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| Revolutionary Letters: Dedicated to Bob Dylan Diane Di Prima I have just realized that the stakes are myself I have no other ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life my spirit measured out, in bits, spread over the roulette table, I recoup what I can nothing else to shove under the nose of the matre de jeu nothing to thrust out the window, no white flag this flesh all I have to offer, to make the play with this immediate head, what it comes up with, my move as we slither over this Go board, stepping always (we hope) bertween the lines. Left to themselves people grow their hair. Left to themselves they take off their shoes. Left to themselves they make love sleep easily share blankets, dope & children they are not lazy or afraid they plant seeds, they smile, they speak to one another. The word coming into its own: touch of love on the brain, the ear. We return with the sea, the tides we return as often as leaves, as numerous as grass, gentle, insistent, we remember the way our babes toddle barefood through the cities of the universe. |
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| The River Has No Hair to Hold Onto Ralph Angel It's only common sense (not that they know the score, they don't avoid it). And so one's life story is begun on a paper napkin and folded into a coat pocket to be retrieved later when it's darker and cooler, and closer. And onward to rockier ground, where conversation is impassable and human beings matter more than the light that glimmers beneath the horizon before sinking into our own inaudible sigh (a long way from these fur-covered hands). And somehow the deal is struck. Money gets made. And the small shocks one undergoes for no reason, the bus driver handing you a transfer, a steamy saxophone ascending the jungle. The city lays down its blanket of rippling lamplight as though exhaustion too was achieved by consensus, and what one does and how one feels have nothing to do with one's self. No, this can't be the place, but it must be the road that leadss there, always beginning when morning is slow and hazy, suffering to get somewhere with all the memorable mistakes along the way, piecing them together, arriving, believing that one arrives at a point different from the starting point, admitting things still aren't clear. A rag doll on a dark lawn injures the heart as deeply as the salt sea air filling one's lungs with a sadness once felt in a classroom, a sadness older than any of us. And the dogs barking, challenging cars. And the willows lining the sidewalk, lifting their veils to the inscrutable surface of wood. (Someone is trying to get a message through. Someone thinks you'll understand it.) |
| Self-Portrait at Six---Stephen Berg My wife hung it there, on the wall on the way to our bedroom. When you take the five steps up to the landing in front of our door, it's on your left, usually in shadow in a gold-rimmed oval mat, Victorian oval walnut molding frame, the eyes already hurt, defensive in the way we think "open" means, but is, actually, only a form of wariness. No steadiness, no self-assurance, no clarity of mind inlfuence the face yet. The thick brown hair is mine, but the mouth is all wonder in a kind of sullen trance and pleads not to be wounded more. He fears the world can kill him, and will, the world is always mysterious, like disease. Being alone attacks him from the outside, saddening his look, he can't ignore it by simply playing. Instead it seems he can't defend himself, there's no courage of acceptance in his gaze. At my age now, I've come to imagine my mother, at the beginning of my life, as a young lovely woman, baffled by her pain, who found my helplessness too much like her own to let her simply reflect my emerging self. So, to extend the thought, my face on the stairwall, then, was already caught in the battles of identity and self0denial, of believing that freedom is impossiblebecause another's self is who one is. Isn't that what our first taste of death is, invasion of another's pain? Isn't that how we first split ourselves into good and bad? Think of an awareness that lets you act without even a shade of sensing others are watching you, judging you, caring about you, so that desire and action diffuse, and there's no gap, no hint of pain that slows you. But this is memory, interpretation, the two great dangers of the mind. What it is I'm getting at, what it is that brings that picture back and stirs my idea is the gnawing aloneness of people, of all things, of consciousness itself, and the opposite--that each of us lives in others' minds, as they live in ours, sometimes flaring in images, sometimes feeling each others' flesh. Each night before I go to bed I pass myself on the stairs, eternally helpless, caught with an early madness crossing my face, and it seems, as I tuck myself in, trying not to wake her, trying not to be seen or heard, that the entire universe is the dark fetal mound breathing on one side of our bed, that everything flows from it, everything returns. |
| The History of Poetry---Mark Cox Once the world was waiting for a song when along came this. Some said it was a joke funny ha-ha but at the end too lachrymose to last. Others that it was writ holier than thou and should be catechised, then set to turgid dirges, wept over with gnashed fang, wrung palm. The ancient declaimed it fad, the young, old fogies' play. Almost everyone agreed, except the children, who didn't listen, that it was kid stuff. Centuries yawned and fell back, stuporous, eons stretched out, soaking up beauty sleep. Then one day a peassant, knowing he hurt too much, remembered hurting too much, told his wife he might have written it if, in another life, he'd been born better, at least literate. And when the gods heard this they hungered suddenly to become mortal and join themselves with us in lecherous praise. Thus hereafter follows the stories of their sins, their cries made flesh by euphony and trope they whispered to us that we take them down, their great debauches, all made up that we should emulate with our blood, play in blood, while they in the cheap seats, stomp the floor and clap-- all loss, all the fallible, all poetry. |