Shape Shifter

I HOPPED INTO MY CAR AND GOT THE HELL OUT OF THERE
JUST FAR ENOUGH AWAY FROM MY WIFE
JUST CLOSE ENOUGH TO MY SON
I FELL IN LOVE WITH A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN
AND WE DID IT IN WAYS HER HUSBAND COULDN'T EVEN IMAGINE
I WOULD HAVE GIVEN HER MY LIFE
BUT
WE LET EACH OTHER GO WHEN IT WAS TIME
AND NOT ONE CHILD WAS HURT

what do you want
me to do lie to
you tell you that life isn't like
the movies grow up life is better
than the movies if you're brave enough
the point isn't morals the point isn't
convention the point isn't shame
the point is life the point is love
the point is do you know there is blood
pumping through you
and is it going to waste
sure there's loyalty sure
there's fidelity
but a certain moment can come in a marriage
when there're no more promises
there's only waiting
when I was young and stupid I wrote
"I can see a day/
when I am old (without wrinkles,
however--/my beard may be scarred by gray)/
when I sit at this desk/ to write
a poem /with a gun to my head"
one night in March 1994 Nashville
after driving around all day listening
to Nat Cole on public radio
visiting my parents' graves
drinking scarlet needles reading
Cohen's Death of a Lady's Man
my mother visited me
and I said ok not today
that's six years ago
not one thing is as it was that day
so yes hurry up please it's time
to be home and it wasn't easy getting there
when T.S. Eliot was named a member of the Order of Merit
Robert Graves said that it was Eliot's reward from the goddess
for agreeing to publish Graves' big book that no one else would publish
hurry up please Colleen says as I dip under the speed limit
the goddess I think has been with me in many forms these six years
I'm learning to love her more deeply everyday
hurry up Lyman she commands I want to see Jacob
before he falls asleep and I comply
(so many things begin in my truck
driving to some place or from some place
in transit between states
of being like a line of poetry moving forward and moving back
turning wheeling accelerating slowing
death visits beauty too
voices come from the other side
we listen write move forward
get frightened see it through
it is my way
of living

2
though perhaps not
the best way
to make a life)
the turning point in the movie was
when the man saw the virgin inside the whore
he had of course to strip her before he could see her
(and we of course get so see her sixteen year-old tits also and
feel righteous over his/our aversion to/perversion of budding femininity)
do you think he was killed because of or in spite of his seeing
do you think he was killed because of or in spite of his inaction
Robert Graves I call you
you know what I'm talking about today
no one is amused by love
try being a forty-six year old poet who writes love poems
it's sad people think at
best lecherous (in certain circles
if you aren't married lechery's still
admirable shows you still have some
juices in you) at worse adolescent
add to that the idea of progress in spite of everything
the Christian Right hates about America these days
its lack of moral center its values clarification in schools its relativism
everyone the right the left thinks that the person you are married to should be
the biggest the best the wildest the tenderest the sweetest the most all inclusive love object you've ever had
so the question is in your second
third fourth marriage what do you do
with the memory of desire hasn't every one had
a really good fuck they can't get out of their minds
and if you're a poet what do you do with your old love poems
I mean is Tom Hanks ever sleepless in Seattle after he marries Meg Ryan
does Meg ever wonder how she measures up in bed
or what do we do when our spouse or our neighbor brings home their silver guns
I know Robert this didn't trouble you instead
you made religion out of it
you wrote a huge book
about it that everyone is afraid
to say they don't understand
I know we all have to live the life
we have or find some way to end it and begin
but Robert I don't write love poems
for my wives either I don't know why
I love Colleen like a turtle loves the sea
but I don't write poems about dinner at home about
golden couscous raisins and blanched
almonds kale and pepper sauce about
finding her in the morning sweeter than a dream about
stepping out on the porch and seeing all her plants purple brazos

penstemon mexican sage lantana purple ruellia tropical sage pink salvia greggi yellow lindhemmer senna flame leaf acanthus mexican heather about
that jump between my legs when I see her putting laundry on the line
I sometimes miss the poems I wrote
six years ago I miss the love poem
I miss the great theme Robert
the storm sea of worshiping capricious woman will
she return will she accept me tonight will she ask for my life I was
I think a better poet then I opened
my wide wings and surprised the both of us
"What did I do to awake such glory?"
Robert is this why you worship the goddess
when laura left you for another man and
turned her back on Europe and poetry and
offered her heart to reason and
gave you to young Beryl no one saw your glory
a middle-aged man his girlfriend their babies in a one room loft bombarded in England
then the trees began to talk and Jesus fell
to earth and the moon rose through the window and filled
your inkwell and Deya was given back to you
in the hearths of your old home you burned every scrap of memory
of Laura each page replaced by a page in The White Goddess
the house was yours and Beryl's and the kids' but
the heart you gave to Her
Judith Bledsoe Margot Callas Aemilia Laracuen Julia Simon
don't you think it got kind of ugly
how many nights was Beryl sleepless in Majorca
while you stayed up/"under the influence"
beyond the twilight into dark senility
the house I built in town with ruby columns and iron
and Italian glass sconces the house I built to write poetry in has been sold
and Colleen and the kids and I live in the country
and everyday the horse in me kicks at the post rejects the bit
I don't mind Robert becoming a saint
but I would rather be a man of my word and a man of words
I don't want to give the past to flame
her white tiny feet danced across twelve seasons of my life
she was its only measure and rule
in burning anew must I renounce that spark
you described a good marriage where "strife below the hip-
bones need not estrange the heart"
I will not be ashamed before Beauty's name
I don't believe Beauty "requires more delicacy" from my private parts
I think the moon shines in the country too
across marriage beds and spotted sheets of manuscript
the goddess asks only that we see her
in all of her forms the virgin inside the whore inside
the wife inside the mother inside the witch
the goddess asks only that we love her
in all of her forms the virgin inside the whore inside
the wife inside the mother inside the witch
the goddess asks only that we sacrifice ourselves mercilessly to her
in all of her forms the virgin inside the whore inside
the wife inside the mother inside the witch
I ask you what is more perverse than verse
(I think I know what it is to live
and die
with words

3
though perhaps not
what it means to
for words )
six years ago I threw it all over
big house big yard nice wife administrative respectability
I knew if there were going to be happiness in my life
it would be a happiness with words
devoted to beauty whatever the fuck that means
I mean I think I knew/know what beauty is that
I was renouncing a life that plugged my ears stopped
my hearing the muse whispering and that for a time I lived in perfect joy
beauty and joy beauty and joy beauty and joy
I worshiped at her wet altar and wrote biting the nipple of desire
let me tell you Laura the body has not had its day
as you found when you found Schuyler
and locked his wife away and locked yourselves away
from Robert and the wife's kids
"Yes, Schuyler and I do."
we let it go because children needed to be loved
and this this this is where you hopped off the poetry train
when beauty appeared as detour gift visitation divine distraction
not renunciation but annunciation of a separate life
you renounced inspiration you renounced visitation
for Eisenhower Nixon Goldwater
renounced Schuyler's children for a dictionary of true meaning
so is this what truth is is
this what rationality is is
this what one gives up poetry for
gives up beauty for a meeting
of the minds so to speak is
this what one harvests from forty years of harvesting
citrus and definition in the flatlands of Florida
rational meaning
because of "a discrepancy, deep-
reaching, between what I call
the creed and the craft of poetry"
last semester Laura I quit
teaching creative writing to my freshman and
sophomores this is what I felt
so few of them woke in the morning
knowing there was language inside them and
there was language outside them and
there was language even outside of that
and the question they had to face
over their bowls of Rice Krispies was
which language were they loyal to
this is the question isn't it
Laura the question you did not know you were asking
can a poet be loyal to language that exists beyond the language in our bodies
beyond the language of our families and cities and favorite poets
can we give up our selves give up our public anxieties and pleasures
to write/speak what is
this is the question that
ignites files drafts earnest scribbles proud manuscripts hopeful beginnings
Schuyler watching you weep
returning all words back to air
the final rational act of verse
no illusions no goddesses breathing over your shoulder
just one just injunction speak/write the Truth
you Laura may be right
but I long for the girl with large deep eyes leaping
in exotic dresses from windows for Irish lovers
Laura Reichenthal Laura Gottschalk Laura Riding Laura Jackson Laura (Riding) Jackson
you goddess seductress witch wife crone
poet in parentheses
weaver and unraveler
persephone penolope pandora cassandra
will I move to Florida or Majorca
when Schuyler died in 68 year of my mother's disease
you began weaving from your insides the texts of your unreadable being
and (re)presenting your old-self with new (pre)faces
threads hung to other threads
"man is fretful, truth is a patient goal"
silk leavings
"when truth is so familiar / that the false no more
than strange is. . . once in robes of certainty / we stood upon
illusion's stage / and then, to expiate our self-deceit,/
sent forth in honesty's ill rags"
the invisible web of words trembling truths we are caught in
judging pronouncing right words in a tortured syntax
lexicographical usage questions of who is using whom
"what were we, then, / before
the being of ourselves began"
a telling of a life in a wholeness of life

"As to speculation on the possibility of entrance into a state of being (whether soon or unpredictably sometime) in which, be it thought of as extremely different or not from the present or any past or imagined future one, being is rebeginning of being: knowledge as to this is a matter for mutual verifying, each with the other. For where rebeginnings are truly made, the world of indivisible being--the whole we are, being truly, the world--rebegins. As to this, we are one another's record: we must read one another."

(this is a poem
and I am speaking about writing (and speaking)
that desires to save itself, myself, other selves
for I don't know
for the what is

4
for silence)
but angels are caught in the cobwebs of my soul they are
screaming not singing my life
is a torture of the beautiful and the true
spiders of my daily routine are trapping
misnamed morsels laying eggs in carcasses of song
I am not saying what I will do but maybe
I will let this all go for awhile end
the compulsion to live with beauty and truth in this world

right now
maybe
I will be
another of the muses' dropouts how many
earnest Victorians could not shine modern how many
bright moderns went postal during the sixties how many
of us will lose our sense of time when the millennial waltz speeds or
slows or changes beat entirely how many
now yearn for the farms of our grandmothers how many
pace cramped apartments waiting for our inheritances
to purchase a foothold in suburbia
we are at the end of something
Dionysus chants Apollo
croons Pele leads us
into the inferno Kali dances
for her lover Zeus is eyeing another nymph
to rape Gaia plots her revenge in the hundred polluted rivers
in the poet's breathing in and out of the million carcinogens
and the ImagiNation monitors our reverential glare and pumps up the volume
we are at the end
of something and we at the beginning
of something I still don't know how it all works
I know there is an I and there are others
a time each lives in as the time changes so do I and so do others
some words are spoken or written to bridge the two
some words are spoken or written to separate the two
words assemble themselves in some shape in our eyes and/or ears
I assemble words into some shape as they leave me
others assemble words into some shape as they arrive
time assembles words too
there is time the words live in and time I live in and time others live in
there is form words never achieve neither in my mind or others' minds
but I don't know why there isn't grace in every word
I might be as Sick as Bob Flanagan but without
the dominatrix in/out of style glasses
to keep my lines in line but what can a poet do
here at the end of time everything
no matter how shocking or how soothing is
a mere example of our lack
of imagination (I'm a video
Jesus ascending prick melancholy phlegmatic coughing
poet tonguing green words into tissue
poster boy for slimy genius) either we destroy beauty
or copy it either we deconstruct truth
or haplessly repeat it we are ironic now
even about irony we disbelieve
the salvation of disbelief we have been shoved
from the deck in our ships full of
maps but with no destination
and everyone's a navigator
Kreystiva Fish Focoult Burke Eco Eagleton Bartles Derrida
somebody save me
my art is my torture my torture is my art
my boredom with myself is my torture and my art
my readers' boredom is my torture and their art
the only torture is that there really is no torture
no beauty no truth just bodies and things and language
everyone with camcorder and a tongue is a poet
nail my dick into lumber and watch me bleed
the angels plead and the gargoyles cover their ears
gothic disfunction
Robert Bly have you met Susan Faluti
this is my shame
I wanted to be special the
only boy in high school with a dead mother the
last remaining muse poet the
only devoted heretic the
sweetest man alive the
world's most famous expert on something
I wanted to write at least
one great poem but I don't think I would
recognize it even if I did
I've got to do something else with my time
Laura you want me to write for truth Robert you want me to write for beauty
Laura you gave it all up for truth Robert you lost your mind to beauty
(dumb philosophy and stupid aesthetics)
ImageNation gave it all up for ratings
so is this the way it is eh
something has to go someone has to die some job has to be lost
innocent people end up alone and hurt
fuck you I don't want to play anymore
bring me more essays assign me to another committee volunteer
me for another bored just bring me my pay check thank you
if this is the path to Grace's house I've taken off
my writing slippers and pulled on my boots already
what do I care if there's art to go something spiritual to sell
a life at the end of all these poems to eulo-anthologize
I now know how everybody stands it
those who can see see those who can hear hear
those who can see and hear are screaming
everyone else is dumb everyone else is blind and the audience ain't listening
the pen is greater than the sword but neon is better
language manifested as light language manifested as sound
our lives will be brighter our lives will be louder
until someone sees someone listens until then
poetry is private property
buy my pain invest in angst my portfolio is diversified
who puts stock in words now anyway
can i have your autograph could you please spell your name twice slowly
enter your social security number followed by the pound key
(signing out)