Just One More

Midnight has passed. The kerosene lamp

is the only thing on in the kitchen.

I tip-toe out for our secret ritual.

“Hungry again,” my grandmother asks?

I nod. There wasn’t much to eat

now that the garden had browned out

and snow came up to the porch-step.

In the tiny pool of yellow light

on the oilcoth-covered table,

she opens a stack of saltine crackers,

splits the wax paper wrapping

to a domino line of leaning squares,

salt-crackled and crisp. The dish

of butter was already waiting.

With one broad knife she spreads

the golden soft butter on one,

then two, then half a dozen.

Hunched over the cracker feast,

we nibble as quietly as mice.

In every room, the sleepers breathe.

We bite – one snorts – we chew —

another begins to snore – we swallow —

as someone moans and turns to one side.

They never hear us, and never will.

“One more?” my grandmother asks me,

broad butter knife in hand.

“Just one,” I say. If I eat one,

she eats another. Somehow we always

find two at the bottom.

A cup of spring water to wash them down,

a good-night wave at the kitchen door,

and I creep back to bed. You never

go to bed hungry if a grandmother is there.

In Chill November

There is a day in November, when you walk in the woods (here, it is Pittsburgh's vast Frick Park), when you see a great stand of leafless trees, and, at a distance, you cannot tell if they have lost their leaves, or if they were dead already. How could you tell? This revised poem comes from that quandary.

IN CHILL NOVEMBER

The leaves be red,

The nuts be brown,

They hang so high

They will not fall down.

—Elizabethan Round, Anon.

The snow has come.

The leaves have fallen.

Long nights commit the chill

low sun and flannel clouds cannot disperse.

We walk the park, stripped now

     to mere schematics,

vision drawn out to farther hills

now that the forest is blanked

like flesh turned glass on X-ray negative.

These woods are sham so near the solstice,

play out a murder mystery of birch and maple.

The riddle is, who’s dead and who’s pretending?

That witches’ elm with clinging broomsticks —

     is it deceased or somnolent?

Which of these trees will never bloom again:

     A Lombardy poplar stripped by blight—

     A maple picked clean by gypsy moths —

     A thunder-blasted pedestal of ash —

     A moribund sycamore whose only life

          came in a few vain buds

          (growing like dead men’s hair and nails,

          slow to acknowledge the rot below)?

The ground’s a color cacophony,

     alive, alive!

the treeline a study in gray and brown.

So, who can tell

     the bare tree from the dead,

     the thin man from the skeleton?

Which denizens of wood-lot shed these leaves?

Which is a corpse? a zombie?

Which one is but a vermin shell?

Which treads the night on portable roots,

festooned with bats,

sinking its web of trailing vines

into the veins of saplings?

Which stalwart oaks will topple,

which trunks cave in to termite nests?

Which is the next victim of carpenter ants?

How can we tell the living from the dead?

It is just the month: November lies.

October always tells the truth.

You could no more fake

the shedding of leaves

than simulate a pulse in stone.

Only the living fall in love,

only the living cry for joy,

only the living relinquish that month

in red and yellow shuddering!

The pines,

those steeple-capped Puritans,

what price their ever-green?

Scrooge trees, they hoard their summers,

withhold their foliage,

refuse to give the frost his due.

Ah, they are prudent,

Scotch pine and wily cedar,

touch-me-not fir and hemlock.

They will live to a ripe old age

(if you can call that living).

I shun this sham Novembering.

Turn back the calendar: there, Halloween,

no, further back to the start of leaf-fall!

There! The first-frost autumn shuddering!

Love! Burn! Sing! Crumble!

Dance! Wind! Fall! Tumble!

Into the wind-blown pyramid of leaves!

Spin in a whirling dust-devil waltz!

Leaf-pile! Treetops! Tramping on clouds!

Weightless, flying, red-caped October!

Prologue

I am revisiting/revising my 2005 book, The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets, for a new 2018 edition. Here is the new version of the opening poem.

PROLOGUE

A fountain pen,

     a yellow legal pad,

a cup of tea, a symphony —

these set the stage.

The empty page is one

     of an eternity of silences,

     the start of an infinite line

          of rambling letters.

The pen is ordinance,

     cannoning lines and dots

     onto the ruled pages.

This page is but a clearing,

     the tablet a wilderness.

     Guidelines are there,

          but they are not a map:

     the short line finds its measure,

     the long one cascading over.

Fall in — you’ll find

     no bottom, no sense

of beginnings and endings.

You’ll find yourself

in a Black Forest of poems.

Wolves lurk within —

     no compass

will help you navigate.

You may slip on a comma,

wind up alone and desolate

because a colon misled you.

Three dots will send you flying

into a waiting sink-hole.

Here is some danger,

yet some reward: poems

may change you forever.

I mean to change you forever.

It is too late to turn back.

I’ve got you, guest,

in my little book.

I will not leave you behind.

Here is my hand.

Read on!

New Year's Day

The meal is, shall we say,

     monochromatic:

in the cramped dining nook

with a hard-white beam

     of afternoon sun

chiaroscuro, bouncing off

white table-cloth, white china,

the white serving-platter

of pale roast pork,

the pearly-white of mashed spuds,

chalky pork gravy,

off-color rancid butter,

bread — white, of course,

no other, ever —

white paper napkins,

the pale complexions

of the right kind of people.

Stepfather presides

over a Swede Lutheran silence.

No one is permitted to speak,

save for pass-this-pass-that

and thank-you. The only sounds

are knife-scrapes and fork bites,

the shuffle of chairs

against the splintered floor,

the stifled winter cough.

Mother says nothing; beer

     has done its work.

Stepfather has no use

     for the two stepsons,

book-reading idlers and spawn

of the man he hated and replaced.

Still, as long as the child-support

checks came every month,

he’d have to feed them.

Nothing has any flavor.

White salt, passed round,

and added liberally,

helps not so much as pepper,

lots of it, and water aplenty.

Food cooked in hatred

can only be washed down,

     not eaten.

Ignoring the shouted order

to “excuse himself.”

the older boy gets up,

takes empty water-glass

to the kitchen sink,

and standing there,

he gazes into the sunlit nook,

at the dusty sunbeam

below the unlit chandelier,

from whose never-dusted

maze of dangling crystals,

descended

on pale white threads of silk

hundreds upon hundreds

of

tiny

white

baby

spiders

onto the white pork

the white bread

the white gravy

the white potatoes

the white tablecloth

the white paper napkins

onto the stern whiteness

of the Stepfather,

the passive Mother,

the little brother

gobbling away

at gravy-bread.

Does he tell them?

Or does he run outside

howling with laughter,

thanking the cosmos

for just desserts?

Poets in a Chelsea Brownstone

Hostess. I remember her hunched shadow

on the frosted glass

of the sliding French door,

as we poets read,

and the door slid silently,

just ever so much,

enough for the thin arm

and age-knobbed wrist

to enter, to place

on the refreshment table,

without one ice-clink sound,

the sweating-cool pitcher

of lemonade.

Most of the eager poets

assembled here,

tracking who-knows-what

on her parquet floor,

shuffling their papers and notebooks,

awaiting their turn to read,

did not know her name.

The elegant brownstone

they come to weekly

is just a place,

one among many that come and go

in The Village Voice listings,

places that tolerate

the disheveled artists,

word-crazed, impractical,

the ones who will never

earn a penny.

As I read in my turn,

she listened there

behind the veil of glass,

a listening that leaned

on every consonant I uttered,

a keen pre-echo

to every vowel.

Oh, she heard us.

We did not know her name,

or how the upstairs rooms lodged

a succession of broken souls,

her “causes,”

knew not that we’d been adopted, too.

One day, with a friend, I saw her,

emerging from the brownstone,

sun-walking Ninth Avenue,

behind some tugging hound

misfortune had doubtless thrust

upon her charity.

The warm day reddened

her parlor-pale face.

My friend tells me,

“That’s Mrs. Tanner, you know.

That’s Auntie Mame!”

A Clarinet Wonder

Something weird and wonderful, Romantic and yet modern. The New York Philharmonic's composer-in-residence in 2010 was Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg. Hear his amazing Clarinet Concerto. Alas, the CD is out of print and the record company (Ondine) does not sell MP3 downloads either. I think it's even harder to be a contemporary composer than to be a contemporary poet.

Rachmaninoff Had Big Hands

Rachmaninoff and Humor do not seem to be two words that could share the same sentence. This video, titled "Rachmaninoff Had Big Hands" will thrill all classical music fans, especially those who once thought they could play the great C-Sharp Minor Prelude, until they saw the chords.  

Teddy Tahu Rhodes

Amazing baritone — Teddy Tahu Rhodes — made a breakthrough appearance on the 2010 Saturday live HD broadcast of "Carmen," filling in for an ailing Toreador. 

Here's also a YouTube clip of Teddy, also nicknamed "the baritone with abs," singing the great solo from Handel's Messiah, "The Trumpet Shall Sound."  

The Most Gothic Spot in Pittsburgh

I've been visiting Pittsburgh's cemeteries for two years now, but I have not seen every ravine and hillside that houses tombs and mausoleums. This week I found the best so far: a round, Gothic mausoleum that looks like a set for Poe's "Ulalume." It's in Allegheny Cemetery near the Bloomfield entrance. 

Moments of the Sublime

Breakthrough moments in human consciousness. Plotinus describes achieving oneness with nature/God/the Sublime (substitute your own overarching noun): "He was one himself then, with no distinction in him either in relation to himself or anything else; for there was no movement in him, and he had no emotion, no desire for anything else when he had made the ascent, no reason or thought; his own self was not there for him, if we should say even this. He was as if carried away or possessed by a god, in a quiet solitude, in the stillness of his being turning away to nothing and not busy about himself, altogether at rest and having become a kind of rest." My first moment like this was experienced at night, leaning against a great maple tree in Edinboro graveyard, after I had entered into the very essence of the tree itself (imagining myself as it, not me as one looking at it) .... another time in Providence late at night in the woods as a family of raccoons and I sat regarding the stars ... a few times, not enough times, in a lifetime. To attempt to describe such moments, and to give them value in everyday life, is a poet's life's work.

My Annotated Edition of Sorley, the Lost WWI Poet

The revised second edition of the poetry of Charles Hamilton Sorley is now available from Poet's Press/Yogh & Thorn Books. Robert Graves called Sorley one of the three best poets killed in World War I. Shot by a German sniper in the Battle of Loos, Charles Sorley died at age 20, leaving behind enough poems for a slender volume published by his father in 1915: Marlborough and Other Poems. Several of Sorley's poems have been featured in countless war anthologies, but the poet's complete work was kept in print only until 1932. There was a reprint sometime in the 1980s and then Sorley seems to have been forgotten again. Sorley's nature poems, inspired by English naturalist Richard Jefferies (the British Thoreau), depict the haunted landscape of the Wiltshire Downs, from the days of Roman-occupied Britain to Sorley's own time.
As a student at Cambridge, young Sorley was steeped in the classics; he then traveled to Germany to study and was in school there when the War broke out. He was arrested and sent home by the German government, and within days of returning to England, Sorley enlisted. The last set of his poems, written in the battlefield, contain both stark soundings of death, but also a kernel of wisdom and tolerance, as when he addresses a poem to the Germans he cannot bring himself to hate.
Perhaps the most poignant poem is one he sent home retelling a key scene from Homer's Odyssey and then assuring his friend that he, too, ten years hence, would be telling his own war stories by the fire. Three months later, Sorley was dead. His last poem, a blistering war sonnet, was sent home to his father in his kit. Sorley's body was never found.
This volume includes passages from letters, selected by Sorley's father as illustrative of the themes of the poems in the book. To make this volume more accessible to today's readers (and to students), I have annotated both the poems and the letters, making clear the numerous classical and Biblical allusion that would have been well-known to Sorley's contemporaries. Some 1903 photos of the Wiltshire landscape have also been added, taken from an edition of Jefferies nature writing.
The book was completely re-typeset from the 1932 edition, using typefaces from the World War I era. The book also includes an annotated checklist of the critical reception of Sorley's work from 1915 through 1973, by Larry Uffelman; a biographical sketch of the poet written by his mother for the 1919 Letters of Charles Sorley; additional letters; and juvenilia. This second edition has a longer introduction, covering biographical and scholarly sources about Sorley that were not available to me when the first edition came out in 2010.

To order from Amazon: http://a.co/eoNmWt7

African Americans and the Classics

It has been fashionable for a long time to trash the classics -- the history, prose and poetry of Greece and Rome specifically. Yet the founders of the United States could almost all read Latin, and many read Greek as well, and they knew Greek and Roman history inside out. From this they learned what democracy is, and how republics rise and fall. There would be no United States had not a group of British Colonials in America fancied themselves as new Athenians and new Romans.
When African captives escaped from slavery, or, later, were freed, they knew that two things were vital to them: literacy, and the vote. Many former slaves craved the very classical knowledge that empowered the white man, and some used the wisdom of the classics in the further argument for their rights. It's more common to imagine these former slaves reading the Bible, but they craved -- and some got -- the education in the classics that white man wanted them not to have.
Finally, there's an important book about this, on a theme that is dear to me -- re-establishing the importance of the classics in American history. My friends who teach American literature or history will want to read this book. Other friends of a classical or historical bent will find it illuminating. Please ask your library to buy it. I'm sorry it's so expensive -- academic titles are criminally priced -- so you might need to have your library get it via interlibrary loan from another library that buys these kinds of books.

See Book on Amazon 

Beverly Sills in "The Turk in Italy"

One of the happiest, happiest nights in the opera house ever was seeing Beverly Sills in Rossini's "The Turk in Italy," a sequel to his "Italian Girl in Algiers." Its empowered heroine defies her husband and makes a fool of an amorous Turkish pasha. This version is in English, in a hysterical translation by Andrew Porter. Jokes, gags and memorable lines abound, such as her aria threatening, "I'll take lovers by the hundreds, yes, a new one every night!" Lines like that you never forget. The work was never recorded, but there was a TV broadcast, and here it is, at last, copied from a VHS tape. Sit yourself down and have a romp with this joyous sex comedy. I wish Fellini had made a film of this opera!