Category: Poetry

The following “prose poem” is from my book in progress
entitled “Mornings With Borges” which will be published by Copper Canyon Press
in the Fall of 2010 if we are still holding our own on this mad planet. Like most
of the poems in the book this is about being lost in multiple and oddly
productive ways.

S.K.

Helsinki, Labyrinth, 1982

I got lost in the library last night and like most blind
people I touched walls and the spines of books.

“Hey Borges,” I said to myself, “Where do I find the entrance to Uqbar?”

(When I was a kid I used to climb in secret on the roof and sleep up there.)

So lost as I was, I pulled a book from a shelf and held it like a royal pillow.

I saw I was full of utility

Like a designer of fountains

Who does his best work in winter.

It was Frank O Hara pointed out

You could just as well use the phone

As write poetry—solo instruments

Being equal. Bell, A.G.

Discovered the telephone

Hoping to find a machine

For the deaf—his bride

Couldn’t hear him;

Think of that first gizmo

As a sort of love poem…

I wish most days

I could describe how the phone works.

About poetry

We have all said too much—

The best of us know

We shouldn’t try to explain things

Now Spring has come.

S.K.

When I was twelve years old and you were seventeen the poet Ed Sanders tried to levitate the Pentagon by chanting. He had tons of help. Robert Lowell was there; Norman Mailer; Allen Ginsberg…and approximately ten thousand young and old people who were fed up with the military industrial complex. The crowd chanted the names of all the gods and goddesses they could think of. "Help us,Gods and Goddesses," they cried. They danced and wept and begged the divinities to spirit the Pentagon from the Earth. And they went home disappointed. And nowadays no one is singing or chanting in this country.

Citizens still protest, of course. There are websites. People occasionally march in the streets. But unless I am mistaken no one dresses in red feathers and calls on Hermes to turn the brutal engines of Capitalism into straw.

I hereby resolve to shake a homemade amulet and dance in a field of soybeans. I won’t worry about the neighbors. I have just enough irony to be sincere and winningly unscientific, which is to say, I remain philosophically hopeless, Confucian as always…

S.K.

–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.