in the hall of mirrors

Stats

June 5 is HIV Long-Term Survivors Day – it's actually a fairly recent phenomenon, with varied definitions. It's 5 June because that's when an article talking about five cases first appeared in the press, so – as in the work I'm writing (or supposed to be writing) now, it's not about the existence of the virus (they've found it in remains from the early 20th century) but about the date it was recognized in the world, so, culture. And cultural psychology.

And this year is the fortieth year since that article came out. So.

***

It's completely normal in PWA groups to compete, somewhat indirectly, over length of time and doctors and when and how bad, and famous people you've hung around with at benefits, etc. In the Newcastle groups I often win, quite unfairly of course – it's about the timing of when it appears in some cities rather than others; if I lived in London I'd probably have more arguments. It's kind of like "so you were at Okinawa, well I was at D-Day" arguments. I'm sure people will be doing this in nursing homes for the next fifty years, at least.

The loooooong stretch of our Patient Participation Team (PPT) in Newcastle, talking to medical students about our life experiences since early 2004, means that I've told all my stories many, many times. The people who've spoken a lot in the group look at each other when certain questions come from the wide-eyed young students, and say, oh, Robert has a story about that, or let's tell you how Claire was told her status. Or, that one's for Paul, you have to tell that story now.

Of course there is a tendency for such retelling to fix things in place, restructure them, and sometimes alter them... which is unavoidable really. Sometimes it's like remembering being at D-Day for someone who really showed up the next day. Or Woodstock for someone who didn't get there in time to see Hendrix.

I actually wrote about this in one of my favorite published things, the one about Reid Beitrusten, which I re-posted recently – Writing a Story for You – and now, as you're no doubt aware, you are in the position of sitting in a dressing room with an aging actress who is looking at a picture and saying, oh, the Barrymores were lovely to me, absolutely lovely.

It's the nature of memory – especially when it's altered/amplified by the fear of death (see the books by Becker and his followers – the fear of death is a basic psychological force, it causes people to raise monuments and publish books and found corporations and hold anniversary dinners – everyone wants to be remembered, somehow). We need to tell our stories, in the hope that they will be remembered....

***

But okay this garrulous actress should pause her musings and go back to the first point here, which was to outline My Stats: the basic facts of when I got into the HIV game.

I started getting laid around 1975; in the summer of 1979, just a few weeks following the Harvey Milk riots (about which I knew nothing at the time), I flew from Washington, DC (with two oversized bags, and my mother crying a lot at the airport) to San Francisco. I did that because I'd screwed up my degree at U.Va. (a four-year course finished in three years, but with terrible grades – because I hadn't gotten in to Princeton my life was clearly already over, a waste of time for everybody; and a couple of years in Washington merely proved I wasn't getting anywhere; and I'd read Tales of the City with a group of friends at that wonderful café/bookstore, and I believed Armistead when he told me that San Francisco was Different).

Wow okay this is definitely garrulous, and it's all prequel, so. Let's speed up and select.

In the winters of 1981 and 1982, I'll have obscure flu-like illnesses that suggest seroconversion. I remember bumping into Reid on a streetcar while going up to Parnassus to UCSF, both of us feeling confusingly ill, including STDs, and talking about feeling very... uneasy. He looks haunted... I think I do, too.

In the summer of 1983 Reid falls very, horribly, ill, in the now-famous Ward 5A. I come visit him occasionally, not really knowing what to do – he tells me I'm wasting my time screwing around in San Francisco, I should go get a PhD somewhere. I try to apply to Berkeley and UCLA; a week or so after he dies, on 2 December 1983, I get an acceptance letter to UCLA. They know my undergraduate degree was crap, but I've been writing program notes and singing in groups, and they decide to gamble.

Yeah, too much detail, again.

In the rising excitement of going to UCLA, there is also the rapidly increasing darkness of AIDS; we know more by the month, and also less. It hits San Francisco like a ton of bricks – obviously David France's recent book focuses on New York's ACT-UP, and he's trying really hard to not offend anybody, but he is annoying flip about a 'few cases' in SF. There were a lot of cases, it was a smaller and more focused city – even though the Village had a certain social containment it always seemed as though AIDS in New York, or London or Paris, was a thing happening across people who were distributed among many networks, nodes, structures; in San Francisco, with an estimated 100,000 LGBTQ people among the city population of 600,000, it was absolutely... well.

It hit us like a ton of bricks.

Theater Rhinoceros allowed Leleand Moss, a very New York actor/director, to put together a workshop of writers and performers that became The AIDS Show, which ran for, I think, ten days in August 1984. I was one of the ten writers and actors – I wrote five 'Party' scenes as transitions, all of which were fragments of dialogue that got darker and more charged over the period of 1981-4, and a final death scene, the 'Hospital' scene – in fact I'm the only one in the production who dies on stage (don't snicker). The otherwise lovely David Roman, whose famous book on AIDS theater was a landmark, unfortunately misread the long list of segments and authors and ascribed my pieces to another guy, which deeply pissed me off, as it kind of wrote me out of history. But I'm clear that Roman was talking about a lot of things at once, and also that – here I shall pout a bit more – as in France's book, those East Coasters always find it difficult to get interested in the details of what was happening on the West Coast.

But I was very proud of what I wrote – Leland didn't really get it, he was very Method and realistic in his approach, where I'd written surrealist stuff that reflected all the Grove Press/experimental books I'd been reading for years. I still think it was good; unfortunately, some years later when The AIDS Show toured San Diego and other parts of California, I went with friends to see it – and my scenes were absolutely terrible, inattentive and hastily passed through between the monologues; like any long-running show, the things nobody was paying attention to had disintegrated...

Anyway. I was a co-writer and performer in what we think was the second play about AIDS (after Robert Chesley some months earlier). And it was good and I was very proud of it. I wish I'd written more stuff like that.

***

But at this point you're in the actress' dressing room and she's just gotten to her twenty-third birthday when she met the Barrymores, and you're longing to reach the door, so I'll speed up.

***

Los Angeles – far less AIDS, the light seemed brighter and people less worried, and I was back in academe and it was going fabulously. I seemed to know what I was doing, despite a supervisor who disapproved of the poststructuralists...

No, speed up. Yeah okay, sex clubs and bars and the Eagle; sun and cars, moving to the apartment on Spaulding Drive... in 1986 I wrote one last composition on Japanese death haiku (I'm still proud of that one), realized I wasn't a composer, and... yes this actually is part of the story because death was increasingly, endlessly present, and I knew, sort of, that I must also be...

Oh, and there were three months in New York on a scholarship to meet famous composers. I was a fool of course, starting out by telling them about myself, but among the various (Wuorinen was an asshole, Reich distant), Meredith Monk was amazingly kind, and we connected.

And I was walking down Christopher Street the night after Charles Ludlam (Theater of the Ridiculous) died, at three in the morning, and saw the huge array of candles and flowers covering the storefront on a silent street, with 'We Love You Charlie' big in the center.

I mean, every story had the same point to it.

***

So, back in LA, April 1987 – the gay and lesbian center in Los Angeles, the blood test, then a few weeks later my results from Mitch Walker, a Jungian analyst in training. I already knew I would be positive, he told me I was positive, yet that was a huge shock... which is how these things work.

Mitch takes me on as an analysand, I have my first, five-year Jungian analysis; of course it is rather circumscribed because we both know I'm going to die soon, and that's the whole point, dealing with death. Mitch is amazing, a mountain climber of an analyst, Nietzschean and more than a bit scary, as Kast will later be – I take them as models these days (though I'm friendlier – I'm more willing to apologize for throwing huge chunks of reality at my analysands, though I do it anyway).

And I join Terry Wolverton's HIV writing group, which is mostly three to six guys across those five years writing in a room, and I write poetry and stories, and feel creative and incredibly happy when I finish a short piece. And very, very taken care of by Terry, which is why I've gone back to her now, thirty years later, for coaching as I try to write these books.

And John (now Laxman Das) becomes my AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA) buddy, and he is a disciple of Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, a rather wild spiritual teacher from Florida, who visits LA and later SF periodically, and is full of life – she gives me the name Nachiketas, the boy who makes friends with death, and a kind of energetic mothering that changes me.

And all this time I'm still at UCLA, though from 1987 I stop actually working on the masters – yes, my degrees will take forever – but everything's overlapping with Susan McClary coming to UCLA, and a huge transition into the New Musicology, with Susan reflecting my work back at me in a way that will actually turn me into an academic. I know I've said it before, but if Susan hadn't become a mentor, then dear friend, there's no way I ever would have actually been successful, as academic or writer – I was digging existential pits for myself and being miserable in them, but Susan, and Philip Brett, pushed me to actually Do Stuff.

Which led to all of the musicological activities of the nineties, all of which nevertheless fell under the continuing shadow of Knowing I Was Going to Die Soon...

***

Okay I'm tired, you're tired, and this is really just my origin story, right? So, a few high points:

I tell my family I'm HIV+ a few days after Christmas, in I think 1990. It doesn't go well, but hey, it's done.

I finish the masters, a response to Adorno, in 1991. Vince Pecora, Adorno specialist, mentions to me after my viva that the thesis is very angry... I learn something from that...

1992, move back to San Francisco. Gorgeous apartment in the hills.

1993, Fulbright to Germany. A year and a half, Darmstadt then Berlin, and it's all, yet again, a Last Hurrah – I'll be dead soon but I am viable, cool! A respected intellectual who can give presentations at Humboldt and at the Darmstadt courses!

1995-6, back to San Francisco, but now in a dilapidated building as the city disintegrates around me. No real job, grimy carpets, working for the building manager who's trying to minimize the amount of crack and speed in the building. I'm messing with speed and crack myself, meeting people who are truly below the line of expecting to live their lives. I remember phoning my beloved Trisha after throwing all my drug paraphernalia in a trash can in the street, panicking that I've gotten in too deep, but...

Death is everywhere. Of course.

June 1996: that big fanfare over the New Medications. I have the Time magazine featuring Dr David Ho, our new hero.

Everything is changed.

There was a big conference scheduled in Florida later that year around famous writers and AIDS – they actually had to reorient the whole thing:

because if the plague no longer seems to walk the streets, the shape of time and emotion and existence are all so unbelievably changed...

***

1997-2001, first job in Hong Kong. Money, huge flat, respect, success. 2001-2, Australia – that great job in Sydney, but I haven't told them I'm HIV+, and the government rejects my right to stay and, after a year of living with John, deports me. Huge crash in money and career and hope: my tendency to assume my life is ending takes over my expectations, again.

2002: job in northern England. Too damned cold, and far from the urban things I love, but a smart department, kind people, a good-hearted city.... I gradually recover over the years.

2009. Visit to Zürich to reconnect with Jungian stuff. Then, that summer, a minor stroke... death appears again, in a different form. More personal this time.

Sometime in the 2013-2016 period, Verena Kast points out to me that I have no expectations for myself, and I realize I've been expecting to die for decades. Decades of knowing that, whatever I was engaged in doing, it wouldn't last long – and also, underneath that, and more dysfunctionally, knowing that never finishing a book or any major work would be something I could get away with, because... I was going to die too early, full of tragic promise.

You know, when you pull that sort of self-deluding game for decades, it sort of wears out. It becomes increasingly unbelievable, as such things do. And my secret, that I never seem to finish anything substantial or important, is exposed as a reality, not merely an accident of dying too soon...

But I also realize, after Verena faces me with it, that I'm not endlessly dying. My Jung-Institut thesis, The Passionate Body, is about AIDS: because the body with AIDS is not merely a body that's disintegrating and dying, it's one that passionately wants to live: anger, grief, activism, memorials, sex, drugs – our stories and our rabbiting on and on about being long-term survivors – all these things are evidence that living is the thing that we insist on doing.

***

So, now I want to write this shorter, commissioned book on the psychology of the politics of AIDS, and though I've already taken a year and a half longer than I expected to, it isn't impossible to finish – especially with the help of Terry, who has returned to my life, just when I need her.

Then an expanded, completely rewritten version of the Jung-Institut thesis: the cultural complexes and underlying archetypes of AIDS.

And even, maybe, that long-drafted overview of music about AIDS – not as detailed as work by other musicologists: I want to try to put it all together, to see what music has done for forty years... that third book already has eighty pages of single-spaced draft, but is full of holes, of course.

***

Last month, a minor event that suggested a stroke – then various minor symptoms and side effects: some weeks of panic around a stroke, but then I was told most of the problems suggested liver problems rather than neurological ones. A relief because liver problems are slower, and don't suddenly end things.

So, me, and AIDS, HIV, and death, and life, and continuing.

I hope I finish a lot of stuff. But, as I told Fred years ago – he was upset at this, but I meant it, and I still mean it – if things don't get written or published, that doesn't seem like a real disaster.

Because, and it's a cliché but it feels absolutely real, the only aspect of all this that still feels necessary, unavoidable, is the simple fact that I have been here....

***

Happy HIV Long Term Survivors Day, 2021.

Renovation

[We started a writing group, Rumana and I and a couple of friends... modeled on Terry Wolverton's approach in the late 80s and early 90s. Two meetings so far; and we're all writing. This poem, blunt though it is, came to me clearly – that sense of making something:...]

 

Nowhere to move, so

work will need to

go on around me.

 

Said it might make sense to just

rip out all the veins,

start over,

replace the stuff on the roof with

something darker – more modern.

 

There are obvious patches of rot

and damp

and infestations;

yes, definitely, infestations.

 

You can see patches

along the arms,

especially across the main joints

and also

across the supporting bits of the

infrastructure

(legs to you).

 

The heating is pretty wonky…

Replace the whole furnace?

Really?

That will be expensive.

Ah, well…

 

Yes, the arch of the foot on the right

keeps collapsing.

Yes, all right, replace:

newer, more modern

materials.

 

All that central processing –

brain, eyes, whatnot –

yes, well.

Well.

You can see

that they’re simply

much older technology.

 

Maybe – can’t guarantee, but –

upload,

data cleaned out, restored,

then you want to dump it all onto a new

two-terabyte –

yes well of course backups –

with brightly flashing

lights.

 

All those tubes and valves –

sure, whole system –

around the cross pins

and those bits above

might as well just be replaced –

 

but I guess only

if you can still get that model…

 

        ***

 

The tough part is

that central pump.

Veins, passions, feelings,

faulty valves, scarred patches,

the whole is pretty much worn out –

 

face it, it’s going to be a matter of

Yank it out,

replace,

send to the trash heap.

 

But, of course,

if we’re going to do that,

 

it’s clear

 

that, really,

 

if we’d thought of it

 

 

we would just

 

 

 

have built

 

 

 

 

from scratch.

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]