Planet of the Blind

A trick, ostrich-fever, you don’t exist
You who stare, public transport
Passersby, if you live at all
You’re inches above the pavement.
You plow without recompense
The fields of your physiques—
Desperate like crows
Where the animal has fallen,
Worshipping where
The animal has fallen.
So you live in a yellow time
Of hunger and you don’t exist.
I walk among you
Without analogy
Though where the animal falls
You think you see me
I loosen every bond.

This morning I run backwards without history, free in the utopian wind that Rimbaud yearned for but never found. You have to know: sometimes words are secondary.

**

I call the ghost cat. He takes his time crossing the floor of memory. The ghost dog never left.

Note to self: never write “of course.’

**

Rimbaud: just another guy who got lost in his noggin.

**

Oh I love Rimbaud just as I love the ghost cat.

**

Question: why is the ghost cat “not” history?

Question: what do you feed a feline spirit? What prayer should we say over milk?

It comes down to mushrooms, it always does. A good soup. The steaming earth spoon by spoon. Give me the primitive dish.
And when I call to the gods may they smell them on my breath.

**

I’ll give you nothing if you’ll reciprocate. I carry zeros in a tiny velvet purse.

**

Before my mother became a full bore drunk she read Dracula out loud to me. Blind kid with photo-monster mommy.

**

Dracula, earth, mushrooms, scary mother, zeros in a little sack.

**

I do love the way Yeats believed in things.

**

My first footprints in snow of the winter. This has been a clumsy year.

**

I actually belong to the G. K. Chesterton society.

**

I recommend the Cremini mushroom.

Arvo Part on the Radio

You get one chance
But listening
You know it isn’t true
For the Gods come
Like winter smoke

So many ways
To enter the houses
Of the grass

Yes I want too much

For a brief hour
We play with silence
Throw our voices

Of chances
The gods have no use
Night coming down

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

Winter Baltic
Wonderful to be alive
How to say it…

Now it’s up to the winter trees to carry us. They stand sentinel. “Empty your pockets,” says the alder. In summer he was a foolish thing–a dunce–but now, shaking his last strained leaves he’s a genius.

Meanwhile post cards and letters to be gone through…

Christ I need a cup of tea.

A small spider walks across the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

Arvo Part playing on the radio.

I attended college from 1973 to 1978. I remember the dormitories as though it was yesterday. They were dank, cinder block affairs. Furniture was Army issue. The lounges were places for Stalinist electro-shock therapy. Sofas were covered with duct tape.

Crossing campus you’d find the gymnasium was much the same. You could smell decades of liniment. The showers seldom worked. And for the classrooms? Desks with graffiti. Cracked linoleum. Spastic fluorescent lights.

I’m one of those who never left the ivory tower. I’m a senior professor these days. I’ve watched with disapprobation as higher ed has fought a space race for “the country club campus” with “lazy river” swimming pools, rock climbing walls, Hilton-esque residence halls, gourmet dining, celebrity concerts, and of course, stadiums and arenas fit for professional sports.

Tuition at the private college I attended was roughly $3000 per year in 1975. This adjusts to $14,000 today. That same college now charges over $50,000 a year.

College administrators know that the lion’s share of tuition doesn’t go to faculty salaries and programatic support. COVID-19 is bringing the chickens home to roost. Students and their families were willing to money up exorbitant tuition dollars when they paid for the Club Med experience promised them by campus tour guides. Minus the resort they don’t want to pay for classes and academics.

I believe that even after we’ve come through the virus crisis students and parents are going to want a change in how tuition dollars are spent. I think students who are willing to live as I did would cheerfully pay less for the on campus experience. One should have the option of living on campus while paying nothing for the frills. If you’re really resort minded you could pay a day fee. Students should not have to bear the costs of irresponsible luxury appointments on today’s campuses.

After hours of reading alone I take to counting on my fingers the random things known to children—dogs I’ve owned or known; automobiles I’ve seen in person; best arias by Verdi. Outside rain brings down the last October leaves. I’m up to my ring finger. The first October I remember was in Helsinki. There was a reindeer wearing pajamas in the market square. 

“It takes so little to make me happy tonight!
Four hours of singing will do it, if we remember
How much of our life is a ruin, and agree to that.”

Excerpt From: Robert Bly. “The Night Abraham Called to the Stars.”

Listen pal, don’t bother me. I’m trying to remember how much of my life is a ruin. I think I’ve got it right. 65 per cent. I’m agreeing to that.

So it’s love among the ruins; dancing in the fallen temple of Hermes; waving my skinny arms at the moon and shouting “what have you done with Lorca?” 35 per cent…

Factor in my age. At 65 I’ve got actuarial creep. Is my 35 per cent still solid?

“Just agree your life is a ruin and you’re alright,” I say.

I write a poem:

Ode to the World

I am at my best when writing
And the Devil take the hindmost.
You know, I was a worm
Before I was a man
And the Devil take the hindmost.
Sunset at the shore
Feeling the pulse
In my wrists
And so forth
All for the Devil.
Of the worm
Call him an accountant—
Shuffling zeros.
Such a steep hill
We’re climbing.
I can’t love you all
Any more than this.