Ian Brown on Joseph Ceravolo's Collected Poems (Part Two)

I fight the urge to see if Joseph and Rosemary Ceravolo’d children have Facebook accounts.  I find it strange and kind of sad that potentially they would exist on a social networking website.  I think about deleting my own Facebook and open my web browser to the page.  I feel a sweep of existential angst, the same as I did when I first moved far enough away from home that I couldn’t return whenever I pleased, and can’t carry through.  I wonder: if Joseph were still alive, would he have a Facebook account?  Probably yes.  But maybe not.  I take a sip of my neglected green tea.  It’s cold, and I think, green tea still tastes pretty good cold.

My mind feels tired, and so I go for a run to clear it. 

Returning - reenergized - I forgo a shower, and power through the remainder of the collected.  It takes me all the way through the night and into the early hours of the morning.  I read, Mad Angels, the bit of this book I most feared because it’s the bit that contains the previously unpublished work, and therefore, the work I feel the most pressure to discuss in my review.  Danielle goes to bed relatively early, and even though she is only in the room next to me, I miss her desperately.

Nearing the end, I am struck by how overtly personal Ceravolo’s poems become.  My lack of sleep turns me more emotional than normal and I hold onto his wisdom to youth in poems like “Legacy” (“O young of this ancient world / we leave you / in perpetual danger of the galaxy / of which we have no stroke / but like a tree or an ant / live and die, / and maybe live again”).  It is a different tone in “Mad Angels,” of course.  It feels as though the poet no longer finds the same pleasures in the word play of his earlier writing, and has now opted for a more direct - often brutally harsh - and honest aesthetic.

It’s early in the morning and I turn on the television.  Nothing is on but infomercials and local news.  I mute the sound and keep reading.  The poems have become unapologetically contemplative, and it’s increasingly difficult for me to read material that presumably grapples with the great poet’s oncoming death. 

August 13, 1984

If I left
nothing would happen
to the stars,
flowers would not wither,
sun would not flicker ...

March 1988
...
No one sees me.  I am just here,
my foot a decoy for compassion
my sympathies and despairs for
     another generation to find.
And if in the dichotomy of a
                        missing world

a cough awakes the night
you’ll find I’m not asleep.

The sun rises through the windows in my apartment.  It falls across the wooden floor.  I can hear Danielle beginning to wake in the bedroom just behind me.  I am young.  As I read Joseph Ceravolo’s final published poem of his lifetime, I wonder, if he had any idea that the poem would be his last.  I wonder:  how does great art go unnoticed?  I don’t know, but it feels wrong.  I go to the refrigerator and eat peanut butter with a spoon and I hope that everyone in the world will read Joseph Ceravolo’s Collected Poems because if they did, the world would be a more beautiful place.

March 1988

When a spirit comes to me
  and frightens
and the weight on my chest
  turns to butterflies into desert lands
and rivers flow through
                        arms to heart
shepherds and farmers sit to drink
my isolated soul,
but not because I’m away
from you or may never see again
 the drunken night
            or shaking star’s illusion
that distance is not time
and time not space
but the spirit comes to me

-- Ian Brown