Author: stevekuusisto

Uncle history doesn’t like Frank Sinatra
He can’t help it
He also doesn’t like American cooking
Back in the day he liked Etruscan music
And when men died
He liked how they played the aulos
He likes New Orleans funerals
Being history is blueness
Its not the idea of blue
Its the blue itself

I am fond of the term “up river”
As a child I lived beside a river
Imaginary crows, real ones—
What luck! Here comes one
That will walk on my grave!

**
Lots of hate in my country
Would that I could talk with the pros
Marlowe, Shakespeare
Sun coming up

**

Did you know your parents were crazy?
Yes
Did you try to please them anyway?
Yes
Are you still trying to please them
Though they’re dead?
Yes
It’s late in the fourth quarter fella…

**

Sometimes I read self-help books
Then I read Wittgenstein
Since no one knows what the self is
Who am I really helping
Death of course
But Ludwig says death
Doesn’t exist
So I’m a dented Buddha

**
If Wallace Stevens was my neighbor
I’d bring him a glass doorknob
If Walt Whitman was my neighbor
I’d bring him fresh hay for his pony
If Emily Dickinson was my neighbor
I would never knock on her door
The heart has many mansions—
To paraphrase Jesus

**

I used to like the big heavy telephones
You could kill somebody with those things
Ma Bell and Maxwell’s silver hammer
Those were the days!

**

I once met a very old man
In an Estonian bar
He said he was the child
Who rang Strindberg’s doorbell
Then hid in the bushes
Hence, he laid claim
To being the inciting ghost
He was of course
Very drunk

**

Whitman’s pony was named “Frank”

Uncle and Aunt history read together by the hearth
Tonight its Wittgenstein’s notebook
“Ethics and aesthetics are one”
“No one should believe this,” Uncle says
“I think he was reading Keats,” Auntie says
A big wind howls outside their house
Their rude little house—ugly really
“Look,” says Uncle
“Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.”
Like Lear and his fool
They go out into the storm
Shaking their cadaverous fists

Aunt History loves Rosa Luxembrg
The Sparticist one
Who believed it was possible…

Don’t be foolish
Auntie says
Stop praying

“Women’s freedom
Is the sign of social freedom.”
Stop praying, get off your knees

Meantime unshakable dark
And thought inside a thought
Which is sometimes sung

Aunt history is cooking up a storm
She starts with the Renaissance—
Silver coated oysters
In questionable aspic
In later centuries
She uses spam
It’s not about eating well
It’s about chewing
History is a bolus
It’s the cow’s cud
It’s the thing
Your dog finds
The Baltic winter
Is coming
Keep those jaws going
Don’t flinch
Open wide

“I can’t unsee the past, can’t—
Bleriot flies over
Can’t unsee the silly airplane!”
In this way Uncle history
Is an old old man
With the soul
Of a Luddite
Machines get worse
Guns get bigger
He sorts his socks
Talks to himself…
“Bub! Can I call you
Bub? Ned Ludd?
Lets hide in the forest!
Oh please don’t say
Its too late!”

Boolean Logic

A friend lost his eyes once–
He was washing them
Prosthetic eyeballs
and they dropped
rolling
two plastic eyes
in transverse directions

My friend
froze–
no words
eyes
like an infinite
sequence
of mistakes
But he heard them
oblong, blue,
exact as algebra

The Titanic keeps sinking and sinking
And Uncle history thinks he knows why
But he’ll never tell
Its enough
That the story
Is never done
It keeps him youthful
Though he remembers
The world’s first shipwreck
The papyrus was soggy
But he’s young at heart
There was a Victrola
On the doomed ship
But only one record:
Tarantella Sincera
A comic song
To be sure

The trouble with “being” history
Is that your blood is everywhere—
In fact there’s too little for the heart
In turn this affects premonitory moods
Stepping around puddles
Uncle history has to look down
Before he can look up
The unknowable is known
“This is terrible” he thinks
“Where’s the Aeolian harp?”
But the wheel of history
With solidifying blood
Turns with
And without him
With its tumbrel squeaks

Uncle history wishes he could fiddle like Nero
But he’s tone deaf and clumsy
Still he loves Shostakovich
And the music of distress
He loves the composer’s humor:
‘Love us when we are dirty
Not when we are clean…”
The planet is filthy
Across the globe
Children are in rags
Landlords laugh
Til they wet their pants
Uncle’s hermitage
Is his left eye
Though it scarcely works
How like scattered petals
The ashes falling