Michael Andrews
6/11/2004
apeiron@beachnet.com
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| Trade Books / A Lone Black Gull / Poetry
Michael Andrews 6/11/2004 apeiron@beachnet.com |
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-083336
ISBN 0-941017-49-4
Copyright © 2000 Michael Andrews
6x9, perfect bound with color cover.
320 pages set with Bernhard Modern and Albertus.
$15.00
ToThe Reader From The Heart Of The Moment
Travels By Night, a poem by Tu Fu
translated by the Michael Andrews
Most Men
Sand Castles
Gumballs
Jelly Bean Machine
Ah Life!
Untaught
Ataraxia
The Way
The Fat Man
The Old Hand
Kowloon To Hong Kong
Saigon Sea Lanes
Cheating
Minnie And Mickie
Willy Peter
Cao Dai Temple
4day Tire Store
Three Frosty Beers
Time To Write A Different Poem
Living In LA
Baseball Caps
On The Heads Of Pins
The Pearl
The Fortune Cookie
Fly In Amber
Trusting Dreams
A Desert Of Talc
Indian Ocean
Collecting Charts
The Champagne Tea House
The Thai Song Greet
Reclining Buddha
Graves By The Ganges
Kamarpukur
A Small God
Words Scatter
Gadia's Mango
Without Words
The New Delhi Blues Again
I Am Painted In The Window
Happy Feet
Austrian Tea, Graz
Getting Lost
Moments, Linz
White Death
Linz Again
The Woman Walking, Vienna
More Morning Fog, Salzburg
Klenovika
Any Passing Wind, Dubrovnik
Strimonilos Kolpos
Delphi
Herse, Goddess Of The Dew
Kastelli, Crete
The Cretan Goatherder
Vision On A Sunlit Road, Crete
Cemetary Of Keramikos
Flesh And Stone
Calais
Bottom Line
Drones
Syllogism
At The Movies
My Ears
We Had Everything
The Great Woolly Cloud Cat
Waking, Summer
Gardens
A Walk In The Rain
For The Dead
Windows
Gross Assumptions
Let The Worms Eat
Devotee Of The Inconsequential
Meeting Gods
Going To Bed
The Goodyear Blimp
In A Crack Of Rock
Twilight
In Return
Jackass Lake
Just Before Bed
Snow
An Event In Autumn
Gravestones
A Dream Of Stones
Walking Stick
A Cup Of Thunder
Branch And Twig
Clouds
For The Old Man
Longer Than A Fruit Fly
Rather Die
The Economic Cog
And A Good Day
One Of Those Days
My Own Way
Somewhere Over France
Stone In Flight
Crows Flying Around Hoseinieh Ershad
Hard Times
A Day's Trivia
Dawn, Tehran
Street Sweepers, Tehran
Things Go On
Treadmills
Muscle Under Grace
Out Of Phase, Tehran
Imaginary Sun
So Many Steps, A Mountain
Beggars
The Art Of Love
A Tehran Love Poem
Born Artists
My Death
Cats, Sun, Myself
Toes To Eyes
Becoming A Man
The Only Luck
Fook Gin's
Master/Slaves
Daisies On Moyoc Marca
A Stone Wall
Huaynpicchu
Whatever Goes Up
Portrait
The Dancer, Cusco
Children, Plaza De Armas
Hands And Peas, Cusco
Altaplana
Faces Of Tiahuanaco
Life is Dukha
A Hungry Mind
Forks In The Road
The Secret Of Death
Surprised
Desert Quiet
Through The Goosenecks
Time To Kill
Riverrat Macho
Suncat
Maps And Metaphors
Purple
The Little Ones Never Get Away
Slickhorn Gulch
Steer Gulch
The Way Old Rivers Die
Clay Hills
Bumper Stickers
The Cabbage Patch
Teeter-totter
Another Day, Another Dollar
Dreaming Of Naps
Gulls
Stones
Dusk
In A Sea Shell
The Piper's Night
Laws
Homilies
Dusk, 2
Ideas On Angels
My Hair Dancing
Empty Shells
Ladies On The Sand
Ticks
Ladybug
Marbles
Even I
Open Wall
Treaties
Foghorn
Gull Tracks
Foggy Night
Lao Tzu
Roots And Sons
Sea Horn
Sea Marks
Sea Weed
Beach Drums
Hurricane Season
Trust
An Old Drunk
New Wine For Old Troubles
Lao Tzu On A Bad Day
Plows And Guns
Poem Composed While Clearing The Breakfast
The Mission Gnome
Ship's Horn
The Park On Skid Row
Lao Tzu Selling Water
The Visiting Poet At The Dakota Cafe
Justice, Poetic
Autumn Fugue
Dandelion
Do Not Dig Up My Bones
The Last Straw
Defensive Driving
Bicycling The Strand On A Crowded Sunday
Bouganvillea And Rain, The Artist And The
Jaguar
The Philosophy Of Renunciation
Only A Fool
LA Is Burning
Blind Fate And Vodka
Waiting For Monica's Wedding
The Luckiest Man
Every Step
The Angel
Laughing
A Lone Black Gull
The first version of this book, titled Gnomae, was made by
hand and I gave it to Flo on her birthday, November 27, 1996.
The numbered aphorisms on the title pages are taken from my book
of philosophy, “The Gnomes of Uncertainty.” The bulk of
these poems span the years from 1965 to 1998 and are roughly
grouped into chronological sections.
For Christmas 1995 Flo gave me a beautiful notebook. The gnomae
that form the kernel of this collection were originally written
in that notebook from 1996 to 1997. These later poems are
contained in the sections titled Gnomae and in the last section,
Most Men.
They were written as gifts for Flo.
Late in life, around 769 c.e., Tu Fu wrote one of the great
gems of human art, a poem variously titled Travels By Night,
Night Thoughts, etc. It is the quintessential poem about the
despair of a great artist who produced his work in good faith
only to find his life over and all his artistic endeavors a
failure. Additionally, Tu Fu did not himself have long to live.
He was old, tired, sick and on a fixed and dwindling income.
The poem is essentially imagistic, that is the work of conveying
the meaning of the poem is borne by the images rather than by
statements of fact. The poem is also Chinese, which is to say
that Tu Fu uses images that are predefined and commonly used in
Chinese literature. This allows the poet to convey his meaning in
a brief, telegraphic manner. This use of image depends upon a
high-context culture. High-context presupposes that there is a
great deal of information commonly assumed within the cultural
context itself. For example a high context statement such as
“Get the muffin bowl” assumes that someone already
knows what the muffin bowl is and where it is located. A
low-context statement assumes that such information must be
conveyed as well; for example “Get the medium sized, green
bowl on the left side of the third shelf in the cupboard to the
left of and above the kitchen sink.”
Contemporary American literature is low-context and traditional
Chinese literature is high-context. Now, poetry itself tends to
be high-context with much of its information implied within its
cultural context and therefore inherently difficult to translate
from one culture to another. On the other hand, a book of
chemical formulae or a book of recipes tends to be low-context
and most of therelevant information is stated explicitly.
In addition, the impact of this particular poem by Tu Fu depends
on the reader knowing something about his life, as well as his
contemporary cultural milieu and current events. These are
components that cannot really be translated within the poem
itself other than through the use of unobtrusive hints.
The one component of the poem that can be translated, or
recreated, from the traditional Chinese to contemporary American
English is the use of imagery. The Chinese tended to use abstract
images that were predefined and commonly known to be metaphors or
symbols that represented certain specific concepts. For example
the phrase ‘between Heaven and Earth' means, in the context
of Tu Fu's poem, that he does not belong to life on earth among
the living and he has no expectation of any reward after death,
and it also can be taken to imply that his poetry and reputation
will probably also disappear into oblivion.
Contemporary American literature tends to follow Wallace Stevens'
advice on the use of concrete imagery. A specific example of a
class is taken to represent the entire class. For example,
Algernon the mouse may represent all mice, all rodents, all
mammals, or an abstraction such as all life.
Concrete imagery makes the poem more accessible by asking its
audience to actively experience a specific thing rather than
being passively told about an abstract concept. It is the
difference of actually having an experience as opposed to being
told about an experience. The concrete image or event is a
metaphor which triggers a real experience in the reader's mind,
the idea, meaning, revelation or epihany which the author
intended to convey, but does not explicitely state. This is one
of the most powerful tools available to the contemporary American
poet. This power is bought at the risk of being imprecise, the
risk that the audience will not make the connection from the
concrete example to the correct abstract class. But then poetry
is a risky business.
Although no one can translate the sum total of Chinese culture or
even Tu Fu's life in a single poem, we can hope to translate the
poem's imagery into the contemporary American idiom in order to
make Tu Fu's poem accessible and alive to an English speaking
reader. This is, for example, the reason that I chose to use the
concrete images of ‘between the mud and stars' instead of
the traditional image ‘between heaven and earth.' The
traditional image has a more authentic Chinese feel, but the
concrete image has a more powerful impact.
“Heaven” is a general metaphor that represents an
abstract concept for immortality, the after life and the sky.
“Stars,” however, conveys more information. It is night
and sky is clear. Astrological objects are apparent. It is also a
concrete image which implies the same abstract concepts of
afterlife and immortality.
“Earth” is, again, a general symbol for the planet and
its life, for terra firma and for soil, which is here taken to
imply the origins of human life. “Mud,” on the other
hand, is specific. It also refers to the idea that human life
springs from the soil and the river as a product of this world,
not of heaven, and that we humans, like the moon, wish to leap to
the stars, to immortality and to heaven.
Mud further reminds us that we are on a river. We are not in a
building or in a city. Finally, mud is also a concrete image that
represents our mortal human life.
I also chose to suggest some of the facts of Tu Fu's life within
the poem. Some hint of the conditions that brought Tu Fu to such
a state of despair needs to be more apparent to a non Chinese
speaking audience who may not be familiar with his biographical
history.
Tu Fu was, in a certain sense, far more fortunate than most
poets. His work was preserved, later rediscovered and accorded
its rightful place in the canon of the poetic arts. Most poets
simply disappear into oblivion and, of course, Tu Fu was simply
too dead to derive any personal satisfaction from such post
mortem acclamation.
Still, his poem remains one of the great monuments to the human
and artistic spirit. Tu Fu toiled at his art in good faith in
spite of the world's indifference and in spite of every other
sort of misfortune.
And that is the heroic endeavor in anybody's language.
There were several famous collections of gnomae complied in
ancient Greece. They were moslty comprised of poets from the 6th
century b.c.e.; Theognis, Solon, Phocylides, Simonides of
Angoros, and others. But there were forms of gnomic poetry in the
early Egyptian tradition, the Chinese Shih and Shu, and the
Sanskrit Hitopadesa going back to the 2nd millennium. Later
examples are the Book of Proverbs, passages from Greek tragedy
and Beowulf. In time “gnomic” came to be applied to any
poetry which deals with questions of ethics in a sententious
fashion.
Most of the poems in this book are of three main types; gnomes
proper, epiphanies and imagist poems. Their most common element
is brevity. Although a few remain, I have removed most of the
long poems even though some of those were, in effect, shaggy-dog
epiphanies.
The long poems that do remain seem to me to be comprised of a
series of ephiphanies or aphorisms, or the entire poem is itself
an epiphany. Although every poem reflects a philosophical basis,
or point of view, most poems refrain from making outright
philosophical statements, which, in general, only weakens the
poem. All the long poems that have been left in this collection
do make philosophical statements.
The distinction between gnomes, epiphanies and imagist poems is
based strictly on my own private definition.
A gnome is a short pithy statement, or aphorism, about some
truth. Typical examples are “Know thyself,” or
“Buy low, sell high.” In my mind the gnome proper is a
general, abstract statement which is stated in a interesting way,
often with a clever twist. An example from this book is:
MOST MEN
To live a moment
is to live forever,
except that few men
live at all,
and though no one
lives longer
than a dead child
most men
die infants.
An imagist poem is exactly that, it states its case in concrete
images, which are metaphors for what the poet wants to say. The
content or meaning is not stated in either an abstract or in a
direct way, but is concealed in the image. The image, however,
has a direct, experiential power that an abstract statement does
not. In the pure imagistic poem the image is presented without
comment.
AN OLD DRUNK
The earth presses
the old drunk
into the sky,
doubling him over
unconscious
on a bus bench.
His hat
topples
into the gutter.
The epiphany is a particular kind of poem defined primarily by
its subject matter which is most often the metaphysical moment,
the eternal now. Haiku is a typical example. These poems portray
that eternal moment of peace, illumination and revelation.
Epiphanies can use both images and abstractions, but most often
lean toward the imagistic. Because they are often stating the
ineffable, epiphanies can sometimes be surrealistic.
AN EVENT IN AUTUMN
A leaf falls,
the earth shakes.
I watch a spider
crawl into the fire.
The leaf flies
back into the tree.
Obviously, the majority of poems are mixtures of all of the above
elements and do not fall absolutely into one type or another.
Most of the poems in this book are the kind of poem I would tell
students not to write. Abstract statements easily become cliches
and general, abstract statements are the most difficult to say in
a new, or even a mildly interesting way.
The purely imagistic poem runs the risk of not conveying the
meaning the poet intended, or worse, no meaning at all. Often the
meaning is simply a vague feeling, mood or atmosphere, and if
that is enough for the poet, then it remains for the reader to
decide if that is enough for him.
The epiphany is always teetering on the edge of the trite. The
metaphysical eternal moment is by definition and in principle,
ineffable. So, to try to communicate what is not-communicatable
is not only impossible, but it can only be done by suggestion and
innuendo. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
My apologies for those that do not. My thanks for those that do.
On shore a small breeze bends fragile grass.
I am alone. My mast tickles the belly of the night.
The stars fall down into the mud on the sad, vast plain.
The moon leaps to the stars from the great river's flow.
Words cannot save me. My name is lost with my poems.
I am old. I am sick. I have been retired from office.
My loved ones are lost on the river's current.
My words, my name and my self adrift, floating
between the mud and stars ¾
a lone black gull.
History turned my art into posters.
Bougainvillea ate the roof.
Rain ate the posters.
Life turned my history into black fungus.
I never mattered anyway.
The ugliest kind of human,
old, fat and crippled,
angry at the world,
bitter with life
glares at me from the mirror.
"Bite me," I say. "In good faith,
I always tried my best."
"In truth," the angry man says,
"You never were good enough."
I think of Li Po floating into exile,
up the Yangtze on a barge
stocked with servants, rice wine and success.
I think of Tu Fu, old and dying,
alone in the night
sailing into obscurity and death.
I am sailing into night
immobilized on my recliner.
The only thing I want from life now
is a massive coronary before morning.
I am deeply serious about
wanting off this planet by dawn.
There is no excuse good enough
to face another sunrise.
Flo is out hunting for groceries.
My jaguar spirit hunts me in the night.
Flo buys me a small stone jaguar
and she brings it to me as a gift
and one more time
and for no good reason
she saves my life again.
Stumps only,
the gravestones
of sequoias.
Seeing this great life
only a man
could cut it down.
When the stars
have forgotten
our names
who will plant flowers
on our graves
when there are no trees
to weep for us.
No one
ever went broke
underestimating
public taste.
No one,
I might add,
ever suffered
for underestimating
public intelligence.
No one ever reads me.
I haven't got a cent.
I can't figure out
what it is
that I am
doing right.
We sit in the pitch black of the Mann Six theater
full up with dull normals chewing Snicker bars,
gossiping about their dreary idols
and the vagaries of the Olympics in Atlanta.
Taken all together they do not have
the combined intellect of a lawn sprinkler.
We are watching a movie about the world's smartest man.
He is smart either because of extraterrestrial
aliens or because of a brain tumor.
The brain tumor is about to kill him
deader than the thought processes
of a House Republican even though he still
wants the woman he loves in spite
of the fact that she is the world's
meanest living human being
and even though she is mean most of all to him.
The best ideas of the world's smartest man
seem to involve improved methods
for using pig shit to power a car,
the arrangement of cars in a parking lot,
and the use of a photovoltaic cell to grow a zucchini.
He is not smart enough to be wary of the FBI,
to avoid the wrath of the local dull normals
and the assaults of the world's meanest woman.
The audience sobs at his pseudo pain,
chokes on their Snicker bars
and tries to grasp the concept of reading a book.
I sit in the dark munching stale popcorn
without butter flavoring
watching an actor who has had it made
since the moment of his birth
get paid fifteen million dollars to portray
pain and intellect to an audience
who barely has the intelligence to vote
itself into becoming the third world.
Now I will have to spend the rest
of the evening belching undigested popcorn
and line my coffin with
unpublished poems.
They are hungry for our trash,
smiling yellow in the sun.
A naughty dog exposes
the Coppertone Girl's rump.
Winter has gone
to summer camp.
No beer bottles,
hot dog wrappers,
no straws, no coke cups,
and no rancid french fries
hidden from the gulls -
the beach drums
are empty and clean
with a brand new coat
of bright, yellow paint,
stacked in the sun,
waiting for summer
and us.
Most men learn
ethics
from the quips
of basketball
stars,
and most men
learn life's wisdom
from television
advertisements
and although
no one lives
without a
philosophy
the philosophy
of most men
comes from
bumper stickers.
Dust, mud and stone,
a museum plundered from the grave,
mementos of the dead,
a forest of stone -
headstones are the flowers
of ash and bone.
There is a stone relief
of a woman looking at her jewels
for the last time.
In the moment before death
her last thought was for her jewels.
I feel sorry for the fool
who bought her with
a handful of baubles
and a lifetime
of cheap trinkets.
I collect charts and study maps,
plot courses,
always moving,
never leaving,
jealous of every place
that I have never been.
Crows have it,
wisdom,
buzzing around the sky
cawing and shitting.
I sit in my kitchen,
three stories up
as high as any crow on a wire.
They sit on a naked tree
and telephone wires
staring in my window,
smug.
They are amazed
that I have no wings.
I sip my tea and stare back,
trying to look like a member
of an intelligent species,
trying to figure out
what they know
that I don't.
Flo and I eat chocolate mousse
and sip our decaf coffees.
The day is clear blue and a little cool.
Love is the tickle of a light breeze.
We hold hands to the car.
On the tiny grass hill
there is a single dandelion,
a perfect planet of white fuzz
swaying on its stem
above the dark green grass -
waiting for the wind.
We drive past the Isthmus,
past Corinth, and late in the day
come to Delphi, looking
down the cliffs to the sea.
The tourists forgot to come
so we have the ruin to ourselves.
It is as silent as the oracle -
only the goat bells
play soft music,
carried away in the
sough of the wind,
the dance of the trees.
We sit on the highest row
in the theater and listen
for words from the god.
Words do not contain
the ecstasy and words
can not endure the light.
They whither under the strain
like dahlias under snow.
It is a sad thing
that they are so fragile,
that they do not bridge
that slender gap
that divides you from me.
In the end, words
also failed the god.
We climb down the mountain
and into the bus.
The goats settle down
for the night.
When I am dead
do not sell my bones
to art dealers
and literary brokers.
You did not want me alive.
You cannot have me dead.
I will burn every unpublished poem,
shred every rejected novel,
mulch unread philosophy
and bury every unwanted image
deep in a land fill to haunt
the dreams of the rich.
Don't piss on my grave
with your posthumous recognition.
Time enough to chat in hell.
You can't scare me.
Life has done everything
it can to pulverize my bones.
Life killed every dream
and took away my voice.
All life can do now is kill me.
Since that would be a kindness
life will make me linger
long past common decency.
Only the useful die young.
I look forward to my social security
and wait for that epidemic
or an economic Armageddon
or for the nuclear holocaust.
I will tell you what I have left.
I have a woman as sweet
as corn syrup and fruit cocktail.
I love her more than chocolate.
She loves me more than cafe au lait.
I have the sudden dance
of clouds in an ice-blue sky,
the sway of jacaranda limbs
in an autumn wind,
the whispering of the fir
on a mountain in the Sierras,
the geometry of a mountain
chipping away the sky,
the sweet melody of waves
licking up the shore.
I never gave up.
I never quit working.
I never stopped trying.
I exhausted every talent.
I never failed to give back
more than life ever gave me,
and still -
life wasted me.
And yet, fool that I am
I never fail to bargain in good faith.
A sweet woman,
whispering pines,
the melody of waves -
if only
sudden beauty
could save us.
A season of dew
and unopened buds
knocks at my front door.
A string of events
leads to a certain poem.
The moment passes.
The poem is ink and paper.
Even I
must guess its meaning.
In the Agora at Athens
there is a marble head
of a goddess.
Alone, I caress her face
with my hands,
making love, flesh and stone,
I even kiss her cold, stone lips
thinking that this would
bring her to my dreams.
In that brief orgasm
of blood and marble
she fails to bring me
back to life.
The old man in Fook Gin's
is eating Tomato Beef,
putting away the steamed rice,
sipping green tea.
The moths beat around the paper lantern
painted with Chinese ladies and parasols.
The roaches crawl from table to table
looking for the Number 3 Special.
He finishes the Tomato Beef.
The fortune cookie comes with the bill.
He cracks it open, reads his fortune
and looks around at everyone in the place.
He looks tired and after a while he falls asleep
with his fortune in his hand
and his head beside the remains of the Tomato Beef.
Everything else keeps on doing what it always does
the roaches crawl, the moths flutter and beat,
and the Chinese ladies with parasols
stare out of paper lanterns.
I leave a tip, pay the bill and go home.
For the old man, that cookie
was his last fortune.
Lao Tzu on a bad day
rode through the gate
into the blue infinity
of the mountains.
A mind is not sucked
into nothingness
until every question
has an answer.
When a question
would bring wisdom -
a fool is silent.
I am 30 years as pointless
as a compass without a needle.
I shuttle days on an abacus,
forget my place and start again.
I always look
as if I am waiting
for some great event
to seize my life.
I will be buried with that look
stamped into my face.
I became
ignorant with learning,
poor with possessions,
lost when others named me.
Trust no god that offers salvation.
Lao Tzu on a bad day
rode into the blue infinity
of the mountains.
If things are done right
I miss nothing
and nothing misses me.
Do not believe
that poets
sell you
their innermost
selves
when they
confess
every detail
even though
they will tell you
every other truth
and any truth you ask.
Bury me
in a shallow grave
and let the worms
eat my brain.
They will learn
nothing
of value.
Every day I am becoming Buddha.
I can't seem to stop it.
Soon I expect to be as bald as a summer squash.
I am growing a respectable pot belly.
I am down to three grains of rice a day.
My arms will turn to sticks.
I am beginning to smile as if I knew secrets.
My hands keep making funny gestures.
My eyelids seem to be getting fatter
and they are almost always shut.
I talk in riddles that don't even make sense to me.
I don't get it.
I used to be a comer.
I got old instead.
I used to be a poet.
The world had other ideas.
I used to make money.
Now I'm looking for refrigerator boxes
and staking out freeway underpasses.
I used to have things on my mind
but life took my voice away.
The universe keeps bringing things to my doorstep.
And the universe keeps taking things away.
I never had a chance.
I guess I never will.
Be careful what you want.
If you want it bad, you'll get it bad.
Buddha said that desire is the root of all pain.
Learn to live without wants he said.
He called this sage advice.
I call it learning to live
with lowered expectations.
Holy shit! my ears are growing down to my shoulders.
I am beginning to stink like a man
who wears cheap serenity for cologne.
I am beginning to attract disciples
like a compost pile attracts flies.
Life is deprivation and ecstasy.
Life ignored my art and strangled my thought.
Life is a series of broken dreams interrupted by death.
I made no difference and I will die without a voice.
Life wasted me.
I have never been so glad to be alive.
I hate the stench of wisdom in the morning.
The price for understanding is everything you've got.
Just about the time you figure life out it's gone.
The deepest realization is the most profound ignorance.
The more I know the less I understand.
God save me from one more revelation.
Hell, now I can't get a hard on anymore.
I have finally learned to live without love.
It's a matter of spiritual triage, a matter of lobotomy.
I see a beautiful woman these days and I just get tired.
I can't seem to get rid of this god damned golden aura.
My legs are frozen in the lotus position.
It turns out that
the best cure for a headache
is the guillotine.
A slave
is anyone
without a voice
and although
the master class
has stolen
the power
to express
one's self
they die
without
a self to
express.
Even though
my words flood
the seas of nonsense
and most men
multiply words
and starve to death
for want of
a single thought
my ears are
more useful
than my mouth.
They ooze through the veins of the bazaar
like those old school day cartoons
of white corpuscles
carrying out the evil germs.
Men that do nothing their whole lives
but carry the load-
carpets and pots and pans,
dead goats, samovars, crates of rice,
their shoulders heaved to the ground,
backs forever bent
into a parody of right angles.
I am walking beside a hunchback porter.
Our views of things are 90 degrees out of phase.
His eyes never leave the ground.
Mine never leave the horizon.
I go everywhere, tripping and falling.
He goes nowhere,
and never stumbles.
In this avalanche of words
a thunder of deadly silence.
We will not speak of
the transience of things.
We cut the azalea,
encrypt it in ceramic
and watch
until its petals fall.
It's fall.
It's water.
It's rain.
It's fog.
It's moss so green
my eyes see purple
when I look at clouds.
It's wet nettles.
It's the smell of resin
and turpentine.
It's dead quiet.
It's no dust.
It's no acid-blue sky.
It's a red twilight.
It's mushrooms under a log.
It's busy chipmunks.
It's bluejays not scolding.
It's the forest
and it's the mountain.
It's waiting for the snow.
If you are interested in the kind of man
who has contributed nothing
to the evolution of the species,
nothing to the welfare of others
adding nothing to the fact that
he eats, shits, procreates and dies,
and still is spoiled rotten
with wealth and fame
then open any
sports page.
A bird flies into the windshield of the bus,
catches its wing in the wiper,
and speed and the wind
tear out its life.
It was no bigger than a plum,
with yellow markings,
and with great convulsions
it beat out its small life
in the palm of my hand.
It just pisses me off.
When we get to the beaches
above Thessaloniki
I strip down for
a swim in the surf.
When I run down to the sea
the dolphins come
and swim in circles
leaping and diving
stitching the surf
to the sky.
The dolphins and I
hold a wake for the tiny bird.
And then it is time
to be glad
to be alive.
Sitting in bars of light,
the morning sun
burns through the blind,
and the tea kettle,
steaming like winter time
fogs the windows.
And me -
sitting around
thinking grand ultimate thoughts,
solving great riddles,
formulating astounding poems
creating the lies of history
and every thought I ever had,
every word I ever wrote -
ignored.
The sun rises.
The pot steams.
Windows fog.
Things go on.
MICHAEL ANDREWS, co-founder/publisher/editor with Jack Grapes of
Bombshelter Press and ONTHEBUS, lives with Flo in L.A. and is
getting by. He has paid the usual dues of being a publisher,
editor, and printer. He has been published in the usual number of
the usual magazines. He has published ten books of poetry that
were received in the usual manner, and produced three unusual
portfolios of photographic prints and letterpress poetry. He has
never sat at the feet of a Great Poet. Nor is he able to teach
anyone else how to write poetry. He has never received a single
grant, award or prize. No one else has ever published his work.
He has sacrificed over fifty thousand dollars on the altars of
art. He is not a professor of anything — and yet, he
persists.
He has traveled around the world twice. He survived time in
Vietnam, where he worked as a civilian from 1969 through 1971. He
worked in Iran in 1974, rode a motorcycle to Peru in 1979, ran
the San Juan River, and guzzled ayahuasca with the shamans in the
Peruvian Amazon. His leg was permanently damaged in a motorcycle
accident in 1987 and he now walks like a cheap imitation of
Dustin Hoffman doing a cheap imitation of a deranged cripple. He
has recently finished two books of poetry, his first book of
philosophy, The Gnomes Of Uncertainty, five screenplays which the
world will never see, two un-publishable novels, and is currently
creating photographic and poetry montages as digital images while
stumbling along on a massive novel about Vietnam and the boomer
generation. To support these disgusting habits he works as a
computer programmer/analyst, pays outrageous taxes, and suffers
the usual atrocities of free market predation.
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