in the hall of mirrors

Exercises

The Newcastle writers' group meets every other week or so; we try, during lunch time between teaching, meetings, and various demands, to just write for an hour, share it, and recover a little bit of ourselves.

***

October 5, 2006 – write a poem.

Postcard from Newcastle

The blackened rusted red

of these buildings,

dark green of trees,

covering sky soft, fibrous greys,

a page of handmade paper.

***

October 30, 2006 – respond to a picture out of a 1938 book celebrating Elizabeth II's coronation. I chose a picture with this title:

The Children of George V and Queen Mary

They look like the Tsar's children, just before – well, you know.

Actually, a bit sturdier, a bit happier – not quite the fragile solemnity of Anastasia and her bigger brothers and sisters. But what if things had happened differently – what if we were looking on this picture, its relaxed smiles and sturdy tartans, with the nostalgic grief of a post-revolutionary era?...

"When the rebel forces caught up with the royal family at Balmoral, they were enraged by the resistance and losses from the Northumbrian campaign, and thus in no mood for clemency. It is perhaps unfortunate that Scott, rather than Sandringham, was the first of the rebel leaders to reach the castle; as Scott had lost his entire family in the Whitsun Massacre at the height of the riots that followed George's attempted resumption of the throne, soon after the assassination of the second Elizabeth, he had blamed the royal family for all his woes.

Under such circumstances, the murder of the children and their retainers was perhaps to be expected. Although the Central Committee is no longer entirely under the control of the Reichstag, memorials and monuments are still discouraged to this day – despite which, it is said that each October 30, under the vigilant eyes of Party sentinels, wreaths are placed in the field to the west of the entrance of the now-abandoned castle."

***

March 6, 2008 – a response to a casual comment at the end of a session:

The brief version of War and Peace:

"Franklin looked out of the window and said, 'Ah, I see that the war is over. Splendid.'"

***

August 19, 2008 – some haiku written at the end of a session, when I'd run out of steam for the assignment – clearly was thinking a lot of Buddhism that day:

Waking from a dream:

it tells me things that are like

waking from a dream.

This book off the shelf –

page suddenly full of light:

I know what is next.

Fresh gray water shines,

drops across the window panes:

fallen from pure world.

***

November 25, 2008 – write someone else's experience – which in my hands turned into a demented parody of British aristocratic memoirs.

"When I was a little boy, Nanny Jane often said to me, 'Oh Master James, you do say the strangest things!'. I remember her telling me this one sunny day on the south lawn, between the French garden and the maze. 'Why, with your clever ideas and handsome profile, you could surely be a famous actor!' Years later, at a luncheon where my guests included the Duchess of Northumberland, Orson Welles, and Mussolini – I think Gielgud was there too – I regaled them with this amusing anecdote. I could see how deeply impressed they all were – indeed the formerly lively conversation stopped completely, and all had thoughtful expressions, as it was borne on to them what an exceptional artist I might have become. It must have been a bit later, when Welles was casting a movie to be titled Citizen Kane, that he so wanted me to play the great Randolph Hearst; but I had promised my Mimsy a cruise to Malta, and I was forced to say no. It was soon after this that Wells became increasingly subject to depression; I have always regretted failing him in his hour of need.

But back to cheerier times. My father, the handsomest Liberal of his day, brought me and my four sisters up to the highest ethical standard. 'My children,' he would say, as we gathered for our morning meal, 'you must never –' and here he would pause until the servants would return to the kitchen – 'you must always – oh bloody hell, is that gardener out with Daphne again?'. For we could see our mother, the most vivacious beauty of her day, far down the East lawn in the pleached alley, evidently convinced that she could not be seen from the house. Some days she never came to breakfast at all! But fortunately, Deborah, Delilah, Desirée, and Maude knew enough t0 start chattering blithely away at my father, distracting him with various questions, requests and demands. Poor Maude – these habits would stay with her until they got her in such trouble at the Palace, in that fatal argument with the young Charles, which ended so badly for the then Shah of Iran. But I digress...."

***

December 4, 2008 – write about the snow.

I should have brought a map.

I never can remember which street is which around here.

DeKalb, I can see the next is Edison... maybe they're in alphabetical order. Which would mean... oh, five or six blocks.

And oh, here we go, I'm glad it's not further – snow. It looks so....

It's so delicate, falling out of a smooth gray sky. Beautiful.

I always love this. Wonderful to see, and it makes everything so quiet. No sounds, really, except my feet of course.

Even they get quieter....

Did I say Edison? But this is Betancourt –

am I going the wrong way?

I'll retrace a bit...

no, that's silly, I can see my prints, they're in a line.

So they're not in alphabetical....

Huh. Coming down a bit more now. Streetlight as if behind a curtain.

I think... doesn't that on the left look familiar?

Familiar-ish. All right, over just a block, I'll see if there's a sign...

Or someone to ask.

Actually, it's been a while since...

Cars? Certainly no people.

You'd think more people would stay home in this weather. Lights in houses?... no... huh. If I lived around here I'd have a fireplace.

Well, not around here. Looks a bit... well. At least it seems very quiet...

Deep footprints. And snow sticking to my boots... well it's not slushy at least.

Glad of this scarf.

Now there's a building you wouldn't want to live near – talk about gutted....

Well wait: I haven't really been watching street signs but – Vifilsma- – Vifil-smarkt? What kind of a name is that?...

Must be annoying for them, spelling it all the time.

Not really a problem, though, I guess – two houses, and those couldn't be occupied....

I do wonder if I should just turn around.

All right, this is – the sign's just gone. Jeez. Vandalism.

I wonder if – there are still miles of town to go –

Well since I turned right back there – no, wait....

Broken street lamp.

If there were a bit more light from the sky....

Now this is a blizzard.

Okay, headed back – there must be lights –

that way?

no, it's not...

It's just white. Everywhere.

Everywhere.

***

December 10, 2008 – today, in fact. Couldn't engage with assignment, and so wrote a tanka – in the correct form!:

Birds flock around the towers:

stripes of blue-gray, calm above the lawns.

Universities are made to seem peaceful.

Why do these swords always return?

[Later correction: today (December 22), my friend and former teacher Terry from Los Angeles sent out a Christmas tanka, and I was reminded that syllables are an important part of the tanka form. The above doesn't have the correct number of syllables – as many haiku translations don't either; because five- or seven-syllable lines are much more difficult, and thus unfortunately often more strained or affected, in English than they are in Japanese. So, when I said the above was written in 'the correct form', I meant the old rules that the first and second lines should be on contrasting subjects; the third brings them together; and the fourth goes off in an unexpected but not unprepared direction. So, I suppose, I should have said: it's in the correct form – but not the correct prosody....]

I open my eyes in the night
See a great dark shape in the sky
I think: that is the shape of my death.
Watching – and it vanishes: it was sky behind the clouds.

The Exodus

(fragments from an ancient manuscript)

[This was, strangely enough, my first published poem, back in 1990; at the time it was an obvious response to the disintegration of arts funding under the Reagan and Bush administrations, and the trials of artists who were regarded as inappropriately shocking to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (especially Tim Miller, whom I knew at the time, and Holly Hughes, who remains one of my favorite performance artists to this day). Of course, the genre and structure are the strange bits. Even writing an extended epic – with sci-fi surrealism, an illusion of fragmentation, and a steady, square, pseudo-Eddic meter – was peculiar enough; the fact that I wrote and published it in Los Angeles, where poetry is dominated by image, personal story, and alternative identities, was even more bizarre. I remain proud of it, though. This is a shorter version, about two-thirds as long as the original, which moves a bit faster and deletes some of the more peculiarly conflicted lines....]

from III. The collapse

... until the dark hand fell,
and the Endowment was no more.

And in the months to follow, when
the Art Laws first prohibited
all images and words that seemed
subversive or obscene, before
the first Secession of the West,
before the MOMA Massacre,
they heard the fear in lyrics, saw
the hints to flee encoded in
small gallery exhibits. They
began to fondle airline schedules,
barter brushes, typewriters,
connive for private grants, beg for
inflated dollars to escape
the ties that held them to the place
that once was called the land of freedom...

VII. The flight

The exodus began: the painters
(trunks of leaking tubes, hair tangled)
flew to Roman villas, Bauhaus
spaces in Berlin...

The novelists defected too,
since it was clear that angry letters
merely caused arrests at three
a.m., and empty, bloody beds.
The poets did not leave until
the third Secession, and the first
of several civil wars. By then
they noticed all was not all right;
they dashed to rickety last planes,
too flimsy to be commandeered
by warring military camps
for strafing runs and bombing of
disruptive types, the poor, and others
whose allegiance was unsure.

They were almost too late, because
at last the axe fell. We all still
remember tales of crippled dancers,
blood and paint enmixed, brave mothers
hiding teenaged poets, and
the film directors who refused
to leave director’s chairs until
machine gun bullets tore the fabric...

XII. The last wave

The artists who had not escaped,
the ones remaining who had thought
that martial law was temporary,
those who tried to play the game,
and those who hadn’t quite believed
the newscasts, hid in unmarked vans,
dashed towards borders driving borrowed
cars without a license, dodging
armored tanks and barricades.

These desperadoes gathered in
the airports and train stations, foul
bus depots and freight-crowded docks
(some fell into the wine-dark sea)
and fled, their faces turned to watch
behind them, hoping not to feel
the black guns’ tearing fire just
before the closing of the doors.

They crossed the borders step by step,
miles won toward safer lands, and miles
away from home. They offered prayers,
original in style, to all
the muses and the rebel arts,
in hope of reaching safety...

from XIII. The empty trap

... And in the space they left behind,
life gradually collapsed to two
dimensions: distance, and expense,
and all was measured by those rules.

(Black uniforms, dark limousines,
assassinations, murders, the
explosive reds of gunfire, and
the brighter reds of terrorism -
striking subjects for the painters,
but the artists all had gone.)

Some journalists and actors stayed
sequestered by the government;
they could not guess their futures, and
perhaps that was more merciful.
In any case, the veil is drawn
on civil wars, the battles of
succession, and three hundred years
of the American Dark Age.
We sing the wanderers, the fleeing
artists, and their transformations.

In far lands, artists found their ways,
bizarre and separate, inventing
gorgeous memories, forgetting
bloody turmoil to recall
a golden, grand America,
a vision made to order from
pre-revolutionary views...

from XXI. The new view

Those who settled tropic islands
saw their arts grow gentler and
more sensual. Tahitian poets
reinvented enchained sonnets,
cheerfully creating without
ego’s signatures, in groups
that gathered around huge bonfires
on white beaches...

Slow, bright musics made with flutes
and electronics in New Zealand,
silver orchestras of gongs
and new steel instruments in Guam
played through long, warm nights in constant
rhythms. Singers moved in boats
across the ocean, scarves protecting
throats that glittered with the jewelry
of a hundred islands, warming
up to sing recitals under
palms, near dead volcano’s rims.

The painters of Antarctica
began an art of subtle whites;
they forged more than a hundred words
for delicate degrees of difference
in the empty canvas, seeking
distant memories of faces
that had vanished in the snow.

And we know their colleagues, the
Saharan desert painters, blending
waves of sandy hues, the sculptors
working with the winds to make
the dunes across vast distances
change shape. The desert-bound musicians
learned the ecstasy of numbers,
let their sounds evaporate
into a silence full of meaning,
hearing glory in the winds
and empty skies. No vacuum, though,
can last forever, and the poets
of their tribes began to chant
their lyrics, making songs that rang
across the world, long, fluid lines
of notes and words that taught the beauty
of the sands to greener countries...

from XXIX. The Return

In later centuries, when the
cruel Baptist-Islam wars were over,
when the long-lost artists came
again to colonize the land,
and when they rebuilt New New York
on a much grander scale, with golden
buildings, crystal domes in clear
blue air, some ancient images
by Mapplethorpe were etched in alloys
all around the city walls.

Children in small boats, who watched
the sun set on the bay, would argue
for their favorites: naked flowers,
men’s dark torsos, and the perfect
faces of long-vanished women....

[Los Angeles, 5/19/90-12/6/91]

Constantinople

[Fragments of an unfinished poem, including two false starts – or perhaps middles]

Lost is lost, no griefs could bring it back.

Blood, blood, those faces, broken walls and burning towers,
Jewels scattered in the alley, a wailing mother,
the bearded merchant skewered,

...

Jeweled women flee down alleys,
A bearded shopkeeper skewered, his shouting slaves, a brave
and foolish boy too young to hold his sword,
two smaller sisters scatter. It made no sense,
served nothing – not much new wealth elsewhere,
not increased power, no trade of happiness,
Was only loss: these buildings, even that bright dome,
Will never show again a perfect flower.

Is lost. Chalices that cannot be refigured,
Tiles finally broken, a crumbled wall
And no one can still see the shape it meant to be
No going back, no return to towers,
If God is their defender then he’s dead.

But when the smoke clears, when the blood is washed
From stones, when men with swords and needles
Have left in search of other plunder,
And survivors find their loves and, wailing,
Consign them to kind earth,
Then another city must be built: not the same,
Not that glory or perfection that happens the first time it is created.
But something: still a beauty, an air, a life:
Time continues, people come to live here,
A new house is built in the shelter of what’s left of the wall.

And in the rubble, searching just for stones, one finds:
A bolt of silk, a broken jar of cinnamon, and see:
A golden chalice. Is found.

[London, 6/19/01- ]

Shiki soku ze ku

Shiki soku ze ku,

Ku soku ze shiki
Hurry up it’s time

clock nails closing door
Drooling cries moaning

flabby hands sweat Drab
knife-edge headlamp glare

shades to black and white
Drive in distorted

circles wait get out
parking Unseeing

eyes flat twisting numb
hands pulling too far

Head thrown back pale lights
clutch fingers Drag out

wet marks cold patterns
Greasy hands jaw slack

eyes slant away Dull
still vacant stalking

lifeless streets searching
Wanting not wanting

absent touch dead heat
Lust is emptiness,

Emptiness is lust

[Los Angeles, San Francisco, 4/27/90-3/7/93]

[untitled]

This poisoned morning: dark gray shades that shift
one to the other, and the doorway’s flesh
begins to soften with the acid wash
of sunlights our unfocused eyes can’t bear;

we run down blackened streets, we try to flee
serrated knives of light, the glaring dawn,
turn sharpened corners, freeze to watch the change
in space, rectangles folding back from night –

but if I thought your darkened eyes would try
to link with mine, I’d fight this twilight edge,
I’d chant the sun awake, I’d fight a war
to bring your dazzling, golden shadow home.

Like desperate brides who stalk the streets at night,
we’re searching, searching, clutching dead bouquets.

[Los Angeles, 2/13-16/91]

In Bel Air

Chic beauties, men in tuxes
run across the wet plaza
to the hospital entrance.

I twist sprung cords
to turn the blinds,
trying to see.

Perfect curves on rainswept autos.
Big smiles, fine suits,
fabrics night-blue, glassy.

My vision’s left is carved
inward by my arm,
skin dim with shadows.

Laughing, waving
to friends who lean out
from Mercedes windows.

The window won’t open.
The nurse comes in,
tells me to go to bed.

White hands, polished nails.
Sharp molars.
What could they want here?

Through this window:
clear, bright teeth like ropes of pearls,
diamond edges.

[Los Angeles, 4/4/90-10/14/92]

The Move

This is actually my own favorite of all my poems, though it has not fared well in workshops. Perhaps I like it because the language and images are both exactly what I meant, and yet startling, even to me. And perhaps others dislike it because it is merely peculiar for them when I express an extreme response to something simple....

Unplug the dusty telephone connector:
arrange this shift in the stars’ patterns
Sharp edges grow from space divided in two

Find the pink receipt for the rental truck.
I stand in the next room, not listening:
the piano movers take away their ancient gift

The embedded tearing hooks of years.
I turn slowly widdershins
in this room that all my muscles know

dusty shelves, the brown chair, clouds of papers
begin to change:
I see them grow more deeply grained, more solid,
they fling at me the space they occupy,
have occupied.  Hard-won,
they thought
safe: reproach me
with all that should have happened between us.

dark flash lightless lids

I pull coldly away,
pick up the first box of all my books
and step through the finally open door.

[Los Angeles, 10/8-16/92]

On 'Her Face'

I should explain....

Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati is spiritual leader of Kashi Ashram, in central Florida. She is also an important AIDS activist – which is how I met her in the late 1980s (I think it was 1989). One of her followers in Los Angeles was also my AIDS Project Los Angeles phone buddy – that is, the guy who checked up on me, made sure I went to the doctor, etc.; so when she visited Los Angeles I went to meet her.

It was entirely amazing. I tend to worry a bit about institutionalized spirituality, and to avoid it when I can; but she not only a remarkable woman and teacher, she is also frankly a bit of a rebel – think of some of those 'wild' teachers famous in Zen and Sufism, who don't act restrained and saintly, and clearly don't fit into a well-behaved and socially 'correct' milieu. Ma was, and is, startlingly real, full of strong feelings and powerful intuition; one of the main ways she teaches is by the startling, even shocking, revelation – she will easily and definitely tell people what they need to know, even when it's not a comfortable thing to hear.

She became an important part of my life throughout the 1990s, as she frequently visited Los Angeles and San Francisco, and I visited the ashram several times on my own; I think this poem came from a week-long visit. The ten sections end up being occasional portraits of Ma in several of her aspects, and also of a few of the people around her – Bina, Rudra Das, Shambo – although it's unfortunate that I didn't write about some of my other friends there, especially Omkar Naga. Of course what it's really doing is trying to link up all those portraits into a sense of what Ma is like (from my point of view), and what it's like to stay with the people who live on the ashram.

This came up in the last few days also because D– was recently in India; when he visited yesterday he was showing photographs of his hotel, the school, the people, elephants in the street – all in an effort to convey the visceral, immediate experience of this strongly flavored culture, this place where feeling, music, spirituality, awareness, and philosophies that link up all of those are respected and in fact omnipresent. Different, of course, than visiting an ashram in central Florida; but I sympathized with what he was trying to do, and even with how hard it was to achieve – how can we convey the vivid three-dimensional reality of cultures that seem more honest, more real than our everyday lives?

I suppose that's what the poem is trying to do....

Her Face

for Ma Jaya

1.

Arc and klieg lights, endless fusion:
the spark leaps from one to the next,
a barely, fiercely controlled explosion.

Paintings melt in profusion, pouring fire
down the walls, flaring acrylics shimmer
through the alarmed, the seduced lens:

the walls melt into us –

2.

Sheer visual density of the figure:
the live brown map of face, great eyes,
rich silks with figured threads, gold clashing,
lips curled up in ecstatic laughter:

she reaches out her hands towards her own joke,
flinging forms of glowing heat to us. Yet, as
a flame changes, so swiftly the eye doubts
the difference between light and darkness,

there is another, visible only as afterimage:
goddess weeping, pure face frozen into grief
that does not move: tears run out
of their own weight, endlessly.

3.

Bina,
a light and moving figure.

Strings vibrate in sympathy,
eyes open deep into the camera.
Held notes maintain a solid ground,
the dull twin gourds resonate
with suppressed and radiant time:

the instrument that tunes the moment,
the dance that shapes us,
the note that plays us.

4.

The moment flickers as she
looks out on demanding meadows of
unflowerlike faces, sucking at energy:
feed me feed me feed.

She fights through flickering nonlight,
a fragment of abyss, a moment of
freedom-from: she turns towards again,
fighting the deep gray formless current,

Speaks, sets her face into the form
that it must take: and in a vast second
vaults over exhaustion, while speaking
comes alive: the form becomes reality, she

returns to her face, and in the time between
then and now – the space between the front
of the hand and its back – she is here, present,
real: aliveness that creates.

5.

Rudra Das.
Sharp planes of cheekbones echo through
the forged lines of an untarnished brass torso,
this body which is carved, made an emblem
by the hard, swift hands of a great artisan –

feet solid ground mountain:
Ksartriya, the warrior at attention,
deep attention to the mother's words.

6.

The web of many colors shifts: asking for
an old song. In the field of people, waving like
tall grass still not mowed, are scattered those
with strong memories of a certain time:

and over the crowd, a fragile armature of that
dramatic social hope, that public love, which
was living fabric a quarter century ago –
it rises, sparkling but barely seen, linked

from the outlines of crystalline forms,
spinning out above the crowd...
as the song ends it falls, silently, delicately crashing,
fading about our feet into the air...

7.

Shambo.
This drumming carves out
long, deep arches of air beneath dim rafters.

Flickering drumbeats, tiny
delicate ones suspending
the sharp bloody slap of strong beats:
they drip, they glitter, battering themselves
into rose petals

that drift redly across the still water,
silence, dimming twilight...

8.

Rain crashes into the dark banana leaves –
a sound of dull small hammers.

It looks like beating, like abuse:
but this is sustenance.

9.

At night the pond gazes upwards.

Smiling at stars, her liquid gaze
sees into their blazing cores:
the long eyes crinkle, remember
all their childhoods, assure them
of endless life, love without limit.

And the face resonates, burns through
that time when the candles are blown out,
our ashes are cast forth,
the fountain vaults, asserts:

all fused within
that eternal, dissolving moment
when red and white flowers fly,
land in the water, held by it lightly...

they are her eyes,
they are her heart.

10.

But when our own dawn comes,
what can we hold to us alone
and shivering under the banana trees,
when the fountain is turned off,
the light is pale and lifeless?

But see: among the reeds
are flowers still unwilted, floating.

[Los Angeles, Sebastian (Florida), 7/25/92-1/2/93]