Marick Press

I've been reading Russell Thorburn's Father, Tell Me
I Have Not Aged, published by Marick Press. The persona
in this book is a little oblique, and by that I mean the poems
themselves do battle over some sort of representational
idea of What's True and a really jazzy kind of music.
It's that form/content thing. For me the poems
are full of paradoxes, and untellings, and suddenly arrived
upon new truths. It purports to be autobiographical
and is, but it is sometimes confident enough that it
flies off into the outfield of the imagination and lets
go of metaphorical precision--and the sentences become
serpentine--and we fly forward out of the purported "past"
and into the moment of reading, the "now" or whatever.
The picture of Russ below was taken at Jonathan Johnson's
in-laws' house in Michigan's Upper peninsula. In the meantime,
it's in the sixties here. This coming after the hellacious nineties.
I'm talking temperature. I'll take flannel any day over shorts
and some crappy T-shirt.

PROZAC


I turned left onto Merrill Street,
noticed my blinker,
looked out the window at trees,
a parked mail truck,
a squirrel walking down the middle of the sidewalk.

Russ Thorburn at Deer Lake.

LITTLE PAINTED SHIP BETWEEN ISLANDS


I can't reiterate enough how much I need you to give up your
share of the inheritance. Don't look away. Haven't you ever
000seen
a turtle sunning? This boat, the acreage. What do you
need with the money? In one of the bait wells a spider swings
000down
onto a thin invisible hammock. She rappels up and anchors
000on the hinge.
Are you trying to write poems? The fact is you're not doing
000anything.
She crosses a seam of light, severs a mistake with her mouth.
One man passes in front of a cardboard cut-out of another man
000and from a distance
the flesh and blood man appears to be speaking. The spider
000sharpens
one of her leg tips. You make me want to throw up. You make me
want to throw up. You couldn't write a poem if your life depended
000on it.

THE OTHER LIFE


000There is no denying that Herb’s work suffered for the
sake of others. I don’t believe the quality of the work was
diminished, but Herb put his own poetry on the back burner
for the better part of fifteen years. He wrote and published
little during this time (an exception being 2001’s “In the
Palm of Space,” published by Sutton Hoo Press) because he
was pouring his heart into his work at New Issues. His last
book, Durations, had come out in 1984. More than twenty
years would pass before he published his fourth, and final,
collection, Sleeping Woman.
000But if the work suffered in terms of quantity, Herb’s last
poems are hard with a deft authority, a simplicity that belies
their emotional depths, a faith in the purposefulness in the art
of the poem, its ability to make something transcendent out of
the given life, out of experience. His last poems are amazingly
intense, and quietly precise; seamlessly humming addresses of
witness so finely tuned they feel as if they’d been effortlessly
transcribed onto the page, perfectly constructed machines of words.
And everywhere in Herb’s poetry a deep awareness of death
keeps sparking an overwhelming and answering solace of possible
loves, to paraphrase from the title poem of this volume.

The above is excerpted from the foreword I wrote for the volume
of Herb Scott's forthcoming book of selected poems, a book I
edited, due to arrive on the scene, published by Carnegie Mellon,
in the spring of next year. The full title of the book is The Other
Life: Selected Poems of Herbert Scott, 1974-2005.

He has been so so sorely missed.

*

My book, The Nervous Filaments, is due from Four Way Books
about the same time--April, 2010. I'll be reading poems from the
book on April 18--a Sunday--at The Bowery Club in New York
City. Many more readings--some of which are already scheduled--
to come.

THE TRAIN FROM CHICAGO


Trees multiply like cough syrup

Steadily

Steadily

I see the same blue painting of the same big dwarf

A fly

It twitches it's wings on one corner of the painting Excavation

"I can't believe you gave me a D!"

Or Bill de Kooning waking in the cellar damp

It rained

Cold gray scrolling glorious one sad day in April

Composition of forgotten laundry

I love looking out the window

It all disappears

IN THE FINE TIME OF WARRIORS


Latin for it, buried deep, in tongues

TONGS

Next, install the Skep-to-kill Driver

Beans shake all over the dinner plate

TOES

Toes to die for

Under the earth there are tunnels and caves full of harvester ants

The guy's name was John

Black Beauty gets it in the end

John the jackass

A couple of times I actually lost my driver's license

Jock Sturges thinking hard about death at Block Island

Trees droop arthritically over the big flat river

The carp--fat Buddhas

There is no king of pop

I put some mustard in her canyon

The world is full for others

BREAKFAST, TAMPA, 1963


Because it's too hard to shred I can't eat it.

A tarantula crawls from under
A tan plastic radio.

It's true, afterwards my mother laughed in the breakfast nook
000talking on the phone and looking at the bruise
000she suffered after screaming and banging off
000its hinges the dishwasher door.

I remember there were sand dollars drying in the window.

The body breathes its milk of white vituperation.
And then it gives birth anyway . . .

I don't want to eat in this fog,
And the remaining light should not be tweezed from the
000tarantula's face.

I LIVED IN FLORIDA AND HAD A SORE
INSIDE MY MOUTH
THAT WAS PRIVATE, AND SINCE NO ONE KNEW IT WAS
00000000000000000000000000000000THERE
IT HAD NO NAME

DIDACTIC


I sometimes talk
a hundred miles a minute

and there is an antioxidant for that

a big plus sign

pulls babies

into cities

or grids

people walking right down the tops of their saddened grandmothers

these same individuals

sit naked waiting for the avant-garde

a thin plastic delusional poodle with voting rights

Alabama may come
first alphabetically

but most people now learn to think in some kind of virtual cherry

some mounting each other

BLACK FLOWERS

000000000000000000(a Valentine's Day poem)

I remember going out on the dance floor with her, slightly
000embarrassed,
placing my hands on her small shoulders--
she was probably eight, maybe nine--
almost afraid of this beautiful someone, scared
000for her a little, too . . .

I was however-old-I-happened-to-be-that-day.
000Nineteen-eighty something.

History glittered and faded
on the horizon beyond the freshly painted, green
000cinderblock walls
surrounding rows of small lockers . . .

The Zapruder film, John Lennon, the image of Challenger
000erupting
over and over again . . .

Light probably as old
as the universe fizzled in through the high, dusty old gym
windows of her elementary school.

I remember she was wearing her ruffled white dress,
the one covered with exploded-looking black flowers.

THE ARTIST RESISTANCE COUNCIL

I remember so much,
and I remember nothing

That's how strange you are

Expert at everything

(When isn't melancholy a "dominating aspect"?)

Broken pieces of red coral

On some mountain I sat near those rocks, not painting,
In an agitated trance

But I wasn't having a dream

(There were no fuzzy geese)

The President was skipping through the dark halls
000of MOMA

God, or a buffalo, was screaming "I'm a woman in a commune!"

The Red Cross Thanks You

Hit reverb

PATOIS


Lavish: I was born under that tree

Tree: I got lost

Unzinnia you know whence I'm going with this

The sparkling bones in your hands

The menu was a blizzard of flames

Please answer me I do not want to face the future combined

generous, profane

Nobody was stiff-necked from abuse

The big graze move is perfect for what you have

Then I woke up

It's a regional dialect of the common people

Walked across that unwitnessed city

NOTE

There are four poems posted below for Friday.

But that's as far as that can go.

Whatever goes up from this point on will be fourteen
lines or under.

This may be because I was struck by lightning.

I wasn't, but close enough.

The outdoors smells green, and cooked.

GRANDERSON


Granderson, Granderson, Granderson

MOTHER, SOMEWHERE OVER THE TREES

Reined in by lanterns and wind, the scores
of parallel lines, we drove over a patchwork under the rim
of our parents' microscope to the meadow
slick with blood. End-stopped at birth,
soldered by will; not the universe, not fate,
but something you could lean back into, let your fear of death

lose meaning. Not like Michigan, these shallow lakes people
000feel blessedly
drawn to if only they could get home completely
by continuously running away . . . Love crawls out of the
000farmhouse
garden. I remember a picture of my mother smiling
next to some man, a stranger, and an ornate lamp
from that other time, long ago, before . . .

Mother, who quails in her bed that is like a stream
of adolescent shrieking, I know you're not real.

*

It's rather endless, our failure to wonder
about each other, some other me in even the next town
000over,
as if distance too were like the forgettable past,
made shy by a quickening of the heart
as we put away groceries and forget they're mostly still
000crops. Just staying the same
becomes so easy even those deeply in love with the music
of the cornrows avoid the porch--where a hot wind blows--
for something less interactive,

the flames singing harmony over the ripples
of the cold, cold actual dream, the roar of the television
replacing the steam after a bath, the picture of a bird
hanging on the wall instead of any literal bird . . .

Mother, you can't even dream about deer eating grass
in one of your hundred or two-hundred yards,
but I love that every one of those hypothetical girls might
000have stopped and watched
and known in that moment she could have been changed,
or that she could have turned away then and refused not to,
and that God, who is only time, has no say in it. When the
000phone rings this time
she picks it up or she doesn't. Either way, after it stops,
she knows for the first time in her life exactly what she
000might want to do.

POEM


I prefer the way a thunderstorm announces itself
00000000000premonitorially, a feather trembling on water,
00000000000aspen leaves looking away.
A basketball resting in the middle
of somebody's front lawn looks especially orange.
00000000000000000000000000000000000And then,
before we're even ready for it,
pillars of clouds sail in from the west
like ten or twelve huge balloons
we first hear--what's that hissing sound?--and then see,
wide maps of primary colors
moving slowly behind the barely blowing trees.

WHERE WELLESLEY TURNS INTO AIRPORT


What I really love are your
actual shark-bone helicopter earrings . . .

A fine fine sense of smell has the pike-faced lemming

And thirty-three years

That's the number I use for accidental

Because of the nails and everything

I remember how this one kid wouldn't
Let you copy his paper for anything

Blue jays screaming at the sun

He was inventing the inside-the-egg scrambler

Now I live in Indiana

The room shook with daemonic orchestras

A "filigreed" boy

A disposable hang-gliding man flies right by at lunchtime

Most of these birds have a beak like a facemask

But that kid had no teeth

He didn't know the answers

IT'S TERRIFYINGLY TERRIFIC

Flick of the switch

But now all the lights have been fried in the storm

Jesus came out of
The bank in love

Records, you can't do anything about it

There, at the bottom of this old brown paper bag--a receipt!

Living in the land of the iced-tea drinking contest

Humane treatment of mice

A small one-act
That ends in the park

It was a Karmann Ghia that squashed him

Ineligible receiver down field

God standing on the front lawn wearing snowshoes in summer

It's like outer space up and down this street

All of us buzzing in this giant hive

Make a mark on the calendar:
Roast chicken tastes great at 3 a.m.

How can you not sleep happily now

THE COLD WET STREETS OF SUMMER


Pinching spiderwebs, as they multiply in the windows,
sir, you won't hear me, as when I serve food
to you, silently, in the voice of a glacier,

*

since I will soon spend my nights in bed, snacking, or taking
000walks along the pier
listening to the bells ring out in the fog
like crystals of melting salt in a puddle of water. Your fucking
000majesty,

*

at least in the afterlife I shall feel no guilt over circumventing
000your grave.
This is certainly a good thing. Meanwhile, I've a painting
000I commissioned
of your skull resting on top of a gleaming casket. It sits
000quietly

*

on top of the polished wood, grinning, like a bird
happily ensconced in its nest. Sometimes, late at night,
when the shadows crawl up my walls and the voices

*

ring like fluorescent bells in the canyons of wet streets
outside my window, I train a high-powered flashlight
on the picture, which hangs like a crucifix on the wall

*

at the foot of my bed. Sir, excuse me. It is at such moments,
as I gaze upon your future, inconsolably lonely
in quarters, that I understand you mean everything to me.

DIVERTICULITIS


Is simply not my simulacrum, for one thing

Cracked eggs in the carton

A field giggling with snow where the penguin can't remember
000his lines

I heard that it's painful

Documentary about bobsledding

I tried it

I tried wearing the gramophone in front of the radio

"Now attach the tilt mechanisms"

The divine, then, is the nimbus that protects such mechanical
000fondling

Marxism Schmarxism

Sprinklers indoors

Haberdashery finally goes digital . . .

You needn't suffer in silence

"THE ARTISTIC PROCESS"


The lard waits in its bucket. The cow.

I know . . .

Where you lived, where you drained from the valley.

One at a time, like separating molars.

2 plus 2 is ooooo [NOT] Five.

But you should see your face when the mountains start
000squeaking.

The sunlight. The frame the wood makes.

The many many buckets of milk.

You, with your identification with what the others are doing.

Crawling toward the open window

I swear your mind is an adapter.

Komodo dragons, or memory, slipping over and through
000the loose sand.

Not founding, not stamping.

Pearls. Like water dripping in a cave.

The table is set. It's been that way for a year.

Dried blood makes a halo. Then flowers.

How white her white skin is at breakfast. Don't think.


***
Benjamin, Walter, etc.

EXCERPT


Here is a tiny excerpt from Flood. Just because. From p. 43:

I hadn't heard from Sheryl for a couple of weeks, and I didn’t
know how to feel about it. As far as I knew her boyfriend
was back up in Houghton, but whenever I called her the
phone just rang and rang inside her big colonial house.
Once her father answered and demanded to know who was
calling. I told him Jimmy Page, and hung up.

I couldn’t get her out of my blood. It was Bolton who’d
introduced us. She was a friend of his sister’s. She’d wanted
a reliable connection for dope, someone, as she’d phrased it,
“Who didn’t live in the woods with shotguns sticking out
of the windows.”

When I met her she just sat there on the hood of her
two-toned Mustang, sizing me up, smiling whenever Bolton
looked away. On a nearby telephone pole a red tailed hawk was
perched, surveying the scene. I kept looking at the hawk, then
at Sheryl. Both were beautiful.

“Aren’t you related to Mandy Orlean? Isn’t she your sister?”
she said, and drew her knees up, clasping her arms around
them.

“I’m not sure I want to answer the question,” I said.

“She had a poem in the paper. I remember because it had all
these deer in it.”

“It was about a cemetery.”

“A cemetery full of deer . . .”

THIS MAY JUST GET ME DEPORTED


X marks the ghosts of the once incipient nipples

Breath follows a lot of random touching

But I can tell you don't believe

There is debate

And a hand passes right through a wreath of angora

More talk is required

A lot of drawing and explaining standing right next to a shadow

And the sand dunes end up on her bare-naked toes

Partly this is a commandant of rain

And one mind thinks of the stem of a pumpkin

A delicate car crash

A system of numbers for ranking by taste

And bouquet

FAR AWAY HOME

It's night

And so the houses and trees seem to be moving

It's that still

Like music you can barely hear coming out of the groundwater

This makes me think of being lost amidst mountains
And forest, a white staircase or a beam of light

Heaven turns out to be a waterfall

The universe clarifies by degree

The further you are away from what scares you

ICE FISHING


There are thorns sticking out of my ear and one palm

Last night sank dreaming through twenty-three floors of
000pillows and classy wallpaper

I picture one world where I'm breathing

Above the other within which I'd drown

You don't have to worry so much heading northeast in a long
000jagged diagonal through the chattering leaves

My heart burrows up out of my chest and it is as cold as a
000willow

The ice doesn't crack it protests

There are so many others I can't seem to know

Astronauts, maybe

SIX MINUTES


The day eats itself then expires

Moths, dirty people

The animals match their blood to the earth and sky in that place

His face was the size of a pin cushion

Old lambs die young in this country

MANUAL GRAVITY


Scrape of shovel

Sediments of meaning multiplying in the woods

It's noisy down around our ankles

The land moans and shudders with broken bottles

Every time I look around I sink into this deepening of reclamation

Milk of Magnesia

An animal with its eyes popped off

Dr. Pepper embossed with a clock

Complete irrelevance

A twig dragged along the naked back to where the ass flares and
000where it assembles

Snow is always expected

Broken fence where you have no choice

And then those trees lit up

GOVERNMENT SPONSORED


He left his head near the Queen Anne's lace

Angling in toward a new day of peace

That's right

But the doc doesn't get to peek inside until he gets cleaned up

Those were the days

Living gloriously week to week with no memory

Sometimes escaping to hide in the shade of another dumpster

Looking down through those wire rims

Sometimes the deer showed up at the check-in station already
000half stiff

I'd have to pry the mouth open with angle iron

And it was good to have such banged up wrists and be thirsty

I'd wake up on bridges five-thousand miles away

He'd open the door and we'd sleep and we'd sleep

THE BLISS-TREE PHOTOGRAPHS III


Thank you for stopping

There is a separate guest finger bowl in the nave of the
000motel proper

Drinking allowed

And the murmuring through the sliding reality wall

Is our tree full of insomniac bats

I see you brought children

You might want to take advantage of our wind tunnel to the
000subconscious

They really can't sleep

We provide conjectural biographies of Judy Garland and Pablo Picasso

The Screaming Woman with a Blue Guitar

Mascara dripping onto the little ones' backs

A bathtub full of Adderall

Our disposable bi-plane is available for exiting daytime or night

The bats are Tacoma natives

You may wish to remain supine while flying over the ocean

The red red mountains inland growing fainter and fainter

FORTY YEARS AGO LAST WEEK


Four of them maybe, thin little reeds with the appropriate fingers

We’d stand invisibly

Bangs touching the eyebrows, like Egyptians or terriers I said to someone
000later on

The mandolin player entered the front door
And there were teeth embedded in the lead singer’s shoulder . . .

A rather toad-like child appeared beside them and he was responsible for
vocal harmonics, like Art Garfunkel

This was on Castle Avenue actually, home of the wounded killdeer

Before my face became dwarfed with my father’s endless exasperations

He would very much liked to have destroyed a Jackson Pollock I think

I played the piano, then watched the record player for a while

The arm for the stylus moved on its own

“Now the man from La Mancha drinks too much,” sang the mandolin
000player

That’s why I left that theater and began collecting other beings

Like Rolly Polly bugs

I found a Polyphemus moth dead on the grass one day like it was waiting
000to be towed into a hangar

The creature both scared me and turned me on

But I don’t mean it made me horny

I would sit in the grass holding my breath while a praying mantis slowly
000turned to look at me

I had no reason to believe in anything else

A FALL EVENING


It's called smart shopping--when a head telescopes

Outside of the main desiring head

And reads a label

You can see this in the muzak-saturated aisles of any high quality store

Or at Costco, Pearl Jam coming in over those big jars of olives

"Squeezed from fresh oranges"

Means that fresh juice can be stored in a tank for over a year

It doesn't say that anywhere of course

You have to listen to NPR

I don't mind flies, really

Stop and look at the separate parts--the shine on the thorax for instance

The impenetrable compound eyes

And talk about consumption

I watched a couple of barn spiders mate last fall . . .

Light shone in the much larger female's eight tiny glittering eyes while they embraced

Tough luck--the male didn't get away afterwards

I had opened a window and just then some coupons blew around on my desk

I write every day

I usually get started by midnight

SNARGE

Answer yes or no to the following questions

What if you were on the plane you are currently watching

Yes

I am a cedar waxwing

Camouflaged as an arbor vitae

There's a lot of fermentation going on this year

No

The goose enters this roaring cave

He doesn't have the appropriate documents

And for a second he's a monk in a hood

Smelling the rain on the dirt road

And in this manner we feel our lives are not so precious

We're tucked so safely inside

And it's really true

They do look like toys or little ants

Besides, everyone calmed right down after they piped in the Chuck Mangione

I am a pileated bushtit

MOBILE HOME


I saw one with a chandelier crashed in the middle of the
000back yard

You might walk across the desert

Rooms opening and dividing before you

And never quite feel safe enough

I saw an abandoned one in Teegarden with a shotgun
000in the closet

I got lost in the forest there in the narrowest of hallways

Fire in all the trees for seven miles

In the seventies we were warned

The table was Formica and was tilted for effective removal
000of seeds

The snow fell for weeks without stopping

Whenever I strip a bed down to bare mattress

Graduation pictures and paneling

I don't know what's more cliche--shoes dangling from

An electrical wire or the wind blowing a Wal-Mart
000bag against a fence

I saw a mobile home burning in a thunderstorm one time

Flames shot out of the small broken windows

The Romantics were singing "A Night Like This" on the radio

And the deer grazed casually in the field next door

I went home to my ground floor apartment a mile away and sat
000looking out the window at the rain and lightning until
000the sirens began

RED SALMON


You could relent a little

The owls in the hemlocks all have shaken baby syndrome

And their eyes are the color of highways

The world begins as a tone and a pinhole of light

Not exactly a surprise

But it's something I "remember" when she bites my ear

This all reminds me of a barn I used to sleep in when I wanted
000to feel gone

There was a hole in the roof

And when the stars were shining I'd sometimes jerk awake
000and watch them swim by

It was like living in a glass-bottom boat

Consciousness at the top of the universe with the ocean
000pouring through it

Conception

And now the moon sails into a tamarack

Whether you like it or not

ELIGIBLE FOR AGING


And so they take away the drinking hall pass

Just kidding

The hills between the transcontinental brain spheres . . .

More and more it's a relevant question

You wake up

Someone pronounces Good Morning

That's why the tongue is so different

Is this that same coffee we got at Sam's Club?

Pink and protean

Like an autonomous muscle

Blind as a clam

There's all this bodily punctuation, and sweating at night

Her salt, tinged with an excess of mental by-product

She caves between pines

The lilacs keep blowing in a dream

The rest is all guessing

And the lizards slip in the dark from planet to shimmering planet

But mostly we die not worrying

DEAD LAST IN THE SCHEME OF THINGS


(after Morandi)

Ill travelled, lost last pressure on the spine

Over certain rivers

Where are we going after all, you wanted to ask

Nowhere in particular

The circus had come and it had gone

Rings in the grass, a smashed almost smothered ethos outside of
000town

Little white lights writhing up to the surface of things

Other than that, the smell of rose water

She’s not begging for attention

Everyone’s a philosophical con-man

That bridge is a collection of notions and it got you into Illinois

Natura morta

And now this—

The whistling patriarch and his forty year old adolescent
000daughter in her Underoos

The swamps outside of Gary felt abstract with extinct business
000models and dead movie stars

What’s wrong with just wanting the chicken (to eat)

That throbbing in the hills for a mid-morning church service

Not the IDEA of the circus

(the denominations now piled, now grinning, have been
000tortured into compost)

A painting of bottles, and tins, two jugs

That’s all