White Herons Returning

The where to which each hastens seems the there from which each comes.
The magnet of lost morning pulls them backward to the grave.
And through that hour that dusk alone determines, when day's done,
White herons turn, borne high upon the crest of evening's wave.

The needle-drawn threads of their paths hid now by bluing cloud,
Now cast in sharp relief upon a palm green living haze,
They fade, they re-emerge, through sky's blue veil and jungle's shroud
And tease the eye with all the tricks persistent memory plays.

How tireless, the muscle that remembers, spurning rest,
its white wing beating beating 'gainst a barrier not there—
In dreams of flight returning to the future of all nests,
The first and final whirlpool in the mirrored egg of air.

Petulu, Bali—1992
for Jay Funk



Reversing The Yeast 
 
No more - no more - oh never more, my heart,
  Canst thou be my sole world, my universe!
Once all in all, but now a thing apart,
  Thou canst not be my blessing or my curse.
The illusion's gone forever, and thou art
  Insensible, I trust, but none the worse.
                                             (Byron)

I'm fresh out of the furnace! Turned about!
  Heart smashed and broken! Garden dry and wilted!
My wine's been spilled and soured! My fire's out!
  Illusions? Smudged, erased, soiled, bent, and tilted!
Rose-colored glasses? Cracked! The lenses have popped out!
  My harbor's been blockaded!  My river's silted!
Stained sheets have turned all my fond hopes to doubt
And make me drink too much when I go out.

And yet there's been a funny alteration—
  In me, or in what I once most desired.
Between me and my object of elation
  A strange and haunting distance has conspired
To steal both satisfaction and frustration,
  Marooning me, alone, and high and dry,
To watch the pageant from afar. . . and wonder. . .
What happened to the lightning and the thunder?

All passion always seeks its own defeat.
  The sad collapse is part of the gay game.
Exhaustion is its crown—one can't delete
  That final emptiness, or shift the blame.
It starts out lush, delicious, and so sweet;
  Indifference soon makes each dish taste the same.
We grow lethargic after rich desserts,
As after moaning and a few good squirts.

Both field and farmer have completely changed
  Since back when I set out to hoe the row.
It's only fair that they be rearranged
  To let all these new comers have a go.
The first act always looks a little strange 
  From deep within act two of the same show.
You criticize, young actors call you bitter.
You walk away, the old ones call you quitter.

And so I bitch and moan and keep my distance—
  A bitter quitter better far than they
Who frolic unreflective, too persistent,
  Like every other dog that has its day—
For that day wanes, it is resistant
  To every dog's attempts to make it stay.
And so I leaven each smile with a frown,
Reverse the yeast, and let the bread go down.

Why, you yourself Lord B, soon had your fill
  Of all the wild fantastic twists and turns
Of mind, desire—call it what you will—
  That force that freezes even as it burns
And often seems to swell the sail of will
  (Which always wants to know before it learns),
Only to send us crashing without cause
When fire turns to ash and cold ice thaws.

Ah, nothing stays the same, within or out,
  The micro and the macrocosm fly,
And all that is will soon be all that was, no doubt,
  No matter how we beat our breasts and sigh.
From loves to landscapes—all get turned about,
  As one by one our stars fall from the sky.
The trail grows cold, the sight grows dim,
And we lose track of it and her or him.

From The Long View: Byronic Replies & Echoes



Alexander Pope Lectures The Iconoclast On The Nature Of Form

“Why must you always view the rules of form
With such insensitivity and scorn?
There’s one fact even you cannot escape:
We enter being in a certain shape.
And just what is a shape?” then asked the poet,
“The form a thing assumes so one can know it!
For without borders, boundaries, and such
What could our senses see or hear or touch?
Without an edge and a perimeter
To separate and to delimit her
All nature would be just one passive blot,
The Cosmic Handkerchief just full of snot,
And all we individuals no more
Than waves upon a nonexistent shore.
                Each single cell of life’s a limitation,
A miracle of differentiation.
From chaos, just like finite islands rising,
Like forms from formless waters’ deep baptizing—
Each body and each feeling and each thought
Until it be in some form trapped and caught
Cannot be said to be at all—it needs that shape
From which you’re always trying to escape.
                Perhaps flight from the finite sets you free;
But to accept a limit lets you be.

                To this you may agree in the abstract
And yet still fight against in point of fact.
Accepting forms and limits as life’s given
You’re thus bound to embrace the world you live in:
That world of complex rules, laws, and relations
Which govern all of form’s manifestations.
It’s true, these can grow overly arcane
And layered to a point that seems insane.
Their subtleties compound, pile up, and blend:
Eternal! Exponential! Without end!
For physics soon outgrows the elemental.
Phenomena emotional and mental
Are likewise subject to its rules and laws,
Its ropes and pulleys, its effect and cause.
Its fulcrum, screw, and lever—all its tools,
Start simple, then found esoteric schools.
Who’d guess that etiquette and social grammar
Spring from the rules that govern nail and hammer?
Or that from apes that screech and scream and chatter
We would evolve to men who preach and flatter,
To conjugators, parsers, or, much worse,
To poets who tie up the tongue with verse?
                I must confess such versifying taught me
A fresh approach to all those laws which caught me
In complicated labyrinths and traps,
Political and personal cul-de-sacs:
That social hell which is as long a story
As careful composition’s purgatory—
Where one bad rhyme, just like one rude remark,
Can start a raging fire from a spark,
And spoil the whole effect of the whole poem
And from the party send one home alone.
                I know too well that passionate refrain
That even now is echoing through your brain:
I have a thought—why can’t you let me say it?
I know my game—can’t you just let me play it?
But saying, just like playing—by form’s rules—
Is more than just the tyranny of schools;
For careful action can, like careful speech,
Bring clarity of purpose within reach.
The smallness of the given playing field
Is no predictor of potential yield.
And life itself, like meter and like rhyme,
Demands that we be patient and take time
To organize our thoughts, our acts, our diction,
Within the bounds of this or that restriction.
Then what is not allowed, what’s thrown away,
Reveals beneath its detritus the play
Of forces we might never have suspected—
Small, perfect beauties we had not expected!
Our humble harvest: poems finely tuned
Not to bright sun but to the changing moon,
And simple acts of simple human kindness
That more than compensate for human blindness.

                I will admit, at times, form’s evolution
Seems more part of the problem than solution.
Just to maintain decorum and convention
All but exhausts our powers of invention.
Alas, you can’t have one without the other—
No gift of birth without the fuss, the bother;
No limit, then no life; no fence, no field;
No aching hunger, no delicious meal.
With breath comes death; with health, every disease;
With pleasure, pain; and with the dog, the fleas.
The one defines the other, that’s my point,
And half-a-world’s a whole-world out of joint.
You’ve got to strike a balance, or you’ll find
You race too far ahead or fall behind
And wear yourself out with misplaced resistance
Which undermines the basis of existence.
                There’s no experience or situation
Too small to warrant patient application
Of artful means to artful ends desired—
The relative by absolute inspired.
                View, thus, the finite as your greatest blessing!
It’s volatile, and thus will keep you guessing!
And all hypothesis is fresh creation:
A universe in every adaptation!
                All hail Seductive Chaos who keeps dressing
Her emptiness in Maya’s charmed succession
Of Color, Character, and Sensory Delight;
All back-lit by an Intellectual Light;
And splashed with Nasty Habits, with Bad Luck;
Shot through with verbs like Weep, Laugh, Fuck, and Suck;
Decked out with Paint, Pastel, with Poem, with Prose—
She’s Fertile Soil for anything that grows!
Life’s intricate illusions are, its true,
A mask that hides the void’s full face from view.
But no mask, then no face...you’d never find it...
First comes the veil...and then the peek behind it!”

From A Gumbo Abandoned



Alexander Pope Lectures The Conformist On The Benefits Of Confusion

“I see your point,” the poet said, “however—
A point is here-and-now and not forever.
Just look around you at each distant star,
Each glowing pin-prick, twinkling from afar...
How vast that open space that comes between
Each point, each truth, each world! What can that mean?
Infinity, up here, is not abstract.
What parts these points of light is also fact.
How can it be less real than what’s condensed
Within each glowing point of common sense—
For sense is common only till we reach
Beyond the lesson that each point can teach.
That’s why I feel it would be worth your while
Despite the fact that it’s not quite your style
To make a few side-trips, some swift detours,
Before we land back on your kitchen floor.
For other points, and the vast space between them,
May modify your own, once you have seen them.”
               
Our homesick Hero never had a chance
To alter Alexander’s travel plans.
It was too late! The mad cruise had begun!
Already they had passed right through the sun,
Through space intergalactic, launched through time,
To worlds mundane, infernal, and divine—
Where gods, or men, or beasts, or hungry ghosts,
Where cannibals, potatoes, wooden posts,
Computers, hockey pucks, or honey bees,
Umbrella stands, or barber shops, or trees,
Germs, helium balloons, or fresh baked bread,
Neanderthals, bent spoons, or the undead,
Lived out their lives—small, large, or inbetween—
According to the rules of their own being.

From Lilliput to Camelot to Oz,
By way of Kabul, Babylon, and Mars,
This chariot was really on the move—
From Ramses’ Tomb to K-Mart to the Louvre;
From the Bermuda Triangle to Eden,
Through downtown Brooklyn, Centerville, and Sweden;
From Walden Pond to Bedlam, Ludwig’s palace,
And straight on through the Looking-Glass-of-Alice;
From Dante’s layered Hells to Virgil’s Roma,
Across the Bridge of Sighs to Oklahoma;
Afloat on the Titanic (for a while),
Then sailing down the Hudson to the Nile;
Emerging from the Whale-of-Jonah’s belly,
With stops at Wall Street and the corner deli;
Swept from the feast in old Valhalla’s Hall,
To the foundations of the Wailing Wall;
Through Saturn’s rings, along Route 66,
To Burger King, across the River Styx;
From Ali Baba’s Cave to Everest’s Crest,
From Santa’s Lap to Soviet Budapest;
Then on to Storyville in New Orleans,
To Narnia, Lake Ronkonkoma, and Queens;
From Happy Hunting Ground to Water Closet,
Our kidnapped Hero crying—“Easy does it!”—
As they sped off like lightning through the skies
Aboard the hijacked Starship Enterprise,
To Alcatraz, Vermont, Baghdad, Nirvana,
And twenty-seven small towns in Montana—
As well as numerous places with no name,
No two of which were ever quite the same—
Black holes, blind spots, dry wells, and desert isles,
Junk shops, ant hills, dust bins, and garbage piles.

The poet, as they ran this frantic race
Through outer and through inner time and space,
Just like a tour guide, commented and pointed,
Until our Hero’s mind grew quite disjointed.
His view of what was right, and what was wrong,
Collapsed into confusion before long.
His clear cause chased the tail of his effect
Till both collided in a heap, a wreck,
Beneath which all his comfortable ideas
Lay buried by an avalanche of fears.
                The devastation of our cherished notions,
Thus loosens floods of doubt as deep as oceans;
Till clear cut common sense is laid to rest,
And truth, it seems, is anybody’s guess.
                For every world comes packaged with its rules,
It customs of behavior, and its schools,
Which teach the exclusivity of laws,
And answer every Why? with a Because!
Because that’s how it is! That’s how we do it!
Because when God made plans that’s how he drew it!
Because that’s what we are! We all agree!
Because that’s part of our identity!
                And yet, if one moves round from place to place,
The iron laws that anchor things are raised,
And what seems solid soon begins to flow,
And what is fluid soon begins to slow,
Congeal, and freeze, into far different forms
Which quickly set themselves up as new norms.
Thus all who travel through this maze can see
The nature of truth’s relativity.
What is polite in one world, is plain rude
If one goes elsewhere where should not is should—
Where do is changed to don’t, and can to can’t,
And shall evolves, in courts of law, to shan’t.
The rhyme, the reason, certainly are plain,
As long as one is willing to remain
Within one realm, one circle, or one bubble—
But one small step outside means instant trouble.
                As if on stepping stones, connecting dots,
They traveled to a million different spots,
Each world one breath, its god one speck of dust,
It myriad creatures but one moment’s lust
For tangibility, for concrete form:
One isle of rest amidst an endless storm.
To dream so many other people’s dreams
And pass so lightly through their hopes and schemes—
This was, our poet thought, a perfect lesson
For one who by his very own confession
Viewed all unruly worlds (those not his own)
As quite beside the point which he called home.
It’s not that all our sense is nonsense, no. . .
It’s just that out of such sense habits grow;
And habits that start out as ways of seeing,
Soon harden into our habitual being.
Once habits reach that point, they’re hard to shed.
Most beings do not try it till they’re dead—
Confusing their essential selves with what,
In this life, they have learned or done or thought.
                “Don’t view it,” said the poet, “as defeat
To have the rug pulled out beneath your feet.
It can be quite salubrious to stumble,
To see the wall that blocked your viewpoint crumble.
It’s painful, yes, but oftentimes quite funny
To see the value drained from all your money,
To hear your native tongue slurred and cut loose,
To let your locomotive turn caboose,
To find what was your ceiling on the floor,
And see all your opinions shown the door.
Exhilaration is the word I’d use
For all one gains when one agrees to lose,
When one’s allowed to play the game some more
Despite the fact that no one’s keeping score.
All travel is a tonic for this reason:
Because it helps to alter time and season,
Because it shifts one’s focus, clears one’s lens,
Swamps one’s ideals, and give one’s self the bends.
                Yet, in the end, one needn’t travel far
To question who and what and why we are.
One only needs to laugh at one’s reflection
In any mirror handy for inspection.
To this mad mirthful end—in lines
Of verse, I wrote rude records of my times,
And tried my best to throw in sharp relief
The folly lurking not too far beneath
The mores and manners of my fellow men,
Dissecting them with my melodious pen.
I swear I never meant to harm a fly!
A bitter vengeful pamphleteer? Not I!
I left such slander, blasphemy, and bile
To those proud members of the rank and file
Who found my sense of humor too exact
Because it could distinguish lies from tact—
Those social pimps whose social grace and laws
By means of flattery served but one cause:
Their own, of course! That crusade called The Self!
That whirlpool of exclusive Personal Wealth!
                Yet some forms of renunciation can
Restore a less habitual wealth to man:
A wealth to which one need not be attached,
A wealth that’s not an itch that need be scratched.
Most people crave the outer peel, the rind,
And, too impatient, leave the fruit behind.
Their sense of value only goes skin deep.
They chew the fat and never taste the meat.      
                I swear I never meant to harm a soul—
And if, in your dream, I’ve assumed the role
Of a loose-lipped demonic travel guide,
You must believe that all I’ve done is try
To point out to you just how many ways
Attachment to specific forms enslaves.
Not that these forms are harmful in themselves!
Our own fixations turn them into hells!
Constructing citadels of self-control,
Defending them with body, heart, and soul—
We cultivate inflexibility
And strangle endless possibility!
And all for what? The citadel soon falls,
The self’s machine runs out of gas and stalls,
And we return to formlessness and dust,
Our clever current coin consumed by rust.
Our moral backbone’s jellied and dissolved.
Dead meat, our problems die with us, unsolved.
The truths we gripped so tightly drift away!
It’s curtains for another little play!”

From A Gumbo Abandoned