Skeleton A and B Sides

Skeleton Misnomer

Not a bone in that thing at all!
The lowly tarsal
will survive the lordly boner.

Piling Bones vs. Playing Bones

    Oh, we drove 'em nine miles
     then we stacked 'em up in piles
     'cept what got drownded in the river.

Who was the Skeleton in real life?

Tiberius? Stalin? Pol Pot?
Nah, Bojangles. Or Milton Berle.

Essay on Voice

The question with poetry:
Should the poet’s voice be in it?
or should it just be—what?
items of data of outer or inner sense?
Voice comes from within,
but toward and from the outside
it’s a bandage, a screen,
a dissembling clown.
Maybe the goal is to be purely without voice,
that interior cock on a fence post.

But how could the voice ever be gone?
What’s left without it? Whatever.
The Black Dog Cafe. The tomatoes.
Alvin and Donna and the orange
metal step stool. How are these items collected
except by being named by the voice?
The voice speaks images, thoughts, feelings
after consciousness registers them.
Does consciousness select them from a flood
of undifferentiated sound and light?
Does it practice journalistic objectivity
as nothing but a recording machine,
a camera?

Maybe the voice expresses
the important feelings of a sensitive person,
even a wise individual who can impart
special truth to us.
I have never imagined myself as such a person.
The poets I love were much too modest
to pretend to be
(except maybe in late, bad poems).
Maybe Jesus Himself, but I equate Jesus
with Socrates, who spent his whole live proving
that no one can be such a person.
But the language used by the voice to speak
was already wise
before Socrates ever set his dialectical wedge.

The voice—consciousness itself—
is two things: desire and meditation.
It can express desire—what’s wrong with that?
It can watch the objects of desire pass by.

Resolution: try to quiet the voice.
It may seem like a barrel of laughs,
but it’s just a barking dog.

Big Tote Bag, Jerry Jeff Walker

Well I’m down to my last legs as you can see Lord
Robin camping with Carol
left me a Farmer’s Market errand get
tomatoes and peppers
threw my car into the street
hadn’t eaten
drove West St. Paul via High Bridge
El Burrito Mercado my favorite, wondering
Will there be any
up in heaven?
Will there be any?
I’ve got to know
parked slanty lot
got the breakfast bowl and nothing else
routed on Robert
Just want to know if everything
gonna be in the middle
not too fast
not too short
parked really far under the overpass
Market molasses to walk through
no cash hike SA and back
box of tomatoes Asian
vendor furthest from my car watched him
dump ‘em in a bag no handle thirty pounds
carried through the Market next to my stomach
across the train tracks past the first lot
did set down once near Tanpoppo Noodle
Will there be any
up in heaven?
OK, back again
not too lame
not too slim
get the loot don’t be slow
right on time
corn, red peppers, jalapeños
all fit in the big pelican-giraffe bag Robin made me bring
and I’ve been toting along with me this whole time
trying to get the straps to stick to my shoulder
sure enough car
but walking back to Black Dog coffee
password blackdog all lowercase
Lord before I go I’ve got to know
I’ve got to know
another hour home start boiling
and peeling those tomatoes.

Skeleton Wondering About Its Own Soul

Where'd
the damned thing
go?

The Skeleton on the Soul

just phantom flesh
a tingling in the limbs
til the fires burn it away

The Skeleton's Mixed Regret

Pay the bill, tip the waiter.

I
liked
Satan.

The Dark Side of the Skeleton

Could Skeleton Dust Account for the Dark Matter in the Universe?

Of course not, stupid!

Skeletons
are white!

Show Us Your Dark Side, Mr. Skeleton, Sir!

When I was in the tomb, the darkness surrounded me.

But now my grave blinks open,
I'm blinded by the light.

The Frosty Bones

She couldn't find
the finger bone the skeleton dropped

when he ascended to the attic 

like a walking chandelier.

But he's up there,
scratching his chalky noggin.

Would the Skeleton Be a Good Candidate for the Scheduling Analyst/Real-Time Analyst Postion?

Afraid not. Skeletons
no longer exist in real-time, so schedules
are incomprehensible to them.

Skeleton Precursor

Berryman’s Mr. Bones, no doubt.
Now there you exaggerate, sah!
Henry still be livin’.

Lord, how he wolde pry 

After the butterfly! 

Lorde, how he wolde hop 

After the gressop! 

Skeleton Sweet Spot

Where do dem bones ring truest?
Skeleton singin' all day long
'bout eternity.

Skeleton Assurance

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan

He grew whiskers on his chin-ne-gan.
The wind came up and blew 'em back in again. 
Poor old Michael Finnegan! 
Begin again.

You’ll get to live again—
or someone will—
when eternity sloughs off its skin again.

Skeleton Platonism

Every single individual mouse, whether
caught in a trap or killed by the cat, is an eternal
form. And mice don’t live to be old!

Long version

Pearl Pirie used the word, “essentialism”—
supposedly, a belief in the real existence of ideal forms.

I don’t know about “ideal”—I think we can dispense with it.
I believe that people are eternal forms.
Actually, everything that exists for a span of time,
each individual, located configuration of matter and energy,
is an eternal form—
even non-living things
(whatever you may call “life”).
“Truth” is not an eternal form,
because it never had a particular temporal existence—
Jung’s archetypes likewise—
these are just categories for sorting.

Every single individual mouse,
whether caught in a trap
or killed by the cat,
is an eternal form.
And mice don’t live to be old!

If it seems incredibly boring to exist forever
as the particular person you were—
the particles of your bones growing ever finer as they fly 
away from one another in space—
you don’t have to worry about that,
because you are no longer that person.
You are all the forms together now.

Sestina: The High Window

Of the full load of summer, you came with a basket

Filled with colored globes. I looked from my latticed window

To search for you running toward me, screened by dark willow,

The rustle of whose leaves whispered your nearness.

I would have sucked the piths of a spreading banquet,

But stood aloof and sour, feeling like an asshole.

I wonder why I wanted to be such an asshole,

Why I would not partake of the full, thatched basket

That summer tendered. I guess that the high window

Through which I viewed the day, and the thick willow

Screen, made me pause and doubt your nearness.

I sat down to an unfulfilling banquet.

And I would think as I rose from my banquet

How sad it was to be this lonely asshole,

Missing the gift, wanting the foregone basket.

And I'd return again to my placid window.

Pendants of light would reach me through the willow,

But no regaling sound to serve for nearness.

And as I mused up there, a glint of the nearness

Of the cold stars pricked at my eyes.  It was a banquet

Of stone that I beheld, fit for the asshole

That I had found myself to be. There was a basket

Of ashen, slab-shaped tablets, shaped like white windows

To be placed there in the soft turf under the willow.

And then the night came down, and rain, and the willow

Shook and its branches slashed together. No nearness

Now, no thought of a resumed banquet.

And the hail struck at the roof and screamed at me, Asshole!

Then the stars came out like cats' eyes in a basket,

And I saw the pale moon rise through the shrouded window.

And there was no more to think. My pallid window

Turned wholly blank.  The extremest twigs of the willow

Scratched against the pane, but their crazy nearness

Caused nary a tear. If there had been a banquet

Set for arriving guests, some asshole

Had scared the guests away and spilled the basket.

How could this asshole have so spoiled the banquet

As to preclude all nearness—grasping for willow

strands through the shattered window to restore a basket.

1990-ish

The Skeleton Remembers Showing One of His Poems to a Coworker at CPT Corporation

I showed Jill Field a very dark sestina
containing slab-shaped tablets like white windows—
wayside marks—

a banquet of stone set for the asshole I’d found myself to be;

the stars’ nearness; willow roots in my eyes.
I'm lying here.

The Skeleton Declines to Read Certain Poems

Those poems have a lot of edible
meat on their bones.
But I ain't no cannibal.

The Skeleton's Perspective on Permanence

When I was alive, permanence had a queer
meaning. My eye-blink future
looked like eternity.

The Skeleton Disavows Kinship with Donald Trump

Burgeoning mass of septic protoplasm.
Or cartilaginous like a shark.
Not a true bone in his body.

The Skeleton Peeps Into the Closet

I opened the closet door, and there they hung,
the silly skeletons,
pretending to be suits and dresses.

The Skeleton Meditates on the Lords of the Forest

Trees are skeletons,
as can be seen
when their leaves depart in fall.

The trees remain skeletons
when, one year,
their leaves do not return.

"Skeletons pointing at my poems"

Thanks to Mark Fleury, “You Are What’s Real.”

Yup, I worked with a lot of skeletons before I retired.
I was dangling from a cubicle wall myself.
I hardly ever showed them my poems.

The Irish Fair, Short Version

The generator was very loud near some of the venues—
all those fish and chips that had to be fried!
I sang “The Hunter’s Death,” from Brian Miller's Phillips collection—
His powder so complete
Was strewed from head to feet,
That the varmints could not eat
His body there.
All those young-girl set dancers outside in their curly red wigs,
a Queen Maeve of Connacht every one of them.
Socks in the Frying Pan was playing part of the time on the main stage.
We’d eat beans out of the can,
Fry our socks in the frying pan
If there wasn’t any women in the world.
Robin and Jess were both pleased with our set.
I think our workshop was informative and well-organized,
even though I wouldn’t want to try to prove
that all of our songs were Irish—
several songs about exploitative mining, interestingly—
hardscrabble songs of human deprivation:
Irish is a state of mind.

Long Version

The generator was very loud near some of the venues
(but it didn’t bother me, fairs are supposed to be like that:
all those fish and chips that must be fried!)—
right away yesterday morning at the traditional sing,
led by Brian Miller,
(I sang “The Hunter’s Death,” from the Phillips collection—
His powder so complete
Was strewed from head to feet,
That the varmints could not eat
His body there—
discovered by Brian),
with Dáithi Sproule, Scott Bartell, etc., a lot of young people
(all those young-girl set dancers outside in their curly red wigs,
a Queen Maeve of Connacht every one of them!)—
the Center for Irish Music where Brian and Norah Rendell
and Dáithi and Laura MacKenzie and so many others teach,
providing many well-practiced, sound groups
formed of children and teenagers,
such as the CIM Advanced Youth Ensemble, who played
in the Triscéil Tea Room
just after we went on on Friday.

So I played two workshop sets yesterday back-to-back—
or, I should say,
we played—Dunquin
and the Murie-Wenstrom Family Singers.
I played mando, banjo, and fiddle.
I wasn’t perfect,
but we were OK.
Message from Sherry Ladig, “I think we did great. It was really hard
for me to hear you because of that generator behind you.”
Socks in the Frying Pan was playing part of the time on the main stage.
One of my gaffes in the Dunquin set was trying
to get their name into “If There Wasn’t Any Women in the World”:
We’d eat beans out of the can,
Fry our socks in the frying pan—
but I blew it.
Oh well.
I wonder what words Sherry sang.

Robin and Jess were both pleased with our set.

Large, attentive audience—a great day at the Fair.
Jess was nearly flawless
on “Rocks of Bawn,” “Banks of Newfoundland,” “Peg and Awl,”
“Watercress-O,” and “Fire in the Hole.”
I had a bit of a load,
with “Pat Do This,” “John O’Halloran" by Sean McCarthy, “Pat McGuire,”
and “Buddy Won’t You Roll Down the Line” from Uncle Dave Macon.
Robin was spot-on
on “4-Loom Weaver” and the Ewan MacColl song, “Terror Time.”
I think our workshop was informative and well-organized,
even though I wouldn’t want to try to prove
that all of our songs were Irish—
several songs about exploitative mining, interestingly—
hardscrabble songs of human desperation:
Irish is a state of mind.

Cain

How can you tell if you have the mark of Cain?
You feel like you never fit in.
You’re paranoid,

you think everyone is antagonized by you,
so you mostly sit quietly—
or don’t you wish you did, as you over-eagerly

dominate every discussion?
You want to make sure everything is OK,
so you go sit with people even when you know

you’ve already made them uncomfortable.
It’s not that they hate you;
they just wish you would stop talking.

You feel like an imposter,
so you try to imagine the real Cain
roaring in the desert,

roaming the world alone,
living in a cave.
Does Cain feel bad about being shunned by all,

as he sits in the white cone of his flashlight
beside all the newspapers he brought up here to read?
hearing a scary rustling.

The real Cain enters, wearing nothing
but a loincloth—but why
does he bother to wear even that?

picking his teeth,
the bones of all the pathetic wannabe Cains
shoved into piles behind him.

Milton

"What would Milton have thought of William Carlos Williams?"—
question from Gordon O’Brien in my preliminary orals.
I was concerned to protect Dr. O’Brien
from feeling he’d flustered me.

The relevant question, really:
"What does Milton think of me?”—
my scribbling in my desultory moral posture.
Milton was a fighter, a risk-taker,

He didn’t know better than to say
what he thought and felt in the strongest possible way.
He almost paid the ultimate price,
but continued after he could no longer see to write,

composing blank-verse lines in his head
and dictating them to his tractable daughters.

To a Rose, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Mexico City, about 1680

Sonnet CXLVII To a Rose

In which a rose is morally rebuked,
along with its ilk

   Rosa divina, cultivated loveliness,
discerning fragrance,
beautiful purple majesty
image of snow-capped gentilesse.

  Trick of human geometry,
example of vain gentility
toward which all nature tends
from cheerful cradle to sad sepulchre.

  From what presumptuous pomp,
despising death,
your decrepit bloom has wilted

  and blanched and fallen! 

Learn from death and foolish living
how truly life deceives and dying teaches!

Soneto CXLVII A una rosa

En que da moral censura a una rosa,
y en ella a sus semejantes

  Rosa divina que en gentil cultura
eres, con tu fragante sutileza,
magisterio purpúreo en la belleza,
enseñanza nevada a la hermosura.

  Amago de la humana arquitectura,
ejemplo de la vana gentileza,
en cuyo ser unió naturaleza
la cuna alegre y triste sepultura.

  ¡Cuán altiva en tu pompa, presumida,
soberbia, el riesgo de morir desdeñas, 
y luego desmayada y encogida,

  de tu caduco ser das mustias señas,
con que con docta muerte y necia vida,
viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas!

Screed for Those Entering the World as Human Beings

You may have a pretty face
and a pretty body.

You’ll have to take care of your body,
because it won’t last forever in any case.

You’ll meet with other creatures,
both human and non-human.

You might love them or hate them, but
they’ll all just be different versions of you.

You’ll be able to consume things through your mouth—
but not just anything.

Oral consumption will constitute as much
as ninety-five percent of your enjoyment of life.

Then you’ll have to pass matter out of yourself.
This will be messy, and also smelly.

You’ll need to clean yourself with plenty of water—even so,
your body will always still have some shit on it.

But even in the desert you’ll have to keep your body watered.
If water is not there for you, you’ll die.

You’ll die eventually anyway, meaning
you won’t be in the world anymore.

Where will you be?
Well, clearly,

you’ll be right back here,

awaiting your next assignment.

My Cousin-in-Law George's Schizophrenic Sister

Was telling Finley a story this morning
about Robin's cousin Riki's husband George,
now dead of a heart attack years after they divorced.
I was in DC for the MLA convention.
I was actually offered a job later as a result of that trip,
at Lamar University, in Beaumont, Texas.
I tell everyone this story.
They flew me to Beaumont and ended up liking me well enough
to offer me a professor job,
but I couldn't drag my family down there.
Far cry from not that many years before,
I passed out trying to give a presentation
in German class about the Kurosawa movie, Ikuru,
which had impressed me when I saw it at the student union—
with Eldon, I think.
The movie was about a city bureaucrat who always passed the buck.
Some women were trying to get a pestilent swamp in their neighborhood
drained and replaced with a park.
They wouldn’t give up, but he just kept sending them
to another department. Then he found out
he had cancer and just a year to live.
Prostitutes and dissipation only made him more miserable.
Finally one day the women came back,
and he decided to get them their park built.
It was amazing, the red tape he had to fight through—
it was literally a Christ-like effort, but he succeeded,
and in the last scene he’s swinging in a park swing,
a beautiful smile on his face,
completely happy.
I tried to say all this in German,
but I short-circuited and fainted.
The teacher was freaked, but luckily
a nice young man offered to take me to the student hospital.
I actually felt fine after we left,
but it turned out his real motive was to win a star for his crown
by bringing my soul to Christ.
I went to a Campus Crusade meeting with him.
There were lots of Christian students there,
including a guy who said that if I accepted Jesus
my grades would improve—
a documented fact, he said—but I said,
that's not surprising and doesn't prove that Christ is real;
it just means that students do better when they introduce
a little discipline into their lives.
This was a tough argument for him to refute.
I think he wondered why
I didn't want to introduce discipline into my own life,
but he couldn’t quite put the question into words.
I turned out to be incorrigible.
I had to send the Jesus boy on his way.
He was a little brokenhearted—he said
he didn't think he'd managed to bring a single soul to Christ.
I was his only prospect.
But my story was supposed to be about
George's schizophrenic sister.
At about the time the Jesus boy tried to rescue me,
I remember, there were adds in the student newspaper:
Call this number if you're interested in serving humanity.
It was the Moonies, I found out later.
If I had answered one of those adds and called the number,
I probably would have been invited to a party somewhere in Boulder.
I would have been prevented from leaving the party
by many attentive, insistent people,
who totally had my best interests at heart.
I might not have been able to resist them
the way I resisted the Jesus boy.
Anyway, George's sister joined the Moonies
and was with them for at least ten years,
being moved around the country,
from California to Florida, to Arizona.
She was counting on them to pair her up with someone.
The Moonies were well-known
for arranging marriages for their devotees, and she wanted that.
But they just couldn't do it,
couldn't find someone to pair her up with,
so she gave up and went back
to live with her mother—
who was bat-shit crazy, George said; his sister
was much better off living with the Moonies.
But today I read a review of a book by David Orr
about Frost's “Road Not Taken.”
The poem is a wolf in sheep's clothing, Orr says.
Everybody loves it—
it's the most popular Google-searched poem in any language—
but it's not really about how confident you can feel
about your bold choices.
It's about never ever being able to know whether or not 
your choice was better.

Pieta

[Enter, in mourning habits, VIRGILIA, VOLUMNIA leading young MARCIUS, VALERIA, and attendants.] Coriolanus, 5.3

I. Valeria

If this sonnet describes my normal preoccupations,
I’ll have to suppress it. There’s a tempest
in the backyard. I’m at my usual station
on the cedar porch, loving this process: peremptory

five-stress lines penned with my feet in a puddle—
urge partly groky-clear, partly olfactory.
It’s kind of a muddle, so it ends with a riddle,
obscenity becoming phylactery.

Bouncing rain battering my legs shrunk back,
toes curled, feet turned in on their edges,
chest wet, crotch wet. The poem is about the facts,
but saying it never declares it aways fudges.

This sonnet may see the light, as it’s discreet,
never once mentioning Christ’s beautiful, precious feet.

II. Volumnia

For what save my own organism do I feel love?
Maybe I’m wandering this department store alone,
no earth in view, no stars above.
But where can I go now? There’s a bone

I have to pick with someone because I need a rhyme.
It all comes back to how you feel, you see,
because, no matter what you do, you’re trapped in time.
You’ve missed the elevator—for the sake of prosody

and prosody alone, you rant and shout
of ultimate things of the heart, of distant wars,
things that were all settled and played out
before this department store ever opened its doors.

This tacked-on couplet will seem pat, I fear.
Read your phylactery! The end is near.

III. Virgilia

Seems right that sonnets should come in threes,
like the three Mary’s: Mary Magdalen,
Mary Shulamit, and Mary THE MARY—
Shakespeare needed them to be three, that’s all. It’s only human

to want things in triplicate, like your three
eyes, your three knees, your three tongues,
your three hearts, not to speak of Calvary’s
three crosses. No one is yet so young

as to remember the final battle in which hope died.
Hope’s friends gave to the end the final drop
of their devotion, when the will was tried. Shall friends abide
the extinction of my flesh when I am without hope?

One image there is that shields me from all harm:

the corpse of the slain God in Mary’s arms.

Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Dickinson/Celan

English translation of Celan’s German translation of Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” 

Death, when I myself could not,
was kind enough to stop.
We sat in the coach box, he and I,
gazing fondly up.

We traveled slowly, fast enough,
and I had put away
my habits and indulgences,
so genial was the man.

A schoolhouse came, with little folks
that stood there in a ring , , ,
The corn fields gave us one last look

We saw it: The sun sank.

And then we halted by a house:
a swelling of the ground.
The roof was barely visible,
the cornice a crevasse.

Centuries since then, but never
longer than the day
I told myself: We’re stopping now
upon eternity.


Here’s Celan’s German translation of the Dickinson poem

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/245388

Der Tod, da ich nicht halten konnt,
hielt an, war gern bereit.
Im Fuhrwerk saß nun er und ich

und die Ansterblichkeit.lance

Ihm gings auch langsam schnell genug,
und ich hatt fortgetan
das Fronen und das Müßiggehn,
so freundlich war der Mann.

Ein Schulhof kam mit kleinem Volk,
das miteinander rang. . .
Es hat das Korn uns nachgeäugt,
wir sahn: die Sonne sank.

Dann hielten wir, da stand ein Haus:
emporgewelltes Land.
Das Dach—kaum daß es sichtbar war,
Das Sims—ein Hügelrand.

Jahrhunderte seither, doch keins
war länger als der Nu
da ich mir sagt: Wir halten ja
aug Ewigkeiten zu!

Paul Celan. Gesammelte Werke in Fünf Bänden.
Suhrkamp 1983.

Soon-to-Be Skeleton Ruminating Upon the Bones of Hiawatha

When Hiawatha himself rested
on this Mississippi cliff,
these limestone strata were same as now.

Taking a piss in plain view
of an aqua-shirted fisherman
on the opposite shore.

The ghost of Hiawatha
remembers taking a piss on this very spot
in Minnesota’s younger days.

Hiawatha’s bones,
whatever remains of them,
can’t be far from here.

Why Baseball Poems Have to Be So Long

Heard a long poem about baseball last night.
The poet was a lean lantern-jawed guy, about my age—
that’s pretty old.
He’d been a better player than I ever was, I think,
playing American Legion ball when he was in high school.
He loved his memories of his young days,
playing baseball.

Never fails to warm the cockles of my heart
when I walk past a ball diamond with kids playing on it—
even better when no adults are present.
So, no reason at all now not to segue
to Pueblo, Colorado, Oldtimers’ Baseball League—
Memorial Auditorium assembly on an early June morning
to learn our team assignments and get our uniforms—
B&A Bootery one year,
green shirt and cap,
stretchy gray pants with little loops for the feet.

Remembering when I smacked a double
(Lord knows I had few enough of those)—
after the proverbial crack of the bat, glancing up sharply
to see where the ball was headed;
making the wide loop to round first—as they say—
and digging hard for second—
did I even have to slide?—
standing, looking at the third-base coach for signs.

Or pulling off the hidden-ball trick when I didn't even 
know the words, "hidden-ball trick"—
arranged beforehand with my first baseman, a lanky blond kid.
I don’t know if the two of us talked to the ump beforehand
(there was just one ump behind the pitcher’s mound who called the balls and strikes;
the coach who ran the whole league was in the dugout),
but after a kid got on, Blondie and I 
had a consult a few steps off the mound,
and our gloves touched invisibly;
and after the dweeby twerp runner led off
and Blondie tagged him with the ball
(while I dissembled on the rubber),
and the ump called him out,
I jumped for joy!
How generic is that?

Or the way we’d round the bills of our caps that we got for free,
Kenny and Mike Macías and me.
If you hung around, you could get into games
when a team would forfeit for lack of attendance
and the game was played with ringer players.
One day I struck out Roy Roibal,
a big friendly guy I was on a team with another year,
and when I got up to bat I announced
I was going to hit a grounder and just keep on running,
and I did it and made it all the way home,
with runners scoring ahead of me.

At least, that’s my memory,
but maybe it was actually some other kid—I remember
him now, his name was John Gray.

So then, why do poems about baseball have to be so long?—
like one of those languorous, hot summer days in Pueblo,
playing in the limey clay,
Southern-Colorado wind blowing little dust tornados up—
so that my forehead was always streaked with dirt.

Not to mention the snow cone stand.

Because you want to fill your poem

with the same stuff your life is filled with.

In memoriam, Bruce David Peck