“Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages...”
Terrible weather hoods Elliott Bay tonight.
From Vashon, Eagle Harbor, all points around the Sound,
boats head for Seattle’s fireworks. The obliterated
stars have unmasked themselves n the dark water,
coalescing into a patriotic nebula.
Red right return.
The clouds incarnadine. A fistful of blazing
shards tears from the smoke and fog toward
shore, toward us, with a resonant
kaboom. The crowd goes ape,
imagining the glorious blossom.
“Stars and Stripes
Forever” blares in simulcast.
Next Fourth, the next, will I refrain
from boring my son with parables
of rockets over Bosnia, Iraq, over
what-all? America’s screens will display
points of light somewhere flowering.
Our sons, theirs, such as survive,
heading home under cover of dark,
in red gauze or other righteous dress.
Just the facts, reeling from the idiot box
like vapor trails, dark tickertape.
A sort of celebration.
Well. Red right return.
Afterward, the crowd slogs
through the storm to their warm
nests to turn the covers back.
To sleep. Stars of light.
Wide stripes of dark. Forever.
The crypt of the Basilica in Assisi:
behind glass a rough, patched robe,
no, a robe of patches, “beast-colored,”
king-sized, labeled as
the ascetic’s—Saint Francis.
In the corner, filigreed reliquaries:
spidery bones and flaps of pemmican
pried from the corpses of clerics
and other saints centuries past. Reliquary of the thorn
of the crown of thorns. Reliquary
of the hair of Saint Catherine.
Relic of the finger of Saint Andrew.
It is purport. It could be an ape
finger for all we know, displayed
by canny, enraptured, or even credulous
priests: for the flock’s tithes and offerings,
prayers, and pleas for dispensation.
For the continued fame of their parish
and of course the glory of the Faith....
Splinters of the True Cross cross
the empire, rusted nails and spots
of someone’s blood. There’s the slab
of marble in Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher,
submitting to the lips of prostrated millions,
although I learn “This is not
the stone on which Christ’s body was anointed.
This devotion is recorded only since
the 12th century. The present stone dates from 1810.”
The myth is believed, promulgated,
nurtured, notated, accepted. No one
knows whether Francis was thin or obese.
Paintings exist by the hundred of his imagined
gaunt frame, but the vast robe’s displayed
right there. Who is mistaken? Perhaps
no one is, and Francis was humbly
dwarfed by his tunic.
Another one in Florence has been proven
fake and one in Cortona is merely plausible.
The Assisi relic has not yet been tested.
At La Verna, monks pace the tiled loggia
in brown wool. Winter fog enrobes the cliffside
where Francis is said to have huddled in a niche
while Satan harangued and scarred him
through a storm. You can see the spot,
barely large enough to contain
my shivering ten-year-old daughter.
Far more believable are the humble ledgers
casually out of sight in an armoire
in the Volterra seminary-turned-hostel,
their frail pages inked with scrawled numbers,
400-year-old book-keeping, scrupulous,
humdrum and thoroughly ungilded.
II
In my town, an “Apothecary and Metaphysical Shop”
evokes the past, or its hypothesis. Kitty-
corner, a new steel dragon overlooks
the roof of an antiques shop with its horde of junk
and ephemera from my past, my parents
and theirs. What can I infer from such artifacts?
Their picture of history is idealistic, patched
and piecemeal, surmised, signage and objects
without context, cloaked in enigmatic clues
of stains, scuffs, creases.
The world is a reliquary. Dusty
centuries from now, will these words
exist? Will someone find a scrap
and peruse it like a knuckle bone
of a “typical American,” let alone “me”?
At home I stockpile albums of Daguerrotypes,
Grandma’s jewelry, drawers of letters, unpublished
manuscripts of my parents and great-grandfather.
The documents and relics they left
—the aspects they chose to preserve or hide
of their own lives and thoughts—
I weigh against the people I knew,
study and assay which truth, if any,
the story supports, and who might fit
the patchwork cloak.
This busy spot, in 1900, was remote,
red and dusty with the Builders Brick
quarry and factory, in the mining boom,
the logging days.
Firs, countless, were as big around
as their fellers were tall,
where now a few tame plantings
punctuate the chain cafes and condos
that push into the thinned remains
of second-growth alder.
Filled with miners, Red Town, Finn Town,
White Town, Rainbow Town
hotels and cabins erected in the clearcut
are only blemished photos
and foundations mossy and hidden in bracken
between rubbled mine shafts:
Ford Slope mine, Primrose, Bagley,
May Creek mine, Muldoon seam.
Hiking trails follow the old flumes
where the hewn trunks sloshed downcreek.
Joggers and dogwalkers erase the ghosts.
Those days, horse-drawn trams lugged coal and logs
down Coal Creek to Lake Washington,
where barges continued the five-day meander
south and then up the Duwamish
to the Sound and Seattle.
Steamers then carried on
to California and profit.
A narrow-gauge steam railway ran
where this five-lane arterial now pulses
with its Teslas, Porsches,
Maseratis. Money is still made,
these days and hereabouts,
but not from solid things.
II
Just in the years we’ve lived here,
the horse pasture down the street has gone,
the sheep and llamas, orchards and corn.
We are now more urb than suburb.
But bobcats, bears, coyotes, possums,
even baffled cougars prowl our yards
for food, as their foothills turn
to townhouses in cul-de-sacs,
the roads that reach them,
nail shops and pizza joints,
churches, firing ranges.
The news seems very black these days
unless you think it’s white. Regardless
where you hear it, it sears the heart and eyes.
The earth is evanescent, and solid things seem
illusive, similes morph to lies,
to belief, as easily as that bright
cloud above grows murky as it gathers,
a thick, broken layer flying doggedly north.
The sun peers through the fissures,
warm in a chill wind, and blinding.
My mesmerized retinas
turn black firs against leaden grey
ember-red. It’s a changeable
day. There’s a storm warning for later.
Branches may fall, they say.
Some trees have fallen already
this gusty spring. But forecasts
have been wrong before, pessimistic,
or hoodwinked with unpredictable
conditions. I sit in sunlight when I can,
hope it lasts, but prepare for the blow.
History flows over us, bright and dark,
dissipating and bloating, threat and promise.
Soon we’ll walk trails through new deadfalls,
hunting old foundations in the leafmold.
“If all movement is always interconnected, the new arising from the old in a determinate order― if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect―what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?” ― Lucretius Carus Titus, 99 - 55 BCE
SWERVE AT 65
Sidewalk café. All that brings to mind.
Tiny table half in shade, pots
of shrubs and gaudy primrose, saplings budding
into sprays of white plus tender leaves, an arm’s
length from traffic. A crow swoops from the eaves
to investigate leftovers from a couple with a Doberman,
who just sauntered off leaving plates
and dregs in cups and most important crumbs.
Life keeps at it: two Latino guys
power-wash the plastic surgeon’s brick
plaza. Deliveries come and go, their boxy
trucks beetling around the corner. One hipster
driver wheels his handtruck, empty, back
to its mobile den. The Doberman’s ears were taped
and rigid as party tooters. He (or she,
I didn’t check) reared up, his front paws
on their table like someone making a point.
His point being, I want what you have.
This week I’ve discovered Lucretius Carus Titus,
his On the Nature of Things, his muse Epicurus,
his followers Bruno, More, Jefferson, Darwin.
I feel the knowledge seeping through my veins,
don’t know quite what to do with it...
Expensive cars crawl past, windows darkened,
engines drowned out by the pressure-washer’s howl,
a cross between waterfall and dentist’s drill.
Bristling with old tools, a yardsman’s truck
heads, implacable, for the next weedy landscape.
A well-dressed lady in a puffy winter coat
(it is warm and sunny) stops and lifts her phone
to the blooming plum, snaps a picture, checks it,
retakes it, stalks on. Across the street, apartments
overlook the scene, and me. Yes,
I am part of someone’s changing view.
Who lives above me, unaware?
If I lived here I would be home now.
That’s what the realtors are selling.
At the barber’s, a giant photo of an unshaven
but “handsome” man (quotation marks are mine),
in posh casual wear, gazes pensively
at the adjacent shot, a “man and son” (ditto)
enjoying quality time with their haircuts.
The workers pressure-wash them too: so clean
you could eat off them.
The last time I wrote such observations
I was 20,000 feet up and a thousand miles
from home, where I live now, and I
was registering the street life of clouds,
the passing traffic of mountains and rivers, as if
it was I who was static, not whipping through the air
at 600 em pee aitch, as though the sun
circled around the earth. Today I am free
to do nothing, leverage the sun
and its changing position, and, well, think—that is,
think thoughts, rather than worry at concerns
like well-worn stones—because my man, as they say,
has clarified with bar charts and spreadsheets
that no, I really needn’t go back to work.
I am retired. All that brings to mind.
My senses stir, small multi-legged critter
roused from a winter’s sleep. A few feeble
blinks, the stretch of a foot, a foreleg, a quick
flapping shake of the ears to clear the cobwebs.
I’ve been wanting all this time here pen in hand
to figure how to fit Lucretius in
to this story. I think I have it now.
I have swerved (cue vee Greenblatt),
like prescient Lucretius’s atomi, which make up everything,
which do not travel in straight lines like raindrops:
they jitter and they change their courses,
thus enabling evolution, happenstance,
free will, art, begging dogs and such.
I slouch writing in this sunlight
like one of those proto-fish dully amazed
to find his front fins scooting through the hot
sand of a scratchy beach, a beach that’s full
of new things, swerving, often, freely.
He wants what they have. He can live here
and be home.
This week's Sepia Saturday theme features typewriters. This is a machine I have not a little familiarity with, having been intimately involved with them from rather an early age.
This model I am experimenting with is a 1948 Royal Poetable. I mean, Portable.
This machine belonged to my mother. Given its vintage, I assume she treated herself to it the year she won the University of Michigan's Hopwood Award for fiction. Here she is around that time, looking literary.
However, she handed it down to me in the early 1970s, as I embarked on my own poetic career at the University of Washington. Here's the site of our "poetry workshop": Parrington Hall, with several of the poetry students taking a break. Summer of '72, I was 18 and most of my friends, from the class, were at least four or five years older.
Jim Mitsui third from left, Kay Deeter standing at center
That's my father at the podium, with the inimitable Frank Maloney eclipsing him.
Reading the announcements
I brought my camera one night. Actually I borrowed it from a fellow student, Daphne. I got arty widdit.
Poet's eye view: under the table
The lonely cup
Window open: in those days you could smoke in class
The side exit
That's Daphne on the left, with her sister, at one of the three poetry readings held every week (in addition to the two poetry classes -- a full schedule!).
After class at 9 PM, several of the class members would retire to the local pub, actually Woerne's European Pastry Shop. You could smoke in there too.
From left: Unknown, my little sister Julian (!?), Ronnie Church, Anne Pitkin, Jim Mitsui, Charles Webb, Frank Maloney, Linda Engel, Nick Seguin
And here is the culprit himself, pretending to work on a poem.
Note that my keyboard technique has not changed since toddlerhood.
I have long since graduated to a computer, and have recently returned the Royal Portable to my mother, who no longer can use it but keeps it as an icon of her college days. Amazingly, you can still get ribbons for it!
Seventeen years ago yesterday my wife gave birth to our second child, a girl whom we named Piper, since we figured that "Pinky," which is what we had been calling her up till that point, was not suitable for her birth certificate. Here she is being carefully greeted by her 5-year-old brother Nicholas.
Twenty-two years before that, I had gotten the notion of basing a poem on the entries for a certain date in my five-year-diary (my first diary), which I had started in high school and now had just graduated from, halfway though my college career. More or less by random, I picked February 10.
Only coincidence, to be sure, but who could have predicted what else might happen on that date so far in the future?
FEBRUARY TENTH
1971
Patrick Kelley is not yet dead today.
Sometime in the near future
that viper, his kidney,
will pump venom into him.
He will make for the doctor,
not ready for his motorcycle:
fifty miles an hour
keels over into the blacktop.
Today Pat has coffee with me.
1972
The horsey librarian whinnied
at students all day while I
tried to study. It is the basic,
raw elements that foul up the works.
Something simple enough to overlook,
some unyielding atmosphere.
The lab conditions are never satisfactory.
A missing ingredient, incorrect controls.
Stimulus and response are not possible.
Imperfect, always. I miss
the last chance to see a friend
before she spreads like airfern,
flows out of the room for Chicago.
1973
The thin snow of days
drifts down from the solid grey
that stays behind where I can reach.
Everything is invisible;
what I think is there
is somewhere else, what I know is there
does not exist. The windless temperature
is too low to be cold, quavering
at a fingerprint fineness one can’t sense
unless he’s close. Light dims to white,
shadows become white, objects
fade to winter hares, the hours
blend in like weasels, lurk
with unbearable calmness
at each twist of the day.
I force myself to wait it out,
hibernate, even. The thaw will
trickle in from the south.
I find a hollow log and fur me in.
1974
The poem was for
her, left two years ago
for the Stacker of Wheat, about
men who tamper with men
should sow their own seeds;
a hatred you transferred, mistaken
identity; you who found it
don’t flatter yourself.
It is no clearer than runes to you,
ignore whatever your plow turns up
in that field. Just push on, farmer.
1975
“A journey is a way of learning
What we know but won’t believe.”
Sylvia Clark
Berkeley.
(The girl in whose bed I am sleeping
is sleeping with her boy friend.
I am not he.) Berkeley.
Every watery yellow morning
I’ve woken in a real place.
California is not just a movie:
the Santa Monica Pier, Ventura Highway,
the Goldfen Gate is red, eucalyptus
Back to back in groves
like musk oxen defending their young.
The wind is steady as electricity,
BART flows in with polarized eyes
and doorlike mandibles
from Charybdis’ cave.
Rain hovers birdlike at tree level,
dives, perches, the pattering
reeks of aviary.
I am not yet dead today.
I pass beneath me in a puddle.
Sometime in the near future
I will survive reckless driving
stoned over the Siskiyous,
heights, water, timing.
I will know it’s my time
When the writing stops.
Just push on; plant.
Here is Piper as she looks now, in a fabulous shot taken by Nicholas, now going on 22, an excellent photographer in his own right. Happy birthday, sweetie!
The other day I recalled this routine from my father's favorite dead-pan stand-up comic, Jackie Vernon, one which ultimately inspired a poem not from him (as one might expect, given his penchant for writing about old comedians) but myself.
Here's the poem. Mind you, I was 21 at the time, so I can't vouch for the quality.
Aunt Velma schooled us we should run in the field
when we got worked up, so as not to raise dust
in the house, which somehow managed always
to be just swept. So there we were,
playing at jousting, with Petey and Mort
on their invisible steeds they didn't want
to call just horses, holding branch lances
and going for each other like they hadn't
forgotten all the doublescrosses
they'd laid for each other in the past.
The dog and me were referee.
When everyone tired of knights we turned
to the day, like a grocer's thumb
on the earth. Even the trees which burst
out in yellow every so often
(you could smell "caution" on quiet days)
were grey, no buds, like spindly clouds.
I had a dog once looked like that,
the runt; he passed away unnoticed
almost, cause he was barely there
anyway. This was a runty day.
We fooled around the barn a good deal,
swinging on the rope from the rafters.
Mom brought it from Ohio where her Ma and Pa
used to tie it to the porch railing
in winter so you wouldn't get lost walking
from the house to the barn in a blizzard.
We all used it so we wouldn't stray
from the farm into the woods like we were tempted
to do on dumb days. Mom called it
"a headiness" that came over you in there,
so you'd walk for months without flagging,
and Percy and me knew it was the jays
who called you on and on from your home.
Even jays themselves have no home,
they've called each other away, following
those raggy cries up and down
from Salinas to Winnipeg. At any rate,
we kids stayed in the barn till suppertime.
And rain, which had been listening to the arguments
of gravity all the way down, hit
the drainpipe and said "Okay yessiree,"
agreeing to try the dry old earth for a spell.
We heard it during dessert, don't you know.
I probably read too much science fiction. Be that as it may, I find myself quite often wondering what an errant Martian would make of our hijinks here on Earth.
Case in point, as Rod Serling would say, this photo. A select audience (you know who you are) will know exactly what to make of this, to say nothing of recognizing the subjects. The rest of you Martians, good luck.
.jpg)
