TO SEE IS TO BE ALONE
Contents:
Always the Same Story
The Hunger That Leads to Death or Nowhere
The Hot Rod at the Lounge Bar During the Band Break
A Hen, A Rabbit, and the Carnival
The Lost Day
The Yowling Dog and Pecking Bird Arouse a Sense of Dread
The Stones in My Yard
Let There Be Fine Weather
Men, Women, and the Metaphysics of Words
On Seeing the Kuwaiti Ambassador Fingering Worry Beads in the U.N.
Spleen
The Bibber
Saddam’s Second Try
October Morning
In Linear Time
Early Snow
Custom of the House
Metaphor of the Cold Wind
Keeping Things Whole
What We Share
A Full Moon, A Meteor Shower, and an Eclipse
The Wedding
Tribulations of Winter
The World of Science
A Time Between
The Old High Road
Radical Will
Obit
Wind
Splendor Borrows All Her Rays From Sense
On Justice and Folly: Rereading Horace
Lamar Alexander’s Flanner Shirt
The Old Gentleman, After One Too Many, Holds Forth in the Bar
Economy
The Sleepless Dawn of Anxious Love
The Grim Old Teacher
The Serious Minded in Pursuit of Happiness
The Journey
The Whiteout
The City After Snowfall
She Has Gone to Pierre
Woodblock
Cold Morning
In Dead Winter
Still Life: A Pot of Frozen Flowers
Our Metaphors Die With Our Myths
The Realist
What Cannot Be Imagined
February
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ALWAYS THE SAME STORY
“Always the same story!”
The April sun
streams through the blinds, the sweetest
and cruelest light, sharpening the room
with shadows, as the Almaden dissipates
and I roll my eyes. The LCD blinds 7:15.
Tractors are cutting hectare-long furrows
and the cattle are huddled
under the budding cottonwoods.
“Who’s there?”
The bile swells up. Oozing mindlessly
out of mad dreams. I’m on a potter’s wheel
getting shaped for the day.
Another cud-
chewing day in the corn belt. No. This
isn’t glass city or even Palm Springs where
the innocent can be killed by golf balls.
“Well, well! Always the same story!
I know what you’re like. A fleshy,
mind wheeling, conscienceless word beggar.”
Who talks about conscience?
That fatted husker has sunk
and no longer sends bubbles to the surface.
God, guilt’s dead. When the cruel dip their
bread in poison, Father, may it please thee
to send them one punishment: a good man.
“Always the same story! He’s spinning like a top.
Who whipped him up this time?”
“Who’s there?”
“He’ll never die on his back, at this rate,
with his nose pointing up.”
Pointing up.
Mine wouldn’t point anywhere after I saw
that hole gape last night like a diahheretic
cow’s between dehydrated cheeks.
I’m no good for this. She cursed me half the night
with the sulfurous breath of righteousness.
Listen--is it worse for the kid
dealing guns and dope than for the MD
milking seniors of retirement income,
or the legislator falling headlong into deceits
that would shrink his wife’s heart if she knew?
I remember Catholic school
and the torment of good monks
smiling at flushed faces after the beatings--
richly deserved, I still smart--
and the coach’s advice after school,
the photos on the sports pages.
Life’s a random slide,
like breaking bottles at the dumps.
Listen--who wants to walk with his head
hanging down, staring at the pavement
muttering in self-absorbed abstraction
the paranoid fantasies of a sick old fool:
Nothing comes from nothing, nothing returns to nothing.
Is this enough to separate a man from his wine?
“No fever. His hands are cold.”
“They are not cold!”
Father, send me a man.
Let his eye fall on a bundle of bills,
make them hundreds;
let him be enticed by a beauty next door,
young, say, thirteen;
let him be invited to Cape Cod;
let a producer suggest a screen test;
let, but never mind, you get the idea;
just let his heart beat steady.
Let him shiver when some ghastly taunt
raises a crop of bristles on his body;
when a match ignites him,
let his blood boil, his eyes spark with anger;
and let him do and say things
which Charles Manson himself,
that archetypal madman,
would swear were symptoms of madness.
THE HUNGER THAT LEADS TO DEATH OR NOWHERE
A deck of cards piled
unevenly, six of clubs on top,
sits next to the pack of Salem cigarettes,
on top of which a green Bic lighter
with red thumb plunger rests diagonally,
a blue cloth underneath.
Across the room, on the counter,
a three-quarters-empty bottle of cheap brandy
stands by an empty glass, plain and small.
Sunlight.
From the other side of the house
could be heard, as though from far away,
a Chopin nocturne. Each room
seems to have just been occupied.
At the door between the silent study
and the hall, someone seems
about to enter. A momentary
holding of the breath.
A glance upward. Expectation.
But the study is empty.
No one is in the hall.
Floating about on currents
of forced-air heat are images
of the Augustan Palatine,
the Sacred Way, the College of Vestals.
A sparrow crosses in the breeze
and misty-eyed Catullus
swoons upward on a draft of air.
A heavy foot boots the stone pavement.
The nocturne stops.
Sunlight has shifted across the room.
The cigarette lighter rests beside the pack.
The refrigerator motor begins to hum.
Strains of a saxophone, melancholy, far away,
add to the music of the low hum.
A thrum of bitterness in the vacant room.
Odor, very faint, of dried flowers.
A rose and branch of fern
lean delicately from a slender vase
on the polished table.
Frankincense, ashes, blue sky.
Ranks of boots goose step by on the stone pavement.
About the house, the litter of careless
living is strewn, a sapphire ring on a lamp table,
books on the floor, a shoe in a corner.
A crumpled tissue tossed on a sofa seat.
A newspaper, still rolled, beside the door.
A drop of blood.
Ears that no longer hear imagine
the low-pitched cello, the violin.
Harpsichord. Far away.
Velvet, brocaded bodice, pearls.
A rustle of clothed limbs. A sigh.
Candles in a chandelier.
Over the stone pavement tank treads menacingly rumble.
Shriek of missiles falling from the sky.
And shreds of skin, fluted bone, a knee.
In an almost-empty bar hazy with smoke
a man, his back to the room, plays
dimly, as though in a reverie, an old rag
on an upright piano against the wall.
Feeling its way blindly across the room
a presence seems to hover,
seems to stretch out a hand before proceeding,
changes course, and disappears.
And far away, the off-pitch pluckings
of a samisen make the afternoon
meditatively lonely. White walls
have been dimmed by heavy shade.
Only breathing stirs the air.
Such intensities of feeling endanger,
like a long shining saber,
the sacredness of bodies wrapt
in the Sabbath round of tragic prayer.
THE HOT ROD AT THE LOUNGE BAR DURING THE BAND BREAK
“It’s a broken tooth that flashes in the smile.
But never mind. The wet lips purse and suck.
Vodka replaces that old give and take
of male-&-female sloshings on a couch,
even when the haggard mother breaks it up
with the shotgun and pants and shoes go flying.
Did I say vodka? Not only that!
Cut to the quick and give me pure sensation.
Three drinks & three divorces drive out of mind
what might tug against it & dull the pain
of lightening, swift & hot--broken tooth
or not! the night is hot & fifty bucks
can burn a hole in any lady’s looks.
‘Love likes a gander,’ & all that shit from books!”
A HEN, A RABBIT, AND THE CARNIVAL
A red glow lights the singers
strumming their acoustic guitars
and melts through the archway
onto the heavy wooden tables
and sawdust floor
where we sit with pitchers of beer
and a blooming onion
a buzz of conversation
filling the hour
On Main Street the midway
whirls howling men and women
round like stones in a bolo
that never gets spent
on a fleeing anything
animal or man
corndog and cotton candy
fluorescent thrills and shills
The guitarist is singing
a Dylan from long ago
something forgotten except
for the creepy insinuations
of feelings and gropings
in a haze of sweet smoke
the melody evokes
behind his head a neon exit
coldly adds its red
to the other red
we tip our glasses
sitting thigh to thigh
She says, “I often walk
the chicken on a leash
the rabbit too”
but he says, “when we walk
I carry the rabbit
or she does
because the dog is on
the other leash
absurd to put a rabbit on a leash”
And later
when I go to bed
after a sobering walk
and three more cigarettes
the house warm and empty
and quiet to the distant chirp
of crickets in the bushes
I imagine them
walking arm in arm
in their country lane
perhaps even now
for the night is cool
and the morning long hours away
she with the hen on her left
he with the rabbit on his right
or in his arms
such queer blessings
all that remain to us
in the dark
THE LOST DAY
They sat to their breakfast in silence,
neither wanting to start what they both knew
would grow into a rupture
as inevitably one word led to another.
So they kept the dam locks closed,
he concentrating on NPR,
she on the newspaper, the air
in the kitchen growing tenser
as minute flared into minute
like a slow-burning fuse threatening
to blow a breach in their decorum.
In the end it was she who opened.
“Our sitting here like this is no way to cope.
Look at this rash on my hands,
that’s a sign of stress I always get
when things turn bad and we don’t talk.
Why don’t you get symptoms of stress?
You never show what you’re feeling,
you just roll up inside your head
and get so self-possessed and superior.”
“Don’t let it come to this,” he said.
But his falling back to the comfort
of the radio would no longer hold.
The breach had been made and she continued,
“I watch you, you know, and I can tell
when you light one cigarette after another
that under your untroubled surface
you are chafing and burning--even
the brandy tells. I saw you last night
taking drink after drink, is that how
you keep so calm, putting the nerves
to sleep? Speak to me! Spit it out.”
“If I were to say it, too much would change
that I am not ready for, nor you.”
He put on his coat and went out
to start the car, pulling his collar up
as he opened the door. She watched him
in silence, unable to say to herself
if he was saving or ruining what they
had spent nearly a lifetime building.
When he returned he seemed more relaxed.
“It’s very cold outside,” he said.
“We’ll have to give the car more time
than usual, have another cup of coffee.”
“I think the coffee makes me more jumpy
Than you do,” she said. “You scare me.”
“If I can still do that after all these years,”
he said in a tone that made her start,
“our marriage has been better than I thought.”
“Don’t I from time to time still surprise?”
“No. And no. Not like this time,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” she said,
“why like this time?”
“Because you strike out and accuse
and take what I say and turn it over
and make it come out meaning
what I never meant.” “Never meant,”
she screamed, “You don’t really know, do you?
I have always carried the heavier load--
two loads, if you didn’t know--
while you always made your work ‘the thing’
of our lives. I’ve always carried
three loads, now that I think of it,
you being more than one.”
“I know enough about what you’re feeling.
Why do you suppose I don’t? That’s surprising,
too--you act like you’re the only one
who feels and that if you didn’t feel
for both of us our marriage would end.”
He had hit the very spot that mattered.
Her silence was ominous and he saw
that something had changed.
She grew solemn and still.
He knew that telling her to get her coat
was useless and that today would be
a lost day for both of them.
He wondered, now that it was starting,
how it would end--worse would be said.
Would either be ready to comfort the other
when they had finally got through it? He looked
at her and tried to see her as she was
and wondered what he looked like now to her.
THE YOWLING DOG AND PECKING BIRD
AROUSE A SENSE OF DREAD
The cocker spaniel
is yowling at the robins.
Being golden furred
and having long ears,
what does he have
to complain about?
On the edge of the newly
green lawn, by the fence,
tulips push up,
a sparrow pecks
among brown leaves
a wind dropped.
Not able to avoid
comparisons, I wreck
myself in the sunlight.
The silence of the barberry,
stiff in thorny crimson,
is eloquent.
THE STONES IN MY YARD
These stones, these stones covered with mud,
are maledictions. Out of them
nothing flows or grows. Under them
nothing lives, but whitens and corrupts.
Why do I tolerate them?
To build a tomb where the spirit will thirst?
But this is worse than praying for wind!
Now, while spring is in the blood,
get rid of them,
let flowers bloom, grass grow.
LET THERE BE FINE WEATHER
Now there’s a well-blown nose, leading that suit.
I’ll bet it takes its weekends in the Hamptons,
sailing on the bay Saturday afternoons
while its wife shops on Fifth Avenue.
I hope it has fine weather to favor its sails
and later plenty of wine to blot by drunkenness
the whiff of mortality, that disturbing smell
that lingers about the crotch--in spite
of the salt sea and Ralph Lauren’s potions.
Sooner or later that nose will require a fragrant
streaming in a solitaire boat--to whatever fate.
Let this be, then, a lament for infirmity,
and let all the scorn I feel for frenzied excess
subside to the simple remedy of care.
MEN, WOMEN, AND THE METAPHYSICS OF WORDS
We play with words and build a dream
that men and women fashion into states.
States are reveries that come to life
and change the dreamers when they wake.
We play with waking when awake
and thus turn waking into dream
as great a vision as a state
for men and women erotically obsessed
with the double-sided ecstasies of sex
the hottest moment of waking life
when quark and distant quasar condense
to a shudder and response
and all the meanderings of the race
are uttered as a single word.
Out of reverie that word is spun
into the linguistic complexity of the poem.
The world as word is the world we wrung
from the first proposition on the plain--
the charred spear tip in the mammoth’s hide--
from which we spoke the universal mind.
The dream of sex and the dream of God
still quiver in the larynx as a word
with which the poet pairs a rhyme
to shape human destiny in time.
ON SEEING THE KUWAITI AMBASSADOR
FINGERING WORRY BEADS IN THE UN
This mysterious float
over lucid moments,
moments like heads on a string,
heads whose faces become
the innocent Octavias of Rome
or the guilty Poppaeas,
the Hapsburgs or Louis
or the sleek-eyed Huns,
tzars, kaisers, or shahs.
Worry heads. This first
is the head of Adam, with a bloody rib,
like an Arabian dagger, in its teeth.
He is the unforgiven,
the father of the next,
with the mark on its forehead.
The next is Saddam,
whose children die on mountain slopes.
These are the black faces
that wither to living skulls
in Sudan, their eyeballs
turning in dry sockets.
A horse gallops,
thousands of horses gallop,
raising a cloud that blocks the sun.
These are the heads
that rose into a pyramid
on the alluvial plain of the Tigris.
These are Boers and Boxers and Kulaks.
Some have the pigtails of subservience,
the ones that swallowed bitter gall.
These are the strange fruit
that hung in the trees
of Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
These are the heads that became
black clouds in Poland.
These are the celebrants of the Angka Leu
in the steamy jungles of Cambodia.
I worry these heads, fingering
the suicides and the condemned.
This one is Spartacus, this one Judas,
and this one a boy from Utah.
This one is a girl who bore a child at twelve
in her stepmother’s bedroom, placed it
in a plastic bag and dumped it,
then limped to school.
This one is the child.
O Paradise! Life is a shriveled heart,
a cold bed for dry eyes.
Each day brings its asp.
Each night its black breath of conscience.
With these beads I beat my heart,
bowing to the angel whose scimitar
shines white in the blue sky.
Far away my sandals are empty,
and sand and emptiness
are cold fortune for the soul.
SPLEEN
What an infection we have made of reality!
Carnival in the afternoon rain, gutters swollen with feverish
mud and offal, disheartened bleating of horns, dazed
purgatorial dancing in drooping tents.
Obscenity and Fraud, iris and gladiolus from the gardens
of Dis, have taken human forms--Milliken, Jones,
Robertson, Flowers, Thomas, Bobbit--sweet-smelling
evangelicals leading smoke-ladened lines of midnight
guilt to Bald Mountain.
Placental flesh hangs from the jaws of media dogs who pick
clacking shuddering bones of lost souls.
From what azure indefiniteness has honor fallen, into what
putrefaction, what profitableness of buy and sell, body-
jerk, twitching populations?
Madonna masturbates on her Mother’s grave.
Grimacing, pelvis-thrusting, leather-clad monstrosities
howl and screech in the cavernous emptiness of human
chests.
The lay-down twang and bang of hot steel and back beat of
blood shake the banks of the clotted river and black-
sided hulls of beached boats, where new Achaians light
their fires and hoard a glittering plunder.
I recall the vistas of the old bard, his catalogues of life
and bounty, the fullness of his vision, and I rend my
garments and pull out my hair and cover myself with ash.
THE BIBBER
I have stood in the shadow of my father’s death.
Vacant. A light in a niche.
I have seen mold on a wall
figure the eyes of a weeping girl--
shut doors, closed gates, ended conversations,
nearing, each day, the animal body.
“There he goes again, his ego’s loose.
Keep him from the wine before we go mad!”
“This morbidness is souring my Chablis.
How about a naked girl?”
But didn’t you see the sun sprawl
this evening on the lawns?
The tireless geese going south again?
Haven’t you noticed how your body stinks?
“Listen, Joe, have more wine and a little
pity, and take a bath when you get home.”
SADDAM’S SECOND TRY
Not on the ground but in the press he’s taken
another beating. Hard to say, “Poor
old fella,” for all his mad ambitious clinging.
Desert birds are wheeling overhead.
For a time slick old sheiks throughout the region
nabbed their worry beads and with nervous fingers
meditated Mesopotamian missiles.
But Saddam’s columns hissed and slithered away.
Eyes of the world turned to Babylon.
The world’s mouths hushed and took deep breaths.
In the silence those desert birds reeled.
But this sunken glory in the level sands
debunks itself with every move it makes,
and smiles attend the exhales of relief.
OCTOBER MORNING
The sky is gray and murky like dishpan water.
Fog clings to trees and swirls through empty spaces.
Buildings as gray as fog have no traces
in the early morning of the business bustle
that men and women energized will hustle.
Sleep is the matrix that staves off daily slaughter
from which we are torn by clocks that hum commercials
in a fall that has fallen to fog like all reversals.
IN LINEAR TIME
“In my end is my beginning,” Eliot declared.
In Jonestown and Waco the pirouette of death
circles and cycles visionary obsessions.
“Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam”--timeless.
The westering pioneer has never stopped
and skips round planets to interstellar space.
But the poetic eye hovers above the sphinx,
and in the pulpit ancient books command.
Like some beastly thing crawling from a cocoon
split and broken from the inside out,
an untamed destiny threatens to get free,
to launch itself as something unconceived.
Terror of transformation--to those who sweat
the mysterious unmapped streets of the internet.
EARLY SNOW
The news this morning says watch out for snow
late in the day, traveling will be dangerous.
Though as I look at the sky the sun forecasts
a bright fall day for raking and bagging leaves.
Snow on the way depresses our mood at breakfast.
What should have been a promise of brisk air
and stimulation is filled with urgency.
“We’re not ready for snow,” she says. “Not yet!”
As I sit at coffee, brooding on things darkened
by the thrusting in of bad news--
health, love, the check book--anxiety calms.
Snow this evening is like the coming of death.
I have to get up leaves and weatherproof doors.
The sun is shining and the day is short.
CUSTOM OF THE HOUSE
A jug of apple cider sits on the counter.
Early nightfalls and snow on roof and lawn
make coming in a greeting to the furnace.
Yams and turkey and pies, fruits and nuts,
the table opened and covered with a cloth--
these are closed links in the chain of days
that bind children to parents and parents to
the whitening of their hair, year after year.
And then the house falls into disrepair,
and nightfall and snow make the coming in
harder to bear for warmth no longer there--
for changes in the custom of the house
and gaping absences where once there sat
an eager round of people transformed all that.
METAPHOR OF THE COLD WIND
The house has been there many years,
long before they came to live in it.
Much strengthening he has given it,
too, beam and roof, and foundation wall.
Its floors may creak and a door swing
slowly open on its hinges
when the furnace starts,
but these are adjustments the house has made
to those who have lived and loved
more or less recklessly inside.
They sit and listen to the wind
chafe the north windows
and try to turn the pages of the books
they pretend to read, yawn a bit
to express the coziness of unconcern.
But their ears are fastened to the blasts
of arctic cold that even as they sit
are drifting snow against the house and walk
and whiting out the sky around the lamps.
He refuses to look out again
when she breaks the silence.
“The television said thirty below
and winds gusting to thirty miles and hour.
I wonder how the animals survive it?”
He knows what she is thinking and thinks it too.
“The house is not just a matter of circumstance,”
he says, “with you just as likely
to be outdoors as in.” “Just,” she says,
and goes back to reading. Just then,
as though in response to what they thought,
the wind struck hard against the north side
and held them almost in a trance.
To take her mind off the inhospitable,
she turns on the TV and fills the room
with Alan Ladd and William Bendix.
As she tucks her feet under her
and nestles into the couch, he says, “the winds
have swept them away a long time ago.”
“But they didn’t die in the cold,”
she says. “Nor will we,” he says,
adding, why he’s not quite sure,
“So long as what we make holds out
against what we make it for.”
And she, “You know it never does.”
KEEPING THINGS WHOLE
There is a place in my trifocals
that splits my image of the world,
that makes line jut from line
and doubles what I know is one.
A flick of my head breaks the pattern.
So, chicken-like, I walk about
keeping the world together.
A weathering task for a single man.
One would think me nearly crazy
to think my keeping the image whole
keeps anything together but
the image in my private skull.
But I would ask where the world exists
except in the privacy of image
each of us has to shape
himself or herself, with what is given.
Keeping whole a world that splits
defeats irrationality.
That’s a good for culture,
even if in a single brain.
Each of us must do what he can
to make life possible for all,
and keep the joints aligned,
especially in the single mind.
WHAT WE SHARE
We talk of virtues and of values, write books
that pluck from Plato thoughts we hold eternal
and over the pavement spread a shroud to hide
a bloody body from the view of crowds.
Black man, white, they lie in blood the same.
What we share as people runs in blood.
Death names us, our songs make love to death.
Children stalk it in our homeless streets.
In pity we hold a camera on a face
wasted thin by AIDS--false pity, to stare
at death still ripening, breaking through the skin.
What harmonies of darkness the camera sings.
“Light and shade,” Gregorian voices begin,
“Our bodies cast no shadows and live as things.”
A FULL MOON, A METEOR SHOWER, AND AN ECLIPSE
Out of the southern sky in the moon’s full glare
the Leonid fragments will come streaking in,
and tonight’s full moon will be too far south
to enter earth’s umbra and so give us
one more eclipse to shudder at or wonder,
though the light penumbra will dim its silver
brightness just enough to make us think.
Think what? Those who know won’t have to think,
and those who don’t won’t wonder but will sleep.
Tonight we all will miss some subtle earth-speech--
a penumbral eclipse and glared-out meteor shower
like subject and predicate of a cosmic sentence
that underscores itself with irony,
and only dust to tell us what we missed.
THE WEDDING
A froth of lace
expanse of bosom
dazzling
in the slow
trumpet-led march
how
studied
the soft walk down
how
trite
and tomorrow and
the day after
how
fatiguing
TRIBULATIONS OF WINTER
The tribulations of the winter wind.
We all turn inward when the snow begins.
Trees bare of robins remind us now
of going, of what has taken wing beyond
our knowing--bare thoughts under bare trees.
But the tracks of a cat and rabbit in the snow,
one behind the other, image the trace
that, even when the heart’s gone cold, survives.
Like ripples frozen mid-motion on the lake.
Like bees balled motionless in their hives.
Like all the thoughtless doings of thoughtless things.
The body does what it should do, no more.
But something else moves thickly toward desire,
stumbles, freezes, dies, then finds the fire.
THE WORLD OF SCIENCE
The meiofauna beneath our feet gnaw
the adamant foundation of our lives.
The great black maw of the galaxy shreds
the sky to streaming filaments of fiery gas.
A myth of billions beyond the rushing minds
of Eleatic Greeks to assimilate--
apocalypse to cataclysm leaps,
and chaos drifts on dreamless energy peaks.
The rage for order never diminishes.
Though the double helix spiral to the end
of time in self-consuming jaws no God
but Horror would imagine or define,
and Truth will not be changed, faith creates
the secrets of our individual fates.
A TIME BETWEEN
Weak, foolish man! will Heaven reward us there
with the same trash mad mortals wish for here?
Dying is bad business, though profitable for some.
Dying for wealth, dying for power, for fame--
the world has become a mortuary place
where equal gall and power leave a trace.
Lofty ladies with resplendent hair
gossip over lunch about despair,
and lusty men, decked in khaki togs,
pummel cities into reeking bogs.
What sweat for personal gain, exertion and strain!
Little Jacks in their little campuses strive
to make a globe out of forty acres thrive,
while Mels and Toms halloo in the halls
of Laws to show who has and hasn’t balls.
All things worthy outclass the simple virtues.
A designer gown and shining Mercedes give hues
to the mysteries of life and create an air,
where there is no ground, of metaphysical fear
among aspiring have-nots and dispirited poor.
Our hopes are sequined with refined ideals
that lack the substance of a meal on wheels.
We live in a time between, a time like Lent,
when one world dies and another rises, spent
but impenitent, a pit inverted to a knoll.
Instead of fasting we feast, before life’s toll.
THE OLD HIGH ROAD
Another beast has fallen to extinction.
We beat our breasts as beasts, without distinction.
“The world is poorer when animals disappear,”
we say, and rightly so, then refuse to hear
the clamoring condemnations and the curse
of any remedy that picks our purse.
Time was when Eden was a harmony
where man and woman dined on milk and honey,
and both were Nature’s stewards, and loved and named.
We think of Eden then and are ashamed
at the mess we’ve made of forest, reef, and plain.
But did hunters in the Neolithic stain
the earth with blood and send to eternal rest
mammoth and saber-tooth and many a big-brain
friend? in stone-ax ritual, an Edenfest?
Perhaps. All roads we travel take us west.
RADICAL WILL
Who can guard me from the thoughts
I think--pale window in the moonlight--
of a nation at odds with itself,
worse, a time, steering into the brain
antipathies of midnight
and class war in the classroom?
Passion is a tropical fruit
and all who eat of it set sail.
Let my lines now rage themselves out
against the rattling window.
Midnight is a Hooper’s veil,
and horror all my heart can hold.
OBIT
Vain was the Chief’s, the General’s pride!
They had no Poet, and they died.
In vain the Critic, our Culture’s head!
He had no Poet, and is dead.
Lest you should think that verse should die,
which sings the Silver Stream along,
put up the video tape and try
to find Yourself amid the throng.
WIND
I’m weary of speeches this November evening,
of turn and turn about in politics.
Of feverish forensics, the culture of hate.
Of gridiron metaphors and cant and glee.
The world, the flesh, and the devil have been scorned,
and liberal democrats, and power’s made safe,
with every motive exposed--except for gold.
This evening I turn it off, nerves twitching.
Just before dark, as I came in, I caught
crossing in the wind a glimpse of something
blowing hard, a cardboard box careening
toward the fence and getting trapped there.
I thought then and think again how empty things
are driven by winds, the inner and the outer kind.
SPLENDOR BORROWS ALL HER RAYS FROM SENSE
The old frame house is hammered and rent asunder.
The lot is leveled, squared, and readied to take
a new house designed to shame the neighborhood.
Majestically it rises, glass and stone.
And he whose name it magnifies gazes
contentedly round to mark how taste alone
raises a man above the common brood.
But out of hearing ridicule heaves like thunder.
Long ago the contest was for knighthood.
Lords and ladies daintily danced for privilege,
while round the manor massed the peasantry.
No one wants the rich to strive for sainthood.
We’ve lost, after all, a feel for sacrilege.
But custom today asks for pleasantry.
ON JUSTICE AND FOLLY: REREADING HORACE
It’s more than three hundred miles to Brindisi.
Plenty of time to talk, to fit words
to the rhythms of the cart
bumping on the stones of the Appian.
And at night, the inns and the bad water
lead to too much wine,
conditions almost too desirable
for the poet in good company.
But at the end of this journey
some sober business
keeps the poet in a philosophical mood--
great powers plot
in the silence of his stare.
Brutality, ruthlessness, war--
mean, cruel, and personal--
make of words an airy emptiness
the poet cannot endure.
By what irony have the gods contrived
to make such insubstantial things
survive the thousands of years
that crumbled marble and wasted
stone and iron and imperial ambition:
Expediency is the mother of justice and fairness.
Justice arises from the fear of its opposite.
Reading Horace today is like rummaging
among memorials in a graveyard,
with night falling and light rain, the car nearby.
Justice is the temper of the disempowered
struggling to get even.
The old Roman lacked contempt,
too wedded to plain human feeling for our tastes.
Nature cannot distinguish right from wrong
as she does desirable from undesirable.
I would replace “nature” with “culture”
to be nearer a truth the old poet
felt but lacked the thousands
of years that make us wiser to say.
But what good would it do?
His desire to rub the rasp of truth
on sensitive ears
has long ago played itself out.
No one cares. Besides, go find a sensitive ear.
Those portholes are plugged
with the coarsest of waxes.
Think of how a young man, his sex got up,
fails to notice the wen on the girl’s big nose.
He writes of folly--where the dick goes
goes the ridiculous.
But that’s the poet,
always in love with proportion.
Even he had risked his ass for a beauty.
But folly has depths darker than
most poets’ light can reach, depths where
depravity and eqotism mingle
that Horace knew better than we--
The worst insanity is found next to folly.
Whoever is entranced by fame’s glassy glitter
hears thundering around him the frenzy of blood.
Brutus is howling,
the besotted Antony moaning--
the calm, measured cadences of Octavian
proclaim peace and order in the modern world.
Change the names. Every age
has its own. Only, ours
cares nothing to reflect.
LAMAR ALEXANDER’S FLANNEL SHIRT
Lamar Alexander’s flannel shirt
has for the moment stunned the press, which lacks
anyway a fine appreciation
for indirection and which finds a simile
so much to ponder it usually gets it wrong.
And so the commentators lift their brows
and smirk, and drool ironic on the news--
another alpha wave in the collective brain.
That flannel was red and black, two colors that
have long associations with the past.
Worn by one who makes a bid for power,
the shirt should have caused the flesh to shiver.
But unconsciousness is bliss, and life is hard,
and everyday the senses need renewing.
THE OLD GENTLEMAN, AFTER ONE TOO MANY,
HOLDS FORTH IN THE BAR
How can one make a life out of what
comes in the end to be nothing more
than an empty shopping bag?
One can still make echoes, you say?
We hear them in the capitol
and believe they are original!
I lack that gift for self-deception.
Behind us the generations come
like snow plows wedging snow aside.
Mercy costs ten times the minimum wage.
And love never was a creamy billow.
What’s to look forward to
at any age
but stimulation and release?
People go to a priest for absolution.
Guilt still makes penitents among us
who believe the darkened closet holds
the mystery of the soul.
Something there is that makes a heavy heart.
Bad living, no doubt. Put us in a crowd
and the scramble begins that gilts the hearse.
We’d be better off to throw away our toys
and leave to children the games that suit them.
Instead of hunting the streets for thrills
or risking dollars on the powerball,
we should set our days to smoother rhythms--
work and meals and sleep--
untroubled in conscience or expectation.
A friend in pain needs help.
A son needs money.
Everyday, rancor vies with compassion.
We know our better side
even though it isn’t glamorous.
What comes in the end, out of the dark,
should greet us like a friend.
ECONOMY
The moth invades the tree
stately in the sky
sun and moon solemnly
roll by
children play in leaves
that fall in June and July
a summer day reprieves
their cry
the wood is cut and corded
and left all fall to dry
less color is now afforded
the eye
THE SLEEPLESS DAWN OF ANXIOUS LOVE
Tied to a chair, your mother mercilessly
beat you with the spiked heel of her shoe,
then sent you to the orphanage where you
learned meekness under monks,
thankful for meals and the mule
you led to town pulling a wagon for wood.
At fourteen they released you from those nights
of guiltless watch, sleepless and self-cursing.
This alienation gave to your years the acidic
odor of loss that no gain could efface. What
could you know of paternity but scars of remorse?
Frail and thin boned, now, the sleepless dawn
disturbs with ancient voices the boy’s
readying for a last release, a happiness
of slumber without dreams and waking
to the heart-clutching fold of mother’s arms.
THE GRIM OLD TEACHER
She settles into her chair, opens her coat,
and beams like a morning glory; fades as quickly.
Flowers are earnest by nature, showing what counts.
One sweet stretch into sunlight above the stones.
The mind tries hard to shove away those stones.
Is itself too heavy. Become like stone. As cold.
Illusions of light and flowers white and red.
What do we know that isn’t cold and dead?
Every utterance is time’s fallen leaf.
Page after page. Youth, middle, old age.
Every moment is a history.
Life fades even in the stretch that fills
the room with color and a girlish scent.
But, AH! that scent--it turns old stone to water.
THE SERIOUS MINDED IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
They live too much inside
their airless selfhood
where the layers of gold
and red gold and red
setting over the dark trees
in autumn
are never likened to
a mother’s frown
on the eve of winter
above her gentle tucking
her silence like the closing
of an eye
the afterimage of her hand
like a bird fluttering into a tree
at the drop of sleep
Nor do the grizzled eyebrows of an old man
or the peach fur on a boy’s cheek
being spring
laugh like shaggy palms on a white beach
waving the marine-glow of morning
to Billy gathering coconuts
on his bedroom floor
If image fits the mind to a mood
the truth must be
they neither feel nor see
Spring summer autumn winter
like youth and age
separate the dreamer from the dream
the color from the thing
that we may learn to sing
not of but as
evening sunlight
and a bird’s dark wing
THE JOURNEY
How the car dies
and rolls almost noiselessly
like a long exhaled breath
to the shoulder
and stops
frozen in prairie blankness.
Steady wind streams snow
across the road,
and fields, blurred
white by the blowing,
lose their familiar detail--
how the silence in the car
is broken only by the buffeting
of wind,
and, helpless at last,
a suspension
settles on the nerves,
and in that breathlessness
one pulse of revelation
wakes you
to the pattern of your life,
how all your decisions have contrived
the zigzagging route
to this place.
THE WHITEOUT
When wind curls the snow on the edge of sheets
blowing across field and house and whitens
the sky so densely that eyes are blinded by white,
no voice cries into that maddened wind
that takes all cries into itself as one
to protest that life diminishes us enough.
We have the calm of our interior spaces
to retreat to and keep such winds outside.
But other storms there are that whiten and blind.
And like the sparrow in the snowy wind
huddled in the lee of a maple’s branch
whose urge to sing is greater than his heart,
we clutch to our perches and loudly cry
glorious protests to life’s diminishing.
THE CITY AFTER SNOWFALL
Some annoyances are trivial
and best forgot to smoothen your day.
But when the plowmen ridge the snow
across intersecting roads and knock
the axles of your car nearly off
at every intersection you have to cross,
annoyance grows with the bumps on your head.
These plowmen get paid for pushing snow.
And so they push, in straight lines
east to west, and when that’s done
they take the perpendicular routes.
All through the city motorists know
the plowmen block as much as they plow.
Wherever snow falls, there is no Eden,
agreed, taking Eden as a figure
for what has never been in human life.
Progress towards is progress blocked.
Life doesn’t move in one direction.
Even plowmen know this, so why
must we crash through snow barriers
where every road meets another road?
Is it some malignancy in the minds
of blue-chinned men with heavy mitts
and knit caps astride the titanic bulk
of those roaring machines splitting drifts?
Or is it merely the curbing of impulse
that corners demand, slowing the bullroarers
to curve their paths by ninety degrees?
If I were the type to see
metaphors in reality,
I’d claim the plowman as a trope
of civilization’s fallen hope.
But the figure doesn’t assuage
a mild vexation turned to rage.
SHE HAS GONE TO PIERRE
And when she returns
she wants to know
why I am so quiet
“Two days away
and you have nothing to say”
But what can pile up
in two days
that needs
accounting of
hours change on the clock
meals are taken in unsavory silence
a novel is left
at page seventy-one
cigarettes
brandy
late-coming sleep
there is nothing to say
except
I’m glad you’re back
those few words
and no more
WOODBLOCK
A reddish brown almost
rust
in which the lines are cut
that impressionistically suggest
palm leaves and plump
naked woman
large cat
and waves for sandy ground
in a library
amid the books on a cloudy
cold day
she dreams a young man’s
fantasy
of tropical sexuality
disports
in airy salty sun--
no woman ever danced
so plumply on the sand
beside so large a cat
under palms this waveringly still--
dim rusty light
of evening
coming on
dark and darker
the hours ahead
oh tan skin
of woman in a dream
these discursive books
and bodiless words
conceal
the color and the feel
of life’s heaviness
and all the strife
you prance away from
in the mad moment’s wildest touch
oh heft of guilt and reprobation
let the body of my wife
become you
gladly in my love
as I dance her off to bed
COLD MORNING
The bare limb creaks
over the snow
and ice
Chimney smoke bends
over the house
next door
A crystalline light
slants across
the room
Winter has set
a table with
the sun
IN DEAD WINTER
In dead winter winter’s grip loosens.
Roads begin to melt, the eaves drip.
Morning sun fires the sky bright blue.
You turn, dizzy, about to fall, and clutch
the counter in a moment of stark terror.
Begins what ends in emergency and shock.
Intensive care, monitors, IVs,
catscans, and me with pounding head, reeling.
You are stable now and I can think.
But only dark thoughts of dissolution
come as the sun beams over the world.
And I am afraid. The weight of you on my arm,
your limp drifting, forced on me how little
life itself cares for what it lives in.
STILL LIFE: A POT OF FROZEN FLOWERS
1
Time is like the long snake’s slither
into its dark hole.
The raunchy dank Autumn
has squeezingly disappeared.
2
Sun lights the snow in morning splendor.
The big round earthen pot
stands like a temple guard on the step.
Beneath the fleecy sky
the world assumes an aspect
of antiquity.
3
It is too cold to fiddle out of doors.
Only the spirit moves
under the temple dome, grandiose,
hymning, like a choir of girls and boys,
a long-unheard worship to long-forgotten gods.
4
Someone somewhere dies.
Someone somewhere always dies.
These are the simplest of words.
The rabbit dies in the mouth of the cat.
5
Snow covers the ground
where the future broods.
But these flowers will not revive;
as dead as yesterday,
they will leave no trace.
6
All the life of the race
we have sought what to believe.
The roundness of women
was first and will be last.
7
A red pear on a white plate.
The will to believe lives in the image.
If the will should dissolve like snow in spring,
along with it would flow
whatever future we should know.
8
The cloud is a bridge between two horizons.
The cloud is insubstantial,
a shape that changes every instant
which the slightest bird
cannot rest on, but its shadow on the snow
chills even the rabbits.
9
She is a shadow.
One may glimpse her in a crowd
or at a sidewalk table
sipping soda.
10
The light powder snow devils up in the wind
and windily dances away.
Shrieking. Like a morning ghost. An effigy.
11
Man is an abstraction
like tomorrow’s weather.
He gathers particularities to stuff his hat.
But he knows fury, and he knows rage.
12
Innocence is not the north wind
blowing stiffly across the plain.
At this moment in Rome
someone walks along the Sacred Way.
Feet shod in Nikes, a red down coat.
Rain taps upon a black umbrella.
She dreams that the night will come
like an ardent lover.
Already she reaches out an arm.
13
In the glare of the sun
snow drips
and freezes in the shadow of the pot.
14
In spring the earth is soft.
The sheathe pushes up a tender tip.
Then an indignant fury takes hold
and madness reigns.
15
An Asian density of life
crawls tumblebug-like through the mud.
Its clanking clunking machinery
stamps numbers on the clocks.
16
In the witness of snow
the destroyer comes. Nobly.
Cleanly. Like a virgin.
17
The trees are leafless by late November.
In their crooked screed made bare
one sees, as though wrought in air,
each year’s notation
of the sorrows of the sun.
18
Like men bent with age the flowers
stand, bewildered and dumb,
their shaggy heads bared to the sun
as it crosses the meridian.
19
The image is a visual music
which all together we can sing
for flowers in the snow.
And in unison for ourselves, as though
we had powers as great as snow.
OUR METAPHORS DIE WITH OUR MYTHS
Rome, colossal amalgam
of thought and stone, modern metaphor
of the antiquity of mind--
seedy, grand, noisy, jammed to the hilt
in the throat of history,
almond-eyed, busty--
is it possible that the chaos of time
is an orderly descent
of seeming after seeming
style after style
from your one successful moment
tangent to the sun?--
Our age is all solitude
in wizened denial
whose style is a calculus
of pluralities
equations whose solution is zero
moonless and sunless
thus--the sun in the mind
once cast shadows in the mind
the moon roved intellectually
but shadow has its counterpart
in flesh and bone
and a pulse to keep its time
beating blood from open wounds
which is the play of actuality and seeming
zero and one
the code of desire
as breath gushing from the dying mouth
and no breath
What risings transfix us--
galleons on fire in insubstantial seas
ramparts hoved against a barrier of walls?
the silent glimmering tick
of geo-positioning satellites
imperially fixes the race
if shadow had no counterpart
in flesh and bone
what infinite possibilities would unfold?
We cannot hope to know
our Lenins are discredited, our Nietzsches dead
and we grow more unlike each day
THE REALIST
“Why not just say what you intend?
What does the guy pumping gas care
about how you don’t say what you mean
and mean what you don’t say, getting lost
in words that lead mind and spirit
nowhere that does anybody any good?”
He says, “life is hard, we work
long hours calculating costs
and benefits to get at truths
that make a difference in people’s lives!”
I tell him in response about
the night the storm took down our trees
and froze the animals in the fields,
snapping power poles and plunging
seven counties into dark,
and how we found ourselves walking
through familiar rooms with arms outstretched
and how by habit long engrained
we still threw switches to turn lights on.
I didn’t tell him of the door
ajar I cracked my forehead on.
I was afraid the metaphor might turn
his lights on, and I didn’t want
to rush him into light too fast.
I didn’t want him, in the end,
to see at all; some light, like ultra-
violet, isn’t meant to be seen.
WHAT CANNOT BE IMAGINED
In the upper story of the house
where clean bed linen and folded blankets mark
a woman’s touch, the wind sounds whoosh,
the steady wind that slides across
the blue sky, not the arctic wind
of January nor the damp muddy wind
of March--it is the February gush.
A sane, common sense wind,
neither cold nor wet, announcing both
an end and a beginning.
Common sense. We lack
appropriate adjectives. It’s like the name
carved on the headstone that aches
the stomach with sadness. Our fathers stand
in our minds with their hands on their hips.
Look! The house needs paint.
The wind is tilting the fence.
That voracious rabbit, damn him,
has gnawed through the lattice
and is nesting under the deck again.
The last leaves that fell
before the snow are slickly shining
in the sun--things absent of color
like necessities and inevitabilities.
What was and what will be
confound and hold us
in a grip that is like
the drip of water from the eave:
a brute unintelligible frankness
sounding what must but cannot be imagined.
FEBRUARY
The flu has made its rounds.
Women are less pale
and men step smartly
in the cold sunlight
uncolored
by the stains of spring
passing into solemnities of March.
The margin of ice
and thaw--when afternoons
release water from plowbanks
at the curbs
and the sharp freezing
of spread water across the roads
makes driving risky
after dark.
When, with eyes at
the sky, we feel our feet
planted on the ground
and feel our clothes
hanging heavily.
The small rain down can,
Christ--
walk now on the lawn,
still matted from the weight of snow,
and imprints of our passing
remain.
Stems of spireas
and yellow corpses of petunias
stand in the black mud
and beside them,
winding toward them,
the brittle vines
of creeping jenny lie.
Life in the skin,
O JoAnna, is no sin.
Glassy, blue-white, breath-vapor brilliance,
glistening eye of a gray-beard month--
red blood reigns, never the
heart can we call our own but
dark, windy, rainy fogs of sister life,
foretelling tragedies
in returns of snow and seeping chills.
Feel the dying breath
of clarity and forgiveness on the skin,
snow-melting showers
(our beauties are not ours).
Sharp breezy shadows
moving on the yellow lawn
(sense, still, ever alone,
a time when distinctions
could still be made--
the final heat of consciousness
before the fall)
sing out on death
that though oblivion shall crack our bones
and sink us in the mud of March,
what life wants has been pressed
out of every year,
and every year is good.
TO SEE IS TO BE ALONE
Joseph M. Ditta
Contents:
Always the Same Story 4
The Hunger That Leads to Death or Nowhere 8
The Hot Rod at the Lounge Bar During the Band Break 10
A Hen, A Rabbit, and the Carnival 11
The Lost Day 13
The Yowling Dog and Pecking Bird Arouse a Sense of Dread 16
The Stones in My Yard 17
Let There Be Fine Weather 18
Men, Women, and the Metaphysics of Words 19
On Seeing the Kuwaiti Ambassador Fingering Worry Beads in the U.N. 20
Spleen 22
The Bibber 23
Saddam’s Second Try 24
October Morning 25
In Linear Time 26
Early Snow 27
Custom of the House 28
Metaphor of the Cold Wind 29
Keeping Things Whole 31
What We Share 32
A Full Moon, A Meteor Shower, and an Eclipse 33
The Wedding 34
Tribulations of Winter 35
The World of Science 36
A Time Between 37
The Old High Road 38
Radical Will 39
Obit 40
Wind 41
Splendor Borrows All Her Rays From Sense 42
On Justice and Folly: Rereading Horace 43
Lamar Alexander’s Flanner Shirt 45
The Old Gentleman, After One Too Many, Holds Forth in the Bar 46
Economy 47
The Sleepless Dawn of Anxious Love 48
The Grim Old Teacher 49
The Serious Minded in Pursuit of Happiness 50
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
Contents: cont’d
The Journey 51
The Whiteout 52
The City After Snowfall 53
She Has Gone to Pierre 54
Woodblock 55
Cold Morning 57
In Dead Winter 58
Still Life: A Pot of Frozen Flowers 59
Our Metaphors Die With Our Myths 62
The Realist 64
What Cannot Be Imagined 65
February 66
TO SEE IS TO BE ALONE
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
ALWAYS THE SAME STORY
“Always the same story!”
The April sun
streams through the blinds, the sweetest
and cruelest light, sharpening the room
with shadows, as the Almaden dissipates
and I roll my eyes. The LCD blinds 7:15.
Tractors are cutting hectare-long furrows
and the cattle are huddled
under the budding cottonwoods.
“Who’s there?”
The bile swells up. Oozing mindlessly
out of mad dreams. I’m on a potter’s wheel
getting shaped for the day.
Another cud-
chewing day in the corn belt. No. This
isn’t glass city or even Palm Springs where
the innocent can be killed by golf balls.
“Well, well! Always the same story!
I know what you’re like. A fleshy,
mind wheeling, conscienceless word beggar.”
Who talks about conscience?
That fatted husker has sunk
and no longer sends bubbles to the surface.
God, guilt’s dead. When the cruel dip their
bread in poison, Father, may it please thee
to send them one punishment: a good man.
“Always the same story! He’s spinning like a top.
Who whipped him up this time?”
“Who’s there?”
“He’ll never die on his back, at this rate,
with his nose pointing up.”
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
ALWAYS THE SAME STORY cont’d
Pointing up.
Mine wouldn’t point anywhere after I saw
that hole gape last night like a diahheretic
cow’s between dehydrated cheeks.
I’m no good for this. She cursed me half the night
with the sulfurous breath of righteousness.
Listen--is it worse for the kid
dealing guns and dope than for the MD
milking seniors of retirement income,
or the legislator falling headlong into deceits
that would shrink his wife’s heart if she knew?
I remember Catholic school
and the torment of good monks
smiling at flushed faces after the beatings--
richly deserved, I still smart--
and the coach’s advice after school,
the photos on the sports pages.
Life’s a random slide,
like breaking bottles at the dumps.
Listen--who wants to walk with his head
hanging down, staring at the pavement
muttering in self-absorbed abstraction
the paranoid fantasies of a sick old fool:
Nothing comes from nothing, nothing returns to nothing.
Is this enough to separate a man from his wine?
“No fever. His hands are cold.”
“They are not cold!”
Father, send me a man.
Let his eye fall on a bundle of bills,
make them hundreds;
let him be enticed by a beauty next door,
young, say, thirteen;
let him be invited to Cape Cod;
let a producer suggest a screen test;
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
ALWAYS THE SAME STORY cont’d
let, but never mind, you get the idea;
just let his heart beat steady.
Let him shiver when some ghastly taunt
raises a crop of bristles on his body;
when a match ignites him,
let his blood boil, his eyes spark with anger;
and let him do and say things
which Charles Manson himself,
that archetypal madman,
would swear were symptoms of madness.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE HUNGER THAT LEADS TO DEATH OR NOWHERE
A deck of cards piled
unevenly, six of clubs on top,
sits next to the pack of Salem cigarettes,
on top of which a green Bic lighter
with red thumb plunger rests diagonally,
a blue cloth underneath.
Across the room, on the counter,
a three-quarters-empty bottle of cheap brandy
stands by an empty glass, plain and small.
Sunlight.
From the other side of the house
could be heard, as though from far away,
a Chopin nocturne. Each room
seems to have just been occupied.
At the door between the silent study
and the hall, someone seems
about to enter. A momentary
holding of the breath.
A glance upward. Expectation.
But the study is empty.
No one is in the hall.
Floating about on currents
of forced-air heat are images
of the Augustan Palatine,
the Sacred Way, the College of Vestals.
A sparrow crosses in the breeze
and misty-eyed Catullus
swoons upward on a draft of air.
A heavy foot boots the stone pavement.
The nocturne stops.
Sunlight has shifted across the room.
The cigarette lighter rests beside the pack.
The refrigerator motor begins to hum.
Strains of a saxophone, melancholy, far away,
add to the music of the low hum.
A thrum of bitterness in the vacant room.
Odor, very faint, of dried flowers.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE HUNGER THAT LEADS TO DEATH OR NOWHERE cont’d
A rose and branch of fern
lean delicately from a slender vase
on the polished table.
Frankincense, ashes, blue sky.
Ranks of boots goose step by on the stone pavement.
About the house, the litter of careless
living is strewn, a sapphire ring on a lamp table,
books on the floor, a shoe in a corner.
A crumpled tissue tossed on a sofa seat.
A newspaper, still rolled, beside the door.
A drop of blood.
Ears that no longer hear imagine
the low-pitched cello, the violin.
Harpsichord. Far away.
Velvet, brocaded bodice, pearls.
A rustle of clothed limbs. A sigh.
Candles in a chandelier.
Over the stone pavement tank treads menacingly rumble.
Shriek of missiles falling from the sky.
And shreds of skin, fluted bone, a knee.
In an almost-empty bar hazy with smoke
a man, his back to the room, plays
dimly, as though in a reverie, an old rag
on an upright piano against the wall.
Feeling its way blindly across the room
a presence seems to hover,
seems to stretch out a hand before proceeding,
changes course, and disappears.
And far away, the off-pitch pluckings
of a samisen make the afternoon
meditatively lonely. White walls
have been dimmed by heavy shade.
Only breathing stirs the air.
Such intensities of feeling endanger,
like a long shining saber,
the sacredness of bodies wrapt
in the Sabbath round of tragic prayer.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE HOT ROD AT THE LOUNGE BAR DURING THE BAND BREAK
“It’s a broken tooth that flashes in the smile.
But never mind. The wet lips purse and suck.
Vodka replaces that old give and take
of male-&-female sloshings on a couch,
even when the haggard mother breaks it up
with the shotgun and pants and shoes go flying.
Did I say vodka? Not only that!
Cut to the quick and give me pure sensation.
Three drinks & three divorces drive out of mind
what might tug against it & dull the pain
of lightening, swift & hot--broken tooth
or not! the night is hot & fifty bucks
can burn a hole in any lady’s looks.
‘Love likes a gander,’ & all that shit from books!”
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
A HEN, A RABBIT, AND THE CARNIVAL
A red glow lights the singers
strumming their acoustic guitars
and melts through the archway
onto the heavy wooden tables
and sawdust floor
where we sit with pitchers of beer
and a blooming onion
a buzz of conversation
filling the hour
On Main Street the midway
whirls howling men and women
round like stones in a bolo
that never gets spent
on a fleeing anything
animal or man
corndog and cotton candy
fluorescent thrills and shills
The guitarist is singing
a Dylan from long ago
something forgotten except
for the creepy insinuations
of feelings and gropings
in a haze of sweet smoke
the melody evokes
behind his head a neon exit
coldly adds its red
to the other red
we tip our glasses
sitting thigh to thigh
She says, “I often walk
the chicken on a leash
the rabbit too”
but he says, “when we walk
I carry the rabbit
or she does
because the dog is on
the other leash
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
A HEN, A RABBIT, AND THE CARNIVAL cont’d
absurd to put a rabbit on a leash”
And later
when I go to bed
after a sobering walk
and three more cigarettes
the house warm and empty
and quiet to the distant chirp
of crickets in the bushes
I imagine them
walking arm in arm
in their country lane
perhaps even now
for the night is cool
and the morning long hours away
she with the hen on her left
he with the rabbit on his right
or in his arms
such queer blessings
all that remain to us
in the dark
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE LOST DAY
They sat to their breakfast in silence,
neither wanting to start what they both knew
would grow into a rupture
as inevitably one word led to another.
So they kept the dam locks closed,
he concentrating on NPR,
she on the newspaper, the air
in the kitchen growing tenser
as minute flared into minute
like a slow-burning fuse threatening
to blow a breach in their decorum.
In the end it was she who opened.
“Our sitting here like this is no way to cope.
Look at this rash on my hands,
that’s a sign of stress I always get
when things turn bad and we don’t talk.
Why don’t you get symptoms of stress?
You never show what you’re feeling,
you just roll up inside your head
and get so self-possessed and superior.”
“Don’t let it come to this,” he said.
But his falling back to the comfort
of the radio would no longer hold.
The breach had been made and she continued,
“I watch you, you know, and I can tell
when you light one cigarette after another
that under your untroubled surface
you are chafing and burning--even
the brandy tells. I saw you last night
taking drink after drink, is that how
you keep so calm, putting the nerves
to sleep? Speak to me! Spit it out.”
“If I were to say it, too much would change
that I am not ready for, nor you.”
He put on his coat and went out
to start the car, pulling his collar up
as he opened the door. She watched him
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE LOST DAY cont’d
in silence, unable to say to herself
if he was saving or ruining what they
had spent nearly a lifetime building.
When he returned he seemed more relaxed.
“It’s very cold outside,” he said.
“We’ll have to give the car more time
than usual, have another cup of coffee.”
“I think the coffee makes me more jumpy
Than you do,” she said. “You scare me.”
“If I can still do that after all these years,”
he said in a tone that made her start,
“our marriage has been better than I thought.”
“Don’t I from time to time still surprise?”
“No. And no. Not like this time,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” she said,
“why like this time?”
“Because you strike out and accuse
and take what I say and turn it over
and make it come out meaning
what I never meant.” “Never meant,”
she screamed, “You don’t really know, do you?
I have always carried the heavier load--
two loads, if you didn’t know--
while you always made your work ‘the thing’
of our lives. I’ve always carried
three loads, now that I think of it,
you being more than one.”
“I know enough about what you’re feeling.
Why do you suppose I don’t? That’s surprising,
too--you act like you’re the only one
who feels and that if you didn’t feel
for both of us our marriage would end.”
He had hit the very spot that mattered.
Her silence was ominous and he saw
that something had changed.
She grew solemn and still.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE LOST DAY cont’d
He knew that telling her to get her coat
was useless and that today would be
a lost day for both of them.
He wondered, now that it was starting,
how it would end--worse would be said.
Would either be ready to comfort the other
when they had finally got through it? He looked
at her and tried to see her as she was
and wondered what he looked like now to her.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE YOWLING DOG AND PECKING BIRD
AROUSE A SENSE OF DREAD
The cocker spaniel
is yowling at the robins.
Being golden furred
and having long ears,
what does he have
to complain about?
On the edge of the newly
green lawn, by the fence,
tulips push up,
a sparrow pecks
among brown leaves
a wind dropped.
Not able to avoid
comparisons, I wreck
myself in the sunlight.
The silence of the barberry,
stiff in thorny crimson,
is eloquent.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE STONES IN MY YARD
These stones, these stones covered with mud,
are maledictions. Out of them
nothing flows or grows. Under them
nothing lives, but whitens and corrupts.
Why do I tolerate them?
To build a tomb where the spirit will thirst?
But this is worse than praying for wind!
Now, while spring is in the blood,
get rid of them,
let flowers bloom, grass grow.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
LET THERE BE FINE WEATHER
Now there’s a well-blown nose, leading that suit.
I’ll bet it takes its weekends in the Hamptons,
sailing on the bay Saturday afternoons
while its wife shops on Fifth Avenue.
I hope it has fine weather to favor its sails
and later plenty of wine to blot by drunkenness
the whiff of mortality, that disturbing smell
that lingers about the crotch--in spite
of the salt sea and Ralph Lauren’s potions.
Sooner or later that nose will require a fragrant
streaming in a solitaire boat--to whatever fate.
Let this be, then, a lament for infirmity,
and let all the scorn I feel for frenzied excess
subside to the simple remedy of care.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
MEN, WOMEN, AND THE METAPHYSICS OF WORDS
We play with words and build a dream
that men and women fashion into states.
States are reveries that come to life
and change the dreamers when they wake.
We play with waking when awake
and thus turn waking into dream
as great a vision as a state
for men and women erotically obsessed
with the double-sided ecstasies of sex
the hottest moment of waking life
when quark and distant quasar condense
to a shudder and response
and all the meanderings of the race
are uttered as a single word.
Out of reverie that word is spun
into the linguistic complexity of the poem.
The world as word is the world we wrung
from the first proposition on the plain--
the charred spear tip in the mammoth’s hide--
from which we spoke the universal mind.
The dream of sex and the dream of God
still quiver in the larynx as a word
with which the poet pairs a rhyme
to shape human destiny in time.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
ON SEEING THE KUWAITI AMBASSADOR
FINGERING WORRY BEADS IN THE UN
This mysterious float
over lucid moments,
moments like heads on a string,
heads whose faces become
the innocent Octavias of Rome
or the guilty Poppaeas,
the Hapsburgs or Louis
or the sleek-eyed Huns,
tzars, kaisers, or shahs.
Worry heads. This first
is the head of Adam, with a bloody rib,
like an Arabian dagger, in its teeth.
He is the unforgiven,
the father of the next,
with the mark on its forehead.
The next is Saddam,
whose children die on mountain slopes.
These are the black faces
that wither to living skulls
in Sudan, their eyeballs
turning in dry sockets.
A horse gallops,
thousands of horses gallop,
raising a cloud that blocks the sun.
These are the heads
that rose into a pyramid
on the alluvial plain of the Tigris.
These are Boers and Boxers and Kulaks.
Some have the pigtails of subservience,
the ones that swallowed bitter gall.
These are the strange fruit
that hung in the trees
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
ON SEEING THE KUWAITI AMBASSADOR cont’d
of Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
These are the heads that became
black clouds in Poland.
These are the celebrants of the Angka Leu
in the steamy jungles of Cambodia.
I worry these heads, fingering
the suicides and the condemned.
This one is Spartacus, this one Judas,
and this one a boy from Utah.
This one is a girl who bore a child at twelve
in her stepmother’s bedroom, placed it
in a plastic bag and dumped it,
then limped to school.
This one is the child.
O Paradise! Life is a shriveled heart,
a cold bed for dry eyes.
Each day brings its asp.
Each night its black breath of conscience.
With these beads I beat my heart,
bowing to the angel whose scimitar
shines white in the blue sky.
Far away my sandals are empty,
and sand and emptiness
are cold fortune for the soul.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
SPLEEN
What an infection we have made of reality!
Carnival in the afternoon rain, gutters swollen with feverish
mud and offal, disheartened bleating of horns, dazed
purgatorial dancing in drooping tents.
Obscenity and Fraud, iris and gladiolus from the gardens
of Dis, have taken human forms--Milliken, Jones,
Robertson, Flowers, Thomas, Bobbit--sweet-smelling
evangelicals leading smoke-ladened lines of midnight
guilt to Bald Mountain.
Placental flesh hangs from the jaws of media dogs who pick
clacking shuddering bones of lost souls.
From what azure indefiniteness has honor fallen, into what
putrefaction, what profitableness of buy and sell, body-
jerk, twitching populations?
Madonna masturbates on her Mother’s grave.
Grimacing, pelvis-thrusting, leather-clad monstrosities
howl and screech in the cavernous emptiness of human
chests.
The lay-down twang and bang of hot steel and back beat of
blood shake the banks of the clotted river and black-
sided hulls of beached boats, where new Achaians light
their fires and hoard a glittering plunder.
I recall the vistas of the old bard, his catalogues of life
and bounty, the fullness of his vision, and I rend my
garments and pull out my hair and cover myself with ash.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE BIBBER
I have stood in the shadow of my father’s death.
Vacant. A light in a niche.
I have seen mold on a wall
figure the eyes of a weeping girl--
shut doors, closed gates, ended conversations,
nearing, each day, the animal body.
“There he goes again, his ego’s loose.
Keep him from the wine before we go mad!”
“This morbidness is souring my Chablis.
How about a naked girl?”
But didn’t you see the sun sprawl
this evening on the lawns?
The tireless geese going south again?
Haven’t you noticed how your body stinks?
“Listen, Joe, have more wine and a little
pity, and take a bath when you get home.”
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
SADDAM’S SECOND TRY
Not on the ground but in the press he’s taken
another beating. Hard to say, “Poor
old fella,” for all his mad ambitious clinging.
Desert birds are wheeling overhead.
For a time slick old sheiks throughout the region
nabbed their worry beads and with nervous fingers
meditated Mesopotamian missiles.
But Saddam’s columns hissed and slithered away.
Eyes of the world turned to Babylon.
The world’s mouths hushed and took deep breaths.
In the silence those desert birds reeled.
But this sunken glory in the level sands
debunks itself with every move it makes,
and smiles attend the exhales of relief.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
OCTOBER MORNING
The sky is gray and murky like dishpan water.
Fog clings to trees and swirls through empty spaces.
Buildings as gray as fog have no traces
in the early morning of the business bustle
that men and women energized will hustle.
Sleep is the matrix that staves off daily slaughter
from which we are torn by clocks that hum commercials
in a fall that has fallen to fog like all reversals.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
IN LINEAR TIME
“In my end is my beginning,” Eliot declared.
In Jonestown and Waco the pirouette of death
circles and cycles visionary obsessions.
“Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam”--timeless.
The westering pioneer has never stopped
and skips round planets to interstellar space.
But the poetic eye hovers above the sphinx,
and in the pulpit ancient books command.
Like some beastly thing crawling from a cocoon
split and broken from the inside out,
an untamed destiny threatens to get free,
to launch itself as something unconceived.
Terror of transformation--to those who sweat
the mysterious unmapped streets of the internet.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
EARLY SNOW
The news this morning says watch out for snow
late in the day, traveling will be dangerous.
Though as I look at the sky the sun forecasts
a bright fall day for raking and bagging leaves.
Snow on the way depresses our mood at breakfast.
What should have been a promise of brisk air
and stimulation is filled with urgency.
“We’re not ready for snow,” she says. “Not yet!”
As I sit at coffee, brooding on things darkened
by the thrusting in of bad news--
health, love, the check book--anxiety calms.
Snow this evening is like the coming of death.
I have to get up leaves and weatherproof doors.
The sun is shining and the day is short.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
CUSTOM OF THE HOUSE
A jug of apple cider sits on the counter.
Early nightfalls and snow on roof and lawn
make coming in a greeting to the furnace.
Yams and turkey and pies, fruits and nuts,
the table opened and covered with a cloth--
these are closed links in the chain of days
that bind children to parents and parents to
the whitening of their hair, year after year.
And then the house falls into disrepair,
and nightfall and snow make the coming in
harder to bear for warmth no longer there--
for changes in the custom of the house
and gaping absences where once there sat
an eager round of people transformed all that.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
METAPHOR OF THE COLD WIND
The house has been there many years,
long before they came to live in it.
Much strengthening he has given it,
too, beam and roof, and foundation wall.
Its floors may creak and a door swing
slowly open on its hinges
when the furnace starts,
but these are adjustments the house has made
to those who have lived and loved
more or less recklessly inside.
They sit and listen to the wind
chafe the north windows
and try to turn the pages of the books
they pretend to read, yawn a bit
to express the coziness of unconcern.
But their ears are fastened to the blasts
of arctic cold that even as they sit
are drifting snow against the house and walk
and whiting out the sky around the lamps.
He refuses to look out again
when she breaks the silence.
“The television said thirty below
and winds gusting to thirty miles and hour.
I wonder how the animals survive it?”
He knows what she is thinking and thinks it too.
“The house is not just a matter of circumstance,”
he says, “with you just as likely
to be outdoors as in.” “Just,” she says,
and goes back to reading. Just then,
as though in response to what they thought,
the wind struck hard against the north side
and held them almost in a trance.
To take her mind off the inhospitable,
she turns on the TV and fills the room
with Alan Ladd and William Bendix.
As she tucks her feet under her
and nestles into the couch, he says, “the winds
have swept them away a long time ago.”
“But they didn’t die in the cold,”
she says. “Nor will we,” he says,
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
METAPHOR OF THE COLD WIND cont’d
adding, why he’s not quite sure,
“So long as what we make holds out
against what we make it for.”
And she, “You know it never does.”
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
KEEPING THINGS WHOLE
There is a place in my trifocals
that splits my image of the world,
that makes line jut from line
and doubles what I know is one.
A flick of my head breaks the pattern.
So, chicken-like, I walk about
keeping the world together.
A weathering task for a single man.
One would think me nearly crazy
to think my keeping the image whole
keeps anything together but
the image in my private skull.
But I would ask where the world exists
except in the privacy of image
each of us has to shape
himself or herself, with what is given.
Keeping whole a world that splits
defeats irrationality.
That’s a good for culture,
even if in a single brain.
Each of us must do what he can
to make life possible for all,
and keep the joints aligned,
especially in the single mind.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
WHAT WE SHARE
We talk of virtues and of values, write books
that pluck from Plato thoughts we hold eternal
and over the pavement spread a shroud to hide
a bloody body from the view of crowds.
Black man, white, they lie in blood the same.
What we share as people runs in blood.
Death names us, our songs make love to death.
Children stalk it in our homeless streets.
In pity we hold a camera on a face
wasted thin by AIDS--false pity, to stare
at death still ripening, breaking through the skin.
What harmonies of darkness the camera sings.
“Light and shade,” Gregorian voices begin,
“Our bodies cast no shadows and live as things.”
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
A FULL MOON, A METEOR SHOWER, AND AN ECLIPSE
Out of the southern sky in the moon’s full glare
the Leonid fragments will come streaking in,
and tonight’s full moon will be too far south
to enter earth’s umbra and so give us
one more eclipse to shudder at or wonder,
though the light penumbra will dim its silver
brightness just enough to make us think.
Think what? Those who know won’t have to think,
and those who don’t won’t wonder but will sleep.
Tonight we all will miss some subtle earth-speech--
a penumbral eclipse and glared-out meteor shower
like subject and predicate of a cosmic sentence
that underscores itself with irony,
and only dust to tell us what we missed.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE WEDDING
A froth of lace
expanse of bosom
dazzling
in the slow
trumpet-led march
how
studied
the soft walk down
how
trite
and tomorrow and
the day after
how
fatiguing
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
TRIBULATIONS OF WINTER
The tribulations of the winter wind.
We all turn inward when the snow begins.
Trees bare of robins remind us now
of going, of what has taken wing beyond
our knowing--bare thoughts under bare trees.
But the tracks of a cat and rabbit in the snow,
one behind the other, image the trace
that, even when the heart’s gone cold, survives.
Like ripples frozen mid-motion on the lake.
Like bees balled motionless in their hives.
Like all the thoughtless doings of thoughtless things.
The body does what it should do, no more.
But something else moves thickly toward desire,
stumbles, freezes, dies, then finds the fire.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE WORLD OF SCIENCE
The meiofauna beneath our feet gnaw
the adamant foundation of our lives.
The great black maw of the galaxy shreds
the sky to streaming filaments of fiery gas.
A myth of billions beyond the rushing minds
of Eleatic Greeks to assimilate--
apocalypse to cataclysm leaps,
and chaos drifts on dreamless energy peaks.
The rage for order never diminishes.
Though the double helix spiral to the end
of time in self-consuming jaws no God
but Horror would imagine or define,
and Truth will not be changed, faith creates
the secrets of our individual fates.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
A TIME BETWEEN
Weak, foolish man! will Heaven reward us there
with the same trash mad mortals wish for here?
Dying is bad business, though profitable for some.
Dying for wealth, dying for power, for fame--
the world has become a mortuary place
where equal gall and power leave a trace.
Lofty ladies with resplendent hair
gossip over lunch about despair,
and lusty men, decked in khaki togs,
pummel cities into reeking bogs.
What sweat for personal gain, exertion and strain!
Little Jacks in their little campuses strive
to make a globe out of forty acres thrive,
while Mels and Toms halloo in the halls
of Laws to show who has and hasn’t balls.
All things worthy outclass the simple virtues.
A designer gown and shining Mercedes give hues
to the mysteries of life and create an air,
where there is no ground, of metaphysical fear
among aspiring have-nots and dispirited poor.
Our hopes are sequined with refined ideals
that lack the substance of a meal on wheels.
We live in a time between, a time like Lent,
when one world dies and another rises, spent
but impenitent, a pit inverted to a knoll.
Instead of fasting we feast, before life’s toll.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE OLD HIGH ROAD
Another beast has fallen to extinction.
We beat our breasts as beasts, without distinction.
“The world is poorer when animals disappear,”
we say, and rightly so, then refuse to hear
the clamoring condemnations and the curse
of any remedy that picks our purse.
Time was when Eden was a harmony
where man and woman dined on milk and honey,
and both were Nature’s stewards, and loved and named.
We think of Eden then and are ashamed
at the mess we’ve made of forest, reef, and plain.
But did hunters in the Neolithic stain
the earth with blood and send to eternal rest
mammoth and saber-tooth and many a big-brain
friend? in stone-ax ritual, an Edenfest?
Perhaps. All roads we travel take us west.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
RADICAL WILL
Who can guard me from the thoughts
I think--pale window in the moonlight--
of a nation at odds with itself,
worse, a time, steering into the brain
antipathies of midnight
and class war in the classroom?
Passion is a tropical fruit
and all who eat of it set sail.
Let my lines now rage themselves out
against the rattling window.
Midnight is a Hooper’s veil,
and horror all my heart can hold.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
OBIT
Vain was the Chief’s, the General’s pride!
They had no Poet, and they died.
In vain the Critic, our Culture’s head!
He had no Poet, and is dead.
Lest you should think that verse should die,
which sings the Silver Stream along,
put up the video tape and try
to find Yourself amid the throng.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
WIND
I’m weary of speeches this November evening,
of turn and turn about in politics.
Of feverish forensics, the culture of hate.
Of gridiron metaphors and cant and glee.
The world, the flesh, and the devil have been scorned,
and liberal democrats, and power’s made safe,
with every motive exposed--except for gold.
This evening I turn it off, nerves twitching.
Just before dark, as I came in, I caught
crossing in the wind a glimpse of something
blowing hard, a cardboard box careening
toward the fence and getting trapped there.
I thought then and think again how empty things
are driven by winds, the inner and the outer kind.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
SPLENDOR BORROWS ALL HER RAYS FROM SENSE
The old frame house is hammered and rent asunder.
The lot is leveled, squared, and readied to take
a new house designed to shame the neighborhood.
Majestically it rises, glass and stone.
And he whose name it magnifies gazes
contentedly round to mark how taste alone
raises a man above the common brood.
But out of hearing ridicule heaves like thunder.
Long ago the contest was for knighthood.
Lords and ladies daintily danced for privilege,
while round the manor massed the peasantry.
No one wants the rich to strive for sainthood.
We’ve lost, after all, a feel for sacrilege.
But custom today asks for pleasantry.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
ON JUSTICE AND FOLLY: REREADING HORACE
It’s more than three hundred miles to Brindisi.
Plenty of time to talk, to fit words
to the rhythms of the cart
bumping on the stones of the Appian.
And at night, the inns and the bad water
lead to too much wine,
conditions almost too desirable
for the poet in good company.
But at the end of this journey
some sober business
keeps the poet in a philosophical mood--
great powers plot
in the silence of his stare.
Brutality, ruthlessness, war--
mean, cruel, and personal--
make of words an airy emptiness
the poet cannot endure.
By what irony have the gods contrived
to make such insubstantial things
survive the thousands of years
that crumbled marble and wasted
stone and iron and imperial ambition:
Expediency is the mother of justice and fairness.
Justice arises from the fear of its opposite.
Reading Horace today is like rummaging
among memorials in a graveyard,
with night falling and light rain, the car nearby.
Justice is the temper of the disempowered
struggling to get even.
The old Roman lacked contempt,
too wedded to plain human feeling for our tastes.
Nature cannot distinguish right from wrong
as she does desirable from undesirable.
I would replace “nature” with “culture”
to be nearer a truth the old poet
felt but lacked the thousands
of years that make us wiser to say.
But what good would it do?
His desire to rub the rasp of truth
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
ON JUSTICE AND FOLLY: REREADING HORACE cont’d
on sensitive ears
has long ago played itself out.
No one cares. Besides, go find a sensitive ear.
Those portholes are plugged
with the coarsest of waxes.
Think of how a young man, his sex got up,
fails to notice the wen on the girl’s big nose.
He writes of folly--where the dick goes
goes the ridiculous.
But that’s the poet,
always in love with proportion.
Even he had risked his ass for a beauty.
But folly has depths darker than
most poets’ light can reach, depths where
depravity and eqotism mingle
that Horace knew better than we--
The worst insanity is found next to folly.
Whoever is entranced by fame’s glassy glitter
hears thundering around him the frenzy of blood.
Brutus is howling,
the besotted Antony moaning--
the calm, measured cadences of Octavian
proclaim peace and order in the modern world.
Change the names. Every age
has its own. Only, ours
cares nothing to reflect.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
LAMAR ALEXANDER’S FLANNEL SHIRT
Lamar Alexander’s flannel shirt
has for the moment stunned the press, which lacks
anyway a fine appreciation
for indirection and which finds a simile
so much to ponder it usually gets it wrong.
And so the commentators lift their brows
and smirk, and drool ironic on the news--
another alpha wave in the collective brain.
That flannel was red and black, two colors that
have long associations with the past.
Worn by one who makes a bid for power,
the shirt should have caused the flesh to shiver.
But unconsciousness is bliss, and life is hard,
and everyday the senses need renewing.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE OLD GENTLEMAN, AFTER ONE TOO MANY,
HOLDS FORTH IN THE BAR
How can one make a life out of what
comes in the end to be nothing more
than an empty shopping bag?
One can still make echoes, you say?
We hear them in the capitol
and believe they are original!
I lack that gift for self-deception.
Behind us the generations come
like snow plows wedging snow aside.
Mercy costs ten times the minimum wage.
And love never was a creamy billow.
What’s to look forward to
at any age
but stimulation and release?
People go to a priest for absolution.
Guilt still makes penitents among us
who believe the darkened closet holds
the mystery of the soul.
Something there is that makes a heavy heart.
Bad living, no doubt. Put us in a crowd
and the scramble begins that gilts the hearse.
We’d be better off to throw away our toys
and leave to children the games that suit them.
Instead of hunting the streets for thrills
or risking dollars on the powerball,
we should set our days to smoother rhythms--
work and meals and sleep--
untroubled in conscience or expectation.
A friend in pain needs help.
A son needs money.
Everyday, rancor vies with compassion.
We know our better side
even though it isn’t glamorous.
What comes in the end, out of the dark,
should greet us like a friend.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
ECONOMY
The moth invades the tree
stately in the sky
sun and moon solemnly
roll by
children play in leaves
that fall in June and July
a summer day reprieves
their cry
the wood is cut and corded
and left all fall to dry
less color is now afforded
the eye
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE SLEEPLESS DAWN OF ANXIOUS LOVE
Tied to a chair, your mother mercilessly
beat you with the spiked heel of her shoe,
then sent you to the orphanage where you
learned meekness under monks,
thankful for meals and the mule
you led to town pulling a wagon for wood.
At fourteen they released you from those nights
of guiltless watch, sleepless and self-cursing.
This alienation gave to your years the acidic
odor of loss that no gain could efface. What
could you know of paternity but scars of remorse?
Frail and thin boned, now, the sleepless dawn
disturbs with ancient voices the boy’s
readying for a last release, a happiness
of slumber without dreams and waking
to the heart-clutching fold of mother’s arms.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE GRIM OLD TEACHER
She settles into her chair, opens her coat,
and beams like a morning glory; fades as quickly.
Flowers are earnest by nature, showing what counts.
One sweet stretch into sunlight above the stones.
The mind tries hard to shove away those stones.
Is itself too heavy. Become like stone. As cold.
Illusions of light and flowers white and red.
What do we know that isn’t cold and dead?
Every utterance is time’s fallen leaf.
Page after page. Youth, middle, old age.
Every moment is a history.
Life fades even in the stretch that fills
the room with color and a girlish scent.
But, AH! that scent--it turns old stone to water.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE SERIOUS MINDED IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
They live too much inside
their airless selfhood
where the layers of gold
and red gold and red
setting over the dark trees
in autumn
are never likened to
a mother’s frown
on the eve of winter
above her gentle tucking
her silence like the closing
of an eye
the afterimage of her hand
like a bird fluttering into a tree
at the drop of sleep
Nor do the grizzled eyebrows of an old man
or the peach fur on a boy’s cheek
being spring
laugh like shaggy palms on a white beach
waving the marine-glow of morning
to Billy gathering coconuts
on his bedroom floor
If image fits the mind to a mood
the truth must be
they neither feel nor see
Spring summer autumn winter
like youth and age
separate the dreamer from the dream
the color from the thing
that we may learn to sing
not of but as
evening sunlight
and a bird’s dark wing
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE JOURNEY
How the car dies
and rolls almost noiselessly
like a long exhaled breath
to the shoulder
and stops
frozen in prairie blankness.
Steady wind streams snow
across the road,
and fields, blurred
white by the blowing,
lose their familiar detail--
how the silence in the car
is broken only by the buffeting
of wind,
and, helpless at last,
a suspension
settles on the nerves,
and in that breathlessness
one pulse of revelation
wakes you
to the pattern of your life,
how all your decisions have contrived
the zigzagging route
to this place.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE WHITEOUT
When wind curls the snow on the edge of sheets
blowing across field and house and whitens
the sky so densely that eyes are blinded by white,
no voice cries into that maddened wind
that takes all cries into itself as one
to protest that life diminishes us enough.
We have the calm of our interior spaces
to retreat to and keep such winds outside.
But other storms there are that whiten and blind.
And like the sparrow in the snowy wind
huddled in the lee of a maple’s branch
whose urge to sing is greater than his heart,
we clutch to our perches and loudly cry
glorious protests to life’s diminishing.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE CITY AFTER SNOWFALL
Some annoyances are trivial
and best forgot to smoothen your day.
But when the plowmen ridge the snow
across intersecting roads and knock
the axles of your car nearly off
at every intersection you have to cross,
annoyance grows with the bumps on your head.
These plowmen get paid for pushing snow.
And so they push, in straight lines
east to west, and when that’s done
they take the perpendicular routes.
All through the city motorists know
the plowmen block as much as they plow.
Wherever snow falls, there is no Eden,
agreed, taking Eden as a figure
for what has never been in human life.
Progress towards is progress blocked.
Life doesn’t move in one direction.
Even plowmen know this, so why
must we crash through snow barriers
where every road meets another road?
Is it some malignancy in the minds
of blue-chinned men with heavy mitts
and knit caps astride the titanic bulk
of those roaring machines splitting drifts?
Or is it merely the curbing of impulse
that corners demand, slowing the bullroarers
to curve their paths by ninety degrees?
If I were the type to see
metaphors in reality,
I’d claim the plowman as a trope
of civilization’s fallen hope.
But the figure doesn’t assuage
a mild vexation turned to rage.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
SHE HAS GONE TO PIERRE
And when she returns
she wants to know
why I am so quiet
“Two days away
and you have nothing to say”
But what can pile up
in two days
that needs
accounting of
hours change on the clock
meals are taken in unsavory silence
a novel is left
at page seventy-one
cigarettes
brandy
late-coming sleep
there is nothing to say
except
I’m glad you’re back
those few words
and no more
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
WOODBLOCK
A reddish brown almost
rust
in which the lines are cut
that impressionistically suggest
palm leaves and plump
naked woman
large cat
and waves for sandy ground
in a library
amid the books on a cloudy
cold day
she dreams a young man’s
fantasy
of tropical sexuality
disports
in airy salty sun--
no woman ever danced
so plumply on the sand
beside so large a cat
under palms this waveringly still--
dim rusty light
of evening
coming on
dark and darker
the hours ahead
oh tan skin
of woman in a dream
these discursive books
and bodiless words
conceal
the color and the feel
of life’s heaviness
and all the strife
you prance away from
in the mad moment’s wildest touch
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
WOODBLOCK cont’d
oh heft of guilt and reprobation
let the body of my wife
become you
gladly in my love
as I dance her off to bed
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
COLD MORNING
The bare limb creaks
over the snow
and ice
Chimney smoke bends
over the house
next door
A crystalline light
slants across
the room
Winter has set
a table with
the sun
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
IN DEAD WINTER
In dead winter winter’s grip loosens.
Roads begin to melt, the eaves drip.
Morning sun fires the sky bright blue.
You turn, dizzy, about to fall, and clutch
the counter in a moment of stark terror.
Begins what ends in emergency and shock.
Intensive care, monitors, IVs,
catscans, and me with pounding head, reeling.
You are stable now and I can think.
But only dark thoughts of dissolution
come as the sun beams over the world.
And I am afraid. The weight of you on my arm,
your limp drifting, forced on me how little
life itself cares for what it lives in.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
STILL LIFE: A POT OF FROZEN FLOWERS
1
Time is like the long snake’s slither
into its dark hole.
The raunchy dank Autumn
has squeezingly disappeared.
2
Sun lights the snow in morning splendor.
The big round earthen pot
stands like a temple guard on the step.
Beneath the fleecy sky
the world assumes an aspect
of antiquity.
3
It is too cold to fiddle out of doors.
Only the spirit moves
under the temple dome, grandiose,
hymning, like a choir of girls and boys,
a long-unheard worship to long-forgotten gods.
4
Someone somewhere dies.
Someone somewhere always dies.
These are the simplest of words.
The rabbit dies in the mouth of the cat.
5
Snow covers the ground
where the future broods.
But these flowers will not revive;
as dead as yesterday,
they will leave no trace.
6
All the life of the race
we have sought what to believe.
The roundness of women
was first and will be last.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
STILL LIFE: A POT OF FROZEN FLOWERS cont’d
7
A red pear on a white plate.
The will to believe lives in the image.
If the will should dissolve like snow in spring,
along with it would flow
whatever future we should know.
8
The cloud is a bridge between two horizons.
The cloud is insubstantial,
a shape that changes every instant
which the slightest bird
cannot rest on, but its shadow on the snow
chills even the rabbits.
9
She is a shadow.
One may glimpse her in a crowd
or at a sidewalk table
sipping soda.
10
The light powder snow devils up in the wind
and windily dances away.
Shrieking. Like a morning ghost. An effigy.
11
Man is an abstraction
like tomorrow’s weather.
He gathers particularities to stuff his hat.
But he knows fury, and he knows rage.
12
Innocence is not the north wind
blowing stiffly across the plain.
At this moment in Rome
someone walks along the Sacred Way.
Feet shod in Nikes, a red down coat.
Rain taps upon a black umbrella.
She dreams that the night will come
like an ardent lover.
Already she reaches out an arm.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
STILL LIFE: A POT OF FROZEN FLOWERS cont’d
13
In the glare of the sun
snow drips
and freezes in the shadow of the pot.
14
In spring the earth is soft.
The sheathe pushes up a tender tip.
Then an indignant fury takes hold
and madness reigns.
15
An Asian density of life
crawls tumblebug-like through the mud.
Its clanking clunking machinery
stamps numbers on the clocks.
16
In the witness of snow
the destroyer comes. Nobly.
Cleanly. Like a virgin.
17
The trees are leafless by late November.
In their crooked screed made bare
one sees, as though wrought in air,
each year’s notation
of the sorrows of the sun.
18
Like men bent with age the flowers
stand, bewildered and dumb,
their shaggy heads bared to the sun
as it crosses the meridian.
19
The image is a visual music
which all together we can sing
for flowers in the snow.
And in unison for ourselves, as though
we had powers as great as snow.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
OUR METAPHORS DIE WITH OUR MYTHS
Rome, colossal amalgam
of thought and stone, modern metaphor
of the antiquity of mind--
seedy, grand, noisy, jammed to the hilt
in the throat of history,
almond-eyed, busty--
is it possible that the chaos of time
is an orderly descent
of seeming after seeming
style after style
from your one successful moment
tangent to the sun?--
Our age is all solitude
in wizened denial
whose style is a calculus
of pluralities
equations whose solution is zero
moonless and sunless
thus--the sun in the mind
once cast shadows in the mind
the moon roved intellectually
but shadow has its counterpart
in flesh and bone
and a pulse to keep its time
beating blood from open wounds
which is the play of actuality and seeming
zero and one
the code of desire
as breath gushing from the dying mouth
and no breath
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
OUR METAPHORS DIE WITH OUR MYTHS cont’d
What risings transfix us--
galleons on fire in insubstantial seas
ramparts hoved against a barrier of walls?
the silent glimmering tick
of geo-positioning satellites
imperially fixes the race
if shadow had no counterpart
in flesh and bone
what infinite possibilities would unfold?
We cannot hope to know
our Lenins are discredited, our Nietzsches dead
and we grow more unlike each day
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
THE REALIST
“Why not just say what you intend?
What does the guy pumping gas care
about how you don’t say what you mean
and mean what you don’t say, getting lost
in words that lead mind and spirit
nowhere that does anybody any good?”
He says, “life is hard, we work
long hours calculating costs
and benefits to get at truths
that make a difference in people’s lives!”
I tell him in response about
the night the storm took down our trees
and froze the animals in the fields,
snapping power poles and plunging
seven counties into dark,
and how we found ourselves walking
through familiar rooms with arms outstretched
and how by habit long engrained
we still threw switches to turn lights on.
I didn’t tell him of the door
ajar I cracked my forehead on.
I was afraid the metaphor might turn
his lights on, and I didn’t want
to rush him into light too fast.
I didn’t want him, in the end,
to see at all; some light, like ultra-
violet, isn’t meant to be seen.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
WHAT CANNOT BE IMAGINED
In the upper story of the house
where clean bed linen and folded blankets mark
a woman’s touch, the wind sounds whoosh,
the steady wind that slides across
the blue sky, not the arctic wind
of January nor the damp muddy wind
of March--it is the February gush.
A sane, common sense wind,
neither cold nor wet, announcing both
an end and a beginning.
Common sense. We lack
appropriate adjectives. It’s like the name
carved on the headstone that aches
the stomach with sadness. Our fathers stand
in our minds with their hands on their hips.
Look! The house needs paint.
The wind is tilting the fence.
That voracious rabbit, damn him,
has gnawed through the lattice
and is nesting under the deck again.
The last leaves that fell
before the snow are slickly shining
in the sun--things absent of color
like necessities and inevitabilities.
What was and what will be
confound and hold us
in a grip that is like
the drip of water from the eave:
a brute unintelligible frankness
sounding what must but cannot be imagined.
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
FEBRUARY
The flu has made its rounds.
Women are less pale
and men step smartly
in the cold sunlight
uncolored
by the stains of spring
passing into solemnities of March.
The margin of ice
and thaw--when afternoons
release water from plowbanks
at the curbs
and the sharp freezing
of spread water across the roads
makes driving risky
after dark.
When, with eyes at
the sky, we feel our feet
planted on the ground
and feel our clothes
hanging heavily.
The small rain down can,
Christ--
walk now on the lawn,
still matted from the weight of snow,
and imprints of our passing
remain.
Stems of spireas
and yellow corpses of petunias
stand in the black mud
and beside them,
winding toward them,
the brittle vines
of creeping jenny lie.
Life in the skin,
O JoAnna, is no sin.
Glassy, blue-white, breath-vapor brilliance,
glistening eye of a gray-beard month--
Joseph M. Ditta
Department of English
Dakota Wesleyan University
Mitchell, SD 57301
FEBRUARY cont’d
red blood reigns, never the
heart can we call our own but
dark, windy, rainy fogs of sister life,
foretelling tragedies
in returns of snow and seeping chills.
Feel the dying breath
of clarity and forgiveness on the skin,
snow-melting showers
(our beauties are not ours).
Sharp breezy shadows
moving on the yellow lawn
(sense, still, ever alone,
a time when distinctions
could still be made--
the final heat of consciousness
before the fall)
sing out on death
that though oblivion shall crack our bones
and sink us in the mud of March,
what life wants has been pressed
out of every year,
and every year is good.
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