Woke up later than usual,
delving into evening’s domain.
Lost brevity somewhere in the morning.

~

Not a thing in this world is of pure origin.
By that, I mean, there is more to the construct
of a thing than can be measured by human means.

~

A story I’m moved by, that I was telling a friend the other day:

There’s this poet I love, and he’s somewhat famous for poets, or at least for American poets, which basically means he’s unknown to about 99.9999999999999999 percent of the world. Probably more, but then we’re approaching hyperbole. Anyway, that very small percent which knows of him tends to be fond of his work, sometimes even affected by it for a few seconds, or minutes, or perhaps even hours.

This poet was being interviewed by another poet. The stated purpose for the interview was a new collection being published, but that was mostly pretense. The actual reason was that this poet was getting up there in years, and was very likely dying. So the few poets who were particularly moved by his work, or influenced by it - these poets even more anonymous than the original - saw fit to keep a record of his travels, or his thoughts, on what was likely to be his last book tour.

At one point in the interview, the poet began talking about his reasons for writing. He told a story about a reading he had given some years before to a small crowd, so that afterwards those in attendance could speak with him. A man - middle aged, heavy set, indistinct in almost every way - approached the poet, and without giving his name, told him, quite simply, “Your poetry has saved my life for the last twenty years.” Before the poet could thank him, this very common looking man walked quickly away, disappearing entirely from the poet’s life, at least in the physical sense of the word.

“That was very nice of him,” the poet said. “I’m glad he told me that.”

~

Wrote rhymed verse for a while,
nothing decent.

No lyricism lurking inside.
Just doddering lines,
like dying men enduring their dying days.

~

Specific places.
Own them for a page or two.
But the key is specificity, smallness.
Philadelphia will not do.
Cityscapes are nice ideas,
but mostly they’re epidermal.
Think the courtyard of her thighs,
the peat that is her veins.
The fine fissures in her
skin, little canyons
you inspect from up close.
See, specificity.

~

Your strength, someone whispers

(the antecedent poets whose books
go unread but look very pretty dressed in dust

), is the esurience with which you regard women.
The curious thing you would like to extract
from some deep place in them. It borders
on asexual, because ravaging them disturbs you,
mostly. Not always, of course. But this hunger
is for some verisimilitude, some essential grace
you believe might be found, hidden. Though,
we wonder what you might do
if you ever found such a thing.

And this is a strength? I ask.
Because I am all alone here, you know.

(the minor poets shrug)

Yes, but you’re not complacent.

~

Drove to the airport in the dark. Watched planes
arrive. Astonishing speed. Attempted to count
the individual windows, see the faces inside.
Could not. The speed was too much. And the distance.

Drove a while more. Watched them leave.
Felt uneasy, as if my body were a geologic fault
before a temblor.

Contemplated the act of disappearance,
its achievements. Then, realized: I’m too poor
to disappear. Impecunious, the poet pleads.
No, just poor. My voice today is flat.

It is the dialect of the middle west.
Peer over it, search both ways. Drive
further on down, bearing-less.

~

Thinking again of smallness and grandeur:
their perfect subjectivity,
how one can hide inside of the other.
Smallness like meter, or a sentence.

Grandeur being not entirely inhuman
because it cannot exist
without that which is small.
The atoms of a human mind
explicating the atoms of a distant star,
its body masquerading as minor
while our bodies play at largesse.

We translate the poetry of massiveness
into more manageable forms

~

If I said, I’m too impecunious to disappear,
you would think I am trying to impress you.

Which I have done obliquely.

~

So if in the sentence,
The girl I love twirled a pen in her fingers,

twirled is replaced by lariated,
which is not an entirely correct use of the word,
in fact not even that closely correct,

you would be stopped, as if suddenly
an outcropping of rock rose
from the long, featureless prairie.

The girl I love lariated a pen in her fingers.
I think I might throw away my life loving her.

(the two statements are not correlated)
~

Sought refuge in a barn of books,
with long, latitudinal fixtures
of florescent light.

(words hiding under the pretense of being books) (memories hiding under the pretense of being lives)

How many words in here will ever be read?
I asked aloud.

No answer.

Well, I’ll get started, then.

~

I will throw my life away because she does not love me
and because, despite this, I can not stop loving her.

I have my theories as to why she does not love me.
Most of them involve my esurience.
Some involve my lack of skill in bed,
or at least my lack of consistency.
A few involve bad luck.
All involve pity, and all involve her.

~

Meter in a poem is very different
from meter in a song.

One imbues nearly all meaning;
one is simply an accessory to meaning.

Still, both are just frames.
Ordering our small universes

so that they cannot surprise us.

~

Got dinner and coffee,
my seismic activity subsided.
The elixir?
Baseball. Reading about baseball.

~

My heart is a palimpsest.
Lie cold, says her dark caress.

Loquacious, writes her slow bite.
Voracious, relent my sight

(a hard consonant, then something like a cataract;
switched at the half)

~

A map of hunger:

Inherited from my father (a writer, but of academic texts)
Inherited from his father (a middle manager, for a Lutheran aid company)
Inherited from his father (a farmer, emigrated from Germany)
One can extrapolate inherited from his father (I don’t know a single detail of his life)

~

Watched snow begin to fall.
Slow accumulations.

~

A me,
a see,
a sing,
a fling,
a fall,
a shall,
a love,
above.

~

The place, of course, is a temporal one.
A mind within a day, of which one can create
a very rough facsimile. Larger than one expects.
Also, more unwieldy. But, still, unremarkably small.

~

Called an old friend. We live
far apart now. Spoke for not quite an hour.
about our careers, which are not
exactly as we had hoped. About women,
of whom there are fewer and fewer.
We can’t ever seem to expose
the heart of the issue, which is,
I think, that we are lonely in our bodies.

A minor conversation, enlightening
the mundane. The kind that, repeated and
forgotten over the years,
comes to resemble love.

Such banal consistency
is not the stuff of poetry.

~

Another story:

In 1953, an American expedition to climb the second tallest mountain in the world - K2 - was launched. All seven members of the team eventually reached their high camp, and were preparing for their final summit push when a massive winter storm rolled down the Karakoram glacier and enveloped the mountain. Persistent, the men hunkered down and waited for two days.

On the third day, the skies cleared enough to reinvigorate their summit hopes. As they were about to leave, a member of the team collapsed outside his tent and was quickly diagnosed with blood cots. At an elevated altitude, there was almost no chance for survival. The condition was terminal. By afternoon, clouds had moved in once more, and the seven men were once more stranded.

Three days later, with their friend’s condition deteriorating, the six healthy members of the expedition launched a desperate bid to save his life. They knew that it was almost certainly going to fail, and that any such efforts to save him might very well mean death for all of them. They rigged a stretcher, and through a series of pulleys, began to lower the sick man down the mountain.

Traversing a steep slope of snow and ice, one of the men fell. His fall, combined with the slope, pulled his belay off the face of the mountain, too. Tumbling, they collided with the other five team members. One by one, their footing failed until six of the men were falling. The last member of the team, instinctively, dug his ice ax in, and braced himself. And he held. The other six men jolted to a halt.

Hours later, after meeting to discuss their options, the team found that the seventh member - the sick man, strapped to a stretcher - had freed himself, and in an effort to save the other men, had simply let himself fall off the side of the mountain. His body was never found. The other six men descended safely, and remained friends for the rest of their lives.

~

We confront our notion of endeavor,
its inevitable impermanence. That even
the grandest of human accomplishments
will lapse, come to nothing

The men who failed to climb K2
had families. Wives and children.
Siblings and parents. And they left,
anyway. Chasing some wild thing

inside their hearts. Some thing they
couldn’t begin to explain. Some thing
that, as soon as they found it,
would be lost.

~

Suddenly you emerge from the darkness of your thoughts,
looking up, and the moon, which is not quite full,
is pouring itself out over the snow and ice and rock
so that the world around you is shimmering, is luminous,
is glowing in some color that is not blue, nor white;
It is not chatoyant; the light is all stillness.
It is ineffable and ethereal. It is a color you have no
human word for, a color that doused this world for centuries
and centuries before humanity, that will outlive even our memory