Occupied Blight

It is usually between

the last of the brain's

end-of-day wane

and sleep we speak,

or I do.

Does he hear,

the landlord,

while I beg

for renovation,

if not eviction?

I exist between him

and the tenant who all day

prior to my pleading

I hear working

at survival.

There's a message in that urgent scurry:

the things I do to live

weaken the structure,

deteriorate the exterior.

There are breaches

in my breaches.

Everything's getting looser,

everything is less secure.

The jambs are warped,

the whole frame is leaning.

You are falling down.

Is this the way

every body ends:

a soul begins to panic,

to scurry more urgently.

With every chunk

of plaster that falls,

with every patch

of rust that rises

fear spreads

and the soul's breath labors.

Does anyone know

a good contractor?

Have I the resources?

Is there an authority

to appeal to?

              -J. O'Brien

Exoskeleton

Before reading Patrick Kavanagh's "I Had a Future" 

It's 1990 
I'm 26

the Cold War has passed

it's late afternoon but it was probably morning

off the 42 bus walking home from class -

in a sudden buffeting blow

of yellow fliers, pizza boxes,

butts, grit, dirt, the news.

Calling no one
for an hour I hid

in a phone booth 
to avoid
the pelting rubbish and dust

I watched in the gust
swirl
in columns
over Columbia Road.

At school I'd peeked
in my teacher's mailbox:

my story she'd liked, 
given to a colleague

returned to her covered in an angry hand. 
Mere miles away
SecDef Cheney's heart rate climbs
as he thinks of oil in sand

There, I've done it

I've plagiarized Patrick Kavanagh

and I hadn't even read him yet.
I''m not yet 27 and clear.
On my sofabed at S St NW
the cockroaches are unaware I'm near.
I had no exoskeleton mode

I hid in that phone booth an hour on Columbia Road.
                                                        - J. O'Brien

Area 52

The strangest thing she ever saw was her face

in the polished fender distorted.

The strangest thing I'd ever seen

half beneath the car that would end her

a girl I knew lying dead in the street

or off a bridge that stranger's body self-tossed

first responders milling when I was 24

or his bullet wound not visible

the victim under a wrinkled sheet

on a gurney in a mortuary backroom

or later naked high in winter trees

arms aloft in triumph over the torn

the birth of a week-long spirit lingering

by my sick old man hale for once

or scrubbed and made up him prone

in a chapel his false teeth gleaming

awaiting a greeting from some Beyond.

The strangest thing I ever saw was myself in a mirror

                                                             - J. O'Brien

Poem by Patrick Kavanagh

Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh

I think someone out there who knows might say that Patrick Kavanagh was 20th Century Irish poetry's bridge, if not thematically then in terms of greatness, between Yeats and Heaney. Apparently, he admired later Yeats. In style and sometimes theme he anticipated Heaney. In his lifetime he never got the respect those two enjoyed. Here I love the tone. Personally, I very much identify with "the mirage/ that was my future." I love the idea -- Give me back the fog! -- and the double-take syntax of the third stanza. It's worth lingering over. I like the occasional absence of expected punctuation. And how "without knowing" becomes a noun. (As I read it anyway.) These things attach you to a poem, they make it tangle with your brain and vice versa; you become intimate, first like wrestlers, then lovers.


I Had a Future

O I had a future
A future

Gods of the imagination bring back to life
The personality of those streets,
Not any streets
But the streets of nineteen forty.

Give the quarter-seeing eyes I looked out of
The animal-remembering mind
The fog through which I walked towards
      The mirage
That was my future.

The women I was to meet
They were nowhere within sight.

And then the pathos of the blind soul,
How without knowing stands in its own kingdom.
Bring me a small detail
How I felt about money,
Not frantic as later,
There was the future.

Show me the stretcher-bed I slept on
In a room on Drumcondra Road,
Let John Betjeman call for me in a car.

It is summer and the eerie beat
of madness in Europe trembles the
Wings of the butterflies along the canal.

O I had a future.
                                 - Patrick Kavanagh

Poem by Ralph Hodgson

'The thickets of the Heart" is such a lovely phrase, of course. I remember once being in New Mexico with an ornithologist netting tiny birds to weigh and tag them, how fragile they were in his hand. But I like the idea of lurking in the heart in search of joy. Hodgson also mentions goldfinches in a poem called "Ghoul Care" (unfortunate title) as one of the three charms that protect him from the master of "the Pit," that "prodigious Bat" that I suspect refers to sadness and perhaps depression. Me, I am weak at catching the twittering beauties, though sometimes goldfinches flit in abundance around my backyard. Maybe I need a new clap-net, whatever that is...

The Birdcatcher
When flighting time is on I go
With clap-net and decoy,
A-fowling after goldfinches
And other birds of joy;

I lurk among the thickets of
The Heart where they are bred,
And catch the twittering beauties as
They fly into my Head.
                           -Ralph Hodgson 
                             1917

Passage from Camus' The Plague

Last night I got stuck on this brief passage describing desperate funerals in The Plague. I was thinking that if someone made a movie of the book, about a town in Algeria stricken with an unstoppable outbreak of plague, this would be a great and compelling scene to open with. (Turns out there is a 1992 film, set in South Africa, and featuring William Hurt and Robert Duvall; it went straight to video. I'll have to look into it.)

Cat prefers Kierkegaard.

This converted school had an exit at the back of the main building. A large storeroom giving on the corridor contained the coffins. On arrival, the family found a coffin already nailed up in the corridor. Then came the most important part of the business: the signing of official forms by the head of the family. Next the coffin was loaded on a motor-vehicle -- a real hearse or a large, converted ambulance. The mourners stepped into one of the few taxis still allowed to ply and the vehicles drove hell-for-leather to the cemetery by a route avoiding the center of town. There was a halt at the gate, where police officers applied a rubber stamp to the official exit permit, without which it was impossible for our citizens to have what they called a last resting-place. The policemen stood back and the cars drew up near a plot of ground where a number of graves stood open, waiting for inmates. A priest came to meet the mourners, since church services at funerals were now prohibited. To an accompaniment of prayers the coffin was dragged from the hearse, roped up, and carried to the graveside, the ropes were slipped and it came heavily to rest at the bottom of the grave. No sooner had the priest begun to sprinkle holy water than the first sod rebounded from the lid. The ambulance had already left and was being sprayed with disinfectant, and while spadefuls of clay thudded more and more dully on the rising layer of earth, the family were bundling into the taxi. A quarter of an hour later they were back at home. - Camus, from The Plague

Nativity poem by George Mackay Brown

George Mackay Brown was a 20th Century Scottish poet who lived in the Orkney Islands. He could make the myth and lore of the Orkneys suddenly gritty and real with one line or image. Here he does that with the birth of Christ. I love the filling-in of the Nativity story, the attentiveness to this unremarkable moment in the lives of the Roman soldier and the innkeeper, and the immense irony of the last line. A 'byre" is a cow shed. The shepherds the innkeeper grumbles at are not drunk, but have gotten word from angels that a savior is born. So they are just excited.

The Lodging

The stones of the desert town
Flush; and, a star-filled wave,
Night steeples down.

From a pub door here and there
A random ribald song
Leaks on the air.

The Roman in a strange land
Broods, wearily leaning
His lance in the sand.

The innkeeper over the fire
Counting his haul, hears not
The cry from the byre;

But rummaging in the till
Grumbles at the drunken shepherds
Dancing on the hill;

And wonders, pale and grudging,
If the strange pair below
Will pay their lodging.
                       -George Mackay Brown

Stanza from Roethke's "The Pure Fury"

This is stanza # 3 of 4 numbered stanzas, I was struck, real struck, by the line, A man's a beast prowling in his own house...


How terrible the need for solitude:
That appetite for life so ravenous
A man's a beast prowling in his own house,
A beast with fangs, and out for his own blood
Until he finds the thing he almost was
When the pure fury first raged in his head
And trees came closer with a denser shade.
                                    - From "The Pure Fury" by Theodore Roethke
                                                           

Insight from Joseph Brodsky

From an interview at the end of my copy of Nativity Poems:

But at some point I realized that I am the sum of my actions, my acts, and not the sum of my intentions.

The Horny Pilgrim: a true story of the Plymouth Plantation

Totally by accident and having nothing to do with the holiday, I happen to be reading books by and about the Mayflower Pilgrims and their early descendants. This morning I ran across this passage in Of Plymouth Plantation, by the primary leader, second governor and Mayflower passenger William Bradford. It is part of a chapter called "Wickedness Breaks Forth." 

See my numbered annotations following, please:


After a time of the writing of these things befell a very sad accident of the like foul nature in this government, this very year, which I shall now relate. There was a youth whose name was Thomas Granger. He was servant to an honest man of Duxbury, being about 16 or 17 years of age. He was this year detected of buggery and indicted for the same, with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.[1] Horrible it is to mention, but the truth of the history requires it. He was first discovered by one that accidentally [2] saw his lewd practices towards the mare. (I forebear particulars. [3]) Being upon it examined and committed, in the end he not only confessed the fact with that beast at that time, but sundry times before and at several times with all the rest of the forenamed in his indictment. And this his free confession was not only in private to the magistrates (though first he strived to deny it) but to sundry, both ministers and others, and afterwards, upon his indictment, to the whole Court and jury; [4] and confirmed at his execution. And whereas some of the sheep could not so well be known by his description of them, [5] others with them were brought before him and he declared which were they and which were not. [6] And accordingly he was cast by the jury and condemned, and after executed about the 8th of September, 1642. A very sad spectacle it was. For first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle [7] were killed before his face [8], according to the law, Leviticus xx.15; and then he himself was executed. The cattle were all cast into a great large pit that was digged of purpose for them, and no use made of any part of them.
 
Upon the examination of this person and also of a former that had made more sodomitical attempts upon another... [9]
 

1. Is this what we should be doing with our turkeys today, if we really want to be like the Pilgrims?
2. Yeah, right, "accidentally." 
3. Bummer. Puritans are so frustrating!
4. Bestial and proud. I bet they tortured him, though.
5. Where's that one sheep with the perty mouth?
6. Did that one, yeah. That one, too, Oh yeah! No, not that one. C'mon, I do have standards.
7. Lesser cattle? Oh, right, that one goat really wasn't very attractive.
8. Okay, this is getting brutal.
9. Further Pilgrim wickedness I shall spare you. But there was some..

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody.