days I ran home to keep company
with Heidi or Swiss Family Robinson or Black
Beauty I
remember trying to read
The House of the Seven Gables too difficult for me later one book cost me weeks of sleep I was maybe thirteen a paperback I bought no illustrations
my mind filled with blood & semen the Scottsboro boys railroaded they didn’t rape white women terror by graphic description
I could not bike from it day & night an Alzheimer’s poet travels his nursing home’s corridors shines a dead flashlight
raps from door to door Gerald Stern asks us “Does anyone still love Diogenes?” light from that classic lantern these days half-crazy
my staring into Meredith’s fire may rhythm flame as this grows older beyond memory here into the
well of William Stafford’s ear who said the four words five syllables to me that defined him maybe limited him that pestered & beguiled me alternately
“I love feeble poems” who heard what trees hear & stones a dead deer’s unborn fawn plain words sighed breathed spoken
over the past
his mother’s primal influence her voice sustained him in the camps he served in
against conscription Dorothy in his heart & at his side their holiday cards were sprigs of cedar & yew glued to construction paper
photos of family together who told me that as he died he expected he’d be afraid but meanwhile planned to live alive
(son Bret became a suicide) who told me he’d just then understood Frost’s preference for inner weather he wanted both but preferred outdoor as did Robinson Jeffers
who needed to touch things & things & no more thoughts toward which & against the poet
masons granite with every
instinct Jeffers sees a concrete dam far off in the future far off in the mountains when humans are
gone like the dead stars Brinnin called Jeffers “gloomy Gus” who overwhelms with galaxies in compensation for beauty’s
broken wing against the cosmos Czeslaw Milosz writes in blood that the poet must not speak an inhuman thing his Jeffers hangs from this cross
the stars coursing critic Hyatt Waggoner sensed Jeffers’ “desperate effort to teach the heart not to love”
this insight a gift & Frost demanding real grief not just grievances & Philip Young on Bartleby
who had “the courage not-to-be” countered by mourner Jack Gilbert who studies eastern sages who advise us not to love it’s too empty tragic dangerous Jack swears “what a bargain it is”
William so help me years ago a voice in my dream told me not to pine
but to mourn
I heard this audition clearly in western terms on the same theme Dick Hugo called one day to claim nothing was new although he’d had
a lung excised & had gotten married he said that obsession is art’s virtual Ursprung he’d
helped bomb
& later crafted bombers for Boeing I like to
hear him watch old spit on their hands & dig in with the ritualistic ghostly mien
of big-league dreamers they’d once been Dick loved ice cream & fishing for decades Walt Pavlich kept Hugo-trout in his freezer sorrowing
he had to move & throw them out to form the compost our other Walt revered with two-thirds his saintly heart & shrank from with the rest
welcoming soothing Death unless whistling in fear but poetry convinces us while we’re breathing it who step away & disbelieve it believe again when we grow old with it
though old Karl Shapiro could not remember his name on anything he’d written the same with Emerson
whose mind once branched with fire Karl stood up for my Erika poems
as has the who almost creamed to hear an old lady
define the new Transcendentalism as something a little bit more & beyond than here she twirled her finger above her may Karl & Waldo reconvene
in brahmin bourgeois inclusive heaven where Hugo has his work by heart snide Snodgrass said he was surprised Hugo memorized such bad poems
& said of Sexton’s there’s a flaw inside every one & it’s a major one William in one of Roethke’s notebooks archived in
on your name I could have erased but smirked when I saw it there & noted it down for gossip & maybe to confess me to myself
forty years later here I pity me when I take up residence in the mad poorhouse of envy as when Frost refers to his “rising contemptuaries”
I studied Ted’s greenhouse forcing room a half-lifetime ago in one acid-free carton
a pair of swollen black shoes worn at heels & soles the university must have kept them for scholars to lift to nose
I could smell him a letter there from Robert Lowell “There’s nothing wrong with your brain— you could write a brilliant book on poetry
if you thought it worth your time” special delivery from a businessman after Roethke won the Pulitzer “Dear Sir, You are presently successful
in a field I wish to enter” he wanted details how to write to win his own prize his sensitive soul somewhat in a hurry
he dictated this to his secretary while Roethke survived the edge to count himself among the happy poets Ordnung fertilized the bathtub grout
he almost drowned in it student Jim Wright in a workbook “I have a feeling for what Bogan has done … my study of her is going to save me about fifteen years of frustration”
for just a moment in the only film of Roethke In a Dark Time his eyes keep meeting mine where he
stockstill in a black glade ramifies who when a new poem “The Dance” appeared fell to his knees as he said of Yeats “He, they—the poets dead
were with me” acting faster than any other he once put out an office fire I forget with coffee or water
the poet’s strophe & instinct there not let it go too far the writing flame god knows it could kill him Wordsworth’s excitation then calm
breathed into flammable form later as an honored man Ted asked his editor why not court the Swedes I see him swaying before the King
doing his papa’s waltzing a long poem about your being son of many fathers I’ve looked for again how many palm strophes written spoken once & then forgotten
Lucien Stryk says there’s a writing hour when he’s always happy even ready to be taken at
dusk-light fully aware so far I am not ready at any hour may the time come when Time is in me to pass through to the stars
I would take love with me but that may not come to be but love can be left behind I have sometimes felt your folded Time
of being both & both being the same Underhill poses that all mystics anywhere ever Buddhist Christian Jew somehow by fire scourge water faith know
eternity is now those three words are hers as Roethke uses them exactly in “The Abyss” where the stair is circular near Emerson’s doctrine
of perpetual revelation I mind how I still hear Lucien’s voice from half a lifetime ago I’ll sound it always against the abyss eternity is now
under stars above the river Meredith’s fire from over the years may memory ripple from it here clear to
the stones on Walden’s shore Thoreau says the emerald pickerel
under if caught would shiver & be translated
(the King James word he uses) into pure spirit into being the essence of what we are the pickerel if caught shimmering
lose color but Henry’s landholder insisted on finding “sufficient perspective” his cavernous monster phrase when everything would come to please
hate holocaust extinction love this Henry’s artist of Kouroo entered Time being disposed toward perfection by making a wondrous staff
just choosing the limb took him past hours when his friends deserted him then while he peeled & polished it Kouroo itself fell slowly to ruin
dynasties ended & the pole-star reconfigured he adorned the head with precious stones while Brahma slept & woke countless times but the artist found Time to be illusion a single scintillation of Brahma’s brain
he made no compromise with perfection could not be overcome I wonder if when he woke those
friends hoped to be friends again maker William Dunbar assumes “This fals world is bot transitory” twenty-five times his poignant refrain
Emerson concludes his lecture “Experience” “up again, old heart!” he’d lost a wife & son
to despised natural evanescence he wanted grief where he could keep it
but grief had its own he jangled in his new estate
remorseless robins & daffodils his translucent quartz boulder at Sleepy Hollow Miss Peabody thought it too singular
“It does not explain itself”
I stared into it for a singular hour
toward its nothing in nature to explain her
said the translucent boulder Marquis de Lafayette sailed through Brockport
on his way to to kiss an old comrade’s lead coffin
in
from the crowd into his arms from then on Walt thought himself chosen each summer I remember
this story the scent of towpath blossoms &
remember the poet’s upstairs where he died I once stood alone there wanting to welcome him
in myself mirrored many of his belongings still there but none at his West Hills trafficked birthplace I dreamed his mother in their kitchen
boiling a snapper’s carapace I’ve inherited this gift a memory from when I first read there Aaron Kramer had to stand on stairs
outside the room with chairs for maybe twenty he later told me he heard & saw me reflected in Walt’s portrait on an angle from me
we read together after that twice in his loyal audience from the Thirties & Forties dying away from him he
was never Emerson’s poet before man his Denmark Vesey dreams that slavers bake young captives to the bone “their fountain of wine was a Negro vein” Kramer’s passion his unwavering offertory
I’ve kept in heart Thoreau’s couplet “Man, man is the devil, the world’s only evil”
my mind’s template Henry painted his desk green tympanum revision flickered in lampflame twenty-two months two weeks two days there
become Time Walden’s archetypal year his hermitage moved sold twice became a corn storage shed I dreamed a green lucite hexagram
suspending pencils of cabin wood while
Robert Lowell’s past St. Gauden’s monument to Robert Gould Shaw’s black regiment
the bronze horses men a central spiral of blanket
toward vortex at above them a winged death-muse spirit
Gould & half his men bivouac under brine in the second verse of her inspired “Battle Hymn” Howe sees God in watchfires of a thousand circling camps may God burn through the brine
in for me the darkest sentence in our literature Goodman Brown rushes on “with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil” guides
being this gospel wherein such knowledge forfeits forgiveness Eliot said I spent a book of hours with Martin Booth at Little Gidding
where prayer is valid Martin enduring chemo as I write I see us
in of Allied crosses so numerous
they cadenced Time for us we breathed the Abbey’s Poets’ Corner Eliot’s redolent granite rose for one moment could we hear color
& Time in our closed eyes Martin wrote novels poetry biographies of Doyle & the white hunter Corbett & opium published Stafford Stryk Bly at Sceptre Press
by which I found him his
refrain of material wielded like a sceptre This
is the land of milk, & honey.
Give me the money. we drove in the big white guzzler of a Cadillac I’d won at poker our tape Elvis’s Sun Sessions I forgot to remember to forget
in the
Derek Walcott’s his birthplace becomes that brush for me
Tiepolo wrote with transluminously Walcott says “The traveller cannot love, since love is stasis and travel is motion” he defines being a native
within memory & imagination one day I found myself in a taxi with Elie Wiesel & others he in the front seat I could only stare
at night’s sacred watch & wrist hairs the vision of the great One seen & heard
as Ginsberg said in particular but myriad
as smoke or a sheep’s revolving eyeballs John Logan’s anonymous lovers Oates’ women whose lives are money Randall Jarrell’s forsaken gunners
Merwin’s e that time you sent Han & me
directions to your home on down to the last palm goddam
we were too busy with visitors where we lived that semester
at something like bubbling waters I was scarred by a moray there
I arrived the day after exhausted digging my car from Brockport ice waded the warm shallows dazed far
toward the shadow of reached down into coral’s flower-hued beauty under the spell of goddess Pele
when beauty struck me but could not hold me long enough or pull me under I saw & felt its teeth
redden the blue water for weeks kept my palm reddened with iodine puss oozed infection
beauty’s mauve blossom that long poem about your being son of many fathers I hear again how many palm strophes written or read
so often unforgotten heard your forty-four species of land snails people hearing
crickets’ silent singing snail snail glister me forward Roethke’s lost son prayed for this was his hard time bird soft-sigh him home
it came
to pass I climbed thrice discovered angles of its profile wired cemented
Elvis’s
or my haole’s head but trespassing past ropes I found a cave whose whole mouth spoke bees golden in the streaming light
writing aura around me they could easily have killed me where ancient kings were buried that night I heard one chanting
combed tongues of honey Robert Hayden’s night-blooming cereus charging his poems with plangency the night-blooming palm & cave abyss
Merwin’s e in his elegy for Dylan
in the yellow leaves of autumn
among funeral processions vows to read him again for art’s solace & “singing light” for me John’s lecherous death from alcohol
mutes any dead-end singing school Emerson said that the poet’s soul should be “tipsy” only with water he didn’t think Satan was in him but wouldn’t tempt fate with demon rum
hopefully on this of all nights of the year Young Goodman Brown’s journey was drunken when he heard his old teachers sing witches’ anthems but makers shiver where Brown molders
William winter continues translucent vellum I burn wood from my own acres fallen ash & silver maple the last elm cut split
stacked all summer what’s a strophe but an echoed iamb a nurtured seed your palm in “Temporary Facts” Bill Stafford rhymes
the poignant home & elm here on my remnant acres I watched a hundred die one forester describes Dutch elm disease
as a kind of suicide a tree sensing one limb’s invasion shuts itself down in maybe one season over a decade as the virus decimated them
I wrote The Chestnut Rain the journal I’ve kept obsessively recedes from me I’ve begun typing it
but not as fast as I’m writing it in this way the present keeps progressing further & further from me uncomfortable unfinished accompaniment
but I know it’s healthy for me lest fear of death shrive me William in Emerson’s “work of the pen” enraptured recognition the synchronicity of Time
at a
rooftop a palm’s trunk reached still higher above me I lay there in fronds of green & gold
dreaming off toward my palm slowly healing I’d wrap it in my towel redolent with chlorine then open it to the sun
my imagination a feverish gangrene but the doc said I’d live I pictured elms with their toothed leaves chestnuts blowing in Pacific winds morays toothless in their caves
I once played a game with John Logan of first-name number one he had his pennant team Keats
Milton Donne & reminded me of Berryman & Steinbeck but I had series mystics Yeats & Blake Wordsworth & Cy Young Shakespeare
I reminded him of you & Faulkner Berryman spat blood writing Stephen Crane’s consumption who called his own poems “pills” he thought of them as medicine
for our romantic ills JB &/or Henry at my table that one Brockport time a day late for their reading my five-year-old daughter asked them
“Mr Berryman are you laughing or crying” he shouted my living room into a weeping rage imagining the horror said he’d earned a book hadn’t he with only
a camp’s name to a page by way of his own suffering he asked how long he’d be condemned to follow women with his erection
lust’s besotted spring a Steinach surgery for Yeats at seventy basically a vasectomy ligature of the spermatic duct not to be a rutting buck
but to feel blessed & bless “The knowledge that I am not unfit for love has brought me
sanity and peace” in the Brockport studio Berryman read “Song of the Tortured Girl” she appeared in the bleached light I heard
her voice terribly xii. a visit to you not to be ever maybe when you’re ninety for now I book this jet by ear beyond
forever’s future that remembers John Unterecker who searched for Crane the voyager John with his belabored heart who
got to the upstairs party Han & I threw in our apartment on Kuhio whose great passion was to charter a
plane when
erupted & flowed & to fly over Emerson visited Vesuvius
how far to poetry’s abyss
lava-flow frozen into bloom he looked up in the Sistine Chapel you & I have also stood there with many poets I recall here
hosts of voices there & that week heard the sound of soccer balls against the great doors of the Pantheon that have swung there
for two thousand years & that year returned home with my family with enough in me of travel to stay in one place until I could make Time stand still
but that decade & the next blur for me necessarily with teaching study poker & money
the lyric mortgage of x over & over again Walt told Traubel one day he’d reveal the secret of his breakthrough ecstatic serenity
that gave him the 1855 Leaves but never told him not even on his deathbed what would have riven even faithful Horace Walt’s discovery
of sublime incestuous love so huge so hopeless to conceive beyond any earthly bible kept secret with the dead
Down’s syndrome brother Edward Traubel mentions offhandedly something that should not have startled me that Walt always wrote & read
with his eyebrows raised my memory of William’s fire grows grateful as I grow older the mystical duration there
the reservoir of Allen Ginsberg’s ear Walt cherishes his roughs who shudder in poetry’s shadow cortege rail from
Atocha to reach on every life stage every passage
Ted Hughes’ crow ravaging earth Frost’s clearing he will not leave Stevens’ peacock flaring in Meredith’s hearth
Merwin’s e a now “consummate insider” once framed archival poems & poets for his stairwall I was one of his gallery
early years he wrote me maybe once or thrice a week such gossip we became obituary he inscribed his last book to me
“in memory of our friendship” he sent me a photo-postcard he’s riding
a camel in the the great astro-geometry looms behind him
he said he saw the Sphinx flap its wings certain rarefied poets claim kinship with inclusive Walt who would have dismissed them
then quickly embraced them placed them in compost’s charnel house & hospice for inventive artifice to sip Jamake Highwater’s curative
“communicative access” my own ouija spelled how some must ever be too erudite &/or ethereal &/or too-too for me Walt sauntered Broadway waded the salt-hay marsh never walked a lobster on a leash
lovers warm their tongues in him he blows them kisses from his palm he
travels to
his mossbunkers school in aria Saint Illuminate dispensed jellies cakes fruit stamps to soldiers who seemed at first to mend but soul swelled in septic stumps
letters delivered the loving dead to family who could not answer him or them the way times were he said this comrade come from your field father
console inconsolable mother Meredith’s prophetic Thresher Louise Bogan’s beguiling blue estuaries Walt’s
Merwin’s e love fame poetry of major writers of the nineteenth century only Whitman died happy says biographer
Justin Kaplan who helps us see the old man poking among strewn papers for memory to pleasure & confirm him he suffered he was there
he candled the long foreground in him Delmore Schwartz’s twelve pierced by starlight’s intuition Stevens’ dreaming Penelope her winter mended by inhuman meditation Merwin’s e
that assumes as Walt & Allen did any subject’s immensity closure’s impossibilities
but death sings in e I’d been shy I kept apart from Ginsberg & Orlovsky their gang of beatific friends in a coffee-shop post-howl reading I’m
displaced in jacket & tie Bill sit with us here & the son of Walt waves me over & makes room wedges in a chair for me this lifetime
of fellow-feelings for him visiting Emily’s homestead Allen gravitated to the attic going down while climbing upward the stair
of battered old sunflower sutra of a poet I’d first heard that elegy
from my Donald Allen anthology that muddled sense for me except for a few poems now remembering a cry by John Wieners
“Poem For All Trapped Things” one evening with students & Wieners & Charles Olson that leviathan sprawled on a motel bed with John their full-mouth kisses other minor incomprehensibles
I knew little & cared less about for I was now listening to everything half lost
married once & for all in debt to poetry that seemed to see & hear me editions of the Poulin anthology Levertov’s
who once asked me if thirty grand a fortune in those days would translate me
to Benjamin
Franklin IV from
who collected me & would welcome me Big Jim had fun deriding y’all’s beats & hippies unshaven I woke up this mornin’
& my armpits were green on the set of Deliverance someone asked him what he thought of JCO he said he was sort of tired y’know
of all these smart women the once & future ad-man hit the line at Clemson three yards & a cloud of dirt
& the fighter pilot’s mystery I poured him Jim Beam bourbon by the half waterglassful we went outside he could still spiral a football
he’d strummed a sweet tragic
ballad of sled burial & dream ceremony
suspended in melody the last time I saw my father I left his hospital room then looked back at him he stared into an eternal ceiling
I speak to him more often here & my older brother Werner dead last spring his was a harrowing my boyhood protector lifelong friend
I remember him coming toward me his bare chest & legs maybe a dozen leeches he & his friends burned them off him this beauty smelled sublime to me
that Hauppauge pond is our history for me where nature by way of nature becomes scarified into poetry’s beautiful terror Werner ripped a water- snake in half when it bit me
in Independence Hall on a green-draped table Ben Franklin’s bifocals who fissured the founding fathers’ bellsound at
Ford’s Theatre in a pair of Abe’s boots on exhibition their black aura blinded me their creases were proclamation
what could it mean to wield your life as Olson put it so succinctly what weaponry what poetry could my own experience justify
where I was where I am now flints of memory spark
as in the instant when a long poem sometimes creates duration I remain guest at William Meredith’s fire only so long as someone here
opens those file-sound correspondences hearing Merwin’s passionate vowel endlessly vary every time within me what has he not given me
that is not immortal in me I saw in
evening woods in while passing in a train a raptor fall from a tree
its darker shadow lodged in me an SS singing while drowning a newborn
Here you go little Moses down the stream from this distance I lust to kill him
but could have been him if
I’d been born in
instead of he still seems to wax & wane in me
do mystics know the evil in me when I was a boy orioles lived above me
returning to their pendant singing nest in the same pear tree
your “Oriole” returns them to me Kabir smiles at everyone’s quest for the great eternal ruby in the east in the west
under earth rocks & undersea but his instinct tells him it is inside himself the hearth in his chest he wraps that gemstone
in his heartcloth Bill Ewert & I with May Sarton a rubythroat preening a few feet from our heads post-stroke May served champagne & strawberries
in her house by the sea & had Archie’s Life moon-landing poem on her refrigerator door though she was bitterly disappointed in him
for not answering her I remember Hessian soldiers her hearth’s andirons forged to burn in hell
some deserted & became Americans that day of her memorial October constant rain the phoenix from her garden sodden above her stone …
William while finishing this to you I heard my friend Martin died whose pen couldn’t half glean
his cancer-teeming brain in abandoned Saint Margaret’s at Knotting he preceded me climbing an oak ladder to belfrey then softly lifting
bones down to me a raptor dust in a hymn of late sunlight John Bunyan had preached there probably we left for home singing Elvis
I’d never seen Martin so happy Martin
said that in schizoid still haunted by King Arthur poets had split from the Round Table & Merlin
now wandered homeless everywhere a long poem about your being son of many fathers awakened in me again how many palm strophes unforgiven once heard cannot be forgotten William as you did I skipped a grade supposedly too elementary for me I was the youngest before I did
I’ve now it could be caught up with me Jeffers said he hadn’t been born until he reached thirty Frost & Stevens published first books in their forties
you came so early into your own in my a huge chart of the elements but Emerson’s “mystic element of time”
& “no greatness without abandonment” waited for me in that library I’d only begun to read after graduate school I wish Mrs Pierce had pierced me
with the single illuminated periodic table unified from within by whatever name we assign in prayer to whatever god even our dictionary in the end
just one word circling within around even memory I was six eight ten
standing in for scratching over the leafed ground
a box turtle approaching me into whose burnished shell someone had cut 1892 this meant nothing to me in this way signs keep awakening in me from William Merwin’s e
Archie oscillated in his mother’s womb the year Walt died who designed his own tomb why can’t I remember
if I’ve ever visited there soon you’ll be eighty when I’m sixty-seven what have I learned about such things poets die or re-sound in me
profound goings & stayings over
coffee I mentioned The Idea of the Holy Rudolph Otto warns us away from him if we haven’t experienced such moments as he’ll study
Das Heilige a confirmation for me to which I brought my intimations of immortality from when I was a boy where I am now when poetry
allows me joy despite that SS maniac who holds a newborn child under a running faucet drowns it
while singing Here you go
little Moses down the stream poets digest the slime of history as appalls them not one finds joy
or soul except in writing e some began in gladness overtaken by despondency Wordsworth prayed for the child’s e to sing from the father’s abyss
Primo Levi’s periodic table included prose & poetry speak clearly of the
unspeakable he threw himself down this stairwell toward freedom not assaying god’s absence
that pre-empted good
but once in a rainstorm tunnel another prisoner shared a radish with him for a time this gemstone
baffled upwelling darkness in him George Steiner spoke of post-war language as haunted music from embers that crackle in cold ashes
of the dead human fire in tasted of ash that blew in from the coal-fired locomotive
#174517 told his young companion drink
you can drink this water safely the chemistry of memory they say he lived without hatred
drink you can drink this water safely
William tongue the starred water for me with what I’ll need in peril this more than we can bear
that our earth itself becomes untenable for palms & their words in wind the turtle my totem animal poems’ diseased roots & shells
our diminishing fellow-travelers Roethke asked littles to lie more close to him he’d rise from a last diminishing Frost asked what to make
of a diminished thing Derek Walcott says that like Crusoe the poet makes his own tools I’m not sure what I’ve fashioned here
with my striated sprung-verse strophes for all such reasons we recall the Knight of the Green Chapel how fast the year passes in his story
until the days again feel wintry until he hears a strange sound as of someone grinding a scythe Gawain flinches from death just once then
the green one’s axe cuts & spares him for his unswerving words his loyalty his bravery his chastity in your translation he welcomes the green night into me
when for the first time young John Woolman said some words at meeting went on past “the divine opening”
this indiscretion tortured him until he prayed himself forgiven then his Redeemer kept him pure in spirit the next time
inspired words seemed few William however many within duration arrive like tender mercies their sounded revelation
I hear thy e in me your lover’s lament for the true sound of brevity it’s far past time as everyone’s unnamed time must come
to rest in such mystery as sounds portend in my present memory we still speak standing in line for coffee that nectar steams black & sweet
you bow not knowing to what in the past or here we may never talk together any closer except along such melody
variegated in our poems to be hearing your vowel infinitely translated within me how much has e given me that will not desert me
or the young poets who find you how will they prove to follow you in their own diminished vehicles into
their own perilous tenors in memory of the makers’ company glittering eaves & smoke above these years Time backflames soundlessly from William Merwin’s e
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