I suppose it’s with a bit of cruelty the New York City classical radio station plays Vivaldi’s La Primavera this morning, reminding me of a dream paragraph I read the other night with two lone phrases recalled upon waking: “cold roses” & “sweeping dust from the floor.” It’s David’s comment from London that he’s “writing in gloom” there drives me tangentially toward Guy Davenport’s take on Olson writing similarly in his final years “on Watch- House Point.” Granted, sun runs through rhododendron leaves & branches, but the furnace is blasting away to keep the cold from seeping in. Not rhyming on purpose, believe me, just in no mood to avoid it. Beginning to think Guy had a great deal more influence than I knew at the time, when reading his work consistently, & corresponding over a period of ten years. Sign of a great teacher. Talk about one observation following another in rapid succession Rimbaud Olson Davenport. In the middle of one letter he says he just got off the phone with Hallam Movius, expert on Acheulean stone tool making culture reaching back to the Lower Paleolithic, the subject Guy takes up toward the end of his essay “Olson.” Guy was never afraid to make one wild conjecture after another. Kept things moving, as he & Olson believed all things do, including stone. Their molecules & meaning. This is where Guy sends me today: to Olson’s Volume Three, where Guy says, “Throughout these last Maximus poems Olson keeps gazing at the offshore rocks, especially Ten Pound Island.” It’s a volume made heavier over the years strewn with bookmarks & jottings. Look, open it anywhere, ha, a dried elm leaf from Cape Ann marks the page where Olson underlines “necessary woman” addressing the geography & spirit of Gloucester herself, begging her “not go away”. Now, the NYC DJ resorts to Dvorak’s My Home, Op. 62, Overture, helping transport me there today
La maja desnuda (The Nude Maja) [Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828), ca. 1797-1800 Oil on canvas, 97 × 190 cm; Museo del Prado]
Real Life & Recent Dreams
There’s the time Lorca appeared in the dream, which I recorded in some obscure Swiss journal. Olson, at least twice: once in a church, the other at 28 Fort Square. Now, in their own way, William Carlos Williams & F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s not that I prefer dreams to reality, for sure: I’m most often grateful to wake from that other World. However, life’s not that much different, is it? Today, decided I needed two sources in order to continue the project on correlation between work by Clyfford Still & Charles Olson. Both catalogues are there at Bowdoin, (Metropolitan, ’79, Albright-Knox, ’66), but on hold shelf, non-circulating. College policy toward ALL ART BOOKS. But if I renew borrower’s card at Maine College of Art, I can take them out. $25 in poet’s economy, where poetry brings in no money, [well, except to, you know] adds up to seven bottles of wine at Trader Joe’s. Geoff told me he purchased two old chapbooks of mine at Yes Books on Congress Street yesterday for $40. So I decide to take a few expendable books down from my shelves: Dylan Thomas, Rexroth, etc., + my own new book, This Time, & take them there. The proprietor offers me exactly the sum I’m looking for. While renewing my card at the library, see Prado Madrid on discard cart for $3. Buy it. The Nude Maja placed as if she were a centerfold in this 1968 edition published by Newsweek. Young Heather double-checks to make sure I’m sixty-five, otherwise it’ll be double the $25. Life is funny. Rarely.
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Recent dreams: in conversation with an academic, she is thin-lipped, short haired in yellow blouse, I judge unattractive as she speaks, but suddenly past banal talk the script of a tattoo emerges from left side of her neck down across chest. Change my mind. Assume she knows what she’s talking about. What with aslant paragraph in the hand of, & signed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, she smiles for the first time.
In conversation with a man about our traumas, as sources. Short-cropped hair, I haven’t mentioned mine at all, but hear him say he had three jobs at Auschwitz. Making any elaboration of my own moot. I say so.
There’s a secret text on the desk. In conversation with another poet about its meaning. I read something into it, & ask the other, with face of William Carlos Williams, what he thinks. Whispers his interpretation. However, the illumination is kept secret by the dream, & the visage of the “Bill” whom I asked is actually a cross between Dr. Williams & William Heyen.
Syrie Moskwitz exhibits a series of her photographs in continuously more rapid succession, so that it verges on becoming film, rather than stills. Not one of her nude self-portraits.
Again, in conversation with an older female academic, she suggests we go for a walk. In the woods. There’s a train trestle high above a body of water. She slips through a hole & falls a hundred feet, or more, into the river. I hesitate for a second, then, to my own surprise, jump in after her, lifeguarding her to the trestle’s cement foundation.
A number of erotic dreams, too numerous to recount, too vivid to elaborate upon, however, just broaching them now, resuscitates a dream from last night, when the young Polish lecturer smiles from lectern to audience mentioning his height at 6’1”, & begins his talk with the similarly gleeful, glib expression somehow according to the dream’s de-sequential scenes turns into his alter: the young Polish woman, who picks up from where he left off, drops something, bends down right in front of me, breasts cupped by bra, but almost visible. Hair, blonde, dyed.
How & why that pair of beige-suede shoes leapt upon the night table of the dream I may never know, but the first thing their image reminded me in the morning were the blue-suede I walked in minor joy that year to grammar school.
Two boys & two dogs follow me along the quick-running stream. Wonder if we can drink from it. Appears clear, one boy dunks his head in. I want to make sure but the water glass is amber, & when filled the water inside looks blue.
Funny, the day after writing down these dreams I stumbled on a long-lost review of my first book of prose poems, Streets for Two Dancers, in which the reviewer is struck most by just what’s going on here: correlations between dream & reality. Jim Feast, who has reviewed each of my books for Evergreen, writes: Moreover, the poet combs his waking life for instants of dream-like fluidity to pair with actual dreams. Thus, the reader can link the moment when Gibbons' wife shows "white estuary flesh" to this: Gently kissing the woman in the dream responds, "I like when my clothes melt off."
Snow in the offing, Europe on my mind. The Maran Poseidon docked across the harbor for two days in a row flying what else than Greek flag. Read recently the populace of Greece is returning to the land, abandoning Athens, heading to mountains, plains, islands. Hoping to harvest something other than what shards are left of the debacle the World Bank & IMF foisted on them. I recall just now having lunch outside Taberna Del Alabardero with both daughters in DC located right across the street from the World Bank, & noticing before we left, then Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown exiting the restaurant with three other men. Things seemed good then, but I could still feel the power & potential corruption coming down from the façade of the architecture of the Bank, never mind what circulated inside. Of course, Brown died under suspicious circumstances, then Paul Wolfowitz, same guy who formulated the preemptive first-strike philosophy for the next administration, took over the Bank, & we can only imagine the dirty dealing begun then. Prefer the mythology of Greece, which influenced my early scholarship & writing: Jane Harrison’s Themis, Károly Kerényi’s Dionysus, Robert Graves’ Greek Myths, etc. & Greek writers themselves, Cavafy, Seferis, Elytis, let alone Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Hesiod, etc., logging miles of research on the country of my dreams, yet to see me there.
"Christmas spirit was evident by the small decorated tree in front of a homeless couple's shelter under an I-30 exit in Fort Worth, TX." Photo by Flickr userzormsk.
In the January 4th, 2012 Sky
Time & Temp Building on Congress read 24 degrees yesterday morning as the most homeless of couples tried crossing Marginal Way, not against the light, but against wind & sand. She had a scarf across both eyes, following him as if blind. Today, transporting my woman to the airport, long before dawn, we caught sight of the guy on the bike heading to work draped in faux leather coat & matching hood, 6 degrees at that hour. Hate letting her go hints of death filtering through separation. Instead of driving straight home, headed down to the waterfront to see if perhaps in the January 4th, 2012 sky I could catch Quadrantid meteors reported heaviest between 3:00-4:00, the quiet hour. Half-hour late, I could not, but caught the Pleiades, both Dippers, Jupiter, & the constellation Leo. Wasn’t disappointed about a sky empty of a broken comet traveling miles per second, but more concerned with what’s left of an American workforce trudging its way on the ground, or her, with stops in DC & Chicago before landing in Lincoln, of all places.
Hess House, Glocuester, MA. Photo by Flickr user jakerome.
The Failure of His Success
Always haunted by O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, the 1962 film version came on late-night TV this week at just the point when James Tyrone admits to his son the failure of his success. O’Neill labeled this confession, (could very well be a soliloquy in other staged circumstances) the “MC speech,” in which the fictive character based on O’Neill’s father, traces how & why he sold out his artistic talent for the easy role of playing the Count of Monte Cristo over & over again without taking on any other challenging roles. Particularly, after having played Othello & Iago much earlier in life. Notes that he’d begun work in a machine shop at ten-years-old making fifty cents a week, learning to value the dollar then. Hearing those lines again spoken by the great Ralph Richardson brought me back to my college days, when I longed to be a playwright. Showed a bad one-act to English Professor, Donald Berry, who didn’t put it down, but encouraged me. Read all the Greeks in the stacks of Emerson College Library then on Beacon Street, where I worked for years. Even “graduated” to the lesser Romans. Took on Miller & Williams & Albee, but it was O’Neill who haunted me. I’d drive by his house on Marblehead Neck listening for inspiration. Once paid $6 for a ticket to see Long Day’s Journey into Night at Hines Auditorium in Boston, absolutely the worst place to stage a great play. It might as well have been standing room only like my second day in London watching Fiddler on the Roof, seat so far away, damn it, but the words filtered through the air, even if I couldn’t see a thing. My own copy of Journey, handsome hardbound, but dog-eared left behind with first wife & all my Yeats books. It may very well be the “MC speech” made me realize I’d never be a playwright. No, that bad one-act never much improved over years of practice. Dialogue was not my game. When I finally did take on a “play,” it was for an actor playing Yeats giving a lecture tying together the 14 poems a friend had turned to song. Newburyport Theater Company performing it at the Hess House in Gloucester. Edmund, the character O’Neill bases on himself, (resurrecting a brother by the same name, who died three years before he was born), calls on Baudelaire & Nietzsche in juxtaposition to Shakespeare.
