JON ANDERSON (1940 - 2007)


Creative Writing


The heart is a violent muscle; it opens & shuts.
The subject is death.
The subject is also laughter, the bravery
of girls, nine in a row.

In each face a hole opens.
Nine tiny stars of nervousness spin languidly out.

Sweethearts, death is blind,
he'll run up & down your bodies.
Death, with a dog's face
goes running through the Women's Dorm;
he has neither breasts nor jewelry.
Counselors run in his shadow, shouting Here,
We're all Christians here!

In the old country, everybody was Jewish.
Everybody had the smell of clothes soaked in a hot tub
and they learned to lament the fallen, the falling,
the about to be born.
Birth was painful, a long vibration
like an intake of breath after laughter.

I don't want to trouble you; you're entering history.
Your flesh is the moon's, gradual & broken.
Those boys are no consolation; they'll circle you,
ooinscrutable calligraphy,
with no place to land.

I'm going to think about death until
my mouth runs. I'm going to look at death
with a terrible face as his own.
I don't want to scare you;
after death there are two alternatives,
both heartless:
memory & forgetfulness.

***

For anyone interested, if you can find them,
I'd purchase The Milky Way, Jon Anderson's
selected poems, published in 1983 by Ecco,
or In Sepia, published earlier by Pitt.

A memorial page for Jon is right here.

TO HOLD IN SUCH HIGH REGARD


In terms that remain constant

it's something
they do

but you aren't some baseline in blue jeans

an autobiography's
an infestation . . .

the men in her Muybridge study
a guitarist and a drummer
the gardener in his grandiosity . . .

"They are certainly smarter than horses"

pushing the linens back
we conceive a love

the
quality
of his leisure

it squeezes the hate right out of your finger

you might find one playing
in the dirt for example

sweating all over her instruments

DREAM ETHER OF THE STATIONARY


They don't mean it
the way it sounds

the more authentic allowance

let whatever substance
fuse to the steel

like in the "olden" days

but no

you're finally one of several

Diners

on loan to God in your wetsuit . . .

O cafeteria
of the overmedicated

two hundred choices
of pie on Grape road alone . . .

it tastes fine

tonsils stuffed with crabmeat
and dill weed

the Squeal and the Plunge

a mile of coiled up oxygen tubing

pneumatic hypnosis . . .

Because she has
designed this system

of ramps and cozy blind coves

for your pleasure

and eventual dismemberment

dream ether
of the stationary

meadows full of Kodak Memories and a "sausage-pancake"

Pet Meds
for the geese
or dog in your life

one musk oxen paying the bill

one actively farting outside in the Prius

***


Shall I begin an anthology on growing complacent
(and hungry for starch) with age after the advent
of this last in a long stack of birthdays?

Last year the Tigers, now the Rockies . . .

I'm happy for Boston but when will both teams simply show
up again for an entire series . . .

Anyway, finally the murdering is over.

I'd like some tap water with my single tamale, thank you.

Some of the "new" poems will be appearing
in Barrow Street and Green Mountains Review,
by the way.

Soon snow on the pumpkin.

(I'm not trying to be lewd.)

BIRTHDAY


And I can feel the exhaust stains all over my heart. A little
gray blast of industry. A little hard drinking under clouds
like the bottom of a lake bumping our heads all those--not
so many--years ago, in Beer Tents and other flotsam. The
precise day is not important, the forceps that were used,
the sleep disorders I was born with. One causes you, when
you close your eyes, to see an orange on an axis turning, pimples
and all, like skin, a woman excited, or cold. I choose
to say woman but pick a gender. (If you have the disorder.)
The leaves along the Michigan/Indiana border have turned
into small windows that throw down orange light, and there
is something about the tilt of things, the sun painting
seven p.m. a luminous gold--beech tree trunks, a filter of painted
light muting the strangely glowing lawns, green siding a kind of
neutral yellow that vibrates . . . I never dreamed these
things. Just the orange, which amazed me early on
with it's cleanly divisible sections. Other sleep disorders:
Long Bridges (I dove from many of them), a right brained
horseshoe crab (a character for my children's book),
my failure to learn Backgammon (even though I learned
how to play just fine) repeated every night for a month.
Now comes a birthday, Mr. Conehead, and the laughing girls,
the time I sacked the quarterback nine times in junior high
football (the next week a halfback ran right over me and
I got yelled at), smoking pot in some kid's tree fort
instead of bow hunting one time because I'm just that
restless. It was practically in the kid's back yard, and
there I am in my camouflage, like swamp thing. Too long
ago. 25 years? And here is another World Series.
Move your clock forward or sideways or upside down
in a week or so (they moved it--nothing stays the same!).
Have a haunted and orange Halloween . . .

CONTRACT PLEASURE


You are so made out of
Coke cans

more love-of-family than

bullet proof

the day the drought (floods) finally never came

an opulent
daydream of water

pears bursting

twelve-packs of Fresca in cans

the upside down cave dweller
sparking like flint

(another vestigial optic nerve . . .)

The architects
left pieces of planning

all over the dam site--

an arm here

a saw horse with a man stabbed over it

a failure of mechanical law

*

Then came the grafting of wretchedness

the Lilliputian shadow of last resorts
under the nose of an Airbus . . .

Oh such painful pleasures

High windows

Erasure of night

Bacon knew how to make
a religion out of such meat

the passion of ordinary love

How to Go Blind With It

(bestseller number 978-0-19-283580-2)

While Nietzsche just falls in a mud hole . . .

Mrs. Grass does make a soup from which you never wake up

oregano and white pepper

forgetfulness

not the bass thump of rap

but chanting coming out of the dark skyline . . .

a terrified army of pleasure seekers

Rhinestones up the sides of your jeans

a stud in your tongue

*

I apologize for the dreadful early fog on the page. I fought
off a bug, and it stuck in my neck. Tip of the hat to Edmund Burke
here. Odd how working this out in plain view sort of pushes the
thing to be sooner rather than later. Sunday morning saw
an odd approximation, notes, as one might dab out with
a small watercolor brush under your flashlight tired
in your northern asylum. Pleasant dreams. The beautiful
cold weather covers the land at last. Did the Red Sox have
to mutilate the Indians? What a dead blank time the last
three games (unless you're a sox fan, but even then the
Indians were like straw flapping in the wind). Hope the World
Series is more than last year's lopsided massacre and comedy
of errors featuring the Tigers, St. Louis playing the role of actual
thunder.

The Woman at the Washington Zoo

by Randall Jarrell

The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I. . . .
ooooooothis print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my grave, with no
Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,
The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief--
Only I complain. . . . this serviceable
Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses
But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,
Wavy beneath fountains--small, far-off, shining
In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death--
Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
And there come not to me, as come to these,
The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas' grain,
Pigeons settling on the bears' bread, buzzards
Tearing the meat the flies have clouded. . . .
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooVulture,
When you come for the white rat that the foxes left,
Take off the red helmet of your head, the black
Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man:
The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,
To whose hand of power the great lioness
Stalks, purring. . . .
ooooooooooooooYou know what I was,
You see what I am: change me, change me!

INCIDENT



Bought ten dollars worth of gas. Went into a store.
Needed milk. When I got to the milk case I heard
fighting, a woman's voice shouting the word Terrorist. Reality
was tucked inside me somehow. I was fuzzed up
in a cramp of other problems. I barely understood
as I got to the register the extent of the altercation.
A young African American woman had been upset
because a Middle Eastern gentleman would not
honor her credit card because the corner with the expiration
date was literally gone. The woman was on a cell phone,
but profane exchanges between the man and woman
continued. What is amazing is as I try to wade
in to tell this little story all sorts of questions
about race enter the fray. What happened versus
How do I tell the story without sounding a racist.
All I can tell is what happened and how I felt, honestly,
though the prospect makes me more than a little tense.
The man told me his side of the story, speeded up,
exasperated, then told about the ten phone calls a day he
got after 9-11 when he ran a 7-Eleven. The woman
said, "I should burn this store down." Sweat
on the back of my neck. Rage in a different tongue
from the man. She wouldn't look at me. Never did.
In these circumstances I grew protective of the man.
I think the woman knew somehow she was in the wrong
but something compelled her to keep speaking, keep
fighting. Something about her husband kicking the man's ass
and then the husband in fact yelling out of the cell phone
held high in the air. I grew emotionally close to the store owner,
to everyone made into something they aren't by the whole
political global mess. Goods and Services. Free Market.
Blackwater. Whatever. I wanted to shelter the Terrorist.
I wanted to have a beer with the Terrorist. I don't know
but the waves of hate filled the space along with some
waves of something else--a deeper kind of understanding.
Police were called--by the woman--and I stayed to act as
the only witness. I said little, just what I heard,
then left. Terrorist. I'll never forget it.

*

Approximately Forever

by C. D. Wright


She was changing on the inside
it was true what had been written

The new syntax of love
both sucked and burned

The secret clung around them
She took in the smell

Walking down a road to nowhere
every sound was relevant

The sun fell behind them now
he seemed strangely removed

She would take her clothes off
for the camera

she said in plain english
but she wasn't holding that snake

*
from Tremble

SOMETHING NEVER FATHOMED

("White bird must fly or she will die," It's a Beautiful Day)



Instead of that, or
rather on a whim

the one in the dark inside the one asleep

tapping out a eulogy

Okay, so what if
I had been dying

no one cancels a bad party

little hot dogs
and Marxism

a diamond talks to you, embedded,
dreaming through an afternoon

thirty years ago

There's a rush of emotion
more arterial than formal

skull with a bunghole

played as a bugle on deck where there's rarely any sun

Iced tea in the morning followed by

It's a Beautiful Day

all night

NOT THERAPY


Sometimes you lock into some other's line of vision

let's call it today's "subject matter"

Some blessed
helmet of eyes

child left in the grocery store

the sister who got to fly to France

then there was that thing her father
said that hurt her . . .

puts a dent in your heart everytime

shovel like some
demented dragon . . .

sinuosity of the deformed psyche

it has wings
you drive a Honda

Mediocrity is simply a fact

not therapy

not the fault of your priest

Pressed to murder for food

you might put your lyre
in a crate and run over it

Somebody invented glass
and they made a room out of it

for you

and a lock

the absolute opposite of zero
isn't poetry

all these fresh graves

and not one animal is praying

A POEM ABOUT PIKE


Take the fork sitting next to your plate
and stab it into your hand. You're lucky you're not
swimming. The pike, like a shark, lives
for blood. A big pike will try to eat a full-grown duck.
They'd like to be alligators.
A pike's eyes glow in the dark.
If you catch one watching you you'd better pull anchor.
I once caught a pike in a ditch
and it had a warbler in its stomach,
and another pike, and a Zippo lighter.
A man at work told me he caught a bass
in Pine Lake with its stomach torn out. A pike had gutted it
ooofor him.
The pike is a million years old. It's seen every craft
man's invented. It's too voracious for its own good
though, and will attack
a paint-chipped spoon dangled over the edge of a rowboat.
Its brain's about the size of a marble.
The best way to catch a pike is with a sucker
or shiner hooked through the spine.
In Indiana a northern pike mauled a child
playing patty-cake in the shallow water of an inland lake.
The clouds stayed pink for days.

*

from Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues, 1997)

TWENTY-ONE MONTHS


The moon enters the water
So near her heart. Dove of fine meat resting.

Outside a mob comes,
voiced,
you might wonder, like crinoline?

It gets hot inside so close to the egg.

A tower where the ringing bed,
taken right off the blackboard,
promises a secular head roll.

Cheeks, mouth, perhaps teeth, jaw, chin, perhaps jewelry . . .

New star for the sun
and the many million
naked human backs
and all the effort of adapting

while still desiring birth on a flat surface.

I think most lambs smile in heaven.

*

Yes, a re-posting. Revisiting it after many months . . .

THE DETAILS!


There is an interview with yours truly here, about publishing and
other miscellany. You have to scroll down. Thanks to Didi Menendez.
Thanks also to Jordan Davis for linking to this blog. I'm still reading
The Hat 6. That's how packed with good stuff it is. A panel
of those of us who like to erase poems is forming. I was
contacted by Joshua Kryah, whose book, Glean, is excellent.
We're headed for AWP 2009 hopefully, and other parts
unknown. There is an excitement about this process I'm
unable to communicate without stopping and writing
a book-length treatise. And I'm writing poems. Joshua is writing
a long essay about this process. More about all this later.
I'm getting ready to head out west . . .

Check out Jen Bervin's (Shakespeare) erasures, her book called Nets.

Want a POETRY MANUSCRIPT fine tuned? HERE.

MOTIVE


I want an epitaph that's rich
yet gently anecdotal . . .

a sort of late birth no one can atone for

something something something writ in something

stripes going right up

the man with his lunch
and the angry forehead

who is the bastard value of zero

she lost her love in a princess

soul of a bad orphan

a pink dildo left spinning on the lazy Susan

the balance takes the doer back behind the outhouse

sitting on the crapper one finds his chakra

the exclamation of love

security of the arrival of the propane man . . .

the body keeps turning around

the body

keeps turning

around

*

Please note theft: most of line eight comes from
Richard Greenfield's A Carnage in the Lovetrees (p. 35)

MARANATHA


It was our friends who died
young raining through the trees
in the middle of the night.
Trimburger blew himself up with a homemade bomb
designed by Sullivan.
Sullivan said the pine needles
were talking and we listened.
A mile away Lake Michigan crashed
against the pier making sand
while the stars exploded
all around us
and someone said There's Mark who'd swallowed
a twenty-two barrel
and said in his note he was afraid
of the purple weeds.
We shivered in the leaves
trying to scrape out the sound of blood
pumping through our veins
when Boy came walking out of the beeches
half-naked and bleeding.
We all knew who he was, and we wetted our shirts
where the water shattered the moon.

from Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues, 1997)

GARDENING AND GOVERNMENT



1.
It's not because you're desperate for a job
Lansing passes a resolution against
"produce freshening by hand."

Oranges and limes and that little sprayer
thing with the cold mist.
A mechanical mister, then.

As soon as this becomes law
all the degreed gardeners with their heads down journaling
stop. Begin weeding, pruning, grumbling.

2.
The sun shines the same as it did when you were
holding court with your glass
of icy bourbon, pond side . . .

Dear Harbor of the Black Rooms where the Fish
Speak in Low Tones

about the Development of an Anti-Filleting Machine . . .
a female fish has disrobed.
Ah, so might you, had you such cold lips.

The former Governor
of the great state of Michigan still sometimes wakes feeling
oooalarmed.
Afraid his actual flesh

is expanding, almost touching the Indiana border, in essence
touching a Hoosier.

Dressed in a synthetic body suit and tails,
he lets the help freshen his drink to the sound of conversion
taking place in the plush leaves overhead.


from Abrupt Rural, New Issues, 2004

AT THE HOSPITAL


Those unbelievable new faces!
Who knows what they see,
What they think when
The world fans out before them

And they have to lie there,
Wriggling, stung by this new light,
Drifting away from the old. They're nothing like the dead
Who on occasion I've looked in on

(I've got a key) in the morgue and who mostly seem
Far away, memory no longer even a part of the room.
We write what we know
On a chart. Someone looks at a watch.

Look at him. Not even a spark in his head.
While upstairs a baby is beginning to breech.
And this guy--he just keeps getting heavier & heavier
And heavier & heavier . . .

Still, if you ride the elevator a few times
You might begin to notice a resemblance between the man
In the drawer in the basement
And the six-pound girl who's been yanked out amongst us.

She howls with uncertainty. The man burns
With consciouslessness, like a chair, or the clock hanging on the
ooowall
Someone looks at.
Writes down the time of birth.


from Arrow Pointing North, Four Way Books, 2002

BURIED AT SPRINGS

by James Schuyler


There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much. A launch draws
two lines of wake behind it
on the bay like a delta
with a melted base. Sandy
billows, or so they look,
of feathery ripe heads of grass,
an acid-yellow kind of
goldenrod glowing or glowering
in shade. Rocks with rags
of shadow, washed dust clouts
that will never bleach.
It is not like this at all.
The rapid running of the
lapping water a hollow knock
of someone shipping oars:
it's eleven years since
Frank sat at this desk and
saw and heard it all
the incessant water the
immutable crickets only
not the same: new needles
on the spruce, new seaweed
on the low-tide rocks
other grass and other water
even the great gold lichen
on a granite boulder
even the boulder quite
literally is not the same

II
A day subtle and suppressed
in mounds of juniper enfolding
scratchy pockets of shadow
while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump—
stand shadowless in an overcast
of ripe grass. There is nothing
but shade, like the boggy depths
of a stand of spruce, its resonance
just the thin scream
of mosquitoes ascending.
Boats are light lumps on the bay
stretching past erased islands
to ocean and the terrible tumble
and London ("rain persisting")
and Paris ("changing to rain").
Delicate day, setting the bright
of a young spruce against the cold
of an old one hung with unripe cones
each exuding at its tip
gum, pungent, clear as a tear,
a day tarnished and fractured
as the quartz in the rocks
of a dulled and distant point,
a day like a gull passing
with a slow flapping of wings
in a kind of lope, without
breeze enough to shake loose
the last of the fireweed flowers,
a faintly clammy day, like wet silk
stained by one dead branch
the harsh russet of dried blood.

A Certain Slant of Sunlight

by Ted Berrigan

In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is
on St. Mark's Place too, beneath a white moon.
I'll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded
against what is hurled down at me in my no hat
which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress
under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing
by the wire fence where the wild flowers grow not too tall
her eyes will be deep brown and her hair styled 1941 American
oooowill be too; but
I'll be shattered by then
But now I'm not and can also picture white clouds
impossibly high in blue sky over small boy heartbroken
to be dressed in black knickers, black coat, white shirt,
buster-brown collar, flowing black bow-tie
her hand lightly fallen on his shoulder, faded sunlight falling
across the picture, mother & son, 33 & 7, First Communion Day,
oooo1941--
I'll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight
they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow.

Pre-Nuptial

poem by Christine Garren

It's like a bowl of roses I carry all day in my arms
even after the flowers have blackened and the water stinks.
I know I could be stronger than to tell, but the flowers are heavy;
they stain the cloth against my breast.
When I try to put them down, they cousin me like vines;
I walk the aisles of my life with them.
I thought you should know this before you marry me:
some days I cannot free my hands enough to love.