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from James Baldwin’s Another Country:
They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying.
-- Henry James
Ever since Trump was elected, I have been trying out variations on the serenity prayer—God, grant me the serenity to accept that Trump is President and the wisdom not to go insane . . .
My prayers have not been answered.
I admit I am not usually a prayerful person, or even a faithful one, but extreme circumstances call for extreme measures. As my friend, the poet, January Gill O’Neil said, Something dark has crawled from under a rock and we need it to crawl back under there.
I am pretty sure last week was a trial for all of us. And I’m already wondering if I will have the serenity to accept whatever happens next. Of all qualities, serenity is one of the hardest for me to master. Even a snippet of a conversation can send me over the edge as it did last Friday when I was walking on the downtown mall in Charlottesville and overheard two men talking about Christine Blasey Ford. One was saying: I betcha she was just a pretty young thang looking for trouble. And they was just being boys. The other agreed, Women always blame men who give ‘em what they ask for.
Yep, we women are to blame. Whatever sexual assaults we suffer, we cause them. Maybe we should bind or feet like the Chinese women once did so we can’t run freely. Or cover our hair if not our entire bodies as women must in certain Muslim countries. Or how about female circumcision? Cut that female genitalia right off.
It didn't help that I also passed a man with a big sign saying, I STAND WITH BRETT.
I was so angry, I ducked into The New Dominion Bookshop to gather my composure. I love bookshops, especially this one. Charlottesville is so lucky to have it. Right when you walk in, you see the poetry section: a quiet place to recover, read a few poems, catch your breath. And the staff is so helpful. Shortly after I arrived, the lovely new events coordinator, Sarah Valencia, informed me that there was a poetry reading starting in just a few hours—two fantastic poets, Erika Meitner and Emilia Phillips, were reading that night.
And what a terrific reading it was! Listening to Erika and Emilia, I felt as if my day had been saved by poetry. (And also, seeing Erika's T-shirt!) Both women are not just fantastic poets, they also know how to give a great reading. I thought I'd close with a poem from each.
by Emilia Philips from her new book, Empty Clip
Yes, I swallowed them.
Those bitter bolts rust in acidic
afterthought. This tetanus
of tautology turns my gut a copper
gangrene, a belfry
swallowed. Did you know passive
aggression is so soluble?
A soapy mouth learns other ways
to speak: homonymic hymns
oflye and lie. The awful offal
becomes my loden, stinking
anger uncomplicates. But I gulped
the wrong way. I am a glutton
for bile. I make drinking
songs of silence. Chugalug catgut.
& choke it back. Wolf
down this I can’t , I won’t—
this yes, yes, I mean, don’t.
I’ll Remember You As You Were,
Not As What You’ll Become
by Erika Meitner from her new book, Holy Moly Carry Me
If you are fearful, America,
I can tell you I am too. I worry
about my body—the way, lately,
it marches itself over curbs and
barriers, lingers in the streets
as a form of resistance.
The streets belong to no one
and everyone and are a guide
for motion, but we are so numerous
there is no pavement left on which to
release our bodies, like a river spilling
over a dam, so instead my body
thrums next to yours in place.
When we stop traffic or hold
hands to form a human chain,
we become a neon OPEN sign
singing into the night miles from
home when the only home left
is memory, your body, my body,
our scars, the dark punctuated
with the dying light of stars.
Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), Copia (BOA Editions, 2014), and Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs.
Emilia Phillips is the author of three poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, Signaletics (2013) and Groundspeed (2016), and Empty Clip (2018), as well as three chapbooks--most recently Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike (Bull City Press, 2015). Her poems and lyric essays appear widely in literary publications including Agni, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She’s an assistant professor in the MFA Writing Program and the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Quand elle sera, elle aussi, aussi fluide que cette eau,
Et elle aura, elle, le geste de cette fille, sur le banc, celle-là,
Qui hoche la tête, qui parle, chuchote presque. A sa sœur ?
Inviterai-je ta machine à table avec le chat le chimpanzé et autres des miens.
Il y a hâte ?
When that machine has the fluidity of water in this carafe
And the look and moment of that girl there, with her drink,
The one shaking her head, talking soft and intense. To a sister?
I’ll ask the cat and the goldfish, the ape, too, to pull it out a chair.
Is it important?
Locate I
love you some-
where in
teeth and
eyes, bite
it but
take care not
to hurt, you
want so
much so
little. Words
say everything.
I
love you
again,
then what
is emptiness
for. To
fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.
Note: Back in 2007, Heather McHugh and I exchanged ideas about erotic poems. "The Language" by Robert Creeley [pictured above left] is one of the poems that Heather praised. -- DL
Poems for this week were inspired by either our own names or the name of someone we admire, coming out in acrostic form. There were a great many poems, furthering David's tried and true method, that prompts are the soil that bear the sweetest of fruits.
Pamela Joyce S’s “Strung Out on Poems” won the award for wit—and she will receive a copy of The Best American Poetry 2018 for her effort.
Poetry, mea culpa maxima,
Aligns clay persona with anima.
Mainlining morphemes and vaping verbs, I
Escape the mundane phrase. Vox humana
Lures a lucid line, words raining like manna
Assembling in time. Then … nothing. Nada.
A brevity prize—and a copy of The Best American Poetry 2018—goes to Beth Dufford for “Short for Elizabeth”:
Beets agree with her;
Elephants enchant.
Time is flexible;
Hope is extant.
Angela Ball’s “Acrostic Villanelle for Elizabeth Bishop” may be the most ambitious of the entries, an acrostic and a villanelle, in with true Bishop-like decision:
Elizabeth, your poems transcend loss—you would hate “transcend.”
Let me try again. They naturalize loss—join it to nature.
In Hebrew, your name means “oath of God”—curse or promise, endless.Zoom of the VW you half-learned to drive, freedom, a patchy memory—
At last we’re getting somewhere—your poems dislike the staid, the mature.
But they do transcend loss, though you would hate “transcend.”Evenings I spot your Man-Moth on the A train. Vaguely
Trembling, wings mashed by glum commuters, he endures.
Help me understand Elizabeth as “oath of God”—curse and promise, no end.“Bishop” means “overseer”—the mucho mundo of your famous eye
Imagined life fresh-minted—yet quaint as a rotogravure.
Still, Elizabeth, your poems transcend loss—you would hate “transcend.”Here I set down your two names, the first, “God’s promise” or “God’s curse.”
Old or almost old, I need the sea as you caught it, art and memory
Perfecting a beach where sandpipers rush on twigs of legs, lagging, insecure.And you, EB, are no more than art—dubious monument to daylight,
Assortment and assembly—like Cézanne’s mountain—provisional and pure.
Your name means curse or promise, permanently.
Your poems transcend loss, though you would hate “transcend.”
The award for originality goes to Grant Dowling, who includes memorable facts, events, and names, in not this, but other poems, taking advantage of all the uses of research and scholarship that a poet has at his or her fingertips:
G ypsies and ewjies: Grunfeld’s lithiogramic agachés reconstinpated again.
R uffling beans, another, unending. Ten times salted across—that perjurer.
A ctus. Triumphiant tribalisms, scattered triavial trivium. “No Theater in Twenty” pays.
N eo-Vichian mirandous necronometer: Patsy’s inarticulately groaning measurements.
T ithing shoebox challah, calmly Conley “chin-ups” Lowrance contradicted Barbara JohnsonB ut now, Baha Men ask: “Who let the dogs out?” A socritease, that sing, tickled my fanny
A pril 26, 2011 last. Bahamanian blisses blessed his kisses. aAhaha Tinktong.
R ichard (Dick familiarly to familiar’s too familiar familiars) Moran explained meaning.
T ransparent mental states swell swell concomitant avec Vinton Freedley’s backing, parlour de façon.
O’ Ten, damn, well. Eaten Agni. Bob Benson, Bill Wambsganss, medical exigencies
L ong, awoke reality, backward protruding. In other contexts and times I did fine.
O BE 2008: Mary Bennett, Mane Binaj, Meiji Tenno, Star Black, and the Bahamian.
M y duck burned in the heart of a pan. She hated Carmen Miranda.
E dward Taylor, specialized in Donald Richie, only Kenkyuujo imprints, only sconce-a-washiki.
Visit the American Scholar's page to read the entire post! A new prompt comes next Tuesday.
“It used to be that the scene faded out when people decided to have sex”, I told our table partners, making sure to send a dark look in Karine’s direction – I’m never quite sure how the woman might take my gassing. Worse still, hers often turns out to be an understanding closer to the truth than my own.
“Fading sex out of the picture and saying it was happening has been dam’ useful”. I leered at ‘em in Flashman style, putting a glass of vino to my smacking lips. I went on to say that putting aside the broader truth that there can be no unfortunate or costly errors of appreciation in the dark, sexual fade-out killed at least three other birds with a single, inexpensive, consensual hallucination.
Sexual fade-out allowed intellectuals and actors to think themselves racy and avant-garde, satisfied the censors’ guild as to their liberalism and titillated the spectator.
All without challenging a single attitude.
Of course, today’s “fade in” techniques – actually, “unfading out” –, in which lots of irrelevant but apparently sex-related stuff is played upon the stage, challenges no attitudes either.
I mean “attitude” in the sense of trajectory adjustments, as for a rocket launcher or tank barrel, but applied to the human psyche: “Attitude, n., 15th c., Late Latin, “aptitudo”, tech., term of art: mental geometry relative to the projection of belief, value, idea, thought & action into the real world.
It’s the beginning of the 2018-19 school year and a ministerial circular is reminding school principals that the 2001 law requiring three “sexuality” classes a year in each school grade has not been implemented. Its opponents are able to raise a furore by claiming schools will “teach masturbation”. Science & Avenir pointed out in its summer issue that the only publically available correct anatomical drawing of a clitoris appeared in a French middle-school text book in 2017 (Wikipedia says a first correct anatomical drawing appeared in 1844).
Cynic that I have been made out to be, I fear that even a real anatomical drawing of a real clitoris won’t change any social attitudes, or the human trajectory, even if it’s in an approved textbook, even published in Wikipedia and even for those, apparently few, who have had actual sex with actual women, even for individual masturbating females, victims of a liberal educational system.
Believe it as you will, but I’ve been thinking of all this because Karine and I were to see a four-bill show at the Opéra Palais Garnier*. The show was opened by James Thierrée’s Frolons, sustained by Ivan Pérez’ The Male Dancer & Hofesh Schechter’s The Art of Not Looking Back and closed with Crystal Pite’s Season’s Canon, which premiered last year. It was real fun. I reckon dance, after all, does corrupt and, like concupiscent thought, corrupts so pleasantly, you hardly notice.
As we milled around the vestibules wondering how the bill was going to roll out, a crackly voice from the PA began crying, “Keep moving – Plenty to see here.” So we did, up and down and around the monumental stairways and landings and spaces. We saw plenty, too.
Thierrée’s idea is that moving is a good thing, even when you can’t see the quarks for the protons or turn anything into a satisfactory sex toy.
The Frôlons (something like Touch it) play notes frame the idea pretty well. “Move, Ladies, Gentlemen, Beasts, Monsters and Creatures of our imagination… Move … The time is now to clearly confront the unknown that devours shadow and light, to light the eye in the depth of the pit! …”.
As atomic theory has shown, but Thierrée’s moving idea only modestly suggests, moving is change and vice versa, as well as a paralell steady state. As an advertisement might put it, moving is what we are (“are” meaning “do”).
Frôlons uses décor, in this case Palais Garnier’s Napoléonic Baroque décor, in the same way that the producers of the 60s TV show Belphégor did, using the incredible notoriety of a well-known place, along with a liberal splash of Brueghel-style strange-iconography and moving, to create mystery. Belphégor, for whom the show was named, is the demon of get-rich schemes.
And as we together gawked, Karine and I, gorgeousness caromed gorgeously. In the monumental stairways, -wells, vestibules, bars and foyers, along long halls and balconies where we went to see, puissant, masked figures dressed in flakes of gold and flashing jewels and silky obsidian swarmed spider-like or loped, as sure-footed as tigers. Handsome ringmasters in evening clothes kept disorder by shining their flashlights, pointing, explaining, pushing, shoving.
Karine, straining on tiptoe to see all around, stuttered, “O! Those bodies!”.
Then, two subtly dangerous golden lizards, all sensual muscle and meat, long scales scintillating, tails aswishing, romped through the stairwells, nudged and fascinated the swarming horde of… of… of… bodies into a coherent herd and disappeared them into a small door, by that time resembling for all the world Hell’s portal.
Sudden intermission.
Where the hell can our seats be? I’m thinking. Karine hoarsely whispers, “May you have a gig at the opera.” She squeezes my hand. I squeeze hers right back – You, too.
All the same, Thierrée moved us, but did not launch us.
Crystal Pite did that, at the end.
Theorists might theorize that maybe it was Thierrée’s exciting liquors and Perez’ and Schechters’ slantendicular amusements that got us loose enough to hop, all buttock and no brain, on Pite’s flight. But I think not.
And it’s not just me that thinks not. Pite’s piece, which followed on Schechter’s and Pérez’, not got four vigorous, spontaneous, curtain calls. Her Canon left people glancing at each other, rather god-smacked and they did and were at the premier, too.
Yes, Crystal Pite Season’s Canon is brilliant. There is a combination of professionalism – Pite’s performers move flawlessly – and creative noos – choreography that always lines up with the underlying sense of the piece…
I asked Karine where she supposed Pite sat to compose Season’s. She replied that certainly it was from where we were sitting, way up high where the real audience sits. For instance, consider the universal popularity of Max Richter’s rework of Vivaldi’s ever-popular Four Seasons for her theme, she said.
If Karine’s right, then Pite knows the secret for transposing perfect self-concentration on the collective consciousness. I think she does.
Just seconds before my consciousness turned to ragged clouds and my pencil fell from my hand, I felt my heart beat, once, hard. I was aware of Karine next to me and at the same time, way down there where once was Hell, I saw a man picking up a woman and knew that picking Karine up just like that made her mine forever. Whatever conclusion I might draw from sense, it was Season’s Canon that enabled it.
So, Pite’s piece is brilliant, and the other three are merely right or good; the binary nature of creation makes it that such a difference exists.
In dance at least, this means that the good are those performances that belong to what you might call the “moving of wishes” (in two subsets: “moving of ideas” and “moving of values”) and the brilliant are those performances that belong to “moving of attitudes” (in two subsets: “moving of feeling” and “moving of sense”).
Karine’s and my breathless moment of tender wishes explained: Thierrée knows how to put on a show that includes the atomic structure of the place he’s at as well as where he wants to go and how so – right ideas, right stuff, right execution. Such rightness – kairos – as you might say, means we experience “moving of feeling”.
While Thierrée’s piece is right, Schechter’s and Pérez’ are good. Schecter is a master of moving, in the same professional category as Pite and he’s as good a showman as Thiérrée any day. The gender-exploring Ivan Pérez is pushes on interesting buttons. But each performance, once experienced, boils down to mere content, “moving of wishes”: The Art of Not Looking Back turns out a demonstration of “moving of ideas”, Perez’, a demonstration of “moving of values.”
Because I have a keyboard and know how to use it and, in hopes of elucidating the notion of good as a moving of wishes, I bring in evidence Schechter’s Show, at the Théâtre des Abbesses in April 2018, a premier in France.
“Dance”, says a quote in the play note, “… is an extreme art that consumes the performer in a burst of emotional flame.” Show – in its own frame as excellent a spectacle as Thierrée’s Frolons – is a tribute to his developing dancers, a demonstration of their “consummation”. Within an uninspiring techno-beat-style sound track, Schechter’s second string performers form into a long series of intense “interactions” between a fluctuating number of gangs, from which particularly aggressive individuals surge forward briefly to do triumphant murder – shooting or throat cutting.
As in politics, the gangs eventually coagulate into – self-defining – killers and killed.
In all his performances, Schechter is a mover of strong imagery that sticks to the spirit. The one I’ve kept from Show is a performer who cuts the throat of a rival. As the rival’s body falls bonelessly to the floor, resolute, she turns on her heel and struts off. Her ass churns attractively, seems to glow red-hot, like a sated bonobo alpha going for a pee after group-grope.
Show was good, but not right. I felt it – I trembled with anxiety – but changed no trajectories – I tapped my foot with annoyance but no outrage.
The audience loved it. But, so what?
“Well, anyhow,” I sneered to Karine, “I guess we humans really are only really interested in winning and fucking.”
Looking artlessly back at me, with an unpleasantly scratchy laugh, Karine replied, “Did you see fucking?”
* Performance 23 May 2018
Psychoanalysis, like all pagan scientia, says: "Come, my good man, no wonder you feel guilty. You have a distorting mirror, and that is indeed a very wicked thing to have. But cheer up, For a trifling consideration I shall be delighted to straighten it out for you. There. Look. A perfect image. The evil of distortion is exorcised. Now you have nothing to repent of any longer. Now you are one of the illumined and elect. That will be ten thousand dollars, please."
And immediately come seven devils, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.
-- W. H. Auden, "Lecture Notes" (1942)
Note: Multiply the bill by fourteen for 2018 dollars. The devil count remains the same. -- DL
If, like me, you can suspend your usual horror at conspiracy theories in favor of the higher paranoia, and you have a weakness for poetry noir and are convinced that JFK was not assassinated by a lone marksman in the book depository building, have I got the book for you: it is Historic Diary by Tony Trigilio (Buffalo, NY: BlazeVOX). Trigilio uses a variety of styles and forms -- e.g., a pantoum for The Manchurian Candidate, diary entries in porose or prosey verse for the assassination witnesses who met violent deaths.
Here are a couple of sentences or lines lifted almost at random from this compelling new book:
"He shot the President on his lunch hour."
"The PTA overrun with communists."
"Tough to believe, in those 90 seconds
After the shots came off, a man could stash
A rifle, run down four flights of stairs, buy
Himself a Coke, stare down a cop."
"Dressed and sitting
upright in bed, November 8, 1965,
Kilgallen found dead of a drug
overdose, her case notes vanished -- "
"'The Queen of Diamonds'? What did she mean, 'The Queen of Diamonds'?"
-- DL
[from the archive; originally posted March 9, 2011. The image is that of the book cover Charlie Orr created for an unwritten book by me.]
In remembering Arthur Mitchell, who died this week, I've been rereading Suzanne Farrell's memoir "Holding on to the Air." Here she is discussing her preparations for the ballet Bugaku, the center of which is "a long, intimate and stunning pas de deux in which the male dancer molds and shapes his partner into physical positions of the most extreme nature":
I consider sex in ballets a very delicate subject. It was also one of Balanchine's primary touchstones--the profundity of physical connections was, after all, the subject of his craft, and he was a specialist--and part of his genius was undoubtedly his ability to treat something so personal, so intimate, and so universal with such raw and yet spiritual implication.
If a step or movement is played only for its sexual suggestiveness, it immediately becomes something other than itself, and the result is a limitation. If, on the other hand, the step or movement is given its full musical and physical value without the trappings of a specific intention, sexual or otherwise, its power can be limitless--it will suggest to some, it will comfort others, and while it may provoke one person, it may be a beautiful image to another. I have never believed in foreshortening any movement's options by imposing one's own experience on it. If there is eroticism in the music and the movement, it will speak for itself; if the dancer chooses to emphasize this aspect, it is the beginning of vulgarity.
This strikes me as a distinction between art and pornography. Thoughts?
-- sdl
Reading this obituary of the brilliant Arthur Mitchell fills me anew with gratitude for my parents who, despite their rather modest backgrounds, exposed me to the New York City Ballet during it's flowering under the direction of George Balanchine in the mid-twentieth century. Later, my parents got season tickets to The Dance Theater of Harlem, the company Mitchell created in 1971. At the time, it was possible for a family of six to see such performances without breaking the bank (though our seats were always in the outermost reaches of the theater).
I saw Arthur Mitchell perform "Slaughter on 10th Avenue" with Suzanne Farrell. With music by Richard Rodgers, it remains one of my favorite ballets and I was thrilled to introduce it to David in 2000 when the NYCB celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Dance Theater of Harlem with a joint program. When making this ballet, Balanchine entrusted Mitchell, who had early training in tap dance, with the choreography for the "Hoofer" role. “O.K., you have 16 bars,” Balanchine supposedly told him. “I’ll be back in an hour, and you have something.”
This week's post offers up a prompt for our creative consideration with the topic of: your name! As Mr. Lehman so masterfully puts it: "When spoken, a person’s name likely affects him or her more than any other word in a language. It is also possible that one’s name can serve as the subject or the scaffolding of a poem."
For example, Mr. Lehman used his own name to create an acrostic poem as follows:
David means “beloved” in Hebrew, and Lehman might lead me to Lac Léman in Switzerland or to the failure of a certain investment firm 10 years ago. Here’s a quick acrostic:
Do I believe in a supreme being?
Against all odds, in the face of all reason, I
Veer from the dogma of our day and
Insist that faith remains
Viable, if not visible, a prelude to a beloved state.
What turns will your own poem take? Visit the American Scholar's page for more inspiration, an alternate assignment, and to enter your candidate!
Arthur Mitchell, right, with George Balanchine
Arthur Mitchell
Slim dragon-fly
too rapid for the eye
to cage,
contagious gem of virtuosity
make visible, mentality.
Your jewels of mobility
reveal
and veil
a peacock-tail.
-- by Marianne Moore
-- sdh
[FRASQ] #10, “Rencontre de la performance”, begins its 10th year of multidisciplinary performance at the Générateur in Gentilly from 6 to 20 October 2018, it's worth a bus ride, let alone a mass.
Chloé Silbano, a painter of the ineffable details of human movement also has a taste for then making somehow apt performances around them. She invited me to see one her oddly apt events at an event called FRASQ#2 at a place called the Générateur in a place called Gentilly, which kisses the bottom of the 13th arrondissement in the far south.
Gentilly, strangely, is directly linked to the Porte de Bagnolet in the north east by the 57 bus, hardly any walking involved. Also, Silbano’s performances tend to radiate a sort of butter-won’t-melt-in-her-mouth humor that tickles as much as perplexes me. So I went. Wine, Sir! More wine!
This astonishing 57 bus brings those passengers boarding in the northeast and who might just wish it, to, virtually, in front of the Générateur. Unsurprisingly, I’ve realized, if one but adds 5+7, one obtains the number 12, which of course denotes Shiva’s divine aspects and is of course divisible into four groups of three, which of course is the number of the mystery of the one true God.
Ed note: A few weeks ago, Angela Ball visited David and me in Ithaca, NY. One morning over coffee, Angela showed me pictures of her lovely home in Mississippi, where she lives and teaches. I was struck by the arrangement of objects on her mantelpiece and asked for the story behind each. This poem is Angela's reply. Thank you, Angela. sdl:
Arranging things on a mantel you have latitude
the longitude is missing just the latitude
to choose things
A series of completions or
incompletions; in 2014, John Ashbery’s husband
said of their interior, “It’s probably the last
version” but so changed
now as is James Tate’s
the house of the strangest yard sale
that after a warm rainy breakfast
of intersections and messages
asked me
to choose
Size of course is always relative
The red scarf above the fez-capped man, the wiener
mobile, Dagwood, and R2D2
could wrap their Central Park, their Yosemite; maybe
their outer space
The mirror is an ocean
propped to the wall
As for the miniature edition of James Wright’s
The Branch Will Not Break
its largess
saved many from the wish
to give up before beginning
This ragtag display’s password
might be “generous”
since below it, in summer,
no edited forest burns
The man with the fez is some remote relative of the Shriners who swooped down the hospital hill
gripping the steering wheels of their midget cars on the very day a newborn was presented to a
mother by the gull-wing armature of a nun. And it is this very Zebra-cat with its free birdseed
who is now heard neighing, meowing, and trilling from a James Tate poem standing alone near a
cotillion of fruit trees and Minnow-Bucket Road
We have gone to great pains translating the universe
into a forgettable vernacular. Life speaks to us
in the New International Version
so that the day lacks a certain cadence, the night
any discernible yearning. A grocery list
of mysteries is written down each morning.
Idols fall like old argyle socks.
And then, one rain sodden rush-hour,
I see him nailed to the back wall of the last carriage,
like twilight at midday, the faint
apparition of a miracle, easy to miss
but for those who catch it they cannot turn away
a Messiah of befuddlement, beautiful
amongst the mass of pleasant and amenable
ugliness. We are given a parable without meaning
anything more than its intention
to offer us the sensation of understanding
what will always remain beyond our grasp.
Something magnificent and indeterminable. Not an answer
but a much more interesting way to phrase the question
no one else would think to ask.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
