~for r, just because~


put her in my mouth and she became my
mouth.

put myself inside her and she became my
insides out.

spill good words on her belly, licked & laced us together, then came my 
poetry.

on elbow, she claimed coauthor-ship, demanded her name above        
          mine.


I smiled, answering most matter-of-factly,
surely they’re your creations, you-a-ruler, procreator, foremost, first,

the ABCedarian

the muse goddess of alphabets, all that is poetic divine mistress to
thousands

I’m mortal,
your transcriber, copyist, alphabetically seconded, merest mere,

the ABEcedarian

I’m rudimentary without you, lost midst the masses o’poets nameless.

She snorted, said
“sounds like poetic ******* to me”*
but returned to her sleepy heaven,
mumbling most contentedly.

I

after a bath
and the window open
I was touched
by an air of autumn
against my body
not quite towelled
hardly dry but ready
nonetheless to feel
something of the season’s
change against my fragile self

(an autumn air)


II

so very green
and multitudinous shades
holding the late afternoon
in greenness
only the towpath
measured out in sunlight
and the seat of a bench distant
providing a goal
a sensible place to aim for

we set out with her guiding hand
clasping my weakness
when a dragonfly
intricate in full sunlight
moves against a backdrop
of dark-shadowed trees
poising at eye-level
to look us over
and is off away

on our return
(from that distant bench
our goal our aim)
there a kingfisher
flashes past
and into a canal-side bush
we wait and wait hoping
to catch again the trajectory
of its miraculous flight

(canal side)

III

to whom it may concern

presumptuous I think to wish for anything
beyond one has and holds - anything
in regard to property or possessions
I have no wish to consider further
Who has what of me I disdain
and whatever it might be can only be
in my gift and surely that must be freely given
Should there be the slightest hint of dispute
I hope some Almighty Hand will
remove all and everything
to the very darkest depths

in friendship


(a letter of wishes)




IV

begun as joyous celebrations
of musical art bright and lively
on the page welcome
to the ear as to the eye

so often full of dance gentle
reflections sonorously sounding
out in playfulness
and reasoned movement


(Beethoven’s Op.18 string quartets)




V

with only the bare essentials
the most limited of means
this music grips and stirs
springing out of unisons
octaves bare chords of the fifth
and a play of rhythms
straight and straight-forward
four-square angular tight
against the beat within the bar
a simple subtlety and space
between two instruments:
the legato violin tempering
the insistent piano - always
movement no repose a constant
unwinding thread
of perilous invention
hardly a breath taken
a pause made

(on hearing Shostakovich’s Sonata for Violin and Piano)



VI

he types:

the post-box is too far way
as I must (e)mail this note today

so with no maker’s mark
this message will forego
the papered page
ink’s curved line and flow
the fold the sticky edge
the stamp well placed
the stroll with the dog
to the box along the lanes
in evening’s light
sounds of roosting birds
and flittering squeaks of bats

(an email from a former student)



VII

aware of my fragility
his gracious manner
moves me to tears
In speaking
he places every word
with infinite care
in practiced deliberation
. . . and I am crying
at his understanding
that he knows my loneliness
in dying and how I wish
to rise above
this momentary upset
to assure him I can
and will cope
that I am in his hands
He just has to say . . .


(visit to the doctor



VIII


Daily I curate the contents
of this window sill
a changing exhibition
backdrop to a sedentary life

Today: Japanese wallpaper c.1925.
Mead Cloth by Matthew Harris,
Hokusai – Mount Fuji and six cranes ( two flying)
Post card from the Pyréneées
An earthenware blackbird and thrush in a cherry tree
David Hockney, April 25 from The Arrival of Spring
Un passé plat empiétant tapestry from Madagascar.


(exhibition on a window sill)



IX

being twenty-one
seems no great age
but I remember it dimly
when adrift in my life
it came and went –
a spring and sunny day
a watch from my parents
a few cards . . .

but for you
a family day at Kew
a meal with relatives and friends
altogether a good time to remember
I so hope you will . . .


(at twenty-one)


X

To members of the London Symphony Orchestra
Ralph Vaughan-Williams is reported to have said:
‘Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the man
who writes my music.’

Unfortunate this, as his copyist Roy Douglas
had the job of deciphering the composer’s appalling
handwriting, the result of a natural
left-handedness being corrected as a child.

For me, the person who has written my music
so faithfully for fourteen years rarely dealt with
illegibility but had instead to cope with conflicts
of musical spelling.
Is this a sharp? Should this be a flat?
Do we need a cautionary accidental here?

Fortunately, he and I were not espoused as Stravinsky and
Elgar were to their long-suffering copyists, who often berated
their husbands for their inability to spell chromatic pitches
correctly. Stravinsky had an excuse: the vagaries of the octatonic scale
he often used and loved. Elgar was just ******-minded! Poor Alice . . .


(saying a warm goodbye to my copyist)


XI


to talk about yourself when
dead and gone How strange!
This need - to put in place
to sort the detail now
and so avoid confusion
What then?


An indeterminate wait
until the moment comes
the eyes won’t open
on a woken world
ears not hear
the sound of traffic
from a nearby road


there will be
an emptiness sublime
a finishing of tasks
and all those earthly
mysteries solved
and deemed complete


So this is what
we recommend
It could be this?
It could be that?

and every which way
it’s yours to choose
for rightness sake
Amen


*(the interview)

~one more for the r man~

almost Monday
and its weighty five day oppressive lead poisoning on the horizon,
is but a thirsty thirty six minutes away from its fortified Sumter, first shot to be fired at midnight, how we love to mark the commencement of hostilities and killing

but I am already wounded, a casualty of having spent evening with pleading, pleasing timer eating, reading of your work,
r

the sounds of inestimable admiration and infectious jealousy
make this old man eager to discard a lifetimes work and
begin fresh, but only as a copyist of you,
r

I know you’re thinking "what in the hell is he blubbering about?"

so I willingly will my confessional offering in the dark of the
holy bedroom; for you make me eat my words, and
spit them out as wastage, in dumbfounding humility

god you and yours, make me frail and blessed that I stumbled
upon your abbreviations of the human life,
r

shut up and accept my three r’s
reading ‘riting and rising
up to sing hymns of praise
for a man with a historical perspective and
whose few occasionals
are carved in the granite bench
of what makes my life
worthy of load bearing;

more than bearable,
all are soul-enlightened by
baring our humility, our admiration

11:24pm 4/15/18
nyc

The words I cannot grasp,
whole dreamscapes painted within me.
Oh, the grand copyist he just might be able,
so much better able,
scrawling pictures of your calls fervently.
Recording hue and thought,
and those oceanic depths,
doing what I can only wish for, pray for.
Yet, I do hear.
I do hear it, hear you
Your words, those words,
and of that I am so certain.
So sure of those words, deep and hazy
and so warm, oh so warm.
The sound, the tremulous tone, makes one drunk
so ruined to hear it even only in dream,
even only in furtive whispers.
Ebrietas you are, Daughter of the Cosmos,
bringer of enlightenment through dumbness.

due to a lack of talent
in the writing sphere
a plagiarist will see fit
to pinch other poet's gear

brilliance not present
on the nib of the pen
hence a copyist will purloin
every now and then

a rich source of poetry
is tapped into online
as if robbing the golden nuggets
from a Colorado mine

their coda reads like
this let's nick a stanza
stowing the best *****
for a thieving bonanza

without any conscience
the reproducer does steal
making much of other's works
which are so ideal

tears are unlike tigers fed by buddhists: oh god... i wish i was a woman, then i’d not have cried my tears drunk, but sober, like any woman does, like any woman has... and my correction what inhabited by tartars fighting the teutons with the tartar i took as blood-relatives and the tuetons as politically-related; ivan made the entitlements of the title of tsar as worth cenroship of the coupon for the lean meat in hunting for war among the pole’s marshall law in dostoyevsky. be warned... my blood runs decided into the harvest of wheat and sweat, rather than the parlor room and chandelier corsets; while boney m filled the rest - inviting islam into europe by ignoring poland.*

so drunk they want a rewrite...
i missed the joke...
got a rewrite instead...
was i plagiarising?
i don’t know... you know.
originally intended like sunrise...
instead taken as copyist of sun-and-orange...
can’t be repeated... but i wanted it said...
but they didn’t want it said... they wanted it unsaid...
wanted it seen but unseen and therefore thought
and when transmitted not really thought...
just willed... comparatively ingrained and lost too...
it was a charlie murray quote that got me...
i thought i was testimony... oh right... now i remember...
gay **** is really emasculating...
it’s like watching 90 minutes of football...
gay **** does that to you... really there
among ******* videos...
i just like watching the eyes...
i make eye-contact...
and it’s almost bowtie with the suffocating gag
of the girl...
but no... it’s more like niqab in the night... joke...
******* is more emasculating than football...
honest to god hear my prayer - while heterosexual
*** is really discouraging from transition
of daughter to ****** to ***** to wife to mother...
nibbled ******* unless it was islamic hide & seek!
ah... call mohammed... i need my head chopped off!

Take a knife and cut the hollow shaft
Of a white feather
A few more deft cuts
And he has his calligrapher's pen.
In front of him, in an old leather case
More goose and swan feathers
He will begin to write on a calfskin parchment.
For the next four years the Holy Book
The illustrations will be illuminated
With gold, silver, copper and platinum
A masterpiece that will survive
Many centuries after the monk has departed.

The king is dead he never rose
from his resting place, chose
instead to be the embodiment
of a false fable writing the copyist.

Within a cave of delusions that kept
the image of false motives hidden.
An off spring of a method not unkempt.
this version the kept reasoning now forbidden.

Delusions of two reflections not seeing that
one is not a king but a falsehood sat on divided chat.
Neither were a failing, but reflections of a belief
that were conflicting upon a tree with a twinned leaf.

But when one must fall, both will simultaneously
greet the earth with a momentary spontaneously.
Always will one be ahead of the other claiming divine
leading, and others follow this moment of design.

But every king has a past that is woven in misbelief,
for all false kings can bring is an unethical belief
that they are the true monarch of a world run by many
where brothers & sisters there just spinning a single  penny

To the Copyist, hunched over her writing desk,
as her flawless hand duplicates Bach's hurried scoring.

To the K-Pop Choreographer, who watches in the mist
as her fans swoon for someone else instead.

To the Masterer and Technician, kept behind insulated glass
as a talentless celebrity spits fire into their microphone.

To the Arranger, whose own pieces mean nothing
to the world, but whose touch has won over millions.

To the Orchestrator, fresh out of grad school, ******
into a contract that gives them neither money nor credit.

Your voices are heard. But nobody knows they are yours.
And each time we sing your praises to another,
the knife gets twisted again.