Work kills the muse. I've spent the last several weeks buried in a blizzard of code, tired of looking at computers. You never know what can break you out of that, but over the weekend I found a copy of the selected letters of Gregory Corso, a book I devoured in January when I got it from the library, and I brought it home and put it on the table in the lounge, next to four other books of letters I'm glancing through- Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady (which I'm reading for a second time as well), HST, and Lew Welch. That whole world had gone dead to me over the last few weeks. Thank the rain that it's back.
Now I've got to go rediscover that ol' sense of humor. The six year American war on laughter and irony has left millions of casualties. I'm in life support, myself. Yesterday morning, driving to the Farmer's Market, I saw a young man, maybe 25, walking across the street wearing a T-shirt that I'd worn through back in the late 80's. The shirt had a picture of Fundamentally Oral Bill, Bill the Cat's (from Berke Breathed's tremendously accurate and now so prescient comic strip 'Blooom County') late-80's resurrection as a televangelist, surrounded by the phrase- "$aved by Fundamentally Oral Bill". On a Sunday in Portland. I was amused. History repeats itself in ever-shortening increments. And Portland clearly stands on some sort of cosmic ley line, maybe on another plane from the baseline stupidity that infects the USA and takes over the nation like a virus. Remember when we all used to scoff at those reports talking about how far behind American education is? Just go look at some of the empty faces around you these days, young people who hardly realize what's being done in their name, idiots who chant "USA! USA!" at a show in Phoenix by pissed-off English punk legends The Fall while lead singer Mark E. Smith, a true asshole who's never claimed to be anything else, is assaulted by the lead singer of the opening band armed with a rotten banana. You can't make this stuff up.Even the best fiction writers can't make up a world where our inner cities and suburbs are patrolled a military assault vehicles, not driven by soldiers but by soccer moms and people made fat on a steady diet of television and greed, purchased with credit on top of credit, who are so far from the road that they don't even see bicyclists...
Wait a minute. Humor! We need humor! Thurber, where are you?!?
I present for your enjoyment three poems today, all about place, all written January 28-29, when work was just a mirage.
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She dances tiptoed across flooded green fields
north of Liverpool, that land of mystery
monsters once secured by Hadrian's Wall,
she revels in the incessant rain, bathed in its
chill and dried by the blustery Atlantic wind,
and she is old, older than the peat-moss land
and the hard rock shores, older than the
hidden hill lakes and pagan kings
buried in perfect earthen mounds that leave
the believers gasping for heavy air.
She travels on the waves of the Aurora
Borealis, across lands of no land where people
not people invent sounds to call the blinding
solid cold that seals the planet like
a straitjacket
She arrives on no schedule and leaves with
no message, and she travels light,
she knows that any man will offer her a
warm bed, a bottle of fine liquor, and any
drugs she needs,
and she takes it all and celebrates and
fakes the wild passions of love,
and runs back to the cold, leaving her
temporary lovers freezing in their pages.
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For Gary Snyder
When this was a tree-filled bottomland, a marshy
swamp full of deer and beaver and the
occasional wandering forager, looking for a pelt
or a quick meal,
it rained all winter, gray forever, a thick
mist running over the muddy marsh and
hiding moccasined feet smelling the year-round
decay, moss beards from thin branches older
than all visitors,
and the bounty of berries, fungus, animal
growing without man's help.
When this was a farm, the trains ran
back and forth all day long, carrying
dandy-dressed couples to the valley, to
Eugene, back to Portland,
the silent creek plain interrupted only by
the electric whizzing of the interurban,
and still winter never ended, frost
covering the fields and the rain giving
all, but resented by the pioneer settlers,
And today it's just a neighborhood, the moss
never died but killed by mechanical construction,
the rain's gifts forgotten as we curse
the cold gray and blame our awful
condition on the skies, even as we
murder the land below.
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Amsterdam Club Paradiso a converted church big
windows high ceiling balconies men tall as
me drinking Heineken
I said goodbye to summer, goodbye to the
USA that night, goodbye to Wilco going
back on that long flight the next day,
a band of wandering Americans with unkempt
beards and eyes deep with dread and fear,
faraway from crowds that they no longer
understood, people who stand on the pool's
edge and look in at drowning Americans
who just want air again, just want
back to the surface one more time, just
one drink in the sunshine,
I'd made it up from there and wouldn't
take a real breath until after the
guitar-fueled atomic waves destroyed
every last tie I had to that America
How could I ever return? Europe laid open
and bare, 47 days of safety and strangeness,
I shared a joint there on the floor where
no religion remained, none but rock and roll,
where grandparents remembered the Germans
took the bikes and never returned them,
I don't know if I even felt the mushrooms
but I cried like a teenager and the band
didn't even talk to the crowd, didn't need to,
maybe the Dutch didn't understand what we're
all running from, or maybe they know
better than we ever will, almost as well as
our possible, doubtful grandchildren.
