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There was the Russian place in Helsinki where the waiter wanted me to order bear. And the taverna on Paros where I watched sunlight in a glass of water. 

 

Nothing is quite right when you dine alone. But you solve the crossword while praising your hands. 

 

 

 

Always I write about the boy, not out of innocence, but because he is me and not me and the not me is where the advantages of irony can be found. I like knowing this. The boy always loved hieroglyphs. Once the boy spent a day believing he was an Ibis. In school they made fun of him for being blind. The Ibis was better. People who dismiss mythology probably don’t understand the nature of personal suffering. Hercules and the Hydra together make a child. The clear sunlight and the boy searching for mushrooms. He was all alone in the woods. He did not play with toy soldiers. He played with the life around him, the miniature “up close” creatures that let him in. “They are me and not me,” he thought. “That also means I am not me.” Long before there was a disability rights movement he knew he wasn’t any one thing. Later in college he read Emerson and he admired “Self Reliance” and: “Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.” Secrets came to him then. He lay face down on the frozen pond and knew there was ice under the ice but the fish could move there. And there were private crickets inside his sleeves. He could talk sideways to living things. That boy is me and not me. The man cannot spend his day face down with the ice fish though often he would like to do this. The poor man must workaday workaday in the steep hours feeling the tensile struggle to retain his innocence and curiosity. If he has irony its in the service of protection. The boy ran away; the man carries the woods with him. And the man knows why this isn’t sentimental at all. He also rescues crickets whenever he can.

Someone is knocking but it isn’t a pop song moment. Its a Jeohovah’s Witness. He smiles like a man who has the golden goose under his arm. He stands in the grey light and waves his pamphlets beckoning me to open the locked door. His pamphlets are of course the warning instructions for doomsday and I just can’t help myself, I have searched all my inner nooks and crannies and I don’t believe in doomsday and worse really (for the unsolicited JW) I don’t care for the idea. I like night music on dark roads. I like figs with teeth marks on them. I think reality should weigh itself. I love the way wind blows darkness against my cheek. I decide I won’t open my door. In this I’m aided by our dogs. The big one won’t bark but she’s stolid, leadning against my right thigh. The little one who is Tibetan and comes from a lineage of temple guard dogs, he’s barking the bark of the teeth that will never let go. I wave helplessly at the little window. “Sorry,” my hands say, but its more dangerous in here than you know. Ding Dong 

 

 

I had me some fun yesterday in the company of three poets: Bob Herz, Georgia Popoff, and Phil Memmer. Fun for poets is reading and discussing poetry and that’s just what we did. Yesirree. Moreover we did it in style as we recorded multiple podcasts at a deluxe recording studio. The facilities were so excellent I said to Phil: “I expect security to come and throw me out at any minute.” “That’s probably happened to you before,” said Phil. “Yes,” I said. There was a Martin guitar hanging on the wall. It was signed by many famous people. 

 

But I had me some fun. We talked about poems by Robert Bly, Marvin Bell, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. All three are honored American poets and need no introduction to poetry readers but the pleasure for us as poets lay in uncovering and sharing the textures and ideas in three great poems—all decidedly different in voice and content. And there, in that ultra modern, almost James Bond-esque studio we talked as poets often do—with warmth, amusement, conviction, and deep pleasure—about everything from the life of the mind to the unanswerable questions of provenance and consciousness and our existential origins and vanishings. 

 

We finished by reading some of our own work, though Bob, who is a terrific poet, had decided to be the moderator and not a participant. My goal in future is to make him read one of his amazing poems “on the air” so to speak. 

 

I think that ultimately poetry is about how we shall choose to live. In one of his early poems entitled “Contagion” James Tate wrote: So this is the dark street/where only an angel lives/I never saw anything like it. I read that poem when I was twenty and saw the “dark street” as Emerson—saw the angel as Emerson’s strange angel which is also D.H. Lawrence’s strange angel, the wings are too much like ours; the wings are possibly sinister. In any case, we never saw anything like it and yet we always knew they were there—the wings, the humanoid specter, and our expectation they are a completion, one answer to the betrayals of phenomenology. Such a view is not Romantic, though plenty have said so. Its tougher. It took Freud and Jung to show us what the figurines mean: they’re neither enemy or friend, but fact. How you will live, in what manner you will live, depends on what you can challenge yourself to admit about the angels. The ones I’m talking about are freakish angels and not the sanitized “idea” of the angel that Wallace Stevens preferred. Stevens’ angels are like those paper wrapped seats in the washroom—sanitized for your protection—and so they are not angels at all. Here is what the angels felt like to Lawrence:

 

 

The Song of a Man Who has Come Through

 

 

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!

A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!

If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!

If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed

By the fine, fine wind that takes its course though the chaos of the world

Like a fine, and exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;

If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge

Driven by invisible split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

 

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,

I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,

Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

 

What is the knocking?

What is the knocking at the door in the night?

It’s somebody wants to do us harm.

 

No, no, it is the three strange angels.

Admit them, admit them.

 

 

Notice Lawrence’s angel is both the man or woman who feels wind blowing inside the body and then the angel is, when more fully realized, like a fine chisel, a wedge that rents chaos—a dangerous tool to be sure. Lawrence’s angel is a wire that pierces. Oh its imagination alright. Its your dream. Its your fear about the future. Its your regret about the past. Its your dead father tuning a piano in the underworld. As Robert Bly would say: Its the distance between the head and the feet as we lie down. The freaky angel is us and not us unless we reckon with time. Its our ambition. Our completion. Its the hard work of consciousness which must admit what’s under the boat. (Ahab) or cry because space has pierced us with a sharp tip (Emerson’s cosmological Boston Commons). I like the word “freaky” better than strange. Freaky can’t be domesticated though we build churches or sideshows and put angels on pedestals so the frightened gazers can gaze and then go home saying, “well, I saw it—good thing it is not me.” 

 

But of course the “freaky angel” turns up. It knocks if you’re lucky. Lawrence was lucky. His angels passed right through his carapace of fear, the lobster back of the psyche, and then he was stronger, undoubtedly weirder, perhaps thinner, maybe with the taste of honey and excrement in his mouth, happy to the point of rending his garments, and sharp, very sharp. 

 

  

So yesterday with my good friends we pulled and smoothed the wings of the strange angels. 

 

 

 

 

 

One morning early, bending to trash, I saw a flash, a light not of this world. “Maybe my retina has detached,” I thought. The gold white iridescent microburst was passing strange but then it was gone and to date has never returned. Of course I went “all Woody Allen” and imagined I had a disease. Then I took a Blake-ean view—it was an unbidden holy vision. Predictably over time I forgot about it. But every now and then that flash, that otherworldly color, returns. I see it. I who do not see well. I know this is not my story alone. All our eyes expect to be received. 

 

  

Photo: Stephen Kuusisto with white cane standing next to Buddhist dragon, Kyoto, Japan

 

When we whisper crumpled saints stand again/

Roll in chairs/

Walk the guide dogs/

Whisper with their hands/

As birds often call to the four directions

 

Photo: Stephen Kuusisto with white cane standing next to Buddhist dragon, Kyoto, Japan

 

When we whisper crumpled saints stand again/

Roll in chairs/

Walk the guide dogs/

Whisper with their hands/

As birds often call to the four directions

 

Ask yourself how many beauties you subvert during the course of a day. No one is brave enough for this. Capitalism helps or does not help reflection where essential joy is concerned. I recall a trip to the Soviet Union when I was 26 years old. I saw that possession of the wrong book was the invitation to a cavity search. This past week, reading of tortures directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, and in particular of “rectal feeding” I’ve remembered rather vividly being searched by the Soviet border guards when I attempted to enter the Soviet Union during the first Reagan term. If governments are generally untrustworthy, so too are they generally resistant to human dignity. At this stage of my life I won’t be convinced otherwise. 

 

Who lives a life of happiness, the pursuit thereof? I prefer free markets and capitalism to what I saw recently in China where I spoke with writers who must gather in secret; where the freedom to speak against the suppression of egalitarian ideas is still far off. I’m not confused. Yet freedom demands I say what I believe to be true: namely that state supported dehumanization is aberrant. The United States has not stood up for freedom and human dignity in the years since 9/11.

 

How many beauties do you subvert during the course of a day? I know I’m small. My arms are relatively weak. I’m a blind poet. An intellectual. I’m the man likely to carry the wrong book when crossing a border. I will not stand against poetry. I won’t flinch. This means I won’t salute the cruelty and barbarous violations of human rights perpetrated by the United States government. Back in 1983 I had Soviet fingers up my ass. I’ve not forgotten. When I hear Dick Cheney justify torture I laugh. I really do. He’s a man with no appreciation of essential joy; a man who doesn’t understand what freedom is.