Last Night in Bed

I heard rain slash through the woods
behind the house and pound
the ground and pelt the windows, gushing down

the roof into the gutters, rattling them
while the eaves creaked in the wind like a mind
straining to focus one last time

on an idea it can no longer remember, and it was then
lying in the dark
between sleep and wakefulness, that I heard

not only the rain’s wildness
but also the simplicity of its rhythm and how
in the midst of all this

barely discernible
was the sound
of mud sliding down the east slope

into the driveway
with the ease of a thought coming to rest
at just the right level.

Poetry Man after applying graf decal at Korean War Memorial, Philadelphia

Captain Necrophiliac Music Video Available

The following link connects to the Captain Necrophiliac music video (6 minutes long) at OurStage, a video posting site --

http://www.ourstage.com/video/channel/8-music-videos/EENLNZUMZMUJ-captain-necrophiliac

The song's printed lyrics are also available at OurStage at

http://www.ourstage.com/video/channel/8-music-videos/CCGLANXBVDJX-captain-necrophiliac-lyrics

Capt. Necrophiliac & the love of his life (from "Capt. Necrophiliac," a music video slideshow)

Thoughts while Walking in the December Woods
for Phil Goldstein

1
The year’s first snowfall is light, almost
gone before it lands. Still
it leaves white patches here and there
on the ground, signs that something
has happened.
Nothing significant, however, stems from this, no
new insight, no rethinking of old thoughts.
The fact that there’s a little snow is all there is
to hold onto.
And the crows, noisy no matter what.

2
Leaves rot on the ground just to the north
of the clearing with spruce seedlings. Where the path
winds downhill toward the creek, white
may-apple flowers bloomed all over in spring.
The wind’s biting. Roots
bared in one spot twist back in another
into the dirt, like meaning
in the hands of a liar.
The season of frog footprints on rocks is over
beyond the candidates’ voices.
If you kneel down here, language grows simpler:
a few acorns in different stages of decay, a few sticks.
Crossing the wooden footbridge over the creek
leads more soldiers than you can imagine
back to Kampot near the Gulf of Thailand.
When I was a kid, I was told the story
of King Nebuchadnezzar, how, lowering
his dirt-smeared face
to the ground, he ate grass among cattle.
Near that same spot not long ago thieves fled from old buildings with treasures in their arms
while miles away ashes drifted
above the river.
Going uphill into the wind, I think
all praise to the fucking of decorum.
“Speak civilly,” I’ve been told more than once.

3
As the sky darkens, its blue deepens, not
like a thought growing richer with refinement, but rather
like something fading away – for instance,
the child in the news the other day, the one
who fell into the reservoir and drowned.

The sky’s blue is falling, too, into its own darkening. It’s about
to leave itself behind.
Life will go on.
People navigate the internet.
The wind, screaming between the trees, will keep
me awake.

Tomorrow we’re supposed to have a few inches of snow.
I wonder what that will be like.

Please see the links below:

Essay Publication & Pushcart Prize Nomination. This link connects to "Eating It All: Empathy, Thematic Range & Antiwar Poetry" which appears in the just-released winter issue of The November 3rd Club Journal. The journal's editors also nominated it for the Pushcart prize in nonfiction.

Going No Place in Order to Move Forward. This link connects to a new essay. As an essay it's not completely traditional since it includes poetry and and also employs graphics in its attempt to communicate. It also includes a 9 Inch Nails music video.

Recent Online Works & Other Selections. This link connects to a selection of my recent online publications and other projects -- e.g., poetry, graphitti words and art, essays. Among these projects is Aging But Still Kicking: Selected New Poems (2002-2007), a collection of about 80 poems which I recently compiled as part of an effort to organize my work.

(untitled)

Click here for larger picture.

(song fragment)

You cheated yourself you are no good
smearing dove’s blood on the rabbi’s Talmud
That penis in a psycho Cadillac
that hero by the name of Captain Necrophiliac
has won your heart after proving he was a man
by fucking dead ladies at a bombed wedding in Afghanistan

(untitled)

Click here for larger picture.

"Always enough light, 3rd St."

Click here for larger picture.

from Going No Place in Order to Move Forward (words and graphics)

Decal title: “Photo at sunset of the central stained glass window in the DuPont Evangelical Cathedral of Moloch built following WWI at Pierre S. du Pont’s Delaware estate”

Click here for larger picture.

Below is “Moloch’s Prophecy,” a poem from a second decal that was designed to go with the stained glass one.

Moloch’s Prophecy

Boil the dead’s sinews
in foxholes foaming
like vats of blood in Lancaster’s slaughter houses
to the west
then feed me
& I will make your gardens bloom
& parade you like a king
in & out of Edens the frightened flee from
because of the bones that
like lit incense sticks left unattended
in an agnostic monk’s cell
set the mattress on fire, after which
the monastery burns
prayerfully to the ground!

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An Afterward to the Above

Moloch is mentioned in the Christian bible as the God of the Ammonites. I first learned this when I was young, brought up as I was in a strict Christian household in which bible discussion and Old Testament lore were an integral part of daily life. When as a boy I heard that Moloch's worshippers allegedly made human sacrifices, I was fascinated, as children often are, by the story's goriness. Of course, as I grew up, that fascination faded as do many youthful interests. Still, the Moloch myth remained somewhere in my consciousness and occasionally returned to memory when something reminded me of it -- for instance, I found references to Moloch in the works of both Gustave Flaubert and Allen Ginsberg and also in John Milton's Paradise Lost (although Milton had a somewhat different take on Moloch). At any rate, when recently rereading some notes I'd taken a number of years ago on how Pierre S. du Pont's sale of explosives during WWI helped to fund the development of his now-famous Longwood Gardens, I was struck by the idea (employed in the above poem and also in the stained glass window graphic)of Moloch as a god to whom the powerful sacrifice our young (i.e., in their role as soldiers) during war so that a pleased Moloch will then bless them (the powerful) with beautiful gardens and life's other wonders.

The following passage, which like the graphic and poem above is also from Going No Place in Order to Move Forward, summarizes part of the history of Pierre S. du Pont and Longwood Gardens:

Not only did Pierre S. du Pont help oversee the DuPont Co.’s transformation from an explosives producer to a manufacturer of a more diverse product line, he also headed General Motors for 8 years, strengthening it economically. By the time he stepped down from the General Motors post, the company had become the biggest corporation in the U.S.

But Pierre was more than just an industrial powerhouse, he was also a devoted gardener. Exactly at what point gardening became an obsession with him isn’t known, although it was prior to WWI, since it was during that period that his talent for garden design became obvious as he transformed his estate into a horticulturist’s dream, erecting 6 acres of greenhouses and filling them with the most exotic vegetation. He loved the idea of beautiful plants from different climates and countries blooming in the monastery-like silence behind glass walls. To make his gardens complete, he imported a bell tower from Europe and constructed an open air theater for visitors. Altogether his gardens and estate covered over a thousand luxurious acres with much of the horticultural work being funded by the mills of which he was part owner. Although the U.S. wasn’t yet a WWI combatant, Pierre’s mill earnings skyrocketed because of (a) explosives sales to Britain and other allies and (b) the fact that the production of smokeless powder, for which he was a patent holder, had multiplied by leaps and bounds. This allowed him to freely indulge his hobby, gardening. Therefore, a certain percentage of each dollar that he earned from selling explosives to combatants went toward the purchase of a new Chinese cherry tree or Peruvian orchid or some other flora for his self-created paradise: Longwood Gardens.

Meanwhile Pierre complemented his role as a major manufacturer with another role: that of superpatriot. Prior to the country’s entrance into the war, Pierre established himself as a bona fide Yankee Doodle Dandy by marching his DuPont company employees down the street while making them chant pro-war slogans. The dovetailing of patriotic enthusiasm and manufacturing genius proved to be a windfall: from 1914 through 1916 the Du Pont Company's smokeless powder production capacity rose from 8.4 million pounds per year to 290 million pounds per year, an increase that was in good part paid for by $100 million from the British government after a Du Pont executive informed them, "We can produce the explosives you need . . . but only if you assume the financial risks of an emergency expansion. I repeat, it's your war, and the risks must be yours!"

The deal went through. From that point on, the DuPont Company's financial prospects were permanently entangled with the fate of Britain and her allies against Germany. Consequently, the mounting Du Pont clamor for U.S. entrance into the war was no surprise. The larger the attack on the enemy, the larger the amount of money to be made.

Longwood Gardens bloomed.

Decal / Self-Portrait with Poem / 10.5" x 8"

Click here for larger picture.

Decal text is as follows:

Title: Although loved in my house, the walls protect no one

Dedication: for Suman

Poem:

A cold November rain
knocks oak leaves to the ground.
If you cross the turnpike & climb
to the top of the landfill, you can see
the river & how the rain, beyond
the chemical plant, beats
the water into a gray froth.
A whale glided into these waters once, bewildered
unlike us with our
digitalized navigation systems.
Here is the Delaware & here its tributaries
with their occult bridges over which we can walk
into other people’s lands & take what we want & come back
with a new appreciation
of Mesopotamian coin-minting processes
or something like that.

"Tina / Portrait of a Beginning" (Detail), Makos Bar & Grill, 3rd & South St., Philly

Click here for larger picture.

Request . . . If anyone runs into a technical problem while trying to leave a comment under one of my posts, please contact me at rebsalerno@comcast.net. I mention this because someone wrote me today indicating they'd had such a problem. I need to know if this is a minor or major issue. Thanks.

Lum's Pond Jetty: Even at the beginning, it is getting late

9 Inch Nails video (1994) / "Hurt" / Silhouetted fan fist lower left while Joshua tree forms on screen above it a little further left

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Trent Reznor (lower right), 9 Inch Nails (same video) / Singing "Hurt" before giant screen

Made a few more minor changes to theWall Words slideshow.

In the Wall Words slideshow that is linked in the previous post, I've posted a revised right panel for the Gangsta piece.

Note: All texts, graphics & background info for "3-Part Gangsta America Vision Rah-Rah" are now online

Follow this link and you will connect to Wall Words, a short introductory slideshow about my graffitti. By clicking the thumbnails in the show's right column you will jump to the relevant image or text.

About 2/3 of the way down the thumbnail column, there is a white-on-black text thumbnail immediately after a fire-orange thumbnail with a 2-stanza poem at the top. The black-and-white text thumbnail begins a 14-slide sequence that provides all the graphics and texts for "3-Part Gangsta America Vision Rah-Rah," a few images of which I posted below yesterday and the day before.

As always, any comments are welcome.

Below are larger (than previously posted) copies of the graphics in each of the panels for "3-Part Gangsta America Vision Rah-Rah for the Santification of Your Mama."

Unfortunately, they aren't large enough to read the writing within the graphics, nor have I posted legible texts of the poems that are supposed to be dirtectly beneath the graphics. Hopefully I'll solve this later today (tomorrow) by posting a link to a slideshow selection of my graffitti work that will include all the triptych's wording and graphics as well as some background information about its creation. Since the graphics and wording were conceived together and are part of each other, the idea of presenting one without the other isn't really the best idea, but I wanted to give some indication of what I'be been up to and after reading Paula's note today I figured I'd post the graphics now, then try to get everything else up later.

So, I hope the images below give at least some idea of what I've been doing until I'm able to present the whole piece in a more organized way.

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Title: "3-Part Gangsta America Vision Rah-Rah to Sanctify Your Mama"

Size: When all 3 sections/panels (each section includes a graphic and, below it, a poem) are assembled together, the total size is 58" x 35".

Later today or tomorrow I'll post more details and also clear pictures of each panel and the accompanying writing.

Finally got it / triptych title (for a new work):

"3-Part Gangsta America Vision Rah-Rah to Sanctify Your Mama"

Wino Crashpad Museum: One-Man One-Work Show

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Graffitti decal (16" x 10") on wall

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Text of Poem ("Arnessa Is a Righteous Babe")

Munson after Johnny’s Arrest

Yeah. I read it in the newspaper. It said
you were caught when you lost your footing
by the river while barreling through a dense stretch of blackberry and wild yew.
I know the place, not far
from Yarnall St. with its
weed-overgrown yards and not a kid in sight for years.
About the time they took you away handcuffed I was hunched on a rock watching gulls glide above the Barry Bridge.
The next day when I read “indecent exposure”
I thought who gives
a shit?
Hell, if I was a dollmaker I’d build an old man doll and insert
little pieces of black thread
in its nostrils for hair
or maybe I’d make me
a stillborn fetus doll wearing
a NASCAR ballcap --
why the hell not?
Yeah, yeah, I guess somewhere there’s a line between farting and shitting in your pants
but a guy can’t spend his whole life worried sick about it.
You know, one night I had a dream
in which I broke into the county hospital and stole
the flesh the docs cut out to make a hole
in my daddy’s throat 3 years ago --
or was the hole in somebody else’s throat, maybe my brother Jimmy’s?
I’m not sure why I can’t remember, I wasn’t
you know
born unclear, but everything’s blurred together now, the morning walk
to 6th grade ends up at the bar instead and when
I cut my face shaving the blood drips
and soon it’s up to my waist and because
I can’t remember how to swim I yell
for Mr. Jacobs, the gym teacher, which is when
I wake up, but the bed
isn’t there, only
the river is and I’m already
10 feet down, sitting at a water-rotted kitchen table reading how
you got dragged away two days ago, only
to be freed a few hours later because
they’d arrested the wrong John Oliver, you being
the out of work pipefitter one, not
the out of work boiler house one, which is interesting
or so it seems to me anyways
because I like a world in which there are still
at least a few distinctions to be made.

Graffitti decal / 8" x 10.5"

Text in above image:

Siege

A camel finds grace in its ungainliness,
a river achieves beauty in spite of its sludge.
Similarly, an Empire's people, mired in failure,
find in debasement the beginnings of nowledge.

No time for excuses now, strike the match,
ignite the fuse with fiery realities! --
burn “Today!” on the Bill of Rights,
pass the torch around, return the Tigris to Iraqis.

Graffitti decal / 5" x 5.25"

Above text:

wall words for al-Hallaj

i slammed
iss lam
then after somebody slammed
my own "i am"
i wondered why i'd slammed
stuff i didn't understand

salaam aleicham! it's the trooth --
the sufi's heart pumps the milkweed's juice!
meanwhile papa's punk street-choir
makes music from the end of Empire!

Graffitti decal / 10" x 6"

White text at bottom says:

America, listen -- the worm will leap up out of the ground & devour the robin

Graffitti decal / 8.25" x 10.75"

White text above reads as follows:

Beaten to Life

When Joe F. the cop punched me repeatedly in the jailcell years ago, he beat me so bad that I fell apart & spilled on the floor like a bunch of tiny seeds which later the janitor flung out the door into a patch of soil in the back alley.

Rather than straightening me out, the thrashing made me love life’s dark side, the dirt of things, even more than before. & so from then on every time I got drunk and blacked out, I praised my hero Satan for letting me be both the seeds and the dirt-pile from which the seeds sprouted.

For years I felt happy like this even when I was strung up and mocked by the Hospital’s guards.

As I grew older, however, I became calmer, more focused, my humor matured.

One day during this period in my life, I disguised myself as a chrysanthemum, accosted aging Joe F. on the street & teased him by saying I wanted a quickie with him behind a nearby building. When he started slobbering, I led him by the hand into the darkness where I suddenly ripped off my mask and told him who I really was. Then, announcing that I had become a professional gardener, I stuffed so many flower and vegetable seeds down his throat that he finally choked to death.

Life sure can be funny. Just look at the irony of poor Joe’s life. He turned me into a gardener, then I turned him into a garden! Soon he’ll sprout morning-glories and string beans.

Sweet Jesus, please bless my efforts to prettify & feed America. The anticipation makes my dickie quake!

Another poster-sized (12.5" X 17") graffitti piece

Since all the text isn't legible above, here's the wording --

a. Top left (gray lettering):

Only those who seek
will find

b. To the right of "a" above (white lettering):

. . . the birth of the Age of Anti-Miracles
has already begun!

c. The wording beginning with the red "Ethel Rosenberg" is:

Ethel Rosenberg,
ressurected, reappears
in her dynastic electric chair.
Her swaddled, newborn hand
teaches the hawk to love the hare
as rioters re-take the land.

d. Top right (white lettering):

I am that which the mediocre moment replaces.

This means:

I'm the dark hair assaulted by the blond hordes
I'm what the boring life buries
I'm that which fear was invented to keep you from
I'm the history that history was written to kill

e. The "giants" quote which begins the text toward the bottom of the poster is from Blake.

"The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence"
will once again walk the earth

f. The 3 faces gazing from behind city buildings are from left to right:
(1) Big Bill Haywood, (2) David Walker, (3) Harriet Tubman.

After being away from the blog for most of August for a variety of reasons, I'm back. Here's one of 5-6 graffitti pieces I've been working on over the last 2 weeks. This one is poster sized, 12" x 18".

If red text above isn't legible on your screen, it says:

Sarcasm Song

Yo zippity a-go-go
I loves to bone the Queen of Empire
She lets me chill & pays the bill
for my beautiful telescope of razor wire

Begun while Listening to the Invasion

I love the drums. Theoretically. But the pounding
hurts my skull now.
Tim’s voice fades into
the silence between songs, as if
he’s walked down the hall into another room. I know
this place. Below
on the sidewalk, someone, stooping
in front of a barred store window, pulls
a shoelace noiselessly through an eyelet
while a car passes quietly under the El
2 or 3 miles from Aunt Lydia’s favorite bowling lanes.
Now another summer.
I remove the earphones and hear
the clothesline pulley creaking in 1961
when I awoke hungover in a walkup with walls thinner than the slash
between and/or.
Always with my eye on something just around
the corner, I strutted
even after telling anybody who’d listen
I didn’t have the cash to buy back the last air bubble
floating up from the bottom when Owen drowned.
Years later on a snowy corner DeeDee slammed the car door
in my face, showing me I could stay
and still disappear.
It doesn’t matter how the light falls nicely
on lavender coneflowers in the backyard now.
They’re ugly.
Forgiveness may find them one day
but not with help from me.

Announcements

1. Dead Drunk Dublin, the Irish zine, has just published 9 of my poems as well as one prose piece, Prefatory Notes to Whatever Happens.

2. Eating It All: Empathy, Thematic Range & Antiwar Poetry is an essay that recently exploded out of me in response to a whole constellation of events, most of them pertaining to the issue of literature's relationship to society, particularly at this time of Washington's imperial arrogance and literature's (actually poetry's) lack of anything other than the most tepid responses to the ever-deepening crisis. I want to thank Teresa White for triggering my thoughts on these matters and Sharon Doubiago for being a wonderful soul companion in discussing these issues. You can read the piece by accessing my Recent Works Online page and clicking the appropriate link there.

3. Drum Summoned is a multimedia piece consisting of images, spoken poems and drumming that I originally developed for MiPo Radio. Unfortunately, because of technical reasons, Didi Menendez was unable to upload the piece at the MiPo site. However, as above, it is available by accessing my Recent Works Online page and clicking the appropriate link.

If you would like to read the poems that are recited in the multimedia piece, you can view the texts by clicking p. 2 below.

Pages: 1 2

Words for a graffitti decal:

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The wondrous unreality of the real.

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Fuck with life & in the end life will fuck with you.

Ah Lily Lil Lilith
sucker of pigs knuckles stolen from old jars . . .
Adam’s first wife
Mrs. Banned-from-the-Bible . . .
Everybody has a story Lil
I just happened to start with yours

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Youth & the Way of the World

Legs spread, what we have
is the opening as paradox:
a toothless hunger, acidity like sugar.

"Where's my bowl of chicken noodle soup?" it softly asks,
wanting a nourishment
Bobby didn’t know he was supposed to give.

Snow drifts against the basement apartment’s window.
In a blizzard what we find
isn’t always what the local handicappers prophesied.

Evening. Before beer.

The Walk

The light, unmoved
by our final push
into it. You laugh when the patch

of wild daises
by the woods' sun-drenched edge
parts. A path

cuts through the trees into a field. In it
is inside you. A dragonfly
zigzags above

nearby thistles. The breeze
on my back tells me
what to do. Light quivers

in the sweatbeads on
your upper lip. Now
doesn't stop.

Mary Sizemore with Her Husband Jim Sitting next to Her

It's hardly noticeable, y’know. Look how, slowly, first
from one, then another, sunlight fades
from the maple's leaves outside
the window, but the kids'
voices, well, they remain, only not so clearly but
more like fuzzy sound fragments
from a radio station with a weak signal
in a snowstorm north of Idaho Falls
where I was born. Listen how
the children play
outside in a disappearing light that doesn't
take them with it, although
soon what we can see of them is replaced
by a memory of what we once saw of them before
they grew up and left while the shutters sagged
on their hinges and we waited
here in the living room, wondering what
happens next.

Traveling Carnival

On the road's shoulder
across from the old fire house
daylilies wet from an earlier rain, and in

a nearby field the house
of mirrors reflects
distorted torsos while outside, far

beyond the sideshow mob, bald Mueller
who for years
worked the steampress in Irrgang's

Tailor Shop, strolls along
a street, exhaling
smoke at tree branches

and wondering why
the July yards, with their night birdbaths
and baseballs forgotten

in grass, mean
nothing to him now near the vacant lot
next to the lumber yard, which he once liked

to wander past on nights like this
although now, seeing it, he views it
differently than before although he still

remembers how, a few years after
the Louden Home burned and Maggie Losie
began working the candy counter

in the store at Park
and Ireland Place, the strongman
didn't depart with the carnival but

stayed on instead at the Narragansett Inn
until he finally coaxed the Warren fellow
to leave with him.

In a letter last week about Ellora, Dilip Meka asked me as an aside if I had stopped doing graffitti poems. He asked because he hadn't seen any posted on the site in a while.

As I told Dilip, No, I haven't stopped.

In fact, here's a graffitti sticker (8.5" X 11") I did for July 4.

Just in case the sticker's text isn't as legible as it should be on your screen, below the title the wording is:

"America's oldest catering service. 1-212-456-1414"

And then:

"Get off your ass! Contact us for your July 4th repast!"

And then:

"Independence Day Special

A 16 oz. American christflesh steak
along with all the lamb’s blood you can swallow
is all it takes to change your fate
& turn you into a good Christian gal or fellow.
Then you’ll be in fashion, aglow with newfound piety
& entitled, cuz of your salvation, to slaughter Iraqis.
O it’s July 4th so bang freedom’s drum
while gorging on delights from Jehovah & Son!"

Lynn’s Poem

Daylit bluestem better unseen.
I turn away from the evening doe.
The wine almost gone.
The children’s bickering never ends.
A year ago someone died.
It doesn’t matter who.

Twice

In sync with Alverez, the wind
in Lao Cay parted tall grass
then stopped. Further ahead

the bamboo thicket's stillness was like
the imagination on Demerol. It

was from there the sniper
pulled the trigger, getting Alverez
in the chest. Years later

the sniper shoots me too, hitting
what I think I know but don't: your body's
feel, the way

your hip slopes down toward something just beyond
my reach, not

only your leg, but also
everything else, all unknown. The wind
blows again. Alverez

is still. Barely
a memory anymore. the corpse becomes
a metaphor for something less, the end

of an affair, a lost fuck.

Two photos of Belen Palacios in performance.

Note: Palacios is a member of the 9-women Venezualen singing and percussion group, Eleggua, which is dedicated to highlighting the African legacy that lives on in much Venezualen music. Palacios, now 73 years old, is often referred to as the Queen of the Quitipilas, a tube-like bamboo percussion device.

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Poem from 1983 Notebook

There’s no justice, only
chainsaws and red flowers, or
as tonight
moonlit roofsnow west of Rt. 9
& ice on the collapsed dock
near Diamond Oil.
Gothenburg seamen helped build a colony here, naming
the water Christina, after a 12-year-old.
Sometimes a drunken man, slumped
over an oak table, face
in a plate of hardening venison grease,
spoke to the unforgotten in his sleep.
The night drumming from outside
the stockade fence didn’t wake him nor did
the copperhead waiting
among the flowers
where nuance evolves into fate.
As the sun rises & the snow
brightens, I lean against the car hood, staring
at the cemetery next to Old Swedes Church.

The Day after Another Return

I ate stewed turnips for lunch
which reveals nothing at all about
what I thought of while eating them, they were
so stirred and smooth like
everything that’s passed along these days
as wisdom. But it was
the woman I noticed, sitting
on a low cement wall across
the street from the window, how
she watched very intently, with
obvious disgust, as
the pigeon in the gutter pecked
at something while she
scowled. I could actually
see her thinking then, as she
wondered how in God’s name
it could possibly matter
over the long haul
if a person
killed a dove or two just for the hell of it

Bone

The dog eats it in the grass behind the house.
His teeth clack against it
as he tries to get the marrow.
He is the Holy Ghost hollowing out a tunnel
from here to there, both locations being
components of the same place.

The bone is less than the invisible which spawned it, unless
it is the invisible which spawned it.
I am the dog who gnaws the bone
in the grass behind my home.

Spirit bone
spirit bone
you are the only meal required

Spirit bone
spirit bone
you are the reason why
I won't cry at the moon tonight

Announcement: New Article Published in Avatar Review

For anyone who's interested, my article "Studying the Undefined: Scattered Notes on the Way to and from Ellora" is in the current issue of Avatar Review. Click here to read it.

The article is about the 1500-year-old religious sculptures in the Ellora caves in the western part of the Indian state of Maharashtra. Additionally, the article contains autobiographical sections that detail some of the experiences that have shaped my artistic views over the decades.

Note: The photo and poem below are part of a larger multimedia piece, Drum Summoned.

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Focus 2

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Focus

The eye, an immigrant that travels
to more than one place at once, arrives
at the ruins. Arrival here doesn’t mean

conclusion but rather
the start, as usual, of another trek, having been
through this before, chased

from other locations for vagrancy & listening
to those who point out where new stalks
shoot up through rubble . Everything, even

the screams in the streets, teach
the eye how to live. Holding
things close, it shows love by staring

at them until it finds the spaces between
their atoms and can see straight through
to the other side

where the destitute angrily assemble
outside the landowner’s grain bins
while miles away the wild boar looks for its jungle.

Babi's Granddaughter

The Significance
for Robert Pinsky

On a rainwet street. That’s where
you saw it. The slate shingles
on the roof

of your mind glistened in that
in-between light, as you, opening
up with

first knowledge, became
what you weren’t,
the

street itself with wind-
beaten canvas awnings flapping
over storefronts that

even now have
doorknobs which offer
themselves up for grabs. But the cars

they’re what
fascinate you most, how they
still cruise decades later into

the distance, beyond this block, beyond
first memories, beyond
everything you know for certain that

you are. The vehicles disappear. The rain
grows heavier, wilder, you say, like
panic flailing in the emptiness. For you

nothing is left now, the nothing, or at least
this is the dread evoked
at the end

of your poem, as if
history ceases wherever
the sentimentalist's memory stops.

Dharti Ma / My Sketch of a Drawing Originally Done by a Man from Amboli

*

Below: excerpt from "Dharti Ma," a Bhil tribal song (translated by Randhir Khare)

You are everywhere, mother earth,
You are within and without,
Above and under,
Your temple is this glowing world
No one can tear asunder

Kiran in Floodlights behind Abandoned Pump Factory
from Portraits of the Immediate / a picture and word sequence

It’s all
out of proportion,
the flowers too big & the sky
too close for comfort. Weeks ago
a bunch of locals stripped the boy’s uncle
& forced him to parade naked through the village
for stealing a woman’s marriage necklace.
Kiran Kiran where is your mother & the goats
she’ll graze on the ridge in the morning?
You smile by the bushes now as if
no mosquito bite has ever bothered you.
I love how the night, bigger
than it looks, stretches further than
from one ear to the other.
The bright darkness is more than enough light for creatures like us.

Kiran in Floodlights behind Abandoned Pump Factory

Intimacies
for Suman

The house and the body, both have many rooms. Some rooms
have rooms inside them, and inside those rooms
are other, tinier rooms.

Our hands are keys fitting into locks.
Which one of us is matter, which antimatter?
We approach a wall with windows. They are
the gigantic magnifying lenses of telescopes.

Now we know more than the star charts know. We are flying.

body craves hot sunlight
it needs moonlight too
& the flesh ain’t got no hole
that don’t know bout mornin dew

Gift

I wrote a poem in my head
one night last week while lying
under the bedsheets before
falling asleep, but

in the morning when I woke up
the poem was gone and there was only
lots of
light outside the window, almost

too much. As serious
as I am about
so many things, I’m still
like a kid sometimes and so

since all I wanted to do that morning was
fuck off
that’s what
I did, going

downstairs in
a hurry in order to
eat a chocolate bar while running
around the yard with Siva, the dog.

nonetheless

-- in there, inside
her belly, having
chanced upon

a mode of growth beyond gills and
the genetics of
a snake's slithering,

finally it's
on its way, a little
mister or miss, the fetus

at last
of age, slipping
forth now and plagued

the moment it hits the light
with a case
of the uglies while wailing

its head off, un
able yet
to talk but still

an artiste of free
association when
it comes to

peeing and shitting any
time any place in spite
of not knowing, basically, a

goddamn thing, which is why
although
evolution's real

it's value isn't
very clear
and yet

today while walking
down the street I felt
happy nonetheless

After Hours: Stalking the Real
Episode #10 available from MiPo Radio
includes selections from The Body's Creeds

MiPo Radio has released the 10th episode of my podcast radio show, After Hours: Stalking the Real.

To hear the show, go to Robert Bohm / MiPo Radio. From the page, you can access the program in one of 2 ways --

1. To access via iTunes, click the iTunes button in the black bar beneath my photo and the text that accompanies the photo.

2. To access directly from MiPo Radio, scroll down toward the bottom of the page and click on the gray mp3 button immediately below the "~Episode #10~" title.

I'd appreciate it if you'd listen and spread the word about the program to those you know.

To hear MiPo Radio podcasts from other writers, go to the MiPo Radio page .

Thanks,
Robert

What I wrote Sunday night (see the May 6 post below, the part beginning "One word describes") about seeing isn't something most poets would disagree with. Nodding yes robotically to the notion that one of poetry's jobs is to see the world freshly is a requirement if you want the official poets to acknowledge you as one of them. Too bad their idea of seeing the world freshly is so circumscribed. They want you to see the tulip with militant clarity and they want you to construct pyramids of oddball images in your attempt to express lucidly the disorientation you experienced when your mother, after giving you an enema at age 12, got all weird on you and started sucking your cock. On the other hand, writing clearly and methodically over a period of time about imperialism and racism isn't as highly valued. Look at all the white folks who feel compelled to proclaim -- and in fact compete with each other to out-proclaim each other -- that they admire the work of Amiri Baraka, but "primarily his earlier work which is so much more creative than his later dogmatisms."

Like most authors, Baraka has written his share of crap, and a lot of this has been written later in his career, but the later-Baraka-haters love to hide one little secret: Baraka also has written some very good stuff since the 1970s. The derision that's directed at a lot of Baraka's later work has nothing to do with its quality but with what he writes about -- a U.S. epistemology that codifies knowledge in such a way that darker-skinned and less-well-off populations are excluded by definition from possessing the historical attributes necessary for defining/accessing truth and producing pragmatic knowledeges. One consequence (both economically and culturally) of such an epistemology is endless callousness and/or romanticization. As an example, over the last hundred years, Puerto Rico's inhabitants and resources have lost their status as indepedent realities and have instead been redefined in terms of their use-value to U.S. capitalism. Look at the U.S. military use of Vieques or the reorganization of the island's economy so the farms disappeared and the petrochemical companies rose in their place as food shortages and foodstamp dependency mounted. Meanwhile, during this same period U.S. poets frequently used (and still do) Puerto Rico and the other islands like warehouses packed with exotic/tropical images just waiting to be put to use by sophisticated folk from further north who allegedly have a need, because of their advanced white IQ's, to decorate their poems with imagery from the colonized boondocks in much the same way that western museums fill their vaults with art treasures looted from the developing world. In one form or another, this romantic/colonial longing of the Fatherland Poet for the noble savage's supposedly more integrated way of life has been with us for centuries, from the Transcendentalists appropriation of India's Vedantic thought for their own purposes to the Beats' use of Zen ideas to give their literary hipsterism a little extra adrenalin.

In a technologically advanced society the fascination with pre-tech philosophies isn't so much a form of reverence for those philosophies as it is the cultural equivalent of the imperialist notion that it is perfectly ok to plunder the natural resources of another country in order to satisfy the needs of folks back in the Fatherland. And so history moves along: Anaconda Copper steals Chile's copper ore while U.S. poets steal Mayan imagery for use in their "ecologically sensitive" poems. A certain percentage of cross-cultural fertilizing is of course done in a respectful and not a thieving way and is therefore not exploitive, yet too often romanticization, always a form of blindness, leads western authors not toward an understanding of otherness but rather toward treating the other's traditional imagery like a private possession to be used however one wants. In Frank O'Hara's 1958 poem "Salute to the French Negro Poets," O'Hara unintentionally gives evidence of the equation in a lot of western writing between the angst of industrialized society's so-called cultured classes and their romanticization of the other -

one who no longer remembers dancing in the heat of the moon may call
across the shifting sands, trying to live in the terrible western world

Someone like Baraka who is merciless -- and, yes, it's true, maniacal and obsessive too -- in pointing out exploitive relationships in his work doesn't get a lot of points for his efforts from the poetry establishment. When for instance he was under attack for his neo-Howlish loopily-rhymed post-9/11 poem-tirade "Somebody Blew Up America," his free speech rights were at best only mildly defended by most other poets (Pinsky: "The poet laureate of New Jersey has the same right as any other American to make a fool of himself"), who felt a need to say all the right things about the first amendment but simultaneously acted embarrassed by the fact that Baraka just didn't seem to know when to shut up. As if free speech was a right best exercised during bland times when nothing is at stake rather than in a time of mounting national hysteria when a good dose of cynicism might be helpful.

Whatever Baraka's weaknesses as a writer might be, he is often a very good writer whose commitment to poetry's rootedness in daily life gives his work an immediacy that many other writers can't achieve. For him the disconnects between art and self, art and daily activities, art and history, art and the hood, art and everything must be obliterated for art to actually matter. Which is why he wrote, in an essay on Aimé Césaire, that "Art is an attempt to describe the world, an ideological form, which also describes the mind of the describer. It is a projection of life; it is a projection of the particular ife, of the artist, as well. Art can exist independently of the context of its creation only at the expense of obscurity." Baraka takes such things seriously. Too seriously from the perspective of many. If he'd contented himself with repeating a lot of his earlier work and aging gracefully while gving nostalgic lectures about the 1950s and 1960s, he undoubtedly would be a much more celebrated poet today, an esteemed member of the Poetic Matriarchs and Patriarchs of America Club. Instead, every chance he gets he rants about the need to see things freshly and as a result he's often dismissed as an ideologically imbalanced eccentric, grudgingly acknowledged to have "once been" a good writer but then quickly ridiculed by alleging that for a long time now he has been "in a period of unproductive decline." I find it interesting that in his so-called later "sterile" years, Baraka has written some poetry that equals and frequently trumps many supposedly superior poems by poets (e.g., Hall, Pinksy, et. al) who after decades of writing are, it is claimed, still slammin' creators unlike poor ex-Leroy who during his downhill trajectory has crashed his sled into a Fanaticism Tree. This excerpt from Baraka's long poem, "Why's/Wise," is an example of how Baraka's alleged poetic degeneration is filled with more skill than some people's periods of regeneration. (Note: the phrase "ile ike" below is the name of an ancient Yoruba city.)

Rough Hand Drummers (Wise 11)

You are a country folk, on
the land. Farmers before farmers
founders of cities, ile ike,
when the world began. Was creator
of university, I trumpet timbucktoo
because I cannot bear to think
you think Bannekar was wilder
than the breed. It was the woman
conceived of familiar cows and
architecture. You drummers know
how they are hide curers and musicians.
Now they enter the cities to enter future
reality. Now death, now blood, now hooded
criminals, resistance in its human dimension
like electric theories, post all abrahams

Hegel had his Phenomenology of the Mind, Baraka has the above geneology of the spirit. Black history for him isn't a collection of a few bios of famous people (e.g., Bannekar) but rather something more massive, an underculture fed by creative mothers who conceptualize "familiar cows and / architecture" and who lay the basic for a music of survival by curing the animal hides that are used as drumskins so the music can be played and passed on. These 15 lines, then, aren't toss-offs. They comprise a tightly compacted, lyrical rolling-forth, a history reinvented as myth or folktale, a story not so much spoken as percussioned into existence, an existence not detached from (not an escape from) daily life but one parented by daily life. And so the hide curer is the maker of the drum's skin without which there is no beat, no music, no narrative of sound to lead us from braindeath to knowledge, from unsite to seeing. Without retaining our connection to our animal nature (the totemic hide) we can't produce the rhythms of freedom. Such rejection of mindbody slavery is the beat, the tala, the duende, the soul-dance of a resistance like no other, a

resistance in its human dimension
like electric theories, post all abrahams

It's worth mentioning in passing here that Baraka's language in "Rough Hand Drummers" is prefigured in both African-American storytelling traditions and jazz experimentation. This isn't surprizing given Baraka's probing writings on blues and jazz. In fact Max Roach's 1960 album, We Insist (Freedom Now Suite), contains a moment that's linked in my mind to Baraka's poem. The moment is when singer Abby Lincoln, her voice having migrated through a series of scats and assorted pre-word sounds, now becomes, as we listen, the midwife of sound's evolution into language and historical recitation and music, all intertwined, all on the move --

The beat has a rich and magnificent history
full of adventure, excitement and mystery.
Some of it's bitter and some of it,s sweet
but all of it's part of the beat, the beat, the beat.
They say it began with a chant and a hum
and a black hand laid on a native drum.

Somewhere along the line that beat, listened to again and again, reinvented a Mr. Jones and turned him into a Baraka. An old guy now, he's still an ornery -- and creative -- bastard. Thank God.

I wrote this late night in my head. In front of a campfire.

Heard, but only as a sub-sound within
the bigger noise

of flames beating upward -- the hiss
of a wet log burning, that

vague whistle of awareness like
a premonition that never

gets beyond its status as
background music, a static-y

car-radio church tune about the second
coming. But

the damned never appear, never
establish chaos' arrival on the heels

of the mad horsemen's stallions, it all being
nothing but

us going
crazy with self-hatred. The hiss

of burning wood,
everywhere.

*

One word describes what I look for when writing: clarity. For me, the clearest things are fragments. Clarity doesn't exist for us as a wholeness but rather as pieces. This once bothered me. It doesn't anymore.

We have eyes so we look around, frequently without thinking about what we're doing. But focused seeing is more than this. It's an experiment in giving back to things their original vividness, how they looked the first time we saw them when our minds weren't yet deadened by the routine of seeing them so often that they eventually became so familiar to us that we stopped seeing them and began seeing instead what we had been conditioned to think we would see. In other words, if we're not careful, seeing gradually becomes nothing more than a process of activating our preconceptions about the world. For me, the struggle against letting this happen lies at the heart of writing. In fact, this struggle is more important than writing, since without this struggle the most one can write is a bunch of regurgitated slop. Sometimes the best way to get at the root of poetry and other art forms is to forget about art altogether and to force oneself to see with a complete disregard for aesthetics, creativity, preconceptions about order, current trendy notions about being, how other people might view the objects at hand, etc. Seeing in and of itself -- just being interested in that -- nothing else happens without coming out of the gate right there at a full gallop.

*

Girl Outside Neighbors' House / Vijaynagar

*

Anand Kirloskar

*

More Than You Can Imagine

*

Man with Lolita Lebron Button on Hat / Self-Portrait

*

Belgaum Store Clerk

Note

Thanks to Amsah and Sheila for their remarks on the "Related by distance, They Focus" photo in my last post. I'm responding with a new post rather than in the comments section because what I want to say goes better here, I think. In particular I want to answer the question about why I used a different technical style in the "Focus" picture as well as in a few others I posted recently. Although I'm not a professional photographer I do like to take photos and so when I started intermittently using a different style a while back I did so for a reason, even though that reason came about through a mistake. About 2 years ago I accidentally shot some black and white double exposures on my 35 mm. One of them in particular caught my attention and as a result I got the idea for a sequence of shots that would include both double exposures and layering techniques that mimicked double exposures. What I wanted (in the sequence) was a method of visibly imposing faces on situations and situations on faces in order to create portraits that made the dividing lines between personality and surroundings as unclear as I think they are in reality. So, there is a method to what I tried to do in "Focus," although it was produced more by accident than vigilance. The photo below - "The Men About Whom Laxsman Spoke To The Children" - employs the same method but in a slightly differen way: someone's description of two young men is imposed on a portrait of those two men, so the dividing line between how they're seen in the imagination and what they are in reality is to say the least flexible.

Photo: The Men About Whom Laxman Spoke To The Children

The words on the above picture are:

"Two men disguised as vendors came to town yesterday. They sold lemons just as if that is what they really do for a living. But nobody was fooled. We knew. They had special powers which we could tell from how they made the jungle reappear again with their stories. After hearing their stories, many people invited the vendors to come for food in the evening. But they said no, that all they wanted was the friendliness we had already shown them. They were nice young men. We will miss the vendors."

Portrait: Related by Distance, They Focus

Excerpt

Madelyn Carmichael lived alone in a dilapidated, one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment. A number of nights running, she heard a baby crying. It was a horrible, unhappy noise and she knew each time she heard it that the child's mother or whoever wasn't attending to the baby the way the baby needed attending. Bothered by the noise, Madelyn complained to the super, who said he didn't know anything about any baby living anywhere near her and so she should stop griping. Although his attitude didn't sit right with her, she felt there was nothing she could do. So she let things be . . .

(Read more by clicking #2 below)

Pages: 1 2

Excerpt / first 3 paragraphs

There are two things I’m not. I’m not the person I was raised to be and I’m not the person I imagined I would become when, rebelling against those who raised me, I decided to set my own agenda for what to do with my life. I neither fulfilled my family’s expectations for me nor my expectations for myself. Instead, at some point during the last 63 years, all the old dream scenarios got flushed down the toilet. One morning after waking up I found somebody I hadn’t expected to be there staring back at me from the mirror. I recognized him but didn’t really know who he was.

“Shit,” I thought, “so this is my life.”

I was stuck with it.

from Portraits

Never Just One

*

Before the Storm

*

Child & Factory Ruins at Jungle's Edge

*

"You look at a lake and think you're gonna see a lake. But when I looked at this lake today, what I saw wasn't a lake but a bunch of dirty water holding up a dead body. It's still a lake, of course. Maybe more of one. Sooner or later a lake's gonna show its dark side. Those're the bad times."

-- Fisherman after finding drowned man

The Journey

Nipples, the dried figs.

And lips which, in a grimace
of thirst, are “like”
whatever we think we see.

The rib cage. A burglar’s ladder ascending
to a second storey window
in a house with nothing in it but
the wish that it contained something it doesn’t.

Brightening more each day
the forsythia’s happy jaundice
insults those fated
to die in spring.

Good Friday and on the train platform the cat sleeps
in a corner behind a trash basket.
Not one but so many
crosses cast their shadows over the faces
of those who stand here.
The passengers who wait with no place to go, they’re the ones
whose eagerness is most holy.

In the end we mount the hill.

Only on Golgotha
where the vinegar alone has dignity
does spring really count.

After Hours: Stalking the Real
Episode #9 available from MiPo Radio
includes selections from Praying in al-Hallaj's Shadow

MiPo radio has released the 9th episode of my podcast radio show, After Hours: Stalking the Real.

To hear the show, go to Robert Bohm / MiPo Radio. From the page, you can access the program either directly from MiPo Radio or from iTunes -- iTunes is the recommended method.

To access via iTunes, click the iTunes button in the black bar beneath my photo and the accompanying text. To access directly from MiPo Radio, scroll down toward the bottom of the page and click on the gray mp3 button immediately below the "~Episode #9~" title.

As always, I'd appreciate it if you'd listen and spread the word about the program to those you know.

Thanks,
Robert

The Now of Things

1
The clanking plow blade scrapes snow
into mounds in the mall parking lot
as night comes on and shoppers
enter/exit through glass doors.

Inside, store aisles, unphased by the crow’s intransigence
or the quantum physicist’s sense
of light as paradox, intersect
in ways too orderly for what we are.

2
The now of things is all that counts, the stormy night’s
existence in the instant, the white
and black of it, the long-anticipated place
where the unabated is.

Listen. The sound of each snowflake
landing on the ground
deafens she who dares to track down
what only the bomba player knows.

Homebound by a stroke, head tilted, bowel control
lost, what Frank heard in the apartment
next to Rosa’s in the Bronx
was the noise of paint slowly detaching itself from walls.

3
Here in the car, silence is
rhythmic tick of things, cadence’s will, and soon
it’s Christmas and the Son is born
o holy night

and just like that with no warning
(it was in the newspaper this morning)
a slacker sets church manger hay on fire and the burning up
of everything we believe becomes

the sole redemption anybody needs
(plow blade scrapes . . . o holy . . .
Mary had
a lambie and

4
The beauty of it. Cars move along
the mall’s exit road, heading toward
the interstate either north or south.
Time did, does, will. Stand still.

Channeling Allama Prabhu

The past’s poets are my children. Thank God
for the women I hung with.
They kept their word and gave birth
to the music which prefigured me.

The future’s poets are my offspring too.
Blood-splattered on arrival, they screamed
when I bathed them in my tears for the murdered.
But later in the domestic quarters, as I washed
the vaginas through which they’d voyaged,
they elected me Papa of the Ages.

Today’s poets, with their
heads in the clouds while playing
in the sky’s blue playpen, are also
my progeny.
To spawn them I fucked my mother, thereby fathering
my own siblings and setting the stage
so I could disown them.

Written in a Hotel North of the Zuari River (revised)

Two sides of a bougainvillea-covered fence.
On which side the heart
attack strikes makes no difference.
How green the grass is or is not
where the body lies doesn’t stop the rot
if the flesh isn’t carted off in time.
After I’m dead, tell the grandkids
knowing things isn’t a fucking crime.
Even when the only noise is silence,
that’s a music which makes sense.

The Mang ‘s Map

All about it. That’s what
Dev Raj knows. Like the hog

sniffing the sewage ditch along
the hill road, he

sniffs between
new mothers’ legs each

time the colony
grows. The after-

birth, a mudhole every bullock
cart sinks into

axle-deep, is all
one needs of prophecy. Even

the crow’s squawks, those
paeans to disorder, are

precoded. As when Dev Raj’s father who, because
he belongs to this

particular group, must
when the water buffalo dies

drag its
corpse from

the street. Each
sweat drop on his

neck boils like
a single grain of rice in

a blackened pot. The car-
cass weighs as much as

the land it’s
yanked across. Blinded

by the sun, he pulls
the dead animal back

to where he
not it

came from, into
a ravine

of dust, thorns and broken
stones, his mother’s cunt, no

deader now than when he
was born months after his father, Dev

Raj’s grandfather, rather than
killing the landowner who

raped his wife, instead went
to work for him. “Truly me is”

the grandson now insists
“that bad day no

god devotee want to be seeing.” It’s over
105 in the shade and the

gulmohar flowers, too
red and motionless

to bear, hover above people who, falling
to pieces in the heat, then

pull themselves
together again, dis-

figured but still
able to move. But this

is nothing. Not compared to
the weight of a water

buffalo’s corpse or the work
of dismembering it while inside

its half-eaten
orifices -- each gaping

like the abyss between one
nerve-ending and another -- piles

of maggots writhe like
tiny thoughts in

love with the idea of finding out how
to fly.

Baylee Horton & brother

After Hours: Stalking the Real
Episode #8 available from MiPo Radio

MiPo Radio has released the 8th episode of my podcast radio show, After Hours: Stalking the Real.

To hear the show, go to Robert Bohm / MiPo Radio. From the page, you can access the program either directly from MiPo Radio or from iTunes -- iTunes is the recommended method.

To access via iTunes, click the iTunes button in the black bar beneath my photo and the accompanying text. To access directly from MiPo Radio, scroll down toward the bottom of the page and click on the gray mp3 button immediately below the "~Episode #8~" title.

Episode 8 features poems from the second half of Closing the Hotel Kitchen. Poems from the book's first half can be heard on Episodes 7 and 7.5, both of which are available on the same page as Episode 8. The book's first 2 sections are based on experiences from pre-1967 NY through the Vietnam war. The book's last 2 sections -- from which the poems for Episode 8 are drawn -- cover post-army experiences in India as well as my return to the U.S.

As always, I'd appreciate it if you'd listen and spread the word about the program to those you know.

Thanks,
Robert

(ideas of migration)

1
The finger, an adventurer, arrives in the world
of the thing touched. Like John Winthrop
disembarking from the Arbella, it comes
in peace. Yet for unknown reasons, years
later all
the locals are dead.

2
Like a Mexican who crosses the border
without permission, the thing-to-be-touched
appears one day in a space that once existed without it.
Disguised as a fishbone or shower nozzle or plutonium atom, it is weathered but awesome.
In grape shadows and under curry stains, it usurps
what eyes it.

3
Although it has no visa, the gladiola
migrates from dirt to air!

4
Like a bus packed with peasants, an idea
passes the Ganpati temple on Hindalga Rd.
Soon it will pass the local prison too, looking
for something unfound.
No matter where the idea goes, it remembers Holika, how
beautiful she is in spite
of the hives on her face and arms.

5
The immigrant is in your midst.
No jasmine in her hair. Or cacao flower.
Just, on the back of her hand, the veins.
She speaks more languages than you do.

Lace 2

As the bulbul splashes in the brass water bowl
on the cement wall, the radio analyst quotes a speech,
"The dogs are impatient to devour your soldiers' carcasses."

Carrying the season's first 2 papayas, Vimal
enters the kitchen through the back door.
"These sandals were made in Switzerland," Anand tells his sister
near the doorway to the next room.

Like the Holy Ghost in an old story, but with no
virgin in sight, sunlight slashes
through the Ashoka tree in front of the house
while, behind where the cotton mill used to be, someone
plays drums.

"The land of the caliphate is capable of being the tomb
for 10 of your armies," the analyst continues.
The white watchdog scampers under the bougainvillea, hunting
the bitch in heat.

Anand holds an old pocket watch in his hand.
Given to his father on June 6, 1927,
it still works.

Lace

Bent over, Nazma whiskbrooms the tiled floor,
sweeping, along with the dust, a chapati crumb, the size
of a lost era,
from the corner.
"Who's that playing flute on the CD?"
"It's the radio," Anand says.
Serena mounts a comeback.
Three months after the monsoon, the buffalo pond
shrinks to nothing.
Nazma stands up straight in doorway light before 9 a.m.
Further north in Srinagar, separists
blow up a police jeep near the lake
while here, as Nazma listens, the coo-coo sings from a custard apple branch.

Note. Not having the negatives, I scanned the photos below from some old 3x2 black and whites I have from 1973-1977. The condition of the originals wasn't too good so I cleaned them up a little with Photoshop by eliminating creases and scratches. Other than that, I left them as is since I didn't want to damage their value to the rest of my family and me as aging but precious snapshots of people who for a variety of reasons have been important to us and still are in spite of the fact that over the last 30-plus years time has left its increasingly elegaic mark on everything. Meeda Mama's dead now, Kamlava has disappeared somewhere, Sundera is sickly and thin as a rail, Shamabai and her husband are deceased, and I feel permanently caught between nostalgia and irritability on the one hand and political and cultural alienation on the other. Besides the people I love, the one solace I get from life comes from those here in the U.S. and around the world who battle creatively against the tyranny of idiotic governments and systems of social-economic oppression. Yet I look at Sundera now, no older than me, and see how her struggles over the decades to maintain dignity by not bowing down to anyone have left her physically debilitated. The best of us are always put to the test in this way. What a horrible truth. When I'm with my grandchildren, all of whom bring me much joy and whom I love dearly, I'm sometimes frightened that they'll discover too soon that my heart is a tiny storefront museum in which meaningless artifacts are on display in small glass cases greasy with the handprints of the museum's only visitors: the people in my head. Still, in spite of this, I continue, suicide seeming senseless. This is the way of things: in one way or another, no matter how drained we sometimes feel, we all pass on our legacies -- a few sentences, some old photos, other people's memories of us. It's all part of a much larger history.

*

Meeda Mama ("Uncle Basketweaver")

*

Sundera

*

Shamabai, Son, Husband

*

Kamlava

Beyond. To This

1
-- through the window.
As the plane ascends.
the right wing slices through clouds like, later,
the plastic knife through
the beet in the tray, or like
a focused mind through matter.

2
"He was a spiritual man," he says
in the row in front of me to the Kolkata woman next to him.
When the attendants turn out the lights, her white dupatta
shines faintly in the dark,
an old cloth in a shuttered building.

-- 01/2007

Four more faces
(sculpures / 2nd to 8th century CE):

Buddha

Buddha 2

Ganesh

Unindentified

Am back from India. Didn't post at blog during time away because of a laptop problem. But starting tonight, I'm posting again.

Four faces:

*

*

*

Am off to India early this evening for a month. Posting will be at best sporadic during this time.

To everyone, be well.

*****

NOTE: Click here for information on how to buy Uz Um War Moan Ode, Robert Bohm's new chapbook

January 11, 1967

The pile of cut beard hair
in the sink 40 years ago
is all my fingers know now of then.
The hair’s feel, almost weightless but not
quite, the real in strands nearly as soft
as ashes.
Outside the bathroom window, a January wind
scraped the church roof across the way.
I looked out, then back in
and rinsed my face.
What I dreamt that night is long gone now
as was, the next morning by 4, whatever
prefigured what I am today.
Later, through a flurry in
the final dark, the bus approached
Ft. Hamilton.
Behind us the tidal strait grew brighter as the driver turned
into the lot.
MP’s watched us disembark.
Further off
a baby rice shoot shivered like hope between
a dead dog’s splayed legs in a field at the edge
of a city we’d never seen.

He Told Me

On a street five blocks from the river,
Rupen, the Armenian waiter, woke up stoned
on his mother’s cot.
Through the doorway he saw, on
the kitchen windowsill, how
the red flower towered, a
bad joke, from a clay pot.
“Gggghh,” he rasped, remembering
part of an old lullaby,
“The caravan creaked along
bearing a burden of tears.”
Barely able to breathe, he
turned over.
For no reason he understood, the thought of turnips
calmed him.

Two for Laurel regarding thereness

Note: Although I've regularly read Laurel Dodge's poetry for years, over recent months I've also been intrigued by how her obsession with focus -- "the art of seeing" -- is expressed in her photos. The two snapshots below which I took are posted here for her because of what I perceive to be our shared interest in the seen's refusal to be taken for granted.

Without Remorse

Infant

Father

1
In 2 hours the temperature drops
30 degrees.

He comes in, says nothing,
takes them, leaves.

2
The night wind howls through
the leafless forsythia.

The birdfeeder
bangs against the oak’s trunk.

3
On the line between order and disorder, he seeks out
the rules. Bitter tubers sprout where

the dead gerbil’s buried in the yard. He follows
wherever his intestines lead. Pain lights the room.

4
A light snow hurled at things
weightlessly.

A groan. He wakes up
in front of the TV. A branch creaks.

5
The daddy’s mommy, dead now, rides
his son’s tricycle on the sidewalk, madly ringing the bell.

“Mommy, please explain that code you’re ringing,” he begs.
“Figure it yourself!” she yells.

6
A useless flurry. A few flakes
here a minute, then gone. The mind’s

empty now. He wakes in the morning
with a stomach ache. Wife and kids make noise.

(discipline)

I push one of the blinds’ slats upward with a finger.

The baby’s nasally breath,
warm on my shoulder.

Outside. To enter the space between
the streetlamp light
and the pavement upon which it lies.

I rock in the feeding chair, back
& forth, in & out
of the position in which I began.

The heart, like the little black terrier
with blood leaking from its ass in the garage,
no longer eats.

I sit very still.

One of my hair-ends pokes the blinds’ cord soundlessly.
What’s awaited is already here.

The baby coos in my arms, unaware
of what I dare to do while holding her.