INDELIBLE BLUES

INDELIBLE BLUES

I fell into another kind of blue last night

& hung with the insomnian moon

My heart was like a bird lost in flight

I drifted alone in dreamless rooms

Caught in the embrace of the blues

The tv and I can’t sleep at night

And I hardly know how to begin

Naming my affliction despite

The fact that my heart is wearing thin

I crawled into the arms of the blues

If it would fix the situation

To battle the problem from within

I’d call a bluesman in for consultation

But the music’s gotten under my skin

I’ve slipped down the throat of the blues

Sometimes I leave my door open wide

Just to hear him play a note or two

Now there’s no place left for me to hide

For the song has left my mind askew

Surrendered to the law of the blues

I’m singing the blues solo at night

My foolish heart can’t take more abuse

The problem: the cure’s worse than the bite

I’m too old for bad love—what’s the use?

The bluesman’s given me the indelible blues

Coming home in the early dawn light

10/8/94

Treasures, Helen Ingersoll, Glenn Ingersoll, CPITS, Sebastopol Times letter to the editor

 

FEEDING THE MINOTAUR

FEEDING THE MINOTAUR

       Un lungo errore in cieco laberinto.

             —Petrarch

                            To John Oliver Simon

This is just to say that enroute

to the emergency meeting I was crucially lost

in the philosophical distance over bilateral

distinctions between the left and the right

exits for MacArthur Blvd., on the Nimitz freeway

wondering why travel required the ghostly benediction

of five-star generals; the army vs the navy.

Mapless, having destroyed all evidence of you,

I toured the burnt stubble of the Oakland hills

(thinking I was south of the border),

searching for the lost gate to 680,

onramps to nuministic labyrinths spiraling me

through the umbilical treachery of tunnels and fault lines,

always away from the source—

and time unrolled like an angry fuse down Telegraph.

Yes, every cell in our bodies having changed,

I wondered what the lesson was this time,

until I walked in Tobey’s door to see you,

my azul minotaur; I found the arbitrary red lines

and blue highways on the funereal map of reprieve.

I’d dreamed of hunting with women

who made their home on these street corners

beneath the sign of the horned Artemis.

Blame it on the undercurrent ballistics of the Piscine moon.

I’ve held both ends of the thread long enough, ready

to flee the purgatorial darkness; your hooves

having scrawled treaties of abandonment in the dust—

enough to bury us—except for that

small, final harvest taken

before the fall.

Tender enemy, once we had no need of threads

or mapping codes. Once I fed you late apples,

we practiced flight beneath the carnelian moon

and the gates of the garden moved open.

Thousands of angelitos singing in the trees.

The Southern Cross offering us up

before the rising sun.

9/20-22/94 Fall Equinox
1995 Maverick, Terrapin issue

sometimes my notes are little poems all by themselves.

WINE OVER GOLD

WINE OVER GOLD

               —for Sonny Lowe

This is just to say

I got it all wrong:

it wasn’t “Love, or money.”

A friend told me to choose

“Love over gold.”

Sure, love would be nice,

but I haven’t been off the farm so long

I can’t recognize a real gold mine

in a shade tree mechanic when I see it.

Getting my truck running again

is gold enough for me.

(For starters, such technical precision it took

smashing those solenoids with crow bars—

Perhaps more appropriate material

for matters of the heart.

Or is it faith?)

Yet we drink strong wine

from the shattered glass of courage,

and daily existence threatens

to run off at the mouth with a poem—

(the chances we each foolishly take).

Is there a Murphy’s Law for love?

Maybe Jim should’ve said,

“Wine over gold…” & just left

love out of the fucking equation.

9/17/94

BLUE MOON

BLUE MOON

She said ail the knowledge
we need is in our bodies.
The planets are lining up inside or us.
The earth is a medicine bundle.

There are more natural laws
that need rediscovering
the laws of horizon, of vortices,
of our need to breathe.

The deer beneath the buckeye
don't see the carcass
of their eventual death
sleeping under the tree.  

The limestone rocks hunger
for the touch of the sea.

8/31/94
Walker Creek Ranch

I feel lucky to have found this poem, no record, no efile, nada. Makes all this scanning madness worth it. Scanning jpgs is a pain. Added 3/18

THE SONG OF PASSING TRAINS

THE SONG OF PASSING TRAINS

           Before there was language

              the dream invented itself again and again

             giving us the binding thread.

Each night trains rumble and growl 

down the Feather River Canyon

like snorting bulls, or fiery dragons.

They do not want taming, but a virgin lap will do.

Real train lights, like moveable stars, 

                                 pulse through my dreams;

my neighbor Sonny and Elvis are jammin’ after hours,

riding the long groundswell and percussion of trains

to the harmonica singing of wheels and tracks

resonating like the mouths of finest crystal;

their curved song reverberates off slate walls.

I dream we clipped the talons of captive eagles,

showed them to the children, 

                   were responsible for their hunger,

the talons making small, dark crescent moons on the floor.

Sometimes the trains are like falling houses

coming barreling down the tracks,

leaving me alone with the eagles and children

(having swallowed the abortant too late)

while the men ride into the west making sweet music.

Too much moonlight on the canyon walls.

It begins with trout and bullfrogs punctuating the darkness.

Then, the deep rumble and moan, thrum and pulse

and the extraordinary singing of wheels—

as if shy angels only practiced with each passing train.

The river answers, slumbering gold in the deeper pools.

What survives are the angry red eyes of trains

dragging us into the well of night.

Each train wails along the canyon walls

of Las Plumas del Oro, stitching them like a shroud.

I stand on the rivershore, the unceasing faith of tides

pulls blood through my body, making love

to the song of passing trains.

8/23/94

Twain, CA

CALIFIA SPEAKS:

CALIFIA SPEAKS:

I did not choose this blanket of grass

or the slow fire of this golden heat.

My trees sink roots deep into my canyons.

They are my children.

I did not choose this deluge of rain,

nor the miners choking my rivers.

Why does the canal run south

for the border when so many

people want to come north?

Why do those red lines on maps

slice me from my first-born peninsula

and why does Baja speak

another language of salinity

the pickled tongue?

The myriad rivers

have lost their mouths

I do not understand this

preoccupation with separate things

when I roll out my wealth for all—

this golden wedding blanket,

this blue sea of the future,

these snowy peaks of the past,

the deep virgin lakes of my sorrow

the promise of my naked wealth

for all to see.

I did not choose this golden hoarde

to steal my hidden wealth;

leaving me vulnerable to the elements—

once my gold was gold enough for all.

8/16/94

CLIMAX ENDING

CLIMAX ENDING

Language comes to me

unadorned with the hypothesis

of roses before the fading

of summer’s rage.

In darkened rooms we lie

naked escaping summer’s

wrathful eye.

Cool nights offer escape

and I rewrite the poems that carry me

until the neap heat of midday;

words sensuously release the metaphors

until orgasm is the invisible line

a conclusion, an end stop—

to what isn’t written, not even hidden

characters to give away

the secret climax ending.

8/14/94

DOG DAYS OF SUMMER

DOG DAYS OF SUMMER

not                quite             noon

the temperature spikes                        another ten degrees

hammer in hand                 I can’t get these windows  open

in this august heat I think of how Tennessee Williams’ women

survived                     naked                               summer

regal liz  poor drowned natalie   vivian eternally blanche

in this three-digit weather                 we learn to appreciate

the minute increments toward                              body heat

    we depend upon the kindness of air            through lace

         and window screens                             stripped down

             the long vowels in sentences    into slivers of glass

           practiced stance in cold showers  

                                                               compared it to chi’i

ate raspberry sorbet at midnight               chewed our nails

                                                                    myriad tongues

of fans tasting the four directions                          for breath

  the pale aftermath of sky no white spaces between words           

                    our eyes covetously transgressed

     the condemned lintels            of imagination

                             and the desire for inspiration

                                                          we hung damp sheets

across doorways and windows bared our necks 

                                                                       to any breeze                      

                                                                                                                           .                                                                                 a truce

            said it’s the right kind of night for                a fire           

                                                                             or murder

           doppelganging in the canyons         the siren’s song

                                                          stitched into a shroud

the cats flopped down     blamed us for the heat       

at tailgate parties

we learned to foretell the future in ice cubes       

     we changed the lyrics  

        crushed mint beneath our heels   slept with the tvs on

          hoisted beer skyward                no one ever chooses

                their family                                neighbors or love

when the screen door slams      it’s not hypothetically measuring 

   the temperate distance between yes and maybe

my neighbor                 retrieves his small son from my bed 

reconciles             with his girlfriend

                        they stop by                     grab the ice chest

                                                                                               I crawl inside

                                     fall through the spaces between worlds

8/7/94

This had justified margins and was set up to look like lace. Doesn't exactly transfer here.

2001  Transfer Magazine, #82, Fall issue

Budapest, 1994

I play roulette with numbers for the grandmothers from the east that I never had; it’s all in my head. But not the numbers. Say them: 19, 45, 56, 68. Lottery or is it roulette? To be at home and at rest among the rubble.

Anna Kiss wrote how the fields became sad when they took away the men. The wind told her. After the war everything became unfamiliar to the survivors, and we, all of us, alive today, are survivors of war. Shell-shock, our inheritance. László said Anna was once so beautiful, he was shocked, she was a witch, a hag, he said.

Postcards from a massed grave. Franz Josef, WWI, Trianon, and the white terror of WWII. A generation without farewell, we were born into the world old. The politics of winter changes its mind, but the storyline remains the same. Snow, a symbol of the old guard mired in the mud, scent of leaves rooms filled with collected shadow mausoleums of the mind, becomes the bright talisman of the new guard.

Margít Island stripped bare of her trees. The soul scratching on the eyes of death. Sand, groin of the Donau, I can still see the outlines ofsoldiers. Occupation in any country, trees dumfounded by the fall. Escaped breath in winter’s kingdom.

Who reads the words of dove’s beaks, tulips, summer’s convulsive mouth. We hold our breath for the dead. Beds unmade by the sunlight. We drink Bull’s Blood, I think of Sandor Csóori’s fingertips blooming in the graveyards of resurrection.

Maybe in this forest someone stabbed a girl made of wax. Scorched voices of the candle flame. Who was talking about angels? I have not had to measure my life by the firing of guns, or the bearing of a son killed by war, any war. The winter death of my father buries me until mi yesd summer. My weapon is pen, film and paint. Who can speak all the names of the dead?

In dreams I find myself wandering along the Danube again, wondering whose life is vicariously living through me. Forints in the ash tray. I don’t smoke. Someone said, “Spiders are drawn to music.” They bite me when I move my poetry books, I become ill for the caretaking of words.

The leaf-hands of autumn knitted the smoke-laden sky’s sweater. I can learn to live with departure, and loss as a way of life. There is no other choice. I have never swam in the warm waters of Lake Balaton, nor have I measured the circumference of Szentendre Island, my notebooks having drowned in the thermal pools of Szechenyi Baths. My poor scalded words, a crude broth for an uncertain future. 

August, 1994

Intangible Instructions, version 2 and a half

There is always the desire to return. The tail of a blue fish emerged from her fingers, his arms were fins. Memories floated backwards in time to listen for the vestigial singing river in the dry riverbed.

 I never wanted the plane to land, but the Andes rose like a white dream to punctuate the sky. Faith in miracles. Here, Pizarro slept. There, Blake saw God in an apple tree. Time flowed backward, lined up like the homeless, like the basureños in makeshift houses along the Apurimac, or in Tijuana. Lined up like the locked eyes of death into the burning future on several continents.

Myth: I carried a new gift of life. In the end, memory fails. Conquistador y amor. In Quito, the snake dancer from the selva cursed me. The bridge at San Luis Rey failed me. Coltrane’s sax defines qualities of night but the doors are locked. The six-legged nightmare rides on the smoke. Ask me what this means, I cannot read history written in the smoke of the victor. Say that in Dubrovnik, Darrio City, Bagdhad, Blake’s London, or L.A. burning. Dante’s seventh circle.

The descending fog envelops our feet. A warning call clearing the double-vision down the canyon past temptation. A gorge divides water from water, brings it together again. Except in the L.A. river.

Do you know how to soar down through the dilemma, both following and leading? Counter-clockwise dance. Remembrance, resemblance. Which direction does the vortex choose? What carries us on and on? The child’s face buried in the moon’s path. White ravens wander through the empty streets of Cusco, Moscow, San Francisco. In every voice, in every mirrored face, the bell toils for them. We speak with our hands. The gift of hands offered language to the children.

She stored apples under her bed. Illicit money whispered in the palms, Feel me! The teeth of graveyards are built on this foundation: the tail of the 20th century rendered in the useless orchestrations of Oppenheimer’s regret. The eagle keening. Living art in empty sheets. Riderless horses. Where is Schrödinger’s cat? Pandora? The blind mouse sleeping on the back of a dead bird dreams of angels. Clear the shelves of omnipotent windfalls and quantum malignancy. The marriage hearse reinvents the mother. Death reinvents the mechanics of fear. Open the box. Not.

Fear of the scent of money, fear of poverty. Fear of the phone in the dead of night. Fear of not enough time to read the face inside the eye of night. Fear of repeating the past. I said I stayed in my dreams. Memorized floor patterns, but specific moments never came.

The hunter flame burned celluloid memory. Hopperesque scenes shot in black & white. The desire to return embedded in the fear of fear. Fear of not growing up. Fear of control. Fear of growing up and not being in control. Or of growing up and being in control. What if I ran away and no one stopped me? That moment of star-crossed thresholds.

Not saying, Now I lay me down to sleep. Saying, I see my future as nothing, becoming nothing. Becoming the breathing of the open door. The thrones of angels. Fish with the hearts of men. Each belabored breath blinded by the light, I open my eyes. Looking forward, looking back. My erotic dreams littered with scorpions. Carpe Diem. Descend with eyes open wide, like Beatrice.

Do you remember when we danced face-to-face? The way your mouth opened into my darkness. Blame it on Beltaine. Just a little more time. I wanted him out of my vocabulary and into a room with no walls. We swam to the ceiling. You flew into the light, grew fins.

We needed to rearrange definitions of speech, of forgotten rain. The dance continues. Kiss me while the bones of humanity learn how to sleep in open doorways, and eyes learn not to see.

They bathe in the streets where privacy is closest held, yet farthest away. To suckle memory. Whose tongue in my mouth? Por el loro, he said. Van Gogh’s sunflowers weren’t gold enough in the city of bankers.

I held a namesake lover who cried in front of Vincent’s Self Portrait. But my arms weren’t strong enough to hold back his madness. I thought of Rilke. Raucous words escape the phosphor screen, take flight, flock to the trees. The computer is the 13th muse.

Fear of his thoughts. Origins of a code tracking down my thigh. What I ought to have said. Or, if I said too much. Fear of my thoughts. Fear of the telltale beating of the apple heart. The heart of a stone beats once every 1000 years. Fear of finding the naked dawn descending the fire escape, each step of light defining the canyons of man. Fear of the raven on CúChulainn's shoulder.

Exponential dreams of sirens scream in prime numbers, the mellifluous sax, the real voice of street corners. Notes bleed from the page escaping a shipwreck of blood. Fear of blood enters into it, another equation. Fermat’s theorum the day before his death.What the raven whispered.

Fear the exponential division of prime numbers. The audience dreaming of an audience dreaming. Fear the agony of doors destined to be reduced to numbers. Fear the stairwells destined for darkness, stolen lives, stale smoke. On bulkheads facing the sea, and in stairwells facing dark alleys, fear the semen trapped or not trapped in translucent orbs, a tangible sign on all the continents.

 The bridge becomes a flamenco skirt for the moon. Whose father swam in the Amazon with the piranha? Who wears the moon’s mask?

Learn to describe doves, the twin orbs of a woman’s ass. The lover’s hand under my dress. No mermaid’s tail. Then the cunt. When I said love, I got religious. Learned to walk, then crawl. Desire silences the guitar strings with scissors. Think about post-modern love deconstructing beneath city clocks without hands. Orgasm is closest to art. I didn’t mention syringes or T-cells.

No need for voices from the void flung like arrows. Or the bell tower of the heart’s drum. What are we willing to accept? The clichéd rose asleep on the piano lid. Maxwell’s hammer descending in slo-mo. Kennedy shot again and again. Some are not yet dead. Others were never really alive. Fish trapped in the sheets. The approaching storm delivered in monotone. Or in natural speech.

Bukowski, dead. The TV channel-surfing in an empty room. Think of random blue noise as a way of life. Intangible instructions. Love’s fascism, asleep in a pool of blood, wants touching, stroking, punctuation. The restless sky mounts the moon.

When will blood learn how to become stone? Was it better than anything, walking on the moon? Were we ever in the garden? The endless pit? One thing is certain: Night is neither noble nor sacred; her indifferent legs are open wide.

1994, 2002

see also

SUNNY BLUES

SUNNY BLUES

I got the blues so bad, gotta get outa this town

The bluesman’s done gone and turned me down

Had a man in New York, another in Leningrad

Two more waited in vain for me by the canals of Amsterdam

When the bluesman turns you down, it’s more than bad

It’s pathetic. No need to leave town to find the blues

It’s got me here at home, right where I am

These blues have got me runnin’ around

The bluesman’s done gone and turned me down

And when he comes over to fix my brakes

I get lost in his naked hills and then I hesitate 

Maybe I’ll tool on down the road, go to Bolinas

get outa town just to save what’s left of my pride

Instead I feed him blackberry pie, pretend it’s all right

No need to leave town to find the blues

The blues’ve got me at home, right where I am

When Sonny plays the blues birds fall from the sky.

Is there nothing between us ’cept my imagination?

Maybe I’ll fly to Spain, I might go to Prague

I wanna say, “Take me for a ride, we’ll go whole-hog,

we’ll go dancin’, yeah, dancin’ in the rain

These blues have got me runnin’ around

The bluesman’s done gone and turned me down

I was too slow on the uptake, she who hesitates

is lost, that’s why I’m sittin’ here all alone

with no single man to call my own

What can I do but wait, dream about him all night long?

Or is he just another man who’d do me wrong?

No need to leave town to find the blues

The blues’ve got me at home, right where I am

I’ve been dreamin’ of scorpions & snakes

stung by the tale of his kisses, been staying up late

just to keep from dreaming that same old song

I neck with a bottle of wine, biding my time

take his kid blackberrying on the back roads of my mind

These blues have got me runnin’ around

The bluesman’s done gone and turned me down

I wanna feel his lips on my harmonica 

wiggle my hips and slide down his trombone

But he’s talkin’ to his new woman on the telephone

We’ll never make sweet music and a brand new song

or go dancin’ in the rain in Forestville

No need to leave town to find the blues

The blues’ve got me at home, right where I am

I like the way his mouth slides down that Mississippi harp

When he smiles at his new woman, it damn near breaks my heart

I got the blues so bad, don’t wanna be hangin’ around

These blues’ve got me runnin’ ragged into the ground

singin’ the place names of blue: indigo midnight prussian delf sky

I got the blues so bad, I gotta get outa town

The blues’ve got me at home, right here, right where I am

And I can’t ever sing him this sweet, sad song           

                                               

7/17/94

GALACTIC TAX

All this talk about neutrons and big lies
the explosion of stars and everything is questionable
even the rules-- but what does that matter
when the sky practices pulling on a taut skin
of blue ocean each morning changing it
for the pinholes of stars
when indigo leaks from the quiet summer
splendor of chikory by the dusty roadside  
and the sky is a dome
where Venus and Jupiuter burn holes
inro our consciousness as if there were no handholds
left upon this earth to hang a frail poem without words
at the debut of the first star each night
Venus eclipsed by the moon
Mercury too low on the horizon to see
an alien planet in the evening sky
I want to shoot holes in the Big Bang Theory
because my family spends time in the west
prospecting for musically honest pulsars
to peddle in the miserly warehouses
and bazaars of the spectrum
while I hunt for neutron stars
with my optical telescope
I sometimes nibble on sweetmeats
and sherbet madse by white dwarfs
and red giants
but the turbanned vulture of Allah
took all my dinars and jewels
of the spectrum
and I honestly can't say,
what universe we'll prospect next for dreams
because the radio telescope was reposessed
by the Crab Nebulae of the
Inter Galactic Revenue Service

date? saved 7/15/1994
probably a CPITS exercise
same date as Duncan Garrett poem

BLACKBERRY SONG FOR NATHAN

BLACKBERRY SONG FOR NATHAN LOWE

I have a friend

He’s only nine years old

We talk about the weather

And the reasons behind our fears                             

In the mornings we pick berries

And wipe away our tears

We tell each other the stories of who we were                           

Blackberries bleeding on our tongues

In those rolling hills where we’ve begun

He smiles at me

With his purpled teeth

Paints the face of the day with light

Rides his bike against the winds                                   

And the river forgets to sleep

The night never begins

We tell each other the stories of who we are

Blackberries measuring the depths of summer

In those rolling open hills we still remember

I want to tell him

No matter what our age

We’re all children deep inside

Still waiting for someone to play with

And the wind whispers inside our ears

Urging us to recount the myths

We tell each other the stories of what will be

Blackberries giving us sweet advice 

In these sheltering hollow hills of our lives

I’m not his mother

He’s the child I never had

I’ve got no one to call father

We pass the time eating blackberry pie           

And sometimes he calls me “Dad”           

Hawks scribe names across the sky           

He imagines the future as a blackberry patch

On the dirt roads of summer leading us back

         To those rolling open hills where he was born

7/17/94

WHO, INDEED

WHO, INDEED

Who is this beast breathing beside me
Like some long forgotten ancestor
Coming for recognition in the night
To give me new colors for dreams
That continue to shake me from the cradle
Where breathing came from
Beneath the skin of the ocean

DATE?
rev./saved 7/7/94

IN THE CLOUD FOREST

IN THE CLOUD FOREST

                           —for JOS

A través de la noche de piedra, déjame hundir la mano

y deja que en mí palpite, como un ave a mil años prisionera,

el viejo corazón del olvidado!

     —Pablo Neruda, IX, Alturas de Macchu Picchu

On the trail to Machu Picchu,

fire opened the door to memory.

Our eyes mirrored the struggle

of the selva’s final story in the cordilleras.

Smoke peddled light across the sky.

Speculatively met us at the pass

of the abandoned fortress, Huaylabamba,

with tarnished masks and season tickets.

Gave us ringside seats—our eyes fondled

the cleavage of the Andean night chained

in firecrested ruby and golden necklaces—

the angry mantle of a campesino’s escaped milpa fire.

Cut off from the wounded hems of snowfields,

and chained to the heights, we dreamed of baptism by fire,

meteors trapped within the smoking mirror of the sun,

and of honor among thieves in this crucible of silence.

We climbed the long ladder of the earth to balconies of the sky,

to draw cool air through Neruda’s wet shrouds,

to firewalk on the coinage of coals and seasoned stars,

and to navigate the adamantine flame of the Urubamba river.

We kissed the secret eyries of crowned solitudes,

we gathered orchids, we entered the shining path to the heart

of the city of stepped stone, we burned poems written in blood

on the intihuacana. We emerged unscathed only to lose faith,

we scattered our ashes to the wind for seven years.

Waited for something—anything—to happen;

perhaps an irrefutable sign from the gods.

7/6/94