TC: Divine Dancers

.

Purple-throated Carib Hummingbird in its natural habitat, Morne Diablotins National Park, Dominica: photo by Charlesjsharp, 1 December 2010

for Edwin Denby

“The angels standing

two or three feet away

terrify,”

Edwin said

The Great Ones

when they sweep

across our sphere

of the universe

move

in a state of

presque vu --

almost seen

in the phantom

motion

of a curtain

stirred by no breeze --

hovering

behind a screen

waiting there

to manifest themselves

TC: So Long

.

Life with its heart down on its hands and knees

Has wasted so much time and lost

90% of the big ones for so long it’s not

Worth it, no, I don’t care what you say

Said the champion

Dempsey and Firpo: George Bellows, 1924
Taking the Count: Thomas Eakins, 1898

TC: The Rebel Against Dogs

.

Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from dogs,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable paws.

Siberian Dogs in the Snow: Franz Marc, 1909/1910 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

TC: Following Rivers into the Night

.

Edge of the Amargosa Desert: Maynard Dixon, 1927 (Nevada Museum of Art)

for Ed Dorn

I guess it’s because

the only things left in this West

I can have any real

respect for

are beauty of character

and beauty of nature

and you know the two

breed one another

in those long miles where

there is nothing to do

as the sun goes down

over the flat horizon

but watch it slowly gild

the surfaces of rivers

from the Belle Fourche

(or Foosh, as the locals say)

to the Cimarron

which will push on into

the darkness with its light

flickering over them like a skin.

TC: A New Light

.

The sandpapery candor of Bobby Dylan
Strikes a jejune note all of a sudden

Throw my ticket out the window
Throw my sneakers out there too

Mama said there’d be days like this
When rain pencils the sky

With an air of biological rigor
And visibility is grimly minimized

Tiny puffs of smoke speckle it
The harmonic spectrum is muffled

The tall white dog stands in the road
Shivering and shaking the water off

The scene makes the usefulness
Of an infinite tolerance evident

Too late I see the value of being
Resolute in a new light

Rain falling: photo by Axel Drouin, 2005
Rain falls: photo by Tomasz Sienicki, 2004
Rain drops on a smoke tree leaf: photo by Kris Miller, 2004

TC: Drifting

.

A trumpet vine
a bright green
tree fern -- the
violet light
of early evening
fog enshrouds
pink big
city clouds

Translucent wave cloud (Stratocumulus lenticularis): photo by El C, 2005

TC: Under the Fortune Palms

.

Some people think meanings are hard to find
In the 1980’s decade of great emptiness
Among the bungalows of Samarkand
I stood under the fortune palms
And watched for a sign to blow by
In the throbbing Santa Ana
But all that came my way
Was the remote echo of a woman’s voice
From down around Xanadu Street
Calling for her dog to stay

The Flamingoes: Henri Rousseau, 1907 (private collection)

TC: Sunflowers

.

A clear night sky steeped in blue and green starlight
Hollow and deep as a huge sea shell flushed from within
And reddening as the rising god once again commands
The drowsy sunflowers to lift their heads and open their black eyes

Teaches us how the world begins all over the earth
How to greet one another in language beyond words
To depart unconcerned with any idea of return and perhaps
To at last begin to speak without not thinking

Sonnenblumen: Egon Schiele, 1911

TC: Up the Creek

.

Had been trying to find its course for years

sans mechanical intervention

toward some thought somebody had had about something

but on the way kept getting lost in the tall weeds

and forgetting its purpose must have been

to arrive somewhere not to stay to splash

Wildbach (brook): Egon Schiele, 1918
Der Lyriker (The Poet): Egon Schiele, 1911 (Sammlung Leopold, Wien)

Madison Avenue Portal Stopped Realities

Last night was a pure poetry night. It ended with Ted Greenwald and Kit Robinson tag-team reading at the Poetry Project. This is a truly inspiring and fun-filled barrage of verbiage, and the turn-taking insured the voice was always fresh. Earlier, it had been Hettie Jones and Tony Towle, hosted by Charles North at the Schimmel Theater at Pace University, in a night of poetry and reminiscences of Frank O'Hara. It was the perfect prelude to a night of language. Tony commented he thinks it's a sin "Second Avenue" is not in the new Selected and recommended people look up the old Selected with its terrific Larry Rivers portrait of the nude O'Hara on the cover. Hettie agreed and reminded us that she and LeRoi Jones had first published "Second Avenue" as a chapbook. Tony then mentioned the episode of Mad Men that includes a Frank O'Hara poem. I had never seen Mad Men, though I did read the January Jones article in GQ. I had to look up the clip. I think it's genius. Here's my comment on YouTube: "I love this reading of Frank O'Hara's poem — it brings out the darker, more depressive quality that underpins the buoyant optimism most people comment on in his work. It is the final section of the final poem in his first book. The book is MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY, and the poem is 'Mayakovsky.'" Here's the clip: Frank O'Hara on Mad Men I think Frank would have loved it too.

TC: A Glimpse of Hope

.

for Charlie Vermont

The bloom is short lived
evanescent spring
and fall after all -- C.V.

Charlie,
Yes it's odd
how short the spring
how long the fall
and another thing
a poem
found in the lining
of an old winter coat

TC: The Blue Dress

.

I close my eyes

and see you at the age of 30

beyond the mist of affect

in your blue dress

so slim and Viennese

in the Sharons’ picture gallery

at Tissa’s party

a stormy night in 1974

with the ocean roaring

against the breakwater

I find you there with

all my projections

withdrawn at last

and what appears is

you in your blue dress

in this bewildering recurrent

intensified mind garden

I call creation

because you created it for me

Girl with blue pillow: Egon Schiele, 1913
Standing girl with blue dress and green stockings: Egon Schiele, 1913

TC: Hope

.

The happiness promised in names like Lord's
Valley and Wind Gap recedes like the fading
Of a rainbow, yet hope walks in anyway,
Where there's life she's there--nature's utopian
Possibility remains part of the scheme
As long as there's a breeze to blow the past away.

Study of Sorrel, Cow Parsley and Willow Saplings: Peter De Wint, 1805-1810 (Whitworth Art Gallery)
Rainbow (taken from helicopter): photo by Mila Zinkova, 2007

TC: Birds

.

Sky full of blue nothing toward which the Magi
Move, like dream people who are Walt Fraziers of the air…
Sometimes the moves they make amaze them
For they will never happen again, until the end of time; but there they are.

So shall I be like them? I don’t think so… and yet to float
Above the rolling H2O
On wings that express the mechanics of heaven
Like a beautiful golden monkey wrench
Expresses mechanics of earth… t’would be bueno.






Sanderlings (calidris alba) flying in formation: photo by Ianaré Sévi, 2009

TC: The Light of the World at 9000 Feet

.

A big
bossy-crested
blue jay
with electric black
wings
and a simonized
gorgeousness
about him
flashes into
the aspens
like sheet
lightning

Steller's Jay: photo by Alan D. Wilson, 2006

Aspens changing color in mid fall: photo by Zephyr Glass, 2007

TC: As the Human Village Prepares for Its Fate (Constable)

.

While everything external
dies away in the far off
echo of the soul
still there’s a mill wheel turning

it is like a good
kind of tiredness in
the moment before sleep
by some distant stream

a note of peace
in a life which
will never be peaceful
as the daylight fades

the dream disintegrates
but the shadow holds
no power
over what’s about to happen

Flatford Mill: John Constable, 1817 (Tate Gallery)

"The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork, I love such things."

TC: Hans Bellmer

.

Why does Bellmer's
art express so well
the fallenness of men
their living under this spell
as if out of each one
had come another
who walks beside that one
and bears that one's name
but feels nothing

Child and Seeing Hands: Hans Bellmer, c. 1950 (Art Institute of Chicago)
La mitrailleuse en état de gråce (The Machine Gun[neress] in a State of Grace): Hans Bellmer, 1937 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
Autoportrait: Hans Bellmer, 1971 (Bibliotheque Nationale de France)

TC: Afternoons

.

it’s fine to wake up and hug your knees
my knees
when I have run out of fire fluid
I rush back to bed

the feeling of paws on my knees
petals and wings
little hair
why have you gone

I sing that in my head
being alone is a song
a cigarette in bed
it’s better not to touch the ceiling
but if love attaches a band aid
from the ceiling to your head
there’s nothing to do but recognize it

A band-aid: photo by Svetlana Miljkovic, 2006

TC: Lullaby for Cuckoo

.

Did you suffer, or was it just the one who made you?
Little bird, deluded or self-deluded,
Close your eyes, and let these chirps resound
Mechanically. Was vision the clue you lacked,
When emerging from the works you sang sweetly
Of midnight, though it was purple noon
And purple riot ran through you, while
The big hand batted and rocked around
The clock, and you alone had time for me?
Or was homo faber the missing link
Who forged you in his workshop of stupid toys?
Either way, the little hand is catching up,
The door is opening; you aren’t coming out.

Cuculus canorus: from Neumann, Naturgeschichte der Vögel Mitteleuropas, 1905
Early cuckoo clock, Black Forest, 1760-1780 (Deutsches Uhrenmuseum, Furtwangen)

TC: The Things They Left Behind

.

Two beautifully clothed things stood on the thing under the thing refusing to accept given things of thing.


Their things touched and stretched out to the things like infinite things.

He nodded toward the thing and returned his opera things to the thing in the duchess's thing.


A thing and a thing and a few assorted things, that night, had to be left behind.

Text: adapted from TC, John's Heart, 1972

Antologica Opera XXXVIII: Maurizia Manfredi, 2006: photo by Bourochejm, 2008
The Thing/What Is It?: photo by Colin Gregory Palmer, 2006

Antologica Opera XVIII: Maurizia Manfredi, 2006: photo by Bourochejm, 2008

TC: Prolepsis

.

Melodious liquid warble in the plum
Tree tells the sinking year how to feel
Its recession into grief as if a thorn
Poked a nester in an old wounded heart
Of stone from which slowly drips recognition
All breathing passion far above
These days atonal as white noise
Through bare branches cotton clouds drift by
Last yellowed leaves catch lone rays of sun
Going down into the motherless ocean
A light plane buzzes off toward brown hills
As shade drops over the next urban plot
To prepare the air for what the dead don’t know
How swiftly we are coming to join them

Boat and Yellow Hills: Selden Connor Gile (Oakland Museum)
Close-up of crocuses in early afternoon light: photo by Linda Spashett, 2009
Lookup (clouds and sea): photo by !rina 1984, 2009

TC: I Lied About Wallace Stevens

.

I dwelt in isolation, long ago, through two long strange winters, in a single room in a small cottage on an exposed coast upon the North Sea, a place where stormy nights of wild wind and rain were commonplace; even then, or perhaps especially then, it was not always simple to view things in a single aspect.

The temptation to alternative interpretations was always urgent; what an unfortunate period it was.

Opposite the feeble gas stove a horrid funereal floral wallpaper decorated the single sizeable wall of this room.

I obtained painting materials, eventually, and painted upon this wall a large representation of the Jastrow duck-rabbit picture as I had found it in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect...” And I must distinguish between the ‘continuous seeing’ of an aspect and the ‘dawning’ of an aspect.... I see two pictures, with the duck-rabbit surrounded by rabbits in one, by ducks in the other. I do not notice that they are the same. Does it follow from this that I see something different in the two cases? It gives us a reason for using this expression here. “I saw it quite differently, I should never have recognized it!” Now, that is an exclamation. And there is also a justification for it. I should never have thought of superimposing the heads like that, of making this comparison between them.... I describe the alteration (change of aspect) like a perception; quite as if the object had altered before my eyes.... The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged. I suddenly see the solution of a puzzle-picture.

This mural remained unknown to, because unseen by, the owners of this dwelling, for the remainder of the duration of my stay in this remote little seaside town.

The wind is blowing hard right now. I am reminded of a poem about a candle that is blown out by the wind, or perhaps it is only the image of the candle, in the poem, that is blown out by the wind; it is a poem about aspect issues and alternative interpretations. The poem comes from Wallace Stevens' first book, Harmonium, published in 1923.

Valley Candle


My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.

I have loved this poem for fifty-two years. When I imagine it lately, though, there is a pictorial aspect change, a reinterpretation of perception whereby, when I see the letters of the Stevens poem, they become transparent and in their place, or as if through them, as the fleeting candlelight seems to pass through the living hand of the child Christ in the Georges de la Tour painting Joseph the Carpenter, I see the words of a different poem, which I have written in my mind.

In fact this is an old bad habit, seeing poems that do not exist through poems that do.

That Stevens had not published his first book until the age of forty and that it had then been the ungodly great Harmonium, for a long time this figured him for me as a significance among significances, a phenomenon from an age of wonders.

And yet, and yet...

North Sea: photo by Muns, 2003
from Philosophical Investigations: Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1953
"Valley Candle": Wallace Stevens, from Harmonium, 1923
Joseph the Carpenter (detail: hands of the young Christ): Georges De la Tour, 1635-1640 (Musée du Louvre)
Duck/rabbit (pink): image by John Schmidt
"I lied in my ad. I hate Wallace Stevens.": Mike Twohy, The New Yorker, 1995

TC: It Is Getting Late (May 1819)

.

Half bottle of claret drunk alone--a soft
Dusk falls in this dragon world of men
Who cannot see what flowers are at their feet
Once the swarming of phenomena begins

Better perhaps to guess than to see
Those flowers of death's close growth and breathing,
Lustrous, fragrant, spongy, aethereal,
Shadowy thought left to supply its own

Earth-figuring text finds this evanescent
Diffuse sense efflorescing, this slow
Faint luminous phosphorescence rising
From the forever speculative ground

Greater periwinkle (Vinca major): photo by Alvesgaspar, 2008

Epiphyllium anguliger: photo by Emma Lindahl, 2006

From TC: Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats

TC: Premonitory (Teignmouth, Spring 1818)

.

Mariners don’t think about the deeps too much.
The canvas of my reverie: maritime,
With promontory, cave, and little antique
Town that’s emptied for a sacrifice.
A boat tacks round the cove and disappears
Into my mind’s eye, where the scene plays over

And over: a small town beside an immense sea,
A white sail tacks around the promontory.
Mariners don’t think too much about the deeps,
Poets were once thought premonitory.
The canvas of my reverie is
Maritime, with a promontory, a town:

The town has emptied for a sacrifice.
I close my eyes, but the same scene plays over:
Above the victim’s head the priest suspends
A blade, light plays cleanly upon bronze,
The sun beats down, the confused heifer lows,
The pipe shrills, the bright libation flows,

Those of the faithful with weak nerves look away,
The blue paint splashed beneath a glowing sky
Bleeds across the harbor to the bobbing skiff
Whose white sail shows above the green head cliff,
Moves round the point, and seems to freeze in time
The unison hymn of sailors who forget

All that they know but their songs’ chiming,
Chanting as we did when poetry was young,
Trying not to think too much about the deeps,
Our fear of death, and this abandoned town
Which itself has lost all memory of
The qualities of life vacated when we die.

Landscape with Aeneas at Delos: Claude Lorrain, 1672 (National Gallery, London)
East Teignmouth, South Devon, mid-19th century: artist unknown

From TC: Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats