Recovering playwright, once won a STRANGER Genius Award for theater. Now writing a bloated novel about… G-d help me! Theatre.
You gamble wrong, hoping
I’m like the others. I ain’t.
I’m the one who’ll kill you,
make you better, or abandon you;
but never hope you’ll care.
I’m the one who’ll make you
bigger than both of us, lift you
thriving above surviving. I’m the friend
circling your heart’s winter with fire.
I grew up in a house on Sweet Air Road just outside the tiny town of Jacksonville, Maryland.
This poem’s from around a quarter of a century ago, maybe longer: it is undated. I remember that I typed the surviving copy — and I do mean typed: it still has the little dabs of Wite Out® where I screwed up — from the handwritten original at my temp job at Northern Life Insurance, circa 1993. Suffice it to say that when I wrote this, I was still a kid, though I would have fiercely argued otherwise. (Clearly, I had a tabbing problem.)
One working definition of an adequate poem is “an improvement on silence.” I think that, at that time at least, this was.
Sweet Air
breathes alcohol blossoms
blurs pressed-flat, cut-dried memories.
Turn a corner in that house
in your mind
sick, sweet air finds you.
Follow your brother
in your dream
into the black at the bottom of the basement stairs;
Watch as he turns and you see
his face has changed—the sheeted head
of a ghost—not your brother at all.
Don’t run. Go dumb—paralyzed.
Dream again
see a man, strange and dangerous,
standing in your bedroom grinning.
Scream silent like they say abortions do.
Know that if downstairs they
could hear they’d come
warm to you.
but they can’t
so they won’t
won’t
won’t won’t
warm to you.
Listen to the one come now
(ah, you’re not dreaming)
cricking knee climbs the stairs;
It’s Mom
Dad comes more silently,
soft drunken concentration up
the carpeted steps
exploding through the door, roaring!
Lie rigidly, impossibly asleep.
It wouldn’t have saved you if you were.
Don’t let not knowing who to mail it to
stop you from sending praise. Just drop
gratitude anywhere, and everywhere, and—
guaranteed—it’ll get where it’s going.
Praise the connections and contingencies,
the blocks and bruises, the stupid choices
that led to this dreamy-eyed kid kissing you.
Praise every worn corner of concrete.
Wow, The Seattle Star published my new poem “316“. Kind of thrilling for me, frankly.
Consuming days like communion wafers
Awaiting the theatrics of the stars
Burning dead illusion somewhere beyond
These swamping atmospheres
Suffering through the wrung-out salt-craving
of the season’s seventy seventh hangover.
That tree is also an outcropping
of the dumb earth, but it can crown
itself again from its own skeleton.
Don’t look at me. I’m meat bound. Graying.
My sons are my blossoms
and their daughters, lost summer.
And what does Ikkyū say? “Chop open
the cherry tree. You’ll find no flowers.
But the spring breeze brings forth. . .”
Baseball cherry pop grilled steak and mojitos.
Winter implicit.
Winter be damned.
Winter come again.
Simple Sympathy
Bill calls because you’re still
angry, not at him, but everything.
Bill wouldn’t call if you were just angry at him.So, instead of walking to the water’s edge to sit
zazen on the spot on the bench someone carved PAUL
into years before you appeared with your dumb ritual— bowing once before it, turning, bowing again to the sound,
then sitting, bowing again and then just sitting
maybe fifteen, eighteen minutes in all weather–you rant over the wind’s blow into the cell phone and Bill,
like a patient boxing coach with sparring mitts gives
you just enough flat punchback to keep you swinging, bleedingoff just enough of your blockheaded hate
for feckless actors and administrators in a rag doll
death dying theatre and mostly your own damned selffor writing another damned play to put on a shelf
over and over putting yourself here,
in front of these waves strangely
luminous, ominous, heaving the sound
in sympathy, or so it seems,
to your simple mind.
*The create date on the Word file containing this poem is Monday, October 26, 2009, exactly a year ago today. Obviously, I was stuck in a very frustrated place. I had just learned that the theatre in Southern California that seemed so eager to premiere my farce Gossamer Grudges had suddenly, unaccountably and irrevocably lost interest. We at NewsWrights United were also starting to realize that a certain “nice” leader within Seattle’s regional theatre echelons was not, in fact, going to come through on his glad-handing promises of resources and good will for the first edition of our Living Newspaper, It’s Not in the P-I. I was feeling fucked, frankly, and very deeply sorry for myself.
Anger has always been a part of my life. Twenty years of Zen practice has not changed that and I doubt the remainder of a lifetime will. Anger is part of who I am. On the other hand, anger is not always inappropriate. Certainly when it comes to Seattle’s current theatre situation, the old hippy adage applies: “If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention.” And, of course, anger unshared is absolutely no fun at all.
I didn’t know it then, but within a few weeks of howling out this poem, I would begin planning the essays that I started posting here last December. I suspect Bill Salyers is glad that I now have this place to vent. For my part, I am grateful too to have Just Wrought, but much so much more grateful that I have my Zen practice, friends like Bill, and the wide open daunting weather of the Puget Sound in autumn, vast enough to humble any marginally sane human being.
Full disclosure: I reworked the poem a bit since I first posted it on Face Book a year ago.
To kill yourself with a cannonball
Requires a grim determination;
A devotion quite beyond the norms
Of self-extermination.Contrary to more mundane means,
It’s important that you show
A knack for holding on to things,
As opposed to letting go.To drown oneself with a twelve-pound shot
Takes physical precision.
It’s not the sort of thing one tries
If prone to indecision.To grasp the sphere with both hands firm
Is an easy proposition,
But to lift it clear and cross the deck
With a hangman’s erudition,Then scale the rail’s see-sawing height
With both hands occupied,
And take your leap into the swell
Before your mates have spied,Well, it’s really quite a trick to pull.
I can’t blithely recommend it.
Though truth be told, there’s poetry
In such a strange, stark way to end it.So hold on tight for as long you’re able
While you watch the heavens recoil.
Only drop your weight when it’s too late
To hope your plan might spoil.
we knew it was going to be a long winter
snow swallowed a mud sucked boot
and yeah we knew that we’d get through but still
lose something somehow like a bad bet won
on a dumb dare wiser but wondering
why survive what you don’t have to? what’s it prove?
and what now? what would jesus do? hell he’d
go to the desert las vegas los
alamos some place bets are happily lost
to the flat pan the mesa the hugeness the
bone-bleached and blueness a place to bake
back into something fresh flaky and true
a body of christ
why not?
amen again
2002
Is it a how or a why that you’re here again
at the bottom of the year again?
What’s to be done with your frustration, your fear again?
Driveling sickness, nagging notion
of a marriage fading to fondness and resent?
What’s to be done?
– hark!
hear the bells
Spring is implicit, one supposes, in the swim down
into darkness, but there should be a deeper,
soberer, more permanent name than “patience”
for what you need (“grim grit?” that’s not it)
For the faith not only to believe
that the days won’t keep shriveling
forever but that there’s even a sun still
somewhere above that blanketing lichen sky
(no, that’s not it
more like a ugly gray breaker
punishing you down, naught to do
but give up and hope you don’t drown under
(Sweet silver bells)
no, not quite– heavier…
leaden– pummeling dimly shimmering molten cold–
that’s the sound that spreads to the West
beneath your high-rise conference room illusion)
And it’s not an old glory that whips in the sound wind
And it’s not the wind that whips either,
and, no, it’s not your mind, clever, but nothing moves
except that one forlorn electron
back and forth through time,
infinitesimal pin-prick nose-so-bright.
Drink to that!
Three Maker’s Marks for Mister Quark!
Hark.
The herald angels sing glory
Sing, bourbon, glory
Hallelujah
–2005