DIXSEPTS

August 9, 2009

Invented a verse form and churned out five poems in it in two days. It is 17 lines, three stanzas of five lines, xaxxa, with a concluding couplet. For some reason the form is extremely amiable to me. I think I’ll call them Dixsepts: 17's.


White Iris


The white iris blooms again in brass-pan August,
as the catalog said it might.
I am grateful for this. Purity and cleanness are not
what rule these torrid afternoons.
She and the waxing moon are white.

My specialty is the making of over-subtle connections,
such as that between the moon and the periodic iris:
their pallor anyone would see;
the frailness, the mutability, the palisade of swords,
these another might just miss.

The moon is coming. The iris stands still, fairly still,
to meet him. The moon, I think is a brilliant man,
searching down and in for an image of himself.
Look, here, the iris, by the world’s whirl made into an orb!
Didn’t notice? I do what I can.

I planted them by the garden path to mark
those nights that promise to be exceptionally dark.




How Shall We Praise the Magnificence of the Dead?

For Conrad Aiken



How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
sewn into their dinky, exquisite clothes
amid their towns—it seems to me-- of alabaster?
Glean the junk shops. Sack the archives.
How did they manage?Someone knows.

How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
who pounded their empires into scree and dust,
and bore such terrible names as we--
with our augmented firepower and all--
have not yet equaled? Though someone must.

How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
their iron cradles and nurseries of quicklime,
who like skaters in some gaudy Games
had their best and worst
rubbed off the stone memorials by Time?

Me, I've kept most meticulous accounts.
The fragments testify. The witness mounts.


By the Time You Get This


By the time you get this I will have planted
a sycamore tree almost too heavy to lift.
I will have written a sestina
which, though bad, will suffice
until the standards for such things shift.

I will have read all these difficult poems
by Spender and Rodgers and their kind,
that are in the book I got as a teenager,
and the like of which I would have
written myself had not-- well, never mind.

By the time you get this I will have
finished my iced coffee and moved on
to some further artistic and improving activity,
concealed behind achievements as a leopard
behind orchids. A night hunter. It is almost dawn,

By the time you get this I will have forgot
what was given, what so dearly bought.



James Dickey Died Owing Me a Bar Tab



James Dickey died owing me a seventy dollar bar tab
I picked up for his vivid drunken self
and hammered proteges somewhere in
I forget where goddam South Carolina.
No house booze for them. Strictly top shelf.

I have alternately gloried in this and
resented it for however many years,
trying to decide whether a brush with fame--
sweating and profane as it was then—was worth
the tribute of a couple of beers.

When I read “The Heaven of Animals,” though,
the ninetieth time, I think it is all right.
I think I should have bought him something
further to take home, something to
comfort through the poem haunted night.

At the cycles' center prowl abroad such men.
They fall. They are torn, They rise. They walk again.



Vanity


The lad under the umbrella has smiled twice.
The pourer of coffee is – well, flirty.
I don't puzzle over this the way some would.
I'm not cursed with excess introspection.
I look to myself the same as I looked at thirty.

You can buy cream in any store
to smooth the dry and flaky spots.
You can tread the treadmill in the gym
to regain the belt's more youthful notch.
And do I do so, ephebe? Lots.

Not vanity, ephebe. Wipe the smirk
of knowing recognition from your face.
I hunger still, is all. I am not ready
for the gray translucent hands to sweep
my feast away and set another place.

One day I'll be set to drop my toys and go.
The playhouse, empty. And you the last to know.


Was driven away from the studio this morning by the loud and infantile behavior of our next door neighbor, not in her space but in ours. She was evidently not annoying J, so I assumed the fault was mine rather than hers, so off I took. As I exited I was called to, and with quivering voice and fainting heart I offered the honest critique J had asked for several times already. I knew what I wanted to say, but perhaps banked fury helped me put it into words. He seemed to think I was right, or at least he didn’t blast me away before company. J is a major talent aspiring to the niche of an eccentric, and perhaps I am here to prevent that. Exactly the reverse could, perhaps, in painting, be said of me. Except that I don’t aspire that much, and am content with being as fulfilled an eccentric as possible.

Seven are killed, including four children aged 1 to 7, when a high speed police chase ends in a collision near Fresno. The alleged offense? a traffic violation. I wonder if the police think of that as a satisfying end. Seven murdered, and nobody will pay. I understand that gangs don’t think of the police as the symbol of civil authority, but rather as a well-armed and advantaged rival gang. There are convincing proofs that they are right.