Author: stevekuusisto

Let me say something about my lute: its made from a birch which, as you know, isn’t always a musical tree. Birches grow by serendipity in marsh land—they are tall, thin mistakes. This is my instrument then, this thing making music from nature’s unseemly muddle.

Here’s to the devil of pejorative noises, rustic with goodness and polemical pen, who’d blow a trumpet without remorse though we trusted him. He’s American, Christian, slick as a specimen dish. Today he’s Joel Osteen, but he’s always a roulette pronouncement. Elmer Gantry, Billy Sunday, Jimmy Swaggart. All of them knew how to take your money. People on the left think these fellows are exploiters of crude hate—but I’ve always seen them differently as the thieves of goodness for they steal from their largely illiterate or alliterate followers in the name of a Christ their laity can scarcely know and surely can’t understand. This makes the American Public Preacher-hood the most cynical sect of all. Tawdry, lurid, greedy, smug—and I think it says a lot to note they’re less trustworthy than auto salesmen.    

My mother loves me but not in her heart. So her love is like water leaking from a neighbor’s apartment. As I grow older I see there’s no landlord and I take up amateur plumbing, stanching my mother’s accidental love however I may. Now that’s she’s dead I still hold the wrench—the one missing teeth—the accommodation of deflection will be necessary again. My poor mother, who loved so little. But at least I can embellish the wrench with corn flowers.

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I live in a cold, northern city in North America. Though its spring its still snowing. One sees how sad the houses are—like the houses in Neruda’s poems—the houses are suicidal. The crows sail around in their unambiguous death watch.�

My mother loves me but not in her heart. So her love is like water leaking from a neighbor’s apartment. As I grow older I see there’s no landlord and I take up amateur plumbing, stanching my mother’s accidental love however I may. Now that’s she’s dead I still hold the wrench—the one missing teeth—the accommodation of deflection will be necessary again. My poor mother, who loved so little. But at least I can embellish the wrench with corn flowers.

**

What a thing to be a man-child with corn flowers. I can’t fix anything. But I love wild flowers and celebrate a patch of sun. I love my mother in memory though she was always a darkling disaster. 

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I live in a cold, northern city in North America. Though its spring its still snowing. One sees how sad the houses are—like the houses in Neruda’s poems—the houses are suicidal. The crows sail around in their unambiguous death watch. 

**

New super heroes: Urchin Boy; Cornflower-Cat; Zero-Sum Sister…

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How I wish I could be stronger, that wishfulness compares with peace. I wish for peace. A strange joke, born into a violent and inarticulate world, and wishing for something like grace. 

Someone will jump up and down on my grave,

a condition of being given life—

one must consider the dance.

And the wind plays no part in it. 

Heavy, wet, spring frost…

There’s a moth in the piano. There’s a piano in Andromeda. Listen. 

Where two fears intersect, there’s disability. Its figuration is the Centaur. And so in the public’s mind crippled-ness is untamed, quick, and too much like us. Culture, social construction, these are aggregate and substitute terms for the intersection of primal fright. Disability is a social construct to be sure, but its a secondary one. In the lead, half man, half horse, is the fear of the capricious body—the one that looks like us but won’t behave.

I remember circa 1962, our family’s first golden retriever, who was a sweet dog, but she hated the milk man with true animus. We decided that he must have kicked her. So we got rid of him. Now, all these years later, I realize he was probably a veteran–I think he had a limp. He likely had PTSD. All the neighborhood dogs hated him. This is likely the start of a Vonnegut-esque novel.

More lives than we perceive know of yours and mine. Don’t kid yourself, dogs hear every whisper. 

“Holy still is Speech, but there is no sacred tongue, the truth may be told in all.” (Auden) 

“Its lucky we don’t need “the vulgate”—for now all languages are holy.” (Kuusisto in a rambling lecture)

I spent my 18th summer playing Billie Holiday records and reading the poet Bill Knott.

I was largely friendless, recovering from a hospitalization for anorexia—I mean, really, I was returning to the world with scars and many tremblings—I’d flip the Holiday record and read, with the aid of a prodigious magnifying glass. 

Bill Knott:

Poem

What language will be safe 

When we lie awake all night

Saying palm words, no fingertip words

This wound searching us for a voice

Will become a fountain with rooms to let

Or a language composed of kisses and leaves

When you’ve lived long with the stripped, coded privacies of injury, you feel the transmission of these lines—the electric, recombinative flesh and syllables of lingo. Imagery depends on nouns but think of Knott’s verbs: be, lie, saying, searching… Bill Knott was orphaned young; I lived my blind-kid solitudes—God Almighty, I used to play Victrola records alone in the attic. What I loved was Knott’s “fountain” with rooms to let. Inner joy… New and promising words. 

I still wonder, every day, what language will be safe? 

Bill Knott:

Poetry, 

you are an electric,

a magic, field—like the space

between a sleep walker’s out held arms….

There is no court rhyme or shepherds pipe for safety. And none for faith. 

“If that isn’t love, it will have to do, until the real thing comes along…”

Bill Knott’s poetry collections include The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans(1968), Becos (1983),Outremer, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize (1988),Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999 (2000),The Unsubscriber (2004), and Stigmata Errata Etcetera (2007), a collaboration with collages by the artist Star Black. He passed away yesterday.