Green Again

The world is green again. Everywhere the vigor of green roars a universe of limbs and leaves hungry for the golden light of May and fair weather. Ants spill out of the sidewalks. Oars lift and plunge, lift and plunge, lift and plunge. The skin opens to the heat of the sun. I am no less inept, but there is grace within, and philosophies of fluidity in the movements of the air. I hold a mound of lather in the cup of my hand and believe it’s the weight of a moment, a dent in time.

I’m attracted, quite naturally, by levers, buttons, zippers, handles and knobs. Doorknobs especially. I like to open and close things. The illusion, however theatrical, is one of control. All the inventions of the Renaissance  -  printing press, telescope, gunpowder  -  appear to be at my disposal. I own none, yet they exist, tangible and possible, objects with intent. I, meanwhile, have no intent. What I do have are words, folds of air, objects molded in my mouth, shaped by lips and tongue, sauerkraut, trinkets, molecules. Intention? I intend ink.

Thought lives by expedient. Words and metaphors. It is by such apparatus that the tissue of thought is woven. Time and sensation are converted to gabardine. Swansdown, taffeta, jersey. Fustian, felt, and mohair.

Right now I’m wearing a wooden hat and a Platonic Idea.

Because the world is green again and metaphors grow on trees, fresh for the plucking. I would prefer it if it were money, but who expects money to grow on trees, apart from me? If money were metaphorical would it still carry value? But isn’t value itself metaphorical?

No one stands alone. Each identity is an amalgam of history, geography, and choice. Nothing is set in cement. The imagination is a saclike body located at points of friction between moving structures. After each mutation it returns to its original state, the bright orange-brown color in the pigment cells of its skin flashing, dying out, and re-appearing in another place, like sparks in tinder. When placed on a sheet of paper it becomes pallid and colorless, but as a finger moves over its pearly whiteness, it pulsates slowly, in such a way that new adjectives will have to be coined to adequately describe the variation in color, and a camera obscura for the cliff swallows.

Being is a defect in the purity of Non-Being. One can choose to wear such and such a thing, say such and such a thing, do such and such a thing, inhabit a place or idea, but the sole true reality eludes detection. We know it’s there, must be there, but what is it? It’s there in the varying temperatures and appearances of the air, a thing adrift in the thousand fragrances of the air, the presence of an absence, the ephemeral membrane of a gnat-wing, an invisible power (to borrow Shelley’s phrase) visiting this various world as summer winds that creep from flower to flower.

Mutation, atom, thorn. The prick of the real. Pointless, but practical. At least when it comes to occupying a world, straying out of its corners to say hello, look for food, a place to rest and sleep. The clouds above in their constant boiling, never a complete image, a form that thunders here I am, a scorpion, a dragon of heat lightning, the electrical charge of a celestial fusion. We below, morose, forgotten, helping one another to warmth, parcels of splendor, the carpentry of words. The drive of a nail in the fragrance of pine.

 

Quasimodo Go-Go

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Walks among these words

A parabola of despair

Languishes in Euclid, warm

And tense like a truth

Or bar of soap. And here I am

Humming a song of thread

To get it out of my head

I like to hang from a limb

Like an apple and rub

The dribble of juice

From my chin. Properties

Of meaning are tangible

To the mind that hatches

Out of an egg of thought

Think of it, think of an egg

And feel it as I do, round

And white and smooth

In the hand. Detail

Your life in the greenhouse

Tell me what your eyes see

On the inside of your head

Life is often sticky that way

This is why I smell like an erection

Of syntax, a fistful of consonants

And vowels walking in the bones

Of a hunchback. Swinging

Back and forth on a giant bell

Howling my love to the angels

Moody Vapor

Vagueness becomes a motion

And fulfills my show as an artist

Beneath a river. Spirits in a bottle

A nude woman squeezing a sponge

Like the careful thread of a wobbly

     personality

Is easily exasperated by color and

Dreams tossed at punches sympathetically

In burlesque. The magician is troubled

The impersonal coils into introversion

The Chowder River brings sorrow

To walk with giants. The oysters

Live on a farm. My face emerges in a

Correspondence with Henry Miller

Dear Henry I admire your tenacity

Now look at my face and tell me

About French fries. We whirl

Through exhibitions of metamorphism

Don’t we? And then the spoons chatter

With ghosts. The unfolding of ourselves

Is intriguing. Maturity crumbles like lingcod

Deep-fried in beer batter. The denizens
     of Deadwood

In a milieu of explosive dialogue. Please

Somebody help me. What is this life

The first thing that comes to mind 

Is the sun shining down on a lake

There may be some use in having a picnic

But because it is cool in the Abalone Lounge

We might also consider Kurt Cobain

Playing his guitar in a kitchen cupboard

We all like to jump into the light

When the smell of the lumber is fresh

Pain is sometimes sexual, but is that why

The English Romantics were so fond

Of frilly cuffs and collars? When the skin

Breaks blood appears. That is all I know

And silt at the bottom of a pond

Teeming with Earrings

The afternoon lifted itself into my eyes

As the cannon thundered frogs and whales

Perception is a process involving prepositions

I’m invisible except when I twinkle

At a joke. The big blue bottle

Is excused and the crackle is flipped

Skulk the scribbles O my pretzel

A warrior yells in battle. Unless

Transacted by cantilever. There is a

Brain that enhances hope. Sometimes

A plant and a cloud will percolate

In the Louvre during an attempt

To understand life, mobility, will  

Alchemy triggers the unconscious 

There is a riddle for this and a stove

For making things boil. Attend to the clutch

Crawl through your secrets angling

     for redemption

When the painter’s canvas mouths its picture

Consciousness becomes a construction
Lightning insinuates itself into the head

While I break from the chrysalis and flap

Out of this sentence to get a better view of things

Here comes a pair of experiences

One of which is imaginary and the other

Is stored under pressure in a portable tank

Imagine it’s snowing In Belgium and sitting

     down to a bowl of string

Beans. The cutlery is consummate. The paragraph

     is hugged

By its own words. The stepladder is heavy

Because it, too, is made of words, and each word

Rides a phoneme into a set of dumbbells

This is how some of us wander through our lives

Dragging the past behind us. Tears

Fit the eager sorrow and a dream of earth

Rolls wide-eyed into Bohemia teeming with earrings

Jingled Percolation

My desk flirts with description

It expresses itself as a desk

Doesn’t vary in any way from being

A desk. It’s a desk, simple and plain

But I sense something going on

In my perception of the desk

Something imperfect in my expectation

Of the desk. I need the desk

To write on, to store things, old letters

Legal documents, tape, paper clips, ribbon

If the desk were a horse the desk

Would be a horse. How is it that I slip

So easily into the subjunctive? Can’t I

Accept the desk as a desk? Must I create

Metaphors for the desk to make it

A better desk? A metaphor doesn’t improve

A thing or change a thing it gives it potential

The power to break against the rocks

Of the imagination and personify prayer

Awakened syllables feel alive and blaze

Into idea with shapes and insistence

Consider this afternoon, its apples and

     apparitions

Falling out of your head. Here I am

Painting a window and attracting a crowd

The potato is behaving badly

And I’m humming a song of thread

To go with the things in my head

Meaning seeps through the words

And it’s irritating when all I get

Is whipped cream and spit. Pronouns

Hang like kelp from my brain

Fondling the heart and sparkling

Give the rags a chance. Add

Consonants and stir. The world

Is a ball of rock and aberration

Baked in jingled percolation

The Price of Success

What is success? Wrinkling and buying

Reading palms and predicting ice

I have to think about emotion

As a form of dilation. I want to know more

About yearning and interpretation

Penetrating anything is sensational

And round. The insects scatter

In a saga of unfocussed rage. Hunger

Burns to inspire a pharmaceutical

That conveys vividness and intestines

On a pretty migration to Siberia

I learn by what the plywood rubs

And crawl wherever there is warmth

To be had and death sparkles

Like a chandelier in Louisiana

Baking has a sexual component

Stitched at midnight. These events

Emerge from the steam of a long

Incubation. The mountains cough

And play becomes increasingly hermetic

But if we don’t rob the bank the bank

Will rob us. We must find other means

To stimulate art. Everything, it seems,

Is a paradigm. I blame the string

For its extraordinary presence

My reactions to Renoir keep changing

Into light and dark and Bob Dylan

On a horse. The word ‘wave’ is so divine

I hesitate to use it, but there it is, wave

Feeding wave after wave in succession

Until it all flops down on the sand

Here I am in a bathing suit

Waving to you, throwing an idea at you

Of sand and sky and malleability

In the spirit of English romanticism

Reacting to a tuft of hair

Incognito in Tin

I wake to a shiver and sweat and authorize

Getting out of bed. I find wisdom

In feet, intestines and desire and feel

The need to say something about

The innocence of occurrence and how it

Occurs like a piece of soap, a slippery bar

Of blue sky leaning across Nebraska. We

Curve into this life as happy contrarieties 

Today I’m wearing a fabulous unseemliness

That zips up with a single swift motion

Or zips down if I want to get out into the world

Naked as a chopstick. I fill with the forms

Of life and experiment with words, swerving

Them into the slop of a sentence where

The emotions smell of rain and the asphalt

Of the heart arrives beating away in a body

Hanging upside-down in the darkness

At the break of noon shadows the silver

Spoon and I distill the gloom of the room

Whispering words like ginger and chronicle

Writing is always like this. It starts as a walk

In a house of language and ends by exploding

Into 50 bucks and a labor pain. Today I have forged

The conscience of a piano which only yesterday

Was wood and ivory and dripped abstraction

And now it sits a diagnosis of clouds

Which is the kind of music that occurs

In the sky when the wind becomes a glissando

Wiggling its fingers in the human mind

Do you feel it? I feel the percolation

Of lightning and my cuticles love it
I have a heavy fire to pack

I’m churning inside to thank you

For making me your guide

To the end of this sentence which is

Headed toward Omaha on Interstate 80

 

Life in the Qi Lane

A Day Like Today, poetry by Barbara Henning

Negative Capability Press, 2015 

I felt completely at home in this book. Not all books are like that. Not all books provide a haven for the mind, a quiet place of reflection that at once feels warm and candid while maintaining a large, wide-ranging perspective of life. I don’t want to feel hugged by a book, but I do like to feel unguarded and easy, free to wander at will and allow myself the luxury of divagation, aided by the pulse of words in a fluent meander.

The poems in this collection are short, none longer than a single page, presented in neat columns whose line breaks have a pleasantly arbitrary looseness, as if they could be swept up and put into prose. But they’re not. Their construction has a subtle importance: they focus the attention lightly, gracefully, so that non-sequiturs emerge almost imperceptibly. One will be reading about an African man practicing postures preparatory to yoga meditation and then suddenly find oneself reading about “the famous feathered /  dinosaur archaeopteryx” which “seems to have had a penchant /  for fossilizing in painful / positions.” This may not be a good example of the kind of abrupt non-sequiturs lying in wait throughout this collection, but it does serve to illustrate how wide-ranging Henning’s musings can be. First the image of a man with dreadlocks flexing and opening his body to supple exercise followed by the scientific image of an ancient bird in angular disaster. The contrast is sharp yet innocent of contrivance. It seems natural, and invites the mind to further delights of contrast and comparison.

Henning describes her process in a poem titled “Family Economics.” She refers to the poet Edward Dahlberg whose “philo-analytic” mind segues easily into “the mind of his mother, / Lizzy, a lady barber / in Kansas City.” She compares Dahlberg’s fluidity of mind to a “jazz jam session, whatever / here and there, wherever / the mind goes the mind / goes, a lettuce factory / in California where robots / pack boxes beside human / workers.” The latter image seems to be the very opposite of what Henning is talking about, which largely seems to be the point of its surprise. The supple drift of a mind in reverie focused, abruptly, on a line of workers, human and robot, the horrific counterpart of reverie, is deftly apropos. Of course, were I one of those unhappy workers, you can be sure I’d be deep in daydreaming.

Henning’s poems are richly detailed, particularly with domestic items and circumstances, which make a wonderful contrast to the newspaper headlines, computers and iPads and modern technology, and whatever else phenomena happens to be out there in the cosmos which she laces in and out, intertwines, as it were, with the events in her immediate vicinity, however seemingly mundane. Nothing is left out. Nothing even seems to be favored over another but coolly, fluently, flowing through the poem-as-gestalt-mediumistic-cosmic-yoga-machine.

A resident of New York City, the imagery of Henning’s neighborhood is largely urban, traffic whooshing by her window or riding on the subway while nursing a bad cough. It is within her musings and walks within the city that we discover whatever else may be occurring in the world, be it the skin of a fresh pea, rain drops hitting the pavement, arthritic hands of an aging friend and poet, trillions of snowflakes swirling with the wind, or the tentacles of a solar-powered cell-phone charger charging up. Here, for example, is “The Way of Qi:”

Sitting on a bench behind

the Krishna tree, we talk

about how trees know how

to grow in particular directions

so to maintain balance. Three

young men and a woman play

their guitars and a trumpet.

One of them starts singing:

I keep hanging on. We search

on our cells for the songwriter.

Simply Red  -  once a young man

and ten albums later a middle-

aged guy. Under the Krishna

tree my cell rings. A friend has

cirrhosis and hepatitis and

didn’t know it. Follow your

spine with your breath, from

your tailbone to the occipital

ridge of your scull. A spacecraft

is currently speeding toward

a close encounter with Pluto,

and Dr. Stern warns, Get used to

planets unlike Earth ruling.

While writing this poem, I’m

under a cotton sheet with tiny

blue flowers and green polka dots

and the guys upstairs are softly

opening their bed. The cars rev up

mid block and then rush past us. 

It wasn’t until I typed this poem up that I noticed ‘skull’ was spelled ‘scull.’ Is that intentional, a pun on ‘skull’  (the skull as a scull, a small light racing boat) or a typo. Either way, I like it.

I had to look up the word ‘qi’ on Wikipedia. Here is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

In traditional Chinese culture, qi (more precisely qì, also chi, ch’i, or ki) is an active principle forming part of any living thing. Qi is frequently translated as “natural energy,” “life force,” or “energy flow.” Qi is the central underlying principle in traditional Chinese medicine and martial arts. The literal translation of “qi” is “breath,” “air,” or “gas.” Concepts similar to qi can be found in many cultures, for example, prana in the Hindu religion, pneuma in ancient Greece, mana in Hawaiian culture, lüng in Tibetan Buddhism, ruah in Hebrew culture, and vital energy in Western philosophy… Elements of the qi concept can also be found in Western popular culture, for example “The Force” in Star Wars. Notions in the West of energeia, élan vital, or “vitalism” are purported to be similar. The etymological explanation for the form of the qi logogram (or chi) in the traditional form is “steam rising from rice as it cooks.” The earliest way of writing qi consisted of three wavy lines, used to represent one’s breath seen on a cold day.

And who is Dr. Stern? It sounds like somebody from a Bob Dylan song. Dr. Stern, it appears, is S. Alan Stern, an American planetary scientist and principal investigator of the New Horizon mission to Pluto and the Chief Scientist at Moon Express.

Henning is right about Simply Red (actually the name of the popular 80s English band, whose lead singer was red-headed Mick Hucknall). Mick Hucknall is now 54 years old. He’s still got his red hair, which he keeps long and wavy, but his face has all the sags and wrinkles that come with that age. I was pleasantly surprised to discover him on the Amnesty International compilation of Dylan covers on which Hucknall sings “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” which originally appeared on Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde.

I also like the way Henning plays “Krishna tree” off the usual seasonal “Christmas Tree.”

A Day Like Today is divided into five sections. All four seasons are represented as Henning travels through the year. Winter has two sections. The collection begins with winter and ends with winter.

In “Up Early Peddling,” the first poem of the book, we find Henning “peddling against / the wind, swerving around / trucks and cars unloading / beer and children.” That image serves metaphorically to register the tenor of the collection, the quick aberrations, the day-to-day struggles, the spontaneity and funny synchronicities of any given day.

When Moonbeams Become a Highway

When moonbeams become a highway

To laughter the universe bubbles  

Its misdemeanors in fern. Rain

Bangs against the retina of a swan

And elbows the world over become

Shampoo balloons. The drool of a pen

Arches the spine of a dragon’s back. The

DNA of tinfoil is crinkled and enigmatic

But gets its identity from a chicken   

It wraps in description. Explore

A paragraph with heat and noise

Derelict in transparency. Feel the air

In revolution. A globe is revealed

In inexplicable attendance. There is a pill

For this that escalates thought. It’s similar

To a blaze of crackling language 

That gets its energy from a pantomime

Of war. It’s a plump morning after all

And the candy is serious. We get set

For the maintenance and care

Of personality. Twilight is labial, an arcade

For the expression of air. It’s always a joy

To crunch in the night in the snow

Of existence and feel the validity

Of Wednesday. Reverie is an horizon

Whose embroidery of energy and form
Mitigates a mosquito bite. The parabolic

Goldfish that passes back and forth in its bowl

Inhabits a gaze as primal as light. You can see it

In its eyes. The blithe ignorance of glass

And the listless momentum of the fish

In its gloom of gold. Is there a value here?

What is its price? Because the corollaries

Are so odd we can’t do anything but mull

The obvious in exhalations of ice 

 

 

In the Drool of Twilight

I like to gather shadows, anything

Perception is a process, shuffleboard

In the basement of a dark bar

Whipped cream maps ambient webs

I concoct a climate that shatters into reality

And hatches a bakery. I feel my feelings

As they thicken and glow. I ride a green train

Whose eyebrows are effervescent diversions

Of hair. You don’t expect this from trains

This is why I smell like a suitcase and go

For those really big metaphors, like Manhattan

Whose ceilings are clandestine residues

Of consciousness exploded out of time

And space. And now it’s time to break

Into abstraction and tell you about cloth

And how it becomes clothing, even

When you’re not looking. Take a look

At Picasso painting in his underwear

Some people go for algebra, but me

I like denim and silk. Money is lousy

With sophistication but it doesn’t serve

My purposes at the moment. I’m laboring

To make a point, which is coughing

While the dictionary explodes

I don’t believe in water

I experience water. Dear Skin

I like your touch and openness   

But where shall I put my paddle

When the paddling is done?

Identity hangs in the mind of the identifier

The rest of this poem is flailing around

In its own diversions. This is serious

Is that a door in your head? Or a bas-relief

Comet churning in a washing machine?

Blood is where it should be and Asia

Is genial with a thousand themes

In the drool of twilight

Hammered

It’s true. I won’t deny it. I own a hammer. I have access to a hammer. It reposes on the upper shelf of my toolbox. I know it’s a hammer because it has all the requisite qualities belonging to a hammer. Weight, volume, density, shape of a hammer. The face, eye, cheek, and claw of a hammer. I failed to specify that detail. Yes. It’s a claw hammer. These are the traits of the hammer. This particular hammer. The hammer that I own. The hammer that I occasionally use. This substantive, this text, this article of wood and iron. This claw hammer. Which is to be distinguished from other hammers. The ball-peen hammer, for instance, or the framing hammer or stonemason’s hammer or joiner’s hammer, which is a small hammer with a square face and cross pein and a hickory shaft. No. This is a claw hammer. The claw is pivotal to the description of this hammer. The actuality of this hammer. Action, adage, and entelechy of this hammer.

Are the things of this world but shadows of a higher reality? The hammer does not provide an answer. It’s only a tool, a dumb shape which could smash my glasses if I brought it down heavily on them. But why would I want to smash my glasses? No reason at all. But if the need arose, I could smash them. The hammer is subject to my will. This is the destiny of all tools. Their shapes and qualities emerge from a vein of function. They’re designed by use. Like fingers. Which are vagaries of bone employed in the dexterous operations of holding, gripping, scratching, squeezing, touching, fondling, shaking, writing, and pounding a hammer.

The hammer is like no other thing in this world. Comparison eludes it. It’s not a meatball. It’s not a memory or a runway. It has nothing in common with a cello. I cannot hang a picture with a cello. I cannot build a birdhouse with a cello. Comparison only dilutes the hammer. The adequacy, adaptability, and tangibility of the hammer.

If I say “I am hammering this point home” the meaning of my import should be grasped in the spirit with which it is given. If I tarry, if I’m tedious, if I delay too long in my meditation of the hammer, that is not the fault of the hammer.

If I say “I am hammered” it might be assumed that I’ve consumed a great deal of alcohol and my coordination, articulation, and cognitive abilities have been noticeably altered. That, in fact, I may have the appearance of someone who has experienced a sharp blow to the head and whose spinning eyes and dispersal of stars might indicate a less than ideal apprehension of the world. But let me be among the first to say, in my defense, that I am not hammered. No. Not in the least. Screwed, maybe, flummoxed, most likely, but not hammered, not non compos mentis.

If I had a purpose for the hammer I would demonstrate the various uses of this hammer. I might pull a nail from a two-by-four, a bent, rusted nail, that would require sufficient effort that the effectiveness of the claw on the hammer could be illustrated. But there is no nail calling out to be tugged, like Ariel, from the narrow crevice of a tree. Nothing bent. Nothing rusted. Somewhere in the future, yes. Certainly. At some point in the future I will go to my toolbox and open it and lift the hammer out of it and go to my destination to fulfill the destiny of the hammer. And that will be a good thing. A fulfilling, achieving, and pounding thing. The hammer awakened, at last, from its sleep.