The Farmer and the Shepherd

I have always imagined the farmer as antagonist

Imposing a Euclidian geometry of lines and squares

Over the curvature of the earth

My sympathies have instead been with the shepherds

And perhaps there is a generational animosity

Between farmers and shepherds

That goes back some time

The farmer is an owner who has big plans

The shepherd has nothing but his songs

The farmer is a servant on his own land

His stewardship is morally commendable

The shepherd has a kind heart and a sweet song

In his throat. He is in unity with his dog.

He is a lover who enjoys the wine

Of the farmer’s bounty.

This is what makes the farmer mean.

He resents the shepherd’s freedom

For wealth can never be stowed upon him.

                                                                                                            

The Demon of Literature

This is what the poet searches for

The moment in every day that Satan

Cannot find

Some of my ancestry were Amish

Until one day in the 19^th century

When my progenitor added a wooden back

To their buggy. His wife had a bad back.

She couldn’t ride to church without it.

The church elders ruled that such an addition

To the standard buggy was not plain

They instructed him to remove it.

I imagine the words that passed between them

Were not kind. Harsh guttural exchanges

Perhaps reverting to the vulgar German.

When my own father absconded

With my young mother after their marriage

And headed for North Webster, IN

For the Glory Barn and entered the church

Of Hobart Freeman and his Faith Assembly

An analogous confrontation was fated to take place.

During a visit to our home the church leaders

Discovered that my mother had the works

Of Shakespeare and Arthur Conan-Doyle

And Bram Stoker on her bookshelf.

They pronounced that she carried

A literary demon inside herself

Warning her of the danger of idolatry

Which accusation has turned out to be true.

Such a demon I find has transversed itself upon me

And long after my father broke with Hobart Freeman

Using perhaps the plainest Pennsylvania Dutch

This demon continues to express his serpent seed.

The Albatross

Funny creatures these literary one percenters

All we really desire is occasional human intercourse

Which to others seams to come so naturally

So practiced its like a gift to them

Pristine in their illiteracy

And perfect in their social posture.

For us with minds too dissolved in the literature

Of previous centuries; the languages, the habits

And manners of the past crowd in upon us.

We have not the alphabet of social propriety

Or the basic rudiments of common human sentiment.

Even the crude sign language of the body and face

Cannot penetrate our boney heads.

Whatever words we choose must give offense

Especially if the listener be another of our kind.

We become pathetic in the attempt at polite conversation

We bristle, we snarl, we protect our little territories

Of intellect, barking at one another like seals

On a rocky beach.

These awkward wings have no utility

When brought down to the deck

On the ship of human interaction

For the people we know best are the imaginary

Friends of writers long dead.

Look how ridiculous we are in public!

With shirts tucked into our boxers

Food in our beards

Our tube socks with our wing tipped shoes

Why are we incapable of doing what to others

Comes so naturally?

But which of us would clip our wings

So that we could more easily navigate

On the deck of that ship?

Urban Frame

      Urban Frame

When the old woman fell from the city bus

And onto the curb of Belmont Avenue

I was watching from the window

Of a corner coffee shop

I saw the two polished girls

Giggling with color

Who stood nearby

Pretending not to notice her

As the bus pulled away

I watched the hustling businessman

Who, tripping, kicked her cane

Swore, and hurried on his way

And another young man

Who stooped to help her

Until he remembered his previous engagement

He left her there

With her knees in the street

And her hands up on the curb

Quaking with the strain

Unable to lift her head

I sat in that coffee shop

Not twenty feet away from her

The glass in the window

Separated me

Protecting me from the scene outside

And then I focused on the glass

Not five inches from my face

And I saw my own image in the glass

A weak mirage of my reflection

Projected onto that scene.

And it did not reflect well on me that day.

American Kids

The flappers and the jitterbugs

The beatniks and hippies never die.

The rockers and grungers speak nothing of the wars

Interrupting our good time

Meaningless things, wars

In which nothing happens really

But you can feel it when a war ends

And the music can continue

After World War One

The survivors of that war became the first generation

Of Americans to do it in the back of an automobile.

Perhaps it was the sex lessons they'd learned in Europe

That led to the American sexual revolution of the twenties.

(Thousands of them returned from the war with VD

after being encouraged by their moral government

to not use condoms, because,

what could be worse than contraception?)

Time passes

And face paint hair band rock and roll

Becomes the turgid flannel and corduroy of grunge

But say something about marijuana

How it sneaked itself into white American culture

Disguised as Jazz

White kids listening to Gene Croupa

The drummer of a Negro band

The first white person ever charged

With possession of pot in 1938

Devil music they called it.

Ecstatic energetic multi-cultural vibrations

Intoning fierce emotive dancing and rhythm

Shocking to puritans

Frightening to moralists who were sure

That swing signified the beginning

Of the decay of American culture:

“The family system will disappear,” they said

“Society, sapped at its very base

Will have to find new foundations,

And Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free

Will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower

Through a sunlit world¹”

Those moralists were right all along

The jitterbug craziness the ecstasy and dementia

The refer madness (the poem pauses while I

crash through the window and fall out onto the street)

In the nineties kids were cool

We were stoned beautifully and there can be

No status among the equally beautiful

All very confusing for young women of common sense

For if there is no status among young men

How is a girl supposed to know who to mate with?

Perhaps she should just sample us all and then choose

Her- mother- said- to- choose- the- very- best- one-

And-you- are- not- it

A kid today has a different bent

He's a straight edged non-drinking non-smoking ass kicker

Whose greatest vice and outpouring of spirit is his violence

And his willingness to repeatedly fall off of a skateboard

Breaking his ankles and cracking his head on a plywood ramp

He tells stories about getting kicked in the face at the metal concert

And relishes the pain of tattooing and piercing and cutting and scarring

Pain is what galvanizes his memory to the moment of life

He loves pain, and so the decadent hedonism of my generation

Has become the masochism and asceticism of his

And what can we say about the movement between the decades

The different faces, the masks of the American spirit?

Perhaps one cannot participate in the emerging incarnation

Without completely disconnecting with the past

As though an awareness of the past disqualifies us

From participating in what is new.

1The moralist is quoted from Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow

Toward a Literary Anthropology

We may have noticed that the old books are gone

No one reads the old books anymore

The authors of the old books are dead

The old crotchety crotch-stuffers-- the old white men-

The Muppet critics snoring in the balcony of literature

Have become extinct

And so the task of the literary anthropologist

Is to discover what killed formalism

Where have the new critics gone?

Were the reader response critics killed off

By some natural catastrophe

Or were they hunted to extinction by over-zealous feminists?

My own theory is that the old critics died out

Because they failed to impress upon a new generation the necessity

That their torch of knowledge be carried further

The project of the old school codified and crystallized

The old critics simply died guarding their elaborate castle in the sand

This failure began in the 1970s when the old school

Refused to engage emerging feminism in a critical dialog

A dialog that some feared would legitimize feminism

They simply ignored the feminists and continued in the old vein

Never recognizing feminism as the vital force

In the criticism of the age

Then they promptly died out leaving no heirs to their throne

And feminism inherited the lordship of the lit. crit. mountain

Because the feminists were breaking new ground

They were the living coral rising from the skeleton of the old

Popping off new intellectual polyps

Filling the brine with the spermatozoa of their knowledge

And now have we come to the place

Where feminism itself has begun to calcify?

Is feminism repeating the mistake of the old dominant hegemony?

Is it trying to guard its finished castle in the sand

By resisting a critical dialog with emerging thought?

Perhaps criticism only thrives as it is rebuilt

The old dilapidated structures of thought

Need to be tested continually and torn down if necessary

The Woods in Hawthorne

The Woods in Hawthorne

I tried to explain to Silvia

what her name meant to the neoplatonists

but she didn't care

no one else at the table cared either

honestly I was not trying to seem smart

when I held the table hostage to my conversation

my voice escalating as I spoke.

On the walk home I was thinking more about the woods

and what they mean. The dense woods

of early America. An old forest with spooks 

and skookums staring out of the dark.

Americans had barely hacked their way onto this continent

the forest was bigger than us

the trees were the original inhabitants of this land

the forest actively hated us then

it sided with the natives against us.

No one knew what was in the forest.

there were dangerous animals like ferocious Pilgrims

dogged in their zeal and zealous in their dogma

there certainly would have been devil worshipers

on Saturday.

But Hawthorne's mind often transplanted itself

to southern Europe where he quickly rooted

in more ancient soil. The Roman woods

created a Sylvan fawn and a marble garden

a pool and a fountain of myth

the stillness and gentleness of the forest

the strong odor of lilacs

which have not yet become cliche in 1860.