stevekuusisto

Rock Kissing and Other Stories

I am, among other things, a pagan-Episcopalian which means I’m really Lutheran and of Finnish heritage–so I like my religious life to be polite and yet, in secret I have these rituals that I can’t disclose in general company but heck, this is a blog and hardly anyone reads it anyway so here goes:

Every year I return to a lake in New Hampshire and kiss a certain rock that lives under water. I swear there’s nothing lurid about this. The rock and I are composed of the same things and we are stolid in our affection for this lake, this sky, planet, universe–and my rock and I find each other though I can’t really see because my skin and bones know how to find the place.

& I dive down and kiss the rock, my legs kicking madly to hold me at depth.

The lake is nowadays being "taken over" by the wealthy. My little cabin is a hold out among the neuveau trophy lodges of the Marriottsand the Romneys and the like.

"Well," I tell myself, "MItt Romney doesn’t have a rock like this. My rock speaks old Finnish and knows the sorcerer poet Vainamoinen personally."

There are, after all, other kinds of wealth.

Hei, Kivi! Sinut poika tulee!

(Hey Rock! Your boy is coming!)

S.K.

Thinking of Atticus Finch

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that: "many a man, who has contrived to hide his ruling passion or predominant defect from himself, will betray the same to dispassionate observers, bu his proneness on all occasions to suspect or accuse

others of it. …"

Lately the air waves in America have been echoing Senator McCain’s assertion that Senator Obama has injected race into the presidential campaign. Enter Coleridge: you don’t have to look too deeply at McCain’s protestations to see a latent and pejorative utilization of racial figuration. The image of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, two young white women, presaging the appearance of a larger than life black man is a carefully constructed semiotic reenforcement of old fashioned white fear. Has anyone forgotten Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird for god’s sake?

By pretending that the Hilton-Spears ad is just a simple "celebrity" alarm about Obama the McCain campaign can divert attention from the haunting and racially motivated visual symbolism in their phony commercial.

I hope that Senator Obama can survive this ugly Karl Rove sponsored attack and that the American people will listen to what he has to say with keen attention.

But in a nation where some 40 million people can’t read I imagine that visual literacy—the ability to analyze imagery—is even less in evidence. Karl Rove and company know this full well.

Obama’s best strategy is to use his warmth and his sense of humor whenever possible. Ronald Reagan and JFK were witty in the face of adversarial attacks.

No one will sensibly suggest that John McCain is witty.

S.K.

Angel Revised in Workshop

"I think her wings should come off," says a student, and so her wings come off. They fall like dirty bandages. "There’s something about the light in her eyes, it doesn’t seem earned," (the voice, impatient, feminine, too quick for "jaded".) Immediately her eyes, Byzantine almonds—they are wiped away, replaced by the eyes of a soldier. "All this self-awareness in the features, it makes me queasy," says a boy (who swears he has instincts—it’s in his nature to know when a face is two-faced…) "So what happens next?" (Another boy, the one with the serial killer trading cards) says (after a semester of silence): "I mean the afterlife, nothing happens, there’s no smell of blood or whiskey." He says it, and although no one knows what he means everyone agrees the halo has to go."Now she looks like one of Brancusi’s eggs," the last student says. "She’s perfect, featureless, and derivative."

S.K.

The Perils of Reading E-Mail

I was imagining what it would be like to have entirely new teeth because I received an e-mail from the local dental school announcing free dentistry if you’re willing to let dental students work on you. I have crooked teeth because when I was 11 or 12 years old I pitched a fit and refused to return to the orthodontist who was essentially preparing me for braces. I suffered from excruciating headaches owing to my blindness and nervous tension and my mother, sensing that I was already feeling overwhelmed by life decided that I should have my wish and live with crooked teeth.

So I was pondering what it would be like to have a Hollywood, big league American smile and then I started to think about all the other middle aged miseries: the tennis elbow; the gravitational effects of aging flesh; flat feet; creeping double chin; hammer toes; cholesterol; evident hearing loss; political cynicism; nostalgia for nickel candy—I was suddenly awash in the physical and psychological spindrift of middle age and there wasn’t any Diet Coke in the refrigerator.

I was right to choose crooked teeth. I will not invest a dime in the Normalcy Industrial Complex.

Man, am I glad I got that out of the way.

It’s good to be restored to a semblance of sanity. I think that instead of getting my teeth fixed I will go inside a stone like the poet Charles Simic. I will admire the Brailled star charts on the stone’s inner walls.

S.K.

Eggs for Ted Berrigan

Who once in Iowa City

Told my friend Marvin

That taken

Together

As poets

They

Were

"Steak and eggs"

& then Ted

Marvin

Was "the steak"

Which was

Fair enough

I too

Want to be

An egg poet—

Once

In upstate

New York

I saw

The composer

Aaron Copeland

Eating

Steak and eggs

In a diner

& nowadays

Who

Would know

That old man

Eating alone

Just off

Route 20

& who drops

Ted’s poems

In bus stations?

I’m still

Leaving the eggs…

S.K.

Clouds Over the Shopping Mall

Have you forgotten the reason you came?

Are you lost like the prodigal son?

Do you tell fortunes there

Above the sad automobiles

& the single mothers

who are walking in a loneliness

Too steep for bare nature?

How I wish I could be like you:

Imperial, slow, half alive

Like the priests of empire,

Talking to yourselves only

In the language

Of minerals

& the unborn.

Let commerce

Appeal to the poor!

Let them

With their broken carts

Believe in magic!

Yes! You! Bombard!

I’m talking to you!

S.K.

Cleveland, Ohio (April)

Rain. But the quality was all wrong:

Walking Euclid Avenue I remembered the Norwegian poet:

The age of the great symphonies is over now…

Euclid; cast off buildings in all directions; ghost of Mahler

In this rain that smelled faintly of sulphur.

Borges, I walked through a keyhole just after ten am.

Then spring was green in the trees

And Mahler’s odd China—

That country of total darkness and total light

Was all my own.

Then the city’s birds were more musical

Though the rain continued gently & blue

S.K.

Miten Surullista, Kaikki

–after the Finnish of Jarkko Laine

How sad, everything…

Purple weeds

Growing beside the tracks,.

Candidates on the radio…

Beyond my window

A neighbor, a young man,

Introduces his baby girl

To the ducks.

She makes joyful sounds and claps her hands—

Human beings

Love this world so much

A spirit takes them

When they can scarcely walk.

My radio crackles & the script of ruin

Snicks through the air. El Presidente

His pants stuffed with money

Speaks of evil

In the catalyzed rhythms

Of nursery tales.

How sad to live

As the nation states

Begin to fall—

When denatured and unseen

Children are erased from the books.

Were he alive today

Even John Wayne

Would vomit in the beach grass.

America?

S.K.

What Now, Captain America?

–after the Finnish of Pentti Saarikoski

God said to Satan:

“Bow down in remembrance of me.”

Satan said: “But you are

a mathematical proposition

Or else you’re nothing

& either way—just for the sake of argument,

Abstractions are graven images.”

God punished Satan by making him the commandant of Gitmo.

Pages turned on calendars of mankind.

The wicked prospered beyond their wildest dreams.

& Satan climbed in and out of human eyes

& his footprints felt like nothing more than sand.

S.K.

More About Valhalla

He’s running for president of the afterlife

& so the dead press corps follows him. ,

Someone asks: "If elected, what will you do about Karma?"

He says that he understands Karma has always been a problem

& the goal of course is to put everybody on the same playing field, etc.,

But the government of the dead shouldn’t get involved with these entitlements,

It’s more a market based matter, skinny souls squeezing through the portals

Of rebirth, like floating lilies pushed by wind. Etc.

"But aren’t you worried, sir," asks a particuarly dead reporter,

That perceived inaction on Karma

Will negatively impact dead Viking land values?"

S.K.