Early Poems: A Pamphlet by John J. Parman

Early Poems: A Pamphlet

John J. Parman

I’m not sure when I started writing poems, but a friend from high school sent me one he’d memorized.

Crows can fly over towns, over factories of women sewing gowns, without a guard's shout or shot heard, while we cannot.

In the late 1960s, I started writing in earnest. A high point was in the early 1970s, when I worked briefly for architecture firms as a modelmaker. For whatever reason, this opened a creative vein. After I married and had kids, there was a hiatus in which poems only appeared sporadically, but were still written. I’ve collected poems written after 2012 in two small books, a pamphlet, and issues of my personal journal, CommonPlace , but what’s here exists only in manuscript. The poems tended to be long and I’ve edited them, sometimes to the point that what’s left is fragments.

From Poems, 1969– (circa 1972)

I bet you never knew your daughter, the one who became her mother, who tried to kill her, the mother who killed herself, who tried to kill your daughter, the daughter who became herself the mother. I think you don’t remember. You think of horses grazing under Ohio grey afternoons, but I passed there yesterday, in the rain. I knew your daughter. We spent one night together.

Passing by this small offshoot, wondering where your daughter had gone, I almost telephoned you.

Shall I tell you what I would tell her? First, I would thank her for her kindness. Second, I would not speak for fear of hurting or would be talking always in a circle around the feeling I carry for your daughter.

Did you know I came to see her? But it was no use. I tried to see it as more than just a favor, but it was a favor, repaying me for visiting her after her mother tried to kill her some time ago.

When the doors opened on the towers of cities backgrounding the infernal tribades of old lamps, he heard murmurs of gout and wondered openly if seven splinters had been felt in the depths of ancient women who sit open-legged like monsters in trances. It was then that Simon spoke, saying: Prado is a city of dead men whose lives link with the past as lobsters live in dark caves. Safe there, they speak to one another and hear nothing, see nothing save the self-serving serfs who wander aimlessly about cow paths like monsters, like monsters without depth or limitation.

He shook his beard, repeated amorous representations on the cunt of his sister who murmured endlessly, repeating syllables of youth on her likeness which hung open now dripping like morning on his tongue. He sweated and opened his lower mouth like a slit in the air of the death-pale shapes.

The whore who previously lived here spoke suddenly and called forth illusions of blackened reputations and then sent them away, forward and backward, menacing like symbols

crashing down like ceilings on timbers long since rotted, gone under like whales. He heard her stalking the moon with her pincers. Her moon was an eye in the night, it came so fast and rocked them both like a boat that intrudes and outrudes in visions of darkness, and he asked himself, For what reason?

When the doors opened on the garden he was stealing a seat on the lawn of flowers which open for the first time and bleed across sheets of white linen like hearts, like virgin hearts which pound only just this time, as for small dogs whose hearts pound also but in simplicity and virtue. However, the wetness of evenings becomes concrete by morning and turns to dawn. The smoothness of bodies becomes seven clouds of meaning by evening, by evening, when even the birds have temperature and know themselves for what they are in rabid thirst, diving and scorching each other with rare breath.

So, the girl spreads her legs for him in simplicity and virtue and heaves her breasts for him in lengthy distortion of his own complicity. His words come slower now like beasts distorting his meaning. He sits here writing about virgins he has never known. In his life there are no virgins save himself.

I saw a girl just now who was as beautiful as you as she passed by us, the walkers on the street. We were each of us without breath, not even a word.

A woman stood by a table littered with Marx.

I asked her: Is it sad to be a socialist here in Berkeley? for I’d noticed streams of indifference. She answered saying: No, I have the strength of the entire working class. It was, so to speak, the correct response.

A man, a martyr of the woman’s sworn allegiance, hero of the people: I had difficulty remembering his name, only his newspaper.

He’s in jail, she said, without comprehension.

Nights of fire, tear us up and down leisurely in the arms of dreams, on the threshold of holding.

God knows nights of fire, days of retribution, sitting in the church laughing at the man speaking about love, sitting in the church holding the baby’s head. God knows the baby at the breast.

I never expected you to be here. I never expected you to come here. I never expected to know you or find your earrings in my sheets. Nights of fire, early mornings of husbands leaving flowers on your window.

Outside, all noises ceased, the air became solid, dogs stepped from their tracks and the earth, God knows, was like a green moon.

Carve your existence on the face of the earth. Polish a stone in your own memory. Seize a bride to bear you children against the day the air falls like lead.

It was a matter of pride with him to know the borders of his knowledge.

Outside, the children played on the tomb of the Pharoah. Outside, a purple family walked its gutted dog, the border like a wall and gentility like a knife.

That afternoon, he stepped into the museum bookstore and stooped to be with her, drawn to her, drawn to several of her in the course of moving across the room.

Naked legs like gauntlets, leather boots and long blue-violet dresses: women of mystery on fields of knowledge.

I am, he told himself, connected to a whole productive of offspring, conducive to a family, deducing an unwholesome intrusion into my solace I’m pushing outward. Ah, but the sensibility of remaining in one’s room, pursuing some river of knowledge to its puddles, of which, he confessed I know nothing. The annoyance of my lack of knowledge of these things! Had I but been a scholar would I walk after women of whom I know nothing, unwelcome intrusion in their lives?

Or are they also fishing in this sea of want, and not, as they appear, so intently bobbing into books of art?

It was a matter of pride with him to be moved by the sight of grass. Yet what was the pleasure, what pleasure in this sidestepping?

The Japanese who walked slowly to the section on sculpture, was it not that she was everything which, at this too terrible moment of throwing aside all considerations he’d instituted and resolved was it not this and not the grass and the gentility of his residence?

Yet strange how the civility of his existence sustained him except when the grass replayed what the moon had done to the earth, releasing its essence of comets

Oh, barren moon! Oh womb, oh, fruited womb!

He guessed he was approaching sainthood: that morning he dreamt he was an assemblyman bargaining for fish.

I see outlines of footprints, thought the emperor Hirohito.

I hear the click click of soldiers, the shoof shoof of generals.

I see the tomb, the tomb.

Once, a young child, he ran to the wall of the palace and peered at the sky.

He heard murmuring murmuring, the nurses and the soldiers. Hirohito Hirohito, you are here, but you are not here.

The emperor remembers the destruction of the mollusk by his scalpel. It was like the womb canal of the empress, the rape of Nanjing or of Burma. It was like, it was like, it was like. The folds of the mollusk give way. It lies bleeding on the table. His watch counts the time left. The mollusk pulses on the table slowly running down. The women all the women slowly wrenching under the scalpel of his troops and bleeding: the bleeding mollusk.

The emperor stared at the marble box. His assistant translated the inscription.

I am anonymous myself thought the emperor Hirohito.

I see the outline of palms, thought the woman in the café, 35 minutes through pretending to be 15. She heard the clap of their four hands, and felt the slow irony of her position, the rising and falling of her breasts, the dream of the mollusk unfolding.

He remembered murmuring murmuring: the body of the Empress. Hirohito!

Hirohito, you are here but you are not here.

I am with the mollusks. thought the emperor Hirohito.

I am touching the wall with my hand and peering at the sky.

I see outlines of palmprints and the shadows my body makes on hers.

It is all arranged, the emperor Hirohito continued, the pattern of my semen and the obligatory toothmarks beneath her chin.

From Selected Poems 1970–1974 (circa 1975)

The man descends the hill in a cart. His face lacks expression. A tie adorns his chest. Motorized, he passes me by. I wonder silently if he will crush the little girl standing at the intersection of the two roads. He looks straight forward, the man, his gaze directed at an unnamed place in the world on which his compatriots, pious, all of them, also stare.

In this tableau, only the small girl does not stare at the empty space in the empty landscape in which a man descends in a cart unknowingly, disowning the future, disowning the trees, becomes himself the car with two eyes. The girl looks up in terror as they are wont to do.

In the Bronx (I read), she looked up in terror as her virginity was swept by and then her ravishers flung her down to the street where she was collected and an account written of her, a figure in an empty landscape. If I listen I hear her mother weeping. She faces windows from which faces peer facelessly. Her own is pale from tedium, the replayed moment when virginity and the beating of the heart ceased. This at the gate of Western paradise.

Who are you who takes my men? They say you are the goddess of the moon. In my fitful sleep, I dream of you, capricious one who sets my heart aflame then drowns it in sorrow.

My heart’s become a stone. It beats, surely, but I’ve hardened it against your injuries. See, I draw a circle of chalk around it, yet still your poisoned arrow pierces me.

I am the vessel, empty now and bereft. You are the flame, the yeast, the millstone, the ringed snake I slipped on twice around my finger, self-consuming. Is it etched there that I would cry out in love, birth, anguish?

Uncollected Poems (1970s through 1990s)

10.

The night you were conceived your father was torn. We were both bloody. He was so pale, and held on to me like a child. In a few months he was dead.

My father was a farmer, but it was hard raising crops then. He farmed at night, moonless, owing to the random planes. The cities were chaotic. We scraped on and your father, a doctor, did what he could.

My father knew his fields like a wife, sensed furrows. My mother was that earth.

The night you were conceived his eyes fixed on mine. Then he saw the blood. “The images reflect the times,” he said, held me as if for a thousand nights, a long, tedious dream ending.

The din of limbo: each soul cries out in its most recent tongue. Above this rushing noise I heard your tiny cry. Forgive a sad face, plaster good wishes on this visage.

The players live destinies, pageants with many scenes. One searches in marshes. Another will never know. Companions for a lifetime or the one finally released.

11.

The inspector with green eyes, I just wrote to her. Where have you been all my life? The inspector with conical breasts, green eyes and a conical heart. I just wrote to her. Where have you been all your life?

12. The doves speak like trees in farmlands that have forgotten to go home and now sit empty like trees of glass which hang openmouthed and indifferent to air. Air is hardly here, is it? Samson and Delilah lie in bed together. She is in ecstasy, her womb playing ball on the fences of her sister’s house, moaning the whole time while Samson waves to a girl who calls to him in comradeship unspoken, like waves upon the ocean. Once I was younger than you, he thinks.

13.

I will be the kingfisher and I will be the fish on whom the kingfisher lays his eyes, shifting his legs along a branch, gazing slowly into an infinity of water. You will be the chosen one and I will be the fish, seeing only hazily the sweep of claws. Precarious though my existence be, it is an existence nonetheless.

14. Narrow is the gate and strait the path, they tell me.

I wonder if I am but the messenger, aptly named, despite my desire. The grace of God, my mother told me.

Camels pass through the needle’s eye, so wondrous is God’s mercy.

I found myself in his house again and on my knees, like you two peasants in the tableau you’ve painted. In my dreams, the golden threads are wrapped around your window and the marriage bed floats miraculously above the loam. My wounds were etched upon my heart. I went so far away, seeking cures. The path I took doubled back on itself. Three times the cock crows, the stone rolls away, the Magdalene stands with Jesus’s mother Mary, Queen of Heaven, vessel of God.

Looking out from my window, I see your house wrapped in fog.

15.

Which target then? A field divides us. Paths that seemed well-trodden veer suddenly into blackness. We call out to each other as night falls, like children.

Out in the sunlight, we strip off our clothes and examine our wounds. Children, husbands, lovers, wives we pause to trace our histories. We tear ourselves open to show our beating hearts; their tendrils root us as surely as our wounds.

Life is short, the journey bittersweet. She wrote, but no, it’s as long as it needs to be, its pain searing us with hapless truth. We lurch. With half an eye, we watch the dice. Incense clouds our sight. We struggle for air and breath. The rest fade from view. Alone, time’s arrows make us stagger. Yet we’ve seen them. They stare at us in disbelief. How unseemly, this pulled-back flesh, these wounds. Or perhaps we only think we see, their hearts also aflame, time’s arrows flying. They stagger too amid smoke and heat, peel back their skin, point to their scars, wounds like slits.

Time’s arrow closes up our wounds. The children grow, stepping through and away. Life is a bridge or doorway.

There is a kind of bliss amid the bittersweet. And we begin, each and all of us, to sing, all the songs we learned before the flood. One of us beats a drum and the others join in. Sometimes as we walk the crowded city streets our eyes and a stranger’s meet. Across that foreshortened space time’s arrows fly, a second’s worth of eternity, a parallel world if we could only leap such a wall or such a chasm.

16.

He tore himself open like a star falling through heavens.

Neither death nor madness define you. We reason and feel, and neither thing was enough for you at certain points. Yet once, secure in your long dress, you laughed and tossed a shuttlecock, and stood and talked, glass in hand, a cigarette held between your fingers.

Karen said your journeys separate, paths divided long ago, despite their one roof.

My father sat always in his chair. In sun sometimes, khaki shorts, legs extended, a glass of beer, the constant cigarettes, smoke drifting upward, later the cigars until, his skin transparent, he remarked,

too old to smoke these things again.

My father sat in his world. He grew old without my noticing. My mother went mad, rebellious not for her the prim strictures old age laid out. Off the rails, as they say, sitting sobbing on their doorstep, crazed.

b. We think we know the world, and then we collapse into ourselves, small children in wicker cages. We see ourselves as men of substance, clothed in our belongings. The wind picks at us, our voices whine. We claw at posterity, sometimes edging toward oblivion with traces of a smile.

I sit down, my world invented around me. A door opens in a wall and sun pours in, the garden I’ve entered a thousand times, the doors opening onto a granite terrace. She walks across it while I read, not saying much, but her smile speaks. I take her hand.

I sit within my world, the same chair as dad’s, old with wooden arms, its fabric like tapestry. Around me are the emblems of acquisition proof of some kind; outside I’m never sure.

Outside are paths. I’m torn with indecision. Its beauty catches me unaware, enflames me.

The three graces hold each other’s shoulders and behold the pear that floats among them, a globe of glass, perhaps, in which they peer, a small sphere of fire, cities burning or a man clutching at his clothes, water standing still.

I thought the drawer of mysteries contained my mother, but I was wrong. Even her ruby ring that glistened in the light was inanimate. I thought the drawer of secrets contained my father, but no, they were all in his head. Mine are all around me, littering my shelves.

The wall parts, wind blows through, the moon’s cut falls across the floor, the door opens and she faces it. How did Christ die? Suffocation, some say, His lungs not able to expel. His body sank and men were fooled. The house my father built, the dog he loved, the world he occupied, now lost. Not for him the cello, its theme.

The Taoist immortals there were seven counted on one finger the women they’d had. “Just one,” they said. Nodding, they agreed that she was perfect. One day, in an old house by a river, one immortal fell in love with shadow, another with substance, and with noname the third, mind-as-mirror the fourth, no-desire the fifth. Two immortals sat together in one corner near a window overlooking some rapids. One by one, the others fell away lost, crushed, mute, or blind. The survivor joined them in the corner. Looking out, the sixth immortal gestured toward the rapids. “How beautiful when excited!” Seven nodded but the fifth said “ no, just a river.” They agreed that it was perfect.

17. Late in the evening he noticed the floor’s squares realigning, and when the sun rose the wholeness of the room didn’t surprise him. And she notices that leaves no longer form shadows on her floor. She gets up, makes her bed, combs her hair, pulls clothes on her long body, surveys the clean sink, her broom, hears the sunny hours struck. Dogs rut like this, she thinks, mounting and mounted.

18.

He turned and stared into the mirror. A middle-aged face, no longer young. Behind him, in his regal bed, some whore lay sleeping, her backside visible where with an oath he’d come. He stood and gazed across the volcanic lake. His minions, headed for work, skated across its steaming ice. He took it in.

I am condemned, he thought, to an eternity of tramps with holes, young fiends on the make. The saints, source of such interesting talks, dead. Even the angels and archangels angels and archangels who once shot menacingly through, blinding the damned, heads wrapped in agony, have long since departed. Oh, Hell! I wrap it into a ball and crush it! (It’s all just an illusion, of course, product of God’s will, His loan.)

@_p_a_l_l_a_s_

Pallas Gallery, 1111 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco

Photo to the left is courtesy of Pallas.

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