Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky

Haiku

yes, life is suffering,

and yet -

the moon over the woods

I think I was three years old
when my mother punched me in the face
so hard I rolled across the floor
and under a chair, and knocked
the chair over.

I don’t know
if that was the first time
she did it, or only
the first time
my memory held on to it.

She hated me, always.
She told me with her words,
her fists and her feet.

She was fat,
had a mouth full of brown teeth
and she smelled of piss,
sweat and cigarettes.

She has been dead for years,
turned to ashes
and given to the wind.

A wind blows this afternoon,
and it smells of grass and rain.

I make an offering of incense,
and I bow to her memory.

Poem: The Dead Outside My Window

The dead outside my window

dance in the breeze. The web

that enshrouds them catches

the sunlight. The spider is small,

thick and brown. I look at it

from the other side of the glass,

my own web, my kitchen, where

a fresh kill roasts in the oven.

A Worker Reads History by Bertold Brecht

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.

Haiku

the hours of contemplation -
thoughts, exhausted, fall
to the floor of the mind

Blackbird - a Poem for Jeffrey Dahmer

The posts about the literature of serial murder I made last week brought to mind this poem of mine, which is in my book Traffic and Murder.

Blackbird

I.

You come out of the court wearing handcuffs,
shirt and trousers. You look like Richie
Cunningham, as one newspaper will observe. They’ve
watched you during the trial, notebooks in
front of them, pens poised and quivering like
excited hard cocks. Now they’re waiting for
you in the cold afternoon, flashing cameras trying
to swallow you. You wonder if this is how it was
for Elvis or Kurt Cobain. They
all want to know about you, they all
shout your name in the hope that you’ll look
their way. You’re glad you’re not allowed
to be interviewed, because you have no idea what
you’d say. You have no creative bullshit
that is relevant to their interest in you. When
you strangled the boys or beat their heads in,
maybe it was to keep them
from leaving. That’s what you told the shrink.
But you don’t know whether it’s the truth. You
don’t recall what you were thinking when you
killed the first one, or the ones who followed.
When the jury saw pictures of what you did later,
some of them needed counseling. The
prosecution has talked about “evil.”
Others want to “understand” you.
You have nothing to tell them.
You’re thirty-two years old
and you don’t know whether you’re evil.
You don’t know
whether the raven is evil, or just a black bird.

II.

Your dad made a home movie, a
visit to your aunt’s house, the record of
a family reunion. You sprawl
on a chair in your glasses and
lumberjack coat. Your aunt asks how
you’ve been. You say you’ve mostly
been working and living on fast food.
No one can say for sure how many boys
you’ve slaughtered by then. When you’re
arrested a few months later, the figure
will be seventeen. In a little less than three
years you’ll be battered to death by
another prisoner. None of this is in
your dad’s home movie. Or maybe all of it is.

Great Zen Books that Don’t Mention Zen

When asked to recommend “Zen books,” my friend Deb Saint Sensei says, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or any other D.H. Lawrence book.”

I agree with her. I think people in the West have a tendency to get confused between Zen and an Asian fetish, and so to overlook the rich Zen tradition in Western literature. Here are a few other great Zen books:

Hombre by Elmore Leonard
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Savage Night by Jim Thompson
Cast in Doubt by Lynne Tillman
Dalva by Jim Harrison
The Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown
Drive and Driven, by James Sallis
Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell
Fish, Soap and Bonds by Larry Fondation
Blues for Cannibals by Charles Bowden
The Burglar by David Goodis
I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond
Love and Rockets by the Hernandez brothers
Three to Kill by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins

Also, the poetry of Burns (who wrote in both Scots and English), Stevenson, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, Philip Levine, Czeslaw Milosz, Norman MacCaig, Wendell Berry and James Tate.

Pangur Bán

I had to interrupt the novel I was working on to write one that came up and pushed it aside, demanding to be written. I’m deep into it now, and it should be finished in a few weeks. It contains this poem, written in the 18th Century by an Irish monk whose name is long forgotten:

I and Pangur Bán, my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.

‘Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

Polyphiloprogenitive: A Very Short Note on Eliot

A friend asked me:

what should i read by TS Eliot? I’ve read ‘J Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘the Wasteland’ but sort of unimpressed by their… i don’t know, obtuseness?
but i think the reason i never really read him was Ezra Pound liked him, kind of dumb.
anyway, try not to say, “everything.” where should i start?

I responded:

Start with the poems “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” “Sweeney Erect” and “The Hippopotamus.” The language is amazing, and the poems are funny as hell. Then read the section of The Four Quartets called “East Coker,” which is an antidote to the abstract posturing of The Waste Land.
“Ash Wednesday” and “Preludes” are great poems too.

A book of Eliot’s that I somehow overlooked until receiving it as a present this Christmas just past is his early collection of essays The Sacred Wood, in which he declares Hamlet “an artistic failure,” and Matthew Arnold “rather a propagandist for criticism than a critic.” Agree with him, disagree with him, or think he’s hanging off the edge of sanity, it’s an exhilarating read.

In Old Ideas, Leonard Cohen Makes It All New

The late Canadian poet Irving Layton once described his friend Leonard Cohen as “a narcissist who hates himself.”

From the beginning, in poems and songs, Cohen has been self-referential. In one poem, he repeats that the person he is addressing wanted “to cuckold Leonard Cohen,” then adds parenthetically that he likes that line because it has his name in it. The song “Famous Blue Raincoat” on his third album ends “sincerely, L. Cohen.” In “Field Commander Cohen,” on his fourth album, he accuses himself of betrayal and abandonment, and mocks his desire to be “nothing more than just some grateful, faithful woman’s favorite singing millionaire, the patron saint of envy and the grocer of despair, working for the Yankee dollar.”

Cohen may or may not have started out as a narcissist, but in those self-referential songs, which have the quality of liturgy, he transcends ego. As a religious poet, I suggest that he ranks alongside St. John of the Cross, Rumi and St. Francis.

His latest album, Old Ideas, which goes on sale today, may be his best. It is certainly his best since New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974). He has made great albums since then, and all of them have been more dramatic than this quiet mix of meditation and desperation, but none as perfect as this. The title is accurate, but this album follows Ezra Pound’s maxim: Make it new.

The old self-loathing has become self-acceptance. In the first song, “Going Home,” he declares with humor and tenderness:

I love to speak with Leonard.
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd.
He’s a lazy bastard
living in a suit.

In “Show Me the Place,” he prays:

Show me the place where you want your slave to go.
Show me the place I’ve forgotten I don’t know.
Show me the place where my head is bent and low.
Show me the place where you want your slave to go.

Show me the place. Help me roll away the stone.
Show me the place. I can’t move this thing alone.
Show me the place where the word became a man.
Show me the place where the suffering began.

Cohen is an observant Jew and a Zen Buddhist monk, and, I think, for years now he has been the greatest living Zen poet. Dogen Zenji wrote:

To study the way of enlightenment is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.

This album, intimate and detached, personal and universal, with its exquisite melodies, heartfelt singing and enchanting poetry, is the work of an artist who has been actualized by myriad things.