They Call it Mystic
--for Sanni Purhonen
When I cross the street
They say its a miracle
(You just can’t get away from it)
Buy a sack of cherries
Blind in the market
Vide et credere…see
And believe
(The blind eating fruit)
Cripples traveling
Hand in hand
Autumn winter
Crazy God lets them out
To stroll with
Sandalwood and incense
And their true bodies
I read only the gloomiest poems
Leave salvation to daisies mystics the apple tree
Finnish poet Lauri Viita–something
About being shoveled under
Still alive, Nordic Poe
That’s for me–just
Over there a thin twisted
Man feeds crows in rain
If I loved myself better…
If I’d a deathless word
Entirely my own…
I knew this much: outside Tallinn
Where the trolley left me
Where I was lost one cold day
I could still raise a hand
So beautiful hitchhiking blind
In a place not mine
Take me back to the fairy tale castle
I told the driver who stopped
Simple dirge black tune
Winter geometrics Baltic
Wonderful to be alive
How to say it….
Do you remember the little outfits you had in childhood? There’s a photo of me somewhere–I was dressed as a grocer. I thought the market was a magical. In another snap shot I’m leaning over a cardboard toilet paper insert (my microphone) pretending to be a news broadcaster.
When we wore those costumes we had no faces. Sometimes when I was very little I’d press my face to the mullioned window. I couldn’t see but the glass was cold. It was possible to be no one and everyone.
The imagination allows us to get around on the tips of our toes. My father bought me a cowboy hat. I was the tippy toe outlaw among the pine trees.
Let us dress up as we once did–not to impress anyone but to admit our hunger.
And without knowing the outcome….
I was on the wrong train
OK let’s see where it goes
I was in the wrong room
OK we don’t get many blind people
Silent stares
Should we tell him?
Maybe he can make something good happen
We don’t get many blind people around here
Irony: academic desperadoes claiming diversity
Worst of all–“his behavior for god sake”
“He should wait his turn…”
“Such a malcontent!”
At least the creaking “literal” train
Was entertaining
How credulous the eyes
Tracking rain and leaves
Seeing Jesus in burnt toast
If they could clap
They’d applaud anything
Dust on dust
Fill themselves
With pilgrim sufferings
Of strangers
Eyes vain as the moon
A rumor pushes
Nerves grow
Little hallelujahs
A memory inventing itself
Fish nosing fish in the dark
It was summer and then in a turn it wasn’t
Birds in the hedgerow vanished
Summer kept beating on the door
Orphan wanting to be let in
It was summer and then it wasn’t
The hunter cleans his gun
A sorrow from the gut
A tear from under your boots
The wildfire of consciousness
The boys were playing catch
I was reading and then I wasn’t
“Love is the flower of life
And blossoms unexpectedly
And without law”
Lawrence coughing it out
Summer/love
Enjoyed for the brief hour
Of its duration
I don’t know if anything matters when my neighbors who don’t look like me are devalued. This isn’t late breaking news for me. Here’s a poem about disability in America.
Walking around my study with a blind cast of mind…
I write in the mornings when the flowers are just ideas
The abiding chancel of Sunday is an idea
My dog sits beside the desk liking middle distance
I jot a few phrases—up river, low sun
Think of Allen Ginsberg who once touched my shoulder
This is a test of the emergency love system…
I’m testing a new way to post to WordPress as they’ve screwed up their editing portal rather royally.
My psyche is built of mordancy and keenness. I laugh oddly because I’m one of those souls who thinks playing chess by our own rules is truly funny. One of the highlights of my life was being allowed to spin Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel in the Museum of Modern Art. That was a Rabbinic moment for me—I was aging Adam and being granted one more look into Paradise.
**
Carl Jung said modern science tells mankind there’s no one looking after us, and so, accordingly, we’re filled with fear. I can’t explain my contrarian feeling—but I’m not afraid. I had one mother and one father and they were helpless people. I don’t need a heavenly father or mother. I’ll be happy to return to star dust.
**
So what makes me laugh my ass off? Greek poetry! Become what you are!
Some mornings I make up my own Greek poets. Here is the ancient poet “Hygiene”:
The drip of the bathroom tap
Morse code of a sort—
Wash your fingers separately
the gods say
But they don’t tell us why…
**
Mistakes are funny. I once stepped on a water lily. I was four years old. Stepped right out of the boat.
**
BTW—not very funny, but illuminating. The Brothers Karamazov and Carl Jung’s Psychological Types make excellent paratactic reading. I love it when books go perfectly together.
**
When the old queen dies, who will burn her secret, impious books?
**
Great moments from Auden:
“After Krakatoa exploded, the first living thing to return
Was the ant, Tridomyrex, seeking in vain its symbiot fern.”
**
Even in winter I dream of insects.
**
The able bodied people laugh at the infirm. This is because we’re still living in the Middle Ages. Science was working to pull us out, but the Cold War buffaloed the effort. It’s all darkness and lesser darknesses in the public mind. Science got slaughtered in its cradle.
There is nothing funny about this.
**
Here’s wishing you a neutralizing peace and an average disgrace, as Auden would say…
Planet of the Blind 