Jim’s Place Press
Robert Gray
Poems Mostly Without Names
Jim’s Place Press
Š 2008, Robert Gray All Rights Reserved
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Preface These poems have been written over the last fifteen or twenty years, mostly in fits and starts, and constitute one man’s effort to reconcile the function of poetry with the stuff of modernity. They were written with the conviction that poetry is among the best things we have (and might well be the best thing you can do alone....). I like to think that good poetry makes you think or feel deeply. Great poetry makes you do both. That is all it does. It should not become a specimen (like too many critics make it) or a weapon (like too many English teachers make it). It is good because it helps us understand ourselves, and reading it should have more to do with understanding that than understanding it. In an effort to wrestle with the place of poetry in the world, I have made liberal use of quotations from other poets and regret that my selected poetic form does not readily allow formal citation or attribution. Therefore, in these pages you will see liberal use of the words of Wordsworth, Whitman, Rilke, Stevens, Harrison, Keats, Hughes, Angelou, Brooks, and many others, and it is hoped that these quotes are suitably conspicuous to act either as allusions intended to enrich the meaning of my own passage or as points for departure, to establish a status quo from which I will then make my own way. I would like to thank the many people who have influenced and benefited my work, including Jim Gray, Fay Simpkins, Louie Skipper; Joel Brouwer, Rini Hughes, Angela Jackson, Sue Walker, and Kathy Winograd, as well as my family and friends for their patience and moral support.
Robert Gray Birmingham, AL May 2007
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wilight is a time of intermingling light and dark where beauty somehow resides however unwelcome and though the victor is predestined by the diurnal it is an internecine drama beyond the reach of shakespeare’s pen or fellini’s lens it is a time that opens perception inviting us to see not in spite of the darkness but because of it it is at this moment that a mockingbird behind me impersonates the nightingale and then the blackbird which causes my mind to stumble among tropes of emptiness and fear and find itself alone i look for god in the pages of a book and find comfort in the longing of duino and dover beach
2002
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e don’t need trees and snow angels or even lakes or mountains to see into the life of things i’ve stood on the edge of the grand canyon in spring breathless speechless ridden through the alps in summer with yellow blooms and waterfalls driven through the rockies in winter mesmerized by snow against a clear sunny sky and i’ve seen my four-year-old son swinging in the back yard reaching to go high enough to see over the bar then returning head tilted back full of delight laughing
2001
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y childhood summers were spent at my best friend’s lake house wading swimming treasure hunting without goggles finding pebbles sticks beer cans and the occasional minnow or bream in the green netherworld beneath the pier soon our searching grew first by canoe and then our ropes were loosened by a small flat-bottom fishing boat that carried us through creeks and woods and ancient dwellings at the ends of this or that slough but even more fond are the memories of the nights evenings where my friend’s mother whom i also called mom would sit with us on the pier under the light of the stars and the sometime moon it was here that the woman who would later bring me to poems thrilled us with her musings of ghosts and god and ufos dreams of death angels and visitations from the recent dead tickling our imaginations and while those tales seem almost silly now it was on that pier that two stargazing boys sunburned with icarus wings first explored the murky depths
2003
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’ve only been to the lake a few times since my brother drew died but i have often wondered if he is still there skiing through the narrows like he always did a single step off the wooden platform at the back of the ski nautique barefoot with one leg crossed over the other as though he were sitting in his own church pew in his own cathedral holding the rope handle in the crook of his elbow cigarette in one hand and a miller high life in the other if you’re not out there on the water now brother i hope heaven is as good as the lake would have been
2008
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oems happen in the dark when the pupils of perception dilate to enhance enlightenment and allow what little light there is to penetrate the darkness and create stark contrasts with the night poems happen in the dark when dim and scattered beams of light quietly enlighten scattered places and fight against the nothingness poems happen in the dark to show the way amid the shadows and save us from the days
2007
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hen i sing i often feel like a rich old woman with a priceless steinway in her front parlor that she’d never learned how to play i possess an instrument on which i can bang out brilliant flourishes fleeting fragments of virtuosity that can at times approach the heights of placido or pavarotti or more often those of tonic or toad like the young guitarist who can dazzle with a few zeppelin riffs but cannot play an entire song and as i sit here in virtual quietness serenaded by the arrhythmic almost inaudible clicks of this keyboard i have a similar feeling as a poet i have stashed away somewhere in the attic in one of the countless boxes of books notebooks and other sorts of literary trinkets an antique ticket for the train to transcendence but i could never use it the bridge is out near simplon pass broken long ago whether by the winds of time or nietzsche’s madman i cannot be certain but it is more likely that its abutments and cross supports collapsed under the weight of their own suppositions or were gradually deconstructed
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by internal contradictions and faulty assumptions and so we are left with the fragments we can mimic the masterpieces i have myself sung handel’s messiah haydn’s creation and bach’s b minor mass and while iambics often trickle off my tongue i can only bang out fragments on this keyboard there is of course brief comfort in attempts to imagine a stairway to heaven but it is no different than the haunting rhythms of the ocean or even the steps of a fool in the rain
2005
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oetry is music painted in black the rhythm of consciousness punctuated by the percussive alliterations of tempo and touch it is language drawn in curves and lines a font of crystalline holiness cast out in many colored clarity it is melody meticulously wrought in a harmonious dissonance of the discursive it is fragrance emanating from image constructed out of arbitrary significations that are enabled by the elimination of artificial dichotomies between logic and imagination between feeling and touch between form and content color and line
2007
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wish that i were langston hughes or even maya angelou able to cry out for freedom over the roofs of the world from a position of surprising and unaccustomed strength but sadly i am not for no matter how much i read or think or discuss no matter how enlightened i may feel i can never fully understand as a white poet privileged if by nothing else but my own whiteness how the truth in their words can see so well into the life of things and so i am damned by that same whiteness always to be disadvantaged always impoverished i have always found a fundamental difference between white poetry and black poetry and i have always envied it and while i am certainly as guilty as anyone and would never wish to oversimplify it seems to me that white poetry historically at any rate has often tended to soar on the ethereal wings of imagination and philosophy with a mission to explore the deep and hidden meanings of the heights of heaven
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in order that poets might as prophets or amanuenses bring the mountaintop down so that truth might come to be within the reach of those of us too blind or deaf to write the zeitgeist of eternity and so white poets have pontificated throughout history on the wherefores and whys of our existence almost as if poets and poetry had nothing else or better to do african american poetry on the other hand has preferred to labor with its hands in the earth it has always done its work in the everyday at the dinner table or through childhood remembrances born out of minds too strewn with petty cares or while standing on the grave of dreams deferred from the earth’s inside this voice of the subaltern long subjected to the margins has always preferred to work down in the midst of things where life happens lifting truth up to the heavens in an act of heavy praise for there is power in pain and strangled possibility but there is also beauty in the fact of blackness just as there is poetry in the song of a caged bird or the lies of a mask perhaps even more than in the tortured thoughts
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of an overly pensive prince or an overwrought ideological wasteland yet while it is indeed a privilege to ponder life’s mysteries by deconstructing the semantics of our social discourses even in a vain hope that by revealing and reversing historical and hierarchical binaries they might dry up or explode it is a privilege wrought with hidden costs and effects that we are taught not to see and while many might argue that poetry should be above the baseness of politics and while there may well be a richness to those arguments there is also a whiteness silently blinding us to the life of things
2007
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oetry is beauty like the lines of a woman’s blouse like the daffodils at ullswater or the loving gleam in my daughter emma’s eyes poetry is power it is the solitary oak standing strong and leafless amid a blinding field of snow and loneliness it is the discursive usurpation of nietzsche by foucault poetry is song in the incomparable soaring of a puccini aria perfected by pavarotti in the ontological musings immortally soliloquized rhapsodized by hamlet poetry is darkness giving shape to the light to the ever encroaching whiteness that surrounds it giving shape to the whistling to the song of the blackbird poetry is all power beauty darkness and song as in the prophetic rantings of blake’s marriage as in the voice of maya angelou
2008
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ur country is broken and never has it been more evident than now that democracy truly is collective mediocrity when every day brings a brand new crop of countless idiotic emails that forward an insipid unwholesome distasteful dose of spam propagandizing ignorance hatred and evil under the ruse the guise of rightness and religion it is a mindless and appalling attack on truth that serves narrow elite interests carefully crafted to appeal to the ignorance hatred and evil of the common masses through the sinister prostitution of righteous indignation under the guise of godliness and the tyranny of the majority rendering the dispossessed middle classes as nothing more than industrious sheep but they are full of a passionate intensity that mocks the historic lines that underlie lady liberty and undergird what is supposed to constitute our national greatness while those who cry out for the poor the tired the tempest-tossed those who cry out against the madness are said to lack
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all conviction and are cast aside as madmen crying out in the marketplace which in our modern metaphysic has become the seeming sepulcher of god our country is broken our country remains broken and we have broken it
2008
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t’s been over seventy years since sinclair lewis prophetically declared that when fascism comes to america it will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross i fear it is now come i fear a time is at hand when so-called traditional values are forging false consciousness through a unifying divisiveness of righteousness and fear through the impious and appalling dissemination of supremacist discourses a time is soon at hand when there will be no one left to speak for those of us not white enough man enough conservative christian american enough and especially those simply thoughtful enough to know the difference between our national history and our national myth and to ardently resist the subtle and seductive call of these new values the traditional fundamental sacred christianamerican values of the new nationalism
2008
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hat good are poems to a young soldier lying dead in the sand the victim of a random act of ideological hatred and callous ignorance what good are poems to a young black man shot on the sidewalk across the street from his grandmother’s house trapped in a crossfire of systemic oppression and deep-rooted hopelessness what good are poems to a young white man with a black w sticker on his new white bimmer silently immune to his less fortunate counterparts’ fate and sullenly unaware of the privilege that protects him from sharing in it what good is poetry in a world where nothing can seem to slow the violence the senseless brutality and the indifferent blindness that keeps us from sharing in it
2007
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am not sure when poets lost their place as the unacknowledged legislators of the world but it is unfortunate poets were once the writers of the zeitgeist composers of the collective unconscious but no more words have been exchanged for imagery philosophy for dogma poets have always read the philosophers though i doubt the philosophers to their cost have as often read the poets priests or more likely preachers lie somewhere between dallying in a bit of both they along with the politicians seem to occupy the pulpit once held by poets the sad part is that politicians don't read any of it if they read at all and while poetry may indeed make nothing happen while it cannot write another world while it cannot translate dreams into the real language is the currency of consciousness it is what constitutes real and so our only hope is that poets continue
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to dream and write those dreams
2006
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ife is nothing but an exercise in reading an effort to find music in the prosaic the alliteration of the landscape the enjambments of daily interactions and the metonymic semiotics of perception i like to dwell where image confronts thought where consciousness encounters the real as language as poetry or even as prose perhaps it’s foolish but i often wonder if i encounter or even inhabit the same world you do surely we have learned different lessons in the reading of reality i tend to inhabit the metaelements of the construct deconstructing the discursive for me the beauty is in the finding of the façade the act of translating five senses into the language of thought and then interpreting that language into the content of our consciousness into the shaping of understanding and the making of memory not only mediates the objective it is the objective poets long ago wrote of how we half-create the scenes we experience of how even though
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we look upon the same tree i doubt we see the same tree
2006
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henever we speak with the angels rilke writes that we should speak of common things of the ordinary objects that are truly knowable to us however i am not often in dialogue with angels nor am i often concerned with things in the age-old dichotomy of perception versus reality i will always side with perception not that the other isn’t important but rather that the portions we can experience free from perception are rare indeed as well as patently boring it is much more fruitful to provosculate upon those things which are mediated by perception therefore we can no longer let being be the finale of seeming rather we must recognize that seeming gives reality to being and that being gives birth to saying but now is not the time for the sayable it is the time for speaking what is unsayable therefore we must continue to probe the unsayable the unknowable for these are all that is worth troubling ourselves to say
2006
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oetry is able to sing because it reaches inside our collective knowing into our cultural memory our shared repertoire of significations without which metaphor symbol and allusion would have no bearing just as music presents the appearance of the harmonic its tonal and rhythmic unities are merely a social construct crafted not out of the phenomena of physics but rather from the discourses which silently determine the discernment of our minds even beauty exists only in the resonance of how the outside world is appropriated by consciousness it resides in the afterthought yet it only can resonate in the material of the social therefore we must delight in the discursive in the course of arguing metaphysics or pondering the constitution of reality plunging the depths of philosophical inquiry nitpicking the superficial boundaries between the material and ideal or worse yet dickering over the boundaries within a slippery cartesian dualism
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and while most discussions of what constitutes the real would seem arguably pointless and at best academic meaningfully confronting the real requires another more troubling confrontation between what it is we have to think and what we are given to think by the discourses that not only shape but determine our consciousness and thus we realize that beauty is learned but so is truth and that is all we need to know
2006
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he world’s a poem that doesn’t rhyme it lacks a certain metric or sense of time the nature of the world and how we interpret it is not what it once was the act of perception must now be an act of writing not reading when conceived as text the world is an endless string of signifieds with infinite possibilities of meaning so writing is more vital more important than reading reading is mere reification of course we could blather on in grandiose phrase of how the world is out of joint or even how we are out of place in our interpreted world or lament what man has made of man but now in the dawn of a new century we can no longer turn to shakespeare or rilke or even wordsworth to help us find our way through the artificial constructs of the natural world around us two hundred years ago wordsworth wrote the harmony of nature as a simple ballad a style that might be at home in an old church hymn or country music song and later turned to the ode perhaps the most contrived
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of all poetic forms to explore his most contrived intimations of his own poetic immortality now we can no longer see what he once saw in nature or in poetry for that matter a godlike harmony and beauty and while our world has perhaps distanced itself even further from wordsworth’s imagined state of nature we must recognize that his accounts of early spring and daffodils were always written from the perspective of outside observer as though he were writing while looking out his window or even at a painting we can no longer write wordsworth’s garden that apple has already been bitten and we now know that it cannot be unbitten if it were ever bitten at all for nature outside of the artifice of poetry is really nothing but the perpetual exercise of sex and violence as evidenced here in early spring amid the ubiquitous pollen and ever-present signs of easter and not to mention the kudzu the dormant kudzu that covers the world like grey cobwebs in a haunted attic if there is harmony it is a brutal harmony wrought of our own writing like the painting of a landscape
2006
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here is a fear that poetry is dead and while that is not the case entirely it does seem under considerable threat from multimedia productions that make seemingly simple text somehow insufficient there is now a new type of poetry that focuses on the physical aspects of the performance voice and meter become transformed by the theatrical mere bombastic exhibition an unsynthesized form of hip-hop or hypertext not that these new forms should ever be undervalued as art or denied the name of poetry it’s just that we must never forget that true poetry does not exist in the performance of the poet or even in the mind of the poet nor does it live in the pages of a book just as this poem does not resonate in the tones of my voice any more than on the page you are now holding or on your computer screen rather it resides only
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in the intermediary spaces between the mind and the object where language dwells it comes to life only through the animation provided by the reader’s voice by your voice
2006
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word in the beginning is the genesis of poetry where it derives itself out of its own becoming it all starts with a single word but not in any banal sense there’s more to it than that to speak of words and how poems can spring from words does seem almost nonsensical yet the finding of a word can lead to musings that grow into feelings emotions and even at times evolve into what long ago was described as a spontaneous overflow but now there is no tranquility this is not a time for poets to be mired in transcendentia to be lost in romantic longings for the reconciliation of our selves and our world which of course has long been the realm of religion then poets tried to fill the void but now it would seem we’re left with politicians who offer hope with nihilistic invocations of the name of jesus as just another empty word but a word as the beginning can be a password into the discourse into the logos into the primeval machinations of language itself the key however is the word its genesis must be
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outside of ideology if that is even possible and while it must be free of unnecessary pedantry and eschew the sesquipedalian it must also transcend the mundanity of the diurnal with a wisdom a genius beyond the reach of the initial glance beyond mere pronunciation it must reach into its own resonance its innuendo and whether it is like the song of the nightingale or the blackbird whether it invokes the angels of bethlehem or benjamin in the end it must survive in the ritual of its recitation its saying its reading its writing
2007
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poem is merely an attempt to construct authentic beauty out of the artifice of language but the beauty of a poem is not built on images of the observable and is therefore perhaps no different from other forms for beauty does not reside in what is visible but rather in insinuation much like the difference between inflection and innuendo the beauty of a landscape is not found in the brushstrokes of the artist any more than the splendor of a poetic line is found in the stroke of the pen or an arbitrary choice of typeface true beauty is about the response about the consequence of perception the romantics often wrote of the intersection the overlap of the sublime and the beautiful which is surprisingly not unlike a more recent poet’s claim that beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror it is as close to intense and overwhelming fear as we can possibly endure it is not simply a presentation of soft symmetry or loveliness it is the interactive juxtaposition of a positive aesthetic response with an overwhelming sense of the unknown the unknowable with what some have called the transcendent and what others call the abyss it is a part of the age-old belief that there is something that is
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bigger than us beyond us and whether that something is a warm and loving god or a cold and empty nothingness we can only really guess but we can find comfort in knowing that beauty lies not in the lines of the artist but in the interpretation of their implications so whether it is an awe-inspiring sunset over smoky mountains a painting of abstract water-lilies an incomparable tenor aria or even an especially poetic turn of phrase beauty is in the impression just as the beauty of a smile lies not in the curve of the lips but in the light of the eyes
2006
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he songs of birds are common in suburbia among the sameness and homogeneity which are the defining features and central symbols of our contemporary culture which confirms something told to me long ago that the cardinal’s song sounds like the tapping together of two nickels the irony of this image brings to mind the time when wordsworth was greeted at twilight by a qwire of redbreasts announcing the coming of winter it was here at the beginning of his trip to london that he decided to join the birds in winter’s service for it was in fear of such a winter that wordsworth amid a sea of revolution from the democratic and industrial to the spiritual and philosophic ushered in the modern age with his own poetic revolution which would reach its apex with an ode about a nightingale i’ve never lived in the city not for any period of time not deep in the city where
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the concrete steel and reflective glass where the chaos and clamor covered with paper scraps and a residue of grime constitute a forest of grey as in winter long after the colors of autumn have fallen to the ground where sirens and squeaky brakes take the place of the singing of birds and yet there is no drowning out of songs but rather an incessant droning amid the din that fills the silences left by the conspicuous absence of song which is likely due to the lack of birds except of course for pigeons whose coo can hardly count for song it is here at the supposed center of modern life in the mighty heart of the city where winter takes its hold on the weariness fever and fret and leaves a drowsy numbness where death pervades the shadows a constant subtext of city life and if there were any songs it would seem that the nightingale had somehow been replaced by the blackbird and so rather than the song causing the poet to fall in love with easeful death it has instead become the pantomime the undiscovered country of death itself but now we need another bird since the blackbird’s circles and innuendoes have come to represent
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a truth we can no longer acknowledge we could turn to rilke’s swan but he is without song unless you count the swan they call the trumpeter but then we might just as well go with harrison’s buzzards whose cries awoke the poet from his dreams on keats’s early death and yet if music is the aim we would be better to choose the goose whose seasonal song sounds from overhead like sixth grade saxophone practice and so we’re left to go bird by bird but it is much more likely that each of these birds from the nightingale to the blackbird from the eagle to the sparrow from the buzzard to the swan from the parrot to the mockingbird they are all just lovely reminders with their varying degrees of beauty and of truth of a happier time long past
2006
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t's not about politics when we are led to believe that racism only resides in individual consciousness which leads to a sense that the problems of a particular community are internal and limited to that community and not a systemic and structural defect of the entire society it’s not about politics when we wrap ourselves in our material comforts and cry out that we should not have to give over our hard earned dollars for the support of others whose plight is entirely of their own making it’s not about politics when we're not allowed to say or do what we're not supposed to think and feel yet are offended because we believe the injustice lies in that suppression it’s not about politics when we spend more money on military might
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than on social uplift when we spend still more to rebuild another nation that we’ve torn down by the vain exercise of our military might keeping us from rebuilding our own broken social structures and all of this is done in the name of saving both nations from spiritual doom it's not about politics when we start our work from where the world should be instead of where it currently is it’s not enough to believe there should be no discrimination no racism sexism classism or homophobia nor is it enough to recognize a need to minimize or erase the many silent and pervasive forms of privilege that provide an even more profound distinction between what has been called the two americas it's not about politics when their problems are not our problems it's not about politics when we recognize the world is better
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than it used to be for people of color but when at the same time our critical lenses are much more sophisticated than they used to be we are able to see and interpret more injustice and to judge it more harshly yet when these improved lenses fail to lead us to a better world it is all about politics
2008
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omeone once asked me if you could be a christian and vote for a democrat i answered that i didn’t believe a true christian could vote for a republican someone else asked me where i went wrong saying it was sad that a good southern boy raised in a good conservative christian home could grow into a dirty liberal i answered that what led me to my leftist leanings came entirely from what i had learned in sunday school this is because the purported party of jesus is in truth the party of the pentateuch and paul of thou shalt nots and accusations of abominations and along the way they’ve become the party of mammon and the market having traded in the golden rule for an idol made of gold but even though this kind of light is not to be found in christ they have come to find
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there is no room in the end for metaphors of camels and needle’s eyes because the metaphor of giving all you have to the poor is more appropriate to serve as just a metaphor one that nicely illustrates our current and compassionate worldview which also finds comfort in knowing that loving your neighbor is safe to do again now that we’re in a gated community all of this is further evidenced by the hottest new business model of the new millennium where charismatic entrepreneurs preach the nondenominational gospel of wealth in their mega churches of jesus capitalism selling the party of christ to their faithful but less fortunate flocks so that their fleecing may more efficiently pad their ledger’s bottom line and better yet it’s all tax free as long as you don’t speak out against war in iraq and yet so many christians still believe that jesus would have been a republican
2008
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t’s different growing up in the south where the past cannot be left behind and instead must be carried around like an invisible but inescapable burden a burden always there always lurking silently somewhere off in the corner only to be spoken of on the outside by insipid elitists incapable of understanding but if you’ve grown up in the south you know what it’s like to be in a perpetual recovery process a never-ending membership in racists and homophobics anonymous where you must constantly remind yourself of your own sworn sobriety while immersed in a raucous public house where everyone is drinking only now mostly in secret drinking the sibilant whispers of what is known to be unacceptable or the discursive reinforcements of our guiltless but misguided sense of denial or privileged enlightenment if you’ve grown up in the south you know how it’s almost like being raised in the house of an alcoholic doomed by both an ideological and genetic disposition of bigotry and hate doomed to always carry the memory the scars of the past
2007
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grew up in the small-town south and while for me it was more mount pilot than mayberry it nevertheless enjoyed some of the characteristics of a stereotypical romanticization of better times long past i always believed that my town was better than most of its kind more cultured more diverse more peaceful and sophisticated and of course i’m not sure whether it’s because i’ve overestimated my town or underestimated others there is one thing that is quite different however whether good or bad my town does not have a square and therefore no confederate monument which is in many small towns in the region one of the more powerful symbols of the decaying and diminishing old south symbols have profound power some provide warmth and comfort while others are intensely inspirational and still others are chilling and sinister in early april azaleas and dogwoods are standard symbols of spring in the deep south just as beautiful belles in their pastels petticoats and parasols sashaying on the veranda <that’s vuh-rayuhn-da> are symbols of the prelapsarian south a still longed for south it is a south that to the extent that
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it ever existed at all only did so in a superficial glossy realm and was in reality experienced by only a tiny few it was undergirded by the ugly realities of social inequity yet it is a south memorialized by distorted dreams of decorum and marble monuments to the many dead most of whom lacked the social advantages to benefit from the institution they gave their lives in vain to preserve and then there is that frightful underbelly that supported the superstructure the product of extreme racial hatred the dehumanizing confinement the heartless brutality and the sacrifice of millions of people and the dreams of countless millions more centuries of senseless hatred lingering still in the discourses as well as in the remnants and remaining vestiges of a system unique to the south particularly in the small concentrations of enormous wealth juxtaposed against enduring abject poverty among both blacks and whites perpetuating profound age-old divisions of race and class and still there were the countless millions who sacrificed with their lives and deaths yet itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s conspicuous there arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t more monuments commemorating them and the most visible remnants of this former way of life are flaunted by the uneducated and unmoneyed whites those who most clearly resemble the soldiers who died in vain for a cause not theirs simply because of the symbols and ideologies that so powerfully shaped their own thoughts and causes
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symbols are the stuff that forges consciousnesses whether false or true ponder the power of the american flag especially in the aftermath of 9/11 or the sea of crosses at arlington consider also the wrenching power of a cross or flag on fire or worse yet contemplate the swastika that ancient and sacred dharmic symbol of goodness and well-being perhaps the oldest and most recognizable symbol in all the world yet in modern times it has been corrupted and transformed incorporated into the symbol of the most unconscionable and most unimaginable evils it is the frightful symbol of extreme racial hatred of dehumanizing confinement and of heartless brutality of genocide and the sacrifice of millions of people and the dreams of countless millions more centuries of senseless hatred concentrated into a single decade of horror it is a shocking reminder of the perspectival power of symbols a reminder of how something so simple can mean so many things so deeply to so many people this simple image possibly predating the pyramids can ignite a beautiful and gifted nation through nationalistic pride and a carefully constructed unity of hatred can empower employ or justify any means necessary to build future prosperity racial superiority and ironically national greatness and i am reminded of the south and specifically of the confederate flag
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and how that whenever i see it whether on a pickup or along the highway on a state building or a fraternity t-shirt or especially on a state or university image i am reminded of how i always think fucking redneck when i see it and i wonder if i should be thinking something else
2007
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espite the pejorative symbols and stereotypes that have long composed the lingering and defining image of the american south no one should ever fall prey to the commonly held impression that the south has a monopoly on racism and regrettable pasts growing up in alabama never hearing or seeing any evidence whatsoever outside of history books of the ku klux klan i have always had to face assumptions about my own attitudes and even my intelligence and later when i moved north to michigan i was further subjected to comments about the ignorant and bigoted rednecks down south but it was also there in the midwest in a land where racism was often pronounced dead where i constantly heard about klan rallies on the capitol steps where racism was invisible merely because the cities and schools were so segregated you could draw it on a map
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and where i quickly learned that while people would not say the n-word in michigan they would very often whisper it
2007
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will never forget the feelings of fear and anger and loneliness the vain attempts to nudge away despair or the shame imparted by looks of knowing strangers and even more so the horror of recognizing that even unknowing looks project similar perceptions strictly out of habit a rote paranoia nor will i soon forget the desperate cries to heaven plaintive wails meant for troubling the angels and grasping for a dying hope out of a discourse of desolation itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like living on death row when all i did was drive the car how was i supposed to know he had a gun Dedicated to all mothers facing life with HIV. May 2007.
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onight i saw jesus in my rearview mirror he was on the side of the road in montgomery and looked just like he always did in all those paintings except that he was a bit thinner on top and a lot dirtier which i guess was just from all the shit that’s been dumped on him recently i couldn’t really tell if he was hitchhiking or just walking along it all happened too fast but it wouldn’t have mattered because i wasn’t looking out for him and besides i didn’t have room in my car
2007
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am not a poet of darkness depression or despair nor am i a poet of light i find beauty in the dialectic the struggle on my end with the relationship of god and the world and i have always found more beauty and dignity more poetry in hemingway’s nadas and hardy’s altar crumbs than in herbert’s easter wings these things aren’t easy for me nor would i have it any other way
2003
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s
omeone recently asked what in my opinion theory is and perhaps more importantly what my theory is i replied that i did not know what it is any more than he i guess it is not unlike asking someone what is the grass only that it is more irregular prickly and especially riddled with gnats and noseeums then after stumbling around for a moment or two i told him that i guess for me theory is a lens through which meaning is filtered or even produced i then added that i suffered from the blessing curse of learning poststructuralism from poststructuralists and marxism from marxists iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve studied semiotics with semioticians and feminism with feminists not to mention critical race theory and cultural studies from provocative advocates iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve also been taught somewhat against my will the absence or avoidance of theory by those who were simply and blindly in the grip of an older one
50
unconsciously unwittingly subject to the hegemonic despite the detours and road bumps this diversity of experience allowed me the opportunity of seeing each positionality as a positionality from within itself through its own lens and through the lenses of others reflexively recognizing the ideological presuppositions that finally doom each to a partiality of knowing and ultimately to failure nevertheless these are each theory on a grand scale they deal with our relation to reality and truth they alethiologically shape and fundamentally determine our notions of how the world is constructed and thereby deconstructed so access to so many world views would seem to leave one an overwhelming spectrum of possibilities leaving us in a state of brilliant ignorance of ineffectual enlightenment in spite of all of that however it is necessary and it means i neglected to tell him however that i have also been taught perhaps to my cost christianity from christians who are the same people who taught me racism
51
sexism and homophobia under the guise of what i would now call white privilege patriarchy and heteronormativity upon second thought i wish i had told him this last bit itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just that when you are from alabama you have to be careful about the kinds of lenses you provide people to see through you which is kind of like theory but not really
2006
52
i
am not normally a poet of love i prefer to dwell in places of uncertainty unknowing but there are times like the laugh of a child the embrace of a spouse or the approving look of an almost sacred grandmother that makes me see into the darkness through the darkness that makes me feel makes me know
2003
53
w
e wish our lives awash in sunlight believing the beautiful days are clear skied and fair yet i driving home in intermittent rain regard this scene the world around me bathed in the spirit of warm black storm clouds luminously sublimely ominous for this north alabama landscape normally bland in late winter is painted in a fluorescent beauty the colors more vivid the contrasts more defined especially the greens the incremental nascent greens of coming spring i've also noticed this in michigan in early may with the tulips and maturing leaves but here in late february with the dull prosaic greys and browns of naked hardwoods the greys and yellows of hay and dormant kudzu creating contrast with the evergreens and greening grass and i remember rilke and how beauty is as close to terror as we can possibly endure and i think of our cloudy days and how the world is more beautiful when the sky is grey and of the emptiness of clear skies you must feel to live
1999
54
a
dorno believed that art can only express pain dickinson that truth would annihilate us dante saw the depths of hell milton the heights of heaven though with an unholy protagonist hamlet envisioned death as too fearful to dare and i saw at dachau a sign that read Here is where they kept the ashes
2001
55
p
oetry is nothing but an attempt to capture a moment in time a single moment emotion image or object but everything is a reduction nonetheless poets try to break the laws of prose and essays they eschew theses paragraphs and often logic to get at a single object one moment's not enough or vice versa no single object or image or emotion can suffice to represent a moment so poetry must always be a failing of sorts yet it must also be a striving a becoming that will on occasion pass through sudden rightnesses which is all it can ever seek to do but also what it must
1999
56
t
he reading of poetry is a privilege unequalled equally available to all who dare to climb its tender branches it can be a frightening undertaking venturing into the unknown nooks and crannies of a shared consciousness suspended between the mind of the reader and the playful animation of the written text surely all of us were taught that we could never hope to understand the sacred mysteries of deep hidden meanings and the hallowed secrets of symbolism and scansion we were taught a poetry of alembication an over-wrought relic a privileged discourse requiring a level of explication far beyond the reach of you and me the tragedy is that we all then come to poems defeated convinced from the start that we can never understand but all we really need to know is that poetry is simply the distillation of our relationship between language and the world
57
it unfolds the origins it explains our condition in language beyond the reach of philosophy or sociology in language seeking sanctuary in the loving embrace of the reader
2006
58
i
wonder if i could make love to you with words overwhelming you with verses invocations of emotion and poetic yearning that pour significations over your soft and supple body undressing you with words words that cover you with kisses from lips and gentle tongue opening in the ear a titillating symbolic journey that advances to neck shoulders arms and eventually after lingering briefly moves then from your breasts on down your torso whetting your delighted mind and rising passion with a virtuose volley of verbal cunning linguistic pleasure and even a few fallacious protestations that redirect the rhetoric into the inmost essence of your femininity and soul soon the wordsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; warmth makes you shed your reserve shattering an avalanche of emotion and fire in fast thick pants amid intermittent bursts of meaning you lose yourself in whispers and murmuring metaphors surges of meaning transposed into feelings of abandoned
59
sense semiotics and syntax where language and longing become warmth and love
2008
60
c
loset klansmen rush to churches of hateful righteousness searching for salvation pale validation in collective animosities veiled in the rhetoric of jesus capitalism and the right longing for a better time long past carefully reconstructed out of ideological fictions imagined out of ancient codes across a missing link neanderthal notions of knowing
2002
61
i
’ve never been there in season ullswater in spring i’ve only seen them in pictures or poetry but now i hear wordsworth’s daffodils are being squeezed out by a wild french species this holy sanctum of poetic history is losing its relics its authenticity of course some might say it’s all because he plagiarized the scene from his sister but it was never really about the daffodils themselves and yet it seems somehow fitting for poetry can no longer be wordsworth’s daffodils for all those boyish days and pleasures are all gone by so at least there is some comfort something else to take its place beyond harrison’s withered in the churchyard among the gravestones
2002
62
i
am ready for a politics of love but i don't believe the christians would go for it politicians know how to use hate to unite their constituencies once they used race but now they've turned to jesus to values to tradition ways to find ways to bring people together to hate in the name of love
2004
63
w
hen i was a child my grandfather used to take my dad and me fishing i can only remember however the anticipation of getting ready to go gathering and packing the gear and the excitement of catching a fish the long empty stretches in the open boat have long since faded now i take my son with my dad we never catch anything but the long stretches aren’t nearly as bad as i’d imagined even though sometimes it’s hours between strikes there is something sacred about these generational rituals about fishing as a grandson father and son and there is something worthwhile in casting our lines into the water i’ve never been fishing as a poet but i think it would be nice
2002
64
w
hen we made god vanish in a puff of logic we blamed it all on nietzsche, or darwin i can't remember
but we didn't need god we had technology for that so we started fighting wars over real important stuff assassinations living space free trade that's the biggie we had to make the world safe for democracy so we imposed it on those who needed it and of course like always we did it in the name of god he's always there when we need him
1998
65
w
ords can paint you flowers in lines along a running stream or even one that meanders slowly around a bend pants through raging rapids or is translated elevated to a majestic waterfall cascading off the page words can paint a mountain or two beside a crystal sea as dawn peeks with its waking head between them or maybe just a summer sky deep azure blue that infinitely ascends into its own infinity some clouds could add a human touch just two that echo earthly forms like mountains or maybe simply mountains mighty crags giant cliffs this time broken jagged no majestic lines flowing upward toward the summer sky lasting and eternal words can paint a picture but words of love are merely words whether soft and flowing sultry sentimental or high and lofty no eloquence can aptly paint the subtle lines of feelings and of love
1990/2008
66
s
omething there is that doesn't love a wall i don't know what it is but it's something big something really really big i mean hell i don't know how big it is but it must be pretty big to keep messing them up like that come to think of it it doesn't seem to be very nice either but as long as it brings me closer to my neighbor dimwit that he is then it can't be all bad because when you get right down to it if you're gonna have fences you might as well have bad ones ones that can't withstand the bigness of that something there is that doesn't love them because the way that i see it it just flat out makes things more neighborly
1996
67
s
amuel is eighty-nine he still likes to go down to the river and fish he likes the solitude he used to be a poet but the fire in his eyes grew dim and his fingers became stiff hours in the empty boat where loneliness is never found his body is tired but not his mind he lights his days with the poems of his thoughts as he casts his lines in the sea he lost his wife he lives with an old basset hound named wordsworth but always fishes alone never keeps anything leaves his catch for a younger hand since he turned eighty he seems to have stopped caring about anyone else the river is starting to freeze there will be no more fishing he begins to regret everything that slipped through his fingers for the river is frozen and the boat waits empty alone
1989
68
a
crayon house is pasted to the refrigerator door the orange sun smiles down its rays as blue and green and violet mâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s float across the page tulips line a tiny path red and yellow as if they rose to meet you somewhere just beyond the margin the very tree that you once drew spreads its leaves beneath the blue-lined clouds so many colors yet the house aside from the red chimney that sends a single spiral of gray into the afternoon is somehow left uniquely bare an umber shade defines the home its two small windows and a door but aside from these outlines of brown the entire house is empty page what are these walls devoid of hue a house and sky of paperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tone our eyes are never asked to stop yet nothing lies beyond these lines provide a simple refuge for empty notions on a two dimensioned sheet simple colors waxed to a simple grandeur flaunted for the world to see this hallowed genius of a child
1989
69
h
ow long has it been since last we spoke brother your life cancer cutting short on nights like this perhaps our souls have met since life withdrew its comfort from your breath the humor seemed to fade as death grew still a day that began in courage drew closed thoughts of yesterday bring on a warmth that fades in morning’s chill today the wind makes brisk the water’s breeze the mighty current ushers past the hopes of me alone who merely waits to see my brother’s smile or hear his voice. the wind will bring the sparrow’s song once more but now until we hear the breeze is gone and yet, the river’s left to always flow reminding me that we shall meet again
1989
70
w
e like to call it progress our souls' regression technology makes our lives go round an axis made of nothing magazines and mtv the heart of a society all is quick lite and hot food sex even spelling education is dead or dying we retreat into substances that alter our minds and make us see beyond and let us forget what we're sitting in where have we gone we're headed for the finish line just behind the soviets or romans we have our choice but won't decide who wants to think who has the time art has become a way for rich old ladies to feel important we want to find ourselves but never really look we'll dance anything to move our hips and make us forget what we're really sitting in
1989
71
w
andering through the forest through the winding paths and trees the voice of heaven a sparrow's song calls down to any passers by who also might have wandered here it echoes through the wooded paths while the daylight yawns and the growing shade creates a chill as slanting dappling diminishing light in dim and speckled lines enlightens scattered places through a clearing in the trees above the sunset looms upon a fiery stage diverting the traveler's way a fleeting view of silent splendor silently trumpeting the close of day but still i hear the sparrow's song a melody of simple grace that sings to me this afternoon bringing a hint of sadness for those who might but didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hear
1990
72
a
puddle crowned by raindrops drapes the road its borders vainly growing the sun will soon shine its death however at least until the rain comes again but now the legacy of puddles gone a lingering film of impure things is left upon the road to mark the bounds of desert kingdoms waiting for a crown
1989
73
t
he shady wood creates a chill as scattered beams of sunlight awkwardly resist the dancing shadows and leave all else under the hand of unknowing darkness the dark concealing underbrush provides a sharp and tangled contrast with the open fields of nothingness and light here the mighty hunter lies in wait silent invisible still the giant stag appears amid the fog alone he writes a line of frightened beauty as he drinks from an intermittent stream stopping along his way to the unknown unimportant acts those little things which day to day are not remembered to the next fulfilled he prepares to go he looks up now the stag lies silent on his bedroom floor but whose hand pulled the trigger what god or chance or something else could actively allow the senseless slaughter of such an innocent beautiful creature what fit of passion did that finger seek to silence from the shadows those lingering shafts of light are seldom reached in the translucent haze of morning's frost yet we are left to seek those scattered beams of sunlight as they struggle through the leaves dancing so illusively into the shadows a giant stag appears on the horizon
74
alone he is the question we are seeking the cyclical embodiment of hunting that drives us mercilessly to the kill we'll never know where he had planned on going but only that he'd packed for somewhere else
1990
75
Deep Thoughts
i
have often thought that what we typically think of as deep is actually only vague it is rare that something is beyond comprehension but rather it is too poorly defined to be adequately understood however when the term deep is followed immediately by man as in thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s deep man all bets are off throughout the ages so much has been said about the concept of beauty that i would never dare explore it here but there is so much more that needs to be said and explored about the concept of ugly for it really takes no more than a little people watching at the mall to realize that ugliness is a relative thing because if you have ugly relatives i've often heard that there are three sides to every story your side my side and the truth but there are actually four sides what you and i each think and then what we each say the important part however is that there is no place for that that third one in the first scenario the truth there is no way for either of us
76
to truly know nor is there a perspective a place where truth can think or say or know i have often said that music died in 1980 with pink floydâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the wall and i have often contributed that to the vapid and soulless ideology which presided over that regretful decade however i have recently had a change of heart and have acquitted david gilmour on appeal indeed he did not kill guitar-based rock but rather perfected it only to be co-opted by a bunch of perm-headed pretty boys who turned lead guitar into an athletic contest that there was a brief revival of music in the mid-1990â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s then can only be attributed to the fact that lead guitar suddenly and temporarily disappeared it may just be the southerner in me but i firmly believe that a yankee is someone who plays baseball professionally in new york and that any other use of the word is grammatically incorrect unless preceded by the word damn in england unlike in the us the rednecks tend to live in the north which is made most evident as is normally the case by language particularly in terms of place names for instance they have sussex, essex, and wessex and then there is norfolk when we consider all of the rigmarole generated over the lewinsky affair it is amazing how we seem to have forgotten
77
that our esteemed first president knocked up more cherries than he ever knocked down i have long been a strong advocate for a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s right to choose however i have often wondered if more emphasis should be made on the fact that better choices might be made before the bra strap is undone the words we now consider profane those notorious four-letter words which now are dripping with mutually assured damnation of which the f-word s-word and c-word are perhaps the most repugnant (and who says i never rhyme?) but in reality these are merely anglo-saxon words that were replaced by the normans after 1066 with the more polite latinate forms of fornicate defecate and pudendum the new french aristocracy found these words of the old english to be of the common people which is the original definition of the word vulgar a word like those others corrupted by time and more importantly perhaps by age-old class biases i am not sure why in these decaying times that even with the explanation above that i cannot bring myself to use the words and not to euphemize but i am sure that my father would just consider it a matter of my poor upbringing recently someone determined once and for all that
78
tomatoes are in fact vegetables and that simply shows that once and for all there is no place for once and for all now you might smirk and say that this is pretty trivial ground for such weighty philosophical determinations however such things are not unusual for someone who once had a revelation about the existence of god in biology class and for whom a discussion of fruit brought all things suddenly out of focus i have never been quite able to understand how the blind forces of evolution could have ever conceived of the commercialization of seeds by placing them into a seductive orb of vivacious color and sensuous sweetness so that an unwitting animal might partake of that fruit unaware of the tiny bits of potential life hidden inside steeled against the destructive forces of digestion all part of a clandestine conspiracy so that it might bring forth new life by being deposited in a ready-made bed of rich fertilizing shit
2007
79
A Poem in Four Parts â&#x20AC;&#x153;Black voters do not support the Republican Party because conservatives have never supported them.â&#x20AC;? --Leonard Pitts Jr.
i.
t
alking politics in the south is just like racist whispers in the north you have to always be wary that someone might overhear and that is why poems are not supposed to be political they are supposed to be about bigger things less petty things the kinds of things that matter for all time but even when a poem achieves those lofty goals it can never escape its own politics this is not because those politics are on the wrong side but rather because absence of politics is merely an illusion politics are always invisible when they are yours and in our society that tends to mean that when something is devoid of politics it only means that it is simply a product of a conservative politics
80
ii. we are told itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all because they hate our freedoms and so we must go over there to fight for them while here at home we silently sit back seemingly unaware that as we are winning freedom for a country that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want any part of our version of liberty or justice we are not interested in fighting for them and all around us the media are merging and the schools are standardizing and all the messages that shape our consciousnesses are becoming progressively increasingly homogenized and we fail to realize that this new figure of patriotism is an almost systemic process where faith and factoids tease us out of thought our teachers are being taught what to think and what to teach instead of how to think and how to teach students to think
81
our talking heads are becoming one voice increasingly seeming like an american pravda carefully constructing our collective consciousness iii. a good friend once argued that everyone in the bush administration had read their foucault of course they had he said vehemently arguing that they were intimately familiar with foucaultâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important work on social discourse and the prison-panopticon another friend once suggested that southerners are very much entrenched in an enlightenment ideology and while i've always agreed i'm not so sure that the same isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t true for most americans when we consider the timeless power of our jeffersonian ideals and yet it would also seem that the modernist constructs of hegemony and ideology as false consciousnesses of control are still an agent in play here however the more subtle and shapeless foucauldian notions of power and discourse would not be likely to flourish if for no other
82
reason than we would reject their frenchness for freedom plus i could never quite believe that the current administration and its outdated metaphysics and conceptions of truth could ever accept or employ such a postmodern philosophy into the design machination and dominion of its policy besides bush wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how to pronounce foucault if it were boldly brought before him all spelled out iv. there used to be a myth of the melting pot where all americans of various nationalities and cultures would come together as one america but then the new concoction began to darken and some groups couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t melt at all so we changed our minds and went in search of a new metaphor first we tried a tapestry and then found that a quilt seemed more democratic and more genuinely american but for some reason it just didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t catch on
83
so we had to settle on a salad bowl a rich and diverse combination of flavors bound together with a nice rich ranch dressing but now weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve decided it is better to be color blind to fail to see or at least deny seeing any difference at all which is an interesting return to the melting pot a brilliant attempt at a mystical alchemy that will bind all together in an alloy of ideology all in a blind hope that if we include the entire spectrum the colors combined together will hopefully somehow still shine white
2008
84
Jim’s Place
d
riving through a central florida swamp listening to tony harrison read of micanopy kumquats and john keats’s joy’s fruit we search for deer but discover only cows and looking for herons find buzzards what we do find however with the aid of homemade mead and some stolen red dog lifted from some guy’s porch fridge is a place only a couple of miles from town and a few dozen yards off the highway teeming with cowshit and mosquitoes we find a place that allows two men distracted by the din of daily living and the drone of modern politics to discover aided by rilke’s longing and harrison’s vs that savoring words is not dawdling but love
2001
85
A Letter to My Brother Drew
i
guess you know you died twelve years ago today you didn't seem so young then in fact you seemed much older much more mature than you probably were but you were barely twenty-four and now at thirty-three i look back and you seem like a child struck down so innocent so young but at the time you were my older brother the one i was only starting to like after years of growing up your little brother i've always blamed a lot on you my shyness my trepidation my fumbling too apologetic tongue i was constantly afraid you pounding me with threats when i was a child although i can never remember you hurting me or even hitting me you were just being the older brother i now know that you didn't mean anything by it but it nevertheless affected me you were my older brother the one i never thought of as a role model you were never good in school you were basically a screw up smoking and drinking
86
playing daredevil and even after i stopped being afraid after we finally became friends i never wanted to be like you yet now twelve years later i'm finding out i was wrong you were one of the funniest people i've ever known you might have been the strongest and you certainly proved yourself to be the bravest i am still amazed that it wasn't your stupid stunts it wasn't anything in that crazy head of yours that got you that probably should have long before but it took something silent sinister a tumor hidden secretly in your brain while i was away at school and although i came back long before you left for good i never really got to say goodbye i just wish i had known then before then that i should have wanted to be like you
1998
87
88