Planet of the Blind

Essay: Summer Solstice

In the old days at the edge of the Finnish woods my father’s father and in turn, his father

Raked the dry weeds and lit a bonfire but they went about their work so cautiously

One might think they were burdened by superstitions.

& yes they kept a spare coffin in the house, eating off of it, using it for a table.

“In these dark times,” they would say. “In these final days…”

& though my father’s father’s father was a Christian

Though he believed in the life everlasting

Hhe was afraid of willful nature.

& while praying they burned that unused coffin.

& the sun dipped to the dark horizon …

S.K.

The Confession

I wasn’t myself today and without forethought of any kind I walked into the tall grass and lay down. Add gold and acid & I’d have an engraving: Hermes Trismegistus dreaming; Carl Jung on holiday—who knows what to call it…"This isn’t me," I thought. "What kind of person lies in the uncut grass in America? Isn’t lying down a confessionof sorts?"

& I lay there sloped in the odors of vegetation unable to imagine my confession. What had I to confess? My foolishness perhaps but even the god inside me was tired of that story. Autumn & the crickets singing during the day. Autumn; crickets; the god inside me; tall grass; foolishness without conceit; a simple half hour while my country wages war & about that time I sensed that I have said all the prayers I have ever known.

S.K.

Walking Swiftly with Robert Bly

In those days I had these coke bottle glasses & I could see a pine cone or a Chinese fan

When I raised them straight to my nose & yet I walked as fast as a man can walk

& no surprise: the body was not afraid of zeroes or empty rooms;

It didn’t see the cloud that resembled a mountain

For when our footing is uncertain men and women see nothing at all.

We were walking beside a lake

& Robert said the shadows cast by the pines

Were like the silences of families

But we were moving quickly

In several darknesses—too many

For a human frame—please understand

The body is pure uncertainty

& its shadows are unobserved

Though we make all the world an algorythmn

Lining up the churches and jeweled caskets, the eyes of animals,

Occidental numbers,post mortems of the heart

The body enters the ocean without claim

Without thought— we have been poor always—

Walking swiftly we are the poorest things in nature.

You who love the bitter seeds in bread and poetry…

You who never believe in devils…

You who laugh at the felicities of Russian rhymes that stay in the ear for a lifetime…

No one calls us

But walking swiftly

The house stands among thorns.

"I will come again to this poorest of houses," the body says. "But not this morning."

S.K.

Angel Revised in Workshop

"I think her wings should come off," says a student, and so her wings come off. They fall like dirty bandages. "There’s something about the light in her eyes, it doesn’t seem earned," (the voice, impatient, feminine, too quick for "jaded".) Immediately her eyes, Byzantine almonds—they are wiped away, replaced by the eyes of a soldier. "All this self-awareness in the features, it makes me queasy," says a boy (who swears he has instincts—it’s in his nature to know when a face is two-faced…) "So what happens next?" (Another boy, the one with the serial killer trading cards) says (after a semester of silence): "I mean the afterlife, nothing happens, there’s no smell of blood or whiskey." He says it, and although no one knows what he means everyone agrees the halo has to go."Now she looks like one of Brancusi’s eggs," the last student says. "She’s perfect, featureless, and derivative."

S.K.

Eggs for Ted Berrigan

Who once in Iowa City

Told my friend Marvin

That taken

Together

As poets

They

Were

"Steak and eggs"

& then Ted

Sd

Marvin

Was "the steak"

Which was

Fair enough

I too

Want to be

An egg poet—

Once

In upstate

New York

I saw

The composer

Aaron Copeland

Eating

Steak and eggs

In a diner

& nowadays

Who

Would know

That old man

Eating alone

Just off

Route 20

& who drops

Ted’s poems

In bus stations?

I’m still

Leaving the eggs…

S.K.

Clouds Over the Shopping Mall

Have you forgotten the reason you came?

Are you lost like the prodigal son?

Do you tell fortunes there

Above the sad automobiles

& the single mothers

who are walking in a loneliness

Too steep for bare nature?

How I wish I could be like you:

Imperial, slow, half alive

Like the priests of empire,

Talking to yourselves only

In the language

Of minerals

& the unborn.

Let commerce

Appeal to the poor!

Let them

With their broken carts

Believe in magic!

Yes! You! Bombard!

I’m talking to you!

S.K.

Cleveland, Ohio (April)

Rain. But the quality was all wrong:

Walking Euclid Avenue I remembered the Norwegian poet:

The age of the great symphonies is over now…

Euclid; cast off buildings in all directions; ghost of Mahler

In this rain that smelled faintly of sulphur.

Borges, I walked through a keyhole just after ten am.

Then spring was green in the trees

And Mahler’s odd China—

That country of total darkness and total light

Was all my own.

Then the city’s birds were more musical

Though the rain continued gently & blue

S.K.

Miten Surullista, Kaikki

                  --after the Finnish of Jarkko Laine

How sad, everything…

Purple weeds

Growing beside the tracks,.

Candidates on the radio…

Beyond my window

A neighbor, a young man,

Introduces his baby girl

To the ducks.

She makes joyful sounds and claps her hands—

Human beings

Love this world so much

A spirit takes them

When they can scarcely walk.

My radio crackles & the script of ruin

Snicks through the air. El Presidente

His pants stuffed with money

Speaks of evil

In the catalyzed rhythms

Of nursery tales.

How sad to live

As the nation states

Begin to fall—

When denatured and unseen

Children are erased from the books.

Were he alive today

Even John Wayne

Would vomit in the beach grass.

America?

S.K.

Contemporary Valhalla, Part Two

You are a coward but Lo! You’re "in" among heroes

In this afterlife

With no signs of poverty.

At dinner you’re handed a gold toothpick

& a wormy poet sidles up

To sing your praises.

(In life you were a varnished toad,

But in Valhalla O you are suddenly blessed

With big teeth and grabby hands.)

Yep. In Valhalla you’re a hero with the others—

Marrow suckers, Colonels, bureaucrats, boot lickers,

All lately of the swamp & if truth be told

You’re all a tad slimy to be sitting at table.

But there you are,

Eating the heart out of something that still has a pulse,

A moral thing,

We’ll call it Philosophy’s lamb.

S.K.

On Distrust

A neighbor cuts wood in the rain

Dragging branches and prodding artlessly

With a cross-cut saw. Rain

Has fallen all summer

& the encyclopedia

Lying open on the table

Has folded its pages like a moth.

Why don’t you do something?

Why don’t you carry painted jars

Under the clouds?

S.K.