for four poets, among many others, who have
profoundly influenced my worldview, selfview, and voice:
Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and Grandfather Walt Whitman
...
As with love
also the bellows
Strophe 1
...
for Karthik
'...descend, and of the curveship lend a myth to God.' - Hart Crane
...
The distant gazebo of that small
town wears white lights garlanded
round, and snow.
...
though curtains darked
allow some sun to pass
...
Dear Incomprehension,
all our Sun goes nova
...
Still this grief
trees just below
...
This aria on this bright sunny clear NYC day whilst the jackhammers and their jackhammerers pound directly beneath my window at 9 am. The patient doves with their blessing dulcets on my usual late winter fire escape just other side of window have fled, my bed no refuge from mad unvaunted unwanted dins in the city of men....juxtapose dust hammered up from the bookshelves, the compliant window ledge graying clouds of god knows what, with Bach's praises, with sharp sneezes in B minor, my whining complaints just so much braying 'hair on a me string', impotent curses abjure to the roaring city that never ever let's me sleep in, the Polis's absolute rule-unchangeable being - neither blizzard, gale, hail, pandemic nor Jehovah's Witnesses shall prevent absolute Imperatives of Unrelenting Progress from hammering meek citizens escaped to their tarred overpriced roofs in a city of Hungry Ghost calculating taxes and wondering just why there is no more ink in the voracious printer.
To quote last lines from two James Wright poems despite the magnificent transcendence of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, ah the complementarity of apparent opposites, contrasts of the morning new and the same old bright dingy yellow-suited helmeted men at war with pavement below mad to get to gas in urban rusted pipes a'leak perhaps, my good dream no longer remembered, blotted, only scraps to poke at -
...
for Josef - '...noons of dryness see you fed' - W. H. Auden
...