Category: Poetry

–for David Weiss

Watching the Marx Brothers in Ashtabula
is, of course, the title of a poem yet to be
written. I expect you will write it? I love
an earlier scene in the film where Harpo
and Chico, disguised as barbers, destroy
the captain’s mustache while feigning
concern for aesthetics. It’s the first fully
post-modern movie ever made. Stowaways
in the bilge of capitalism. Each of them
driven second by second by hormones
and appetites. And every moment Harpo
forgetting what he’s doing because he
sees a Bryn Mawr coed in a tennis outfit.
Every authority figure is a fraud. Dirty
money and guns everywhere. Thorstein
Veblen gagged and bound in the Purser’s
office. And the funniest joke of all —
they have to sneak into France. No
one sneaks into France. Only the pure
of heart would have trouble getting in.
Only the pure of heart would pretend
to be Maurice Chevalier and to disguise
themselves solely by singing like him.
The jokes are all so elegant, and
they are always stealing dinner rolls.
Once I was in Ashtabula, did I ever tell
you that, where the lake is Erie. What
else but Harpo batting his eyelashes
could make the ashes on our plate
palatable? So, here’s to Pig Alley
and to the girl (Lillian Gish) who rejects
Snapper Kid but lies to protect him from
the police. Sometimes that’s all you get.
And let me know how it comes out.

S.K.

I think occasionally of poets who live on far shores while standing with the dogs. I center my quiet impressions about these men and women with the compulsive itch of that man who can’t hang a picture on his wall—too crooked at every glance. I want my kinship with the far flung poets of my tribe to be “just so” and perhaps this is because I am lonely at the end of winter. I’m lonesome and my country is at war and I want to drink tea from a glass with Kai Nieminen who lives on the south coast of Finland. I need to walk with Sam Hamill in Argentina.

With either poet I could talk about the history of war and the glass blowers of Murano who made a killing just when the crusades were ending with their artfully painted custom made glass eyes.

S.K.

Suppose the rain treated us

As philosophers do—

Fingering skulls with sure duration

And knowing our time is brief

Sweetly steers attention away from dying?

Minturno of spring storm;

Proclus of fog skimming the fields;

Didn’t we talk to one another about seeing?

Oh yes, rain is the art of dying:

Men fear rain who do not shut their eyes.

S.K.

When my father died my neighbor said

“That’s a bend in the river”–

It was spring, honeybees

Like drowsy eyes

Circled the pear blossoms…

S.K.

–for Robert Bly

Time will say nothing but I told you so–

Yes & thank you Auden.

Time only knows the price we have to pay…

Snowdrifts say another thing

Like children lost among trees.

"How long have you been here?"

"I can’t remember my mother or father."

S.K.

If you are a writer chances are good that the most frequent question you are asked (other than “How do you make a living?”) is: “What do you do about writer’s block?”

I don’t have an answer for this because frankly I’ve never had the experience. This admission doesn’t make me better than those who do suffer from WB and I freely admit to having lots of faults both literary and beyond. (I can’t spell; I have vicious table manners…)   

But confronted by a blank page or an empty screen I leap into the unknown like the guy who dives into strange bodies of water even though he doesn’t know how deep they are.

James Wright once said something to the effect that you have to be willing to be a bit of a dummy to be a poet.

I should say here just in case any attorneys are reading this that I do not advocate or recommend diving into unknown bodies of water without first checking to see how deep they are.  Any inference that a person should risk a C-4 fracture by jumping off a cliff is subject to seven kinds of ambiguity and is consequently subordinated to the vagaries of college English departments. May the gods be gentle with you.

I went to Paris this morning. The streets were still wet.
A very old priest was walking along the liminal sidewalk with a pet goose by his side.
The goose was looking straight ahead and the old judge was looking at the ground.
Ah, I thought. Justice may be blind but it’s also a forethoughtful gander.
I was there for only a moment.
Now I’m back in Iowa where the snow is covering my whole town.

S.K.

It was late in winter when I heard the thin, halting piano through the walls:

A neighbor playing Chopin, but with care, pausing,getting it right.

Having no scholarly sense of romantic piano

And partial judgment, I felt sorry for the strange man, whose playing

Was weak and earnest, inflected by the tired life.

So I imagined it. A sadness born of loving that music…

That’s the kind of thing you do when you’re young:

Think of the old as falling or fallen, quiet,

Welling with occasional tears.

I had no idea the body, aging, garrulous

Takes up an instrument without the heart’s permission

Fiercely keeping warm…

S.K.