Reviewing Photographs on My Phone

What was I thinking?
Or was I thinking?
Walked past my kids’ old school, Webster Elementary, today,
then came to a place where I looked up
over a white roof into a normal
blue and white sky.
At that moment
All my life
I’ve empathized with those mystical people -
St. Teresa and others described in William James’s
The Varieties of Religious Experience -
sighing and groaning in the ecastasy
of God’s direct presence
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and took pictures
of the white roof,
of the surrounding trees,
of the sky itself with nothing more in view -
now I see -
of a man in a yellow shirt on the far end
of a distant street.

What do you do with your mind at the moment of death after you stop breathing? (Allen Ginsberg)

If you are drowning, there is still about eight minutes without breath in which you can still be brought back.
So there still must be some life.
Obviously on your deathbed all the struggle and pain is over by the time you stop breathing.
You are out, things have stopped, and there is nothing you can do anymore,
but you are still conscious on some level.
I am always interested in what consciousness is there.
What recourse is there?

There’s the traditional Buddhist view that at the time of death,
Dharma will be my only refuge.
Because I create karma, I must abandon evil deeds and always devote my life to virtuous action.
Therefore, every day I will examine myself
so that it's a continuous self-examination to make sure I'm not building up
an indissoluble barrier that will make me panic
because I didn't get things right.
Then the question is, what do you remember at the point of death?
So many Buddhist practices are preparations for taking off—
not panicking, to being bound to look back and trying to rearrange your bookshelf—
but going out with a clean slate…"

http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.com/2016/04/april-5-anniversary-of-allens-death.html

Why Stonehouse Is More Satisfactory Than Charles Wright

Mortality is Wright’s
strongest trump card.

For Stonehouse, either we aren’t mortal,
or our mortality is not a problem.

Wright makes ironic
death-aware forays.

Stonehouse celebrates 

his way of life. 

Essay on Sentimentality

When old Blue died, he died so hard
Shook the ground in my back yard
Dug his grave with a silver spade.
Lowered him down with lengths of chain.
With every link I called his name:
Oh Blue,
I'm coming there too.

As a young woman, Sarah Freligh submitted poems about her dead cat.

She was trying to follow Hemingway’s dictum, Write what you know,
but was told the poems were “too sentimental”:
“I’m sorry your cat died, but I don’t want to read a poem about it.”
But there are hundreds of poems nowadays about dead animals.

Do we want to read poems about dead animals even if they aren’t sentimental?
What makes them sentimental?
Inauthentic feeling, we may agree.

How I miss old Rascal,
such a sweet old kitty cat!
What would make this less sentimental?
Rascal’s neck was broken, and she was shoved up the chimney by a maniac orangutan
like Madame L’Espanaye in Murders in the Rue Morgue.
Do we want to read the poem now?
How does the sentimental pet death go?
Rascal died with such dignity!

She was a lower creature, but we’re touched by how uncomplainingly she died –

That’s sentimental for sure.
I want to live with the animals, said Whitman. Was that sentimental? – No.
Rascal died in the kitchen lying on a white plastic dish-drying tray.
She always went ballistic when we took her to the vet,
so we let her die at home.
(Does this increase the sentimentality?).
As I passed the kitchen to walk up the stairs, I could glance over at Rascal in her death agonies.
Rascal’s sister Farina walked by more than once without taking any notice at all.
(Does this lessen the sentimentality?)
It seems we have a sentimentality thermometer,
and we somehow raise or lower the temperature with the color of the details—
do they create a fuzzy feeling or a dire one?
It only took an hour for Rascal to die.
As soon as she was dead, I carried her outside and dropped her into a hole I’d dug in the yard.
Then I put a big rock over her to keep dogs from digging her up—
Why did I even have that thought?—must be T.S. Eliot’s fault:
Oh, keep the dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again.
So now is it dire enough?
Do I want to read it now?
I’d rather sing Old Blue.

Everness, Jorge Luis Borges

Only one thing is not. Oblivion.

God, who saves the metal, saves the dross,

and arranges in His prophetic memory

moons that have set, moons not yet risen.

Everything still is: the thousand reflections

between the day’s two twilights,

your face, lost after departing from mirrors,

and everything that will be lost, departing.

And it's all part of the crazed

glass of that memory, the universe;

no end to your arduous running,

doors closing as you pass;

only, on the other side of sundown,

you will see the Archetypes and Splendors.

Texas, Jorge Luis Borges

Here too. Here, as at the other

edge of the continent, an infinite

field for a dying cry;

here also the indian, the lasso, the colt.

Here the secret bird

that on the rumblings of history

sings for an afternoon of memory;

here the mystic alphabet

of the stars, which today dictate my pen

names that the incessant labyrinth of days
does not arrest: San Jacinto

and that other Thermopylae, the Alamo.

Here also the unknown,

anxious, brief thing, life.

Days, stars

sing that Thermopylae.
Alphabet memory,
history unknown,

San Jacinto
the secret bird sings,
infinite field where
a cry dies alone.

Brief mystic colt,
indian rumblings
in labyrinth space,

edges never arresting a quill.

Texas and life dictating
all continents as Alamo.

Trek North

 You will not be able to stay home, brother.

Didn’t want to get roped into the march.

Heard early this morning—
five shot by white supremacists in North Minneapolis Precinct 4
a block from the police station.
Assailants escaped (a couple of them may now have been apprehended—
MPR helping establish a self-defense plea by immediately announcing that the Black Lives Matter people chased them).
Drove a block up kitty corner from Maeve’s coffee shop in Nordeast and parked,
just above the yellow-brick Bavarian-style old Grain Belt Brewery castle.
Checked out Eat My Words—lovely little bookstore with an in-tune spinet piano in a reading room in back.
Wanted to have fish and chips at the Anchor, but it was closed,
a passerby telling me about Mayslack’s Pub just a few blocks away—
great old polka bar—
so I ordered the original beef sandwich to go,
huge Styrofoam bowl full of sliced beef, onions, au jus, cole slaw, yellow pepper slices—
pumpernickel bun on the side
(the plumpish, sexy, sandy-haired waitress even bringing me a jar of good horseradish)—
I had to take half of the sandwich back to the car.
Then I set out past the castle to the Broadway bridge.
Not sure of the direction, I cross
to North Washington. More bridge beyond,
seeming to go to the familiar Kromarcek’s area near the U of M,
so I turn right—realizing my mistake after less than half a mile and walking
back across Broadway towards downtown.
I know for sure I’m on track when I see helicopters a mile and a half ahead, on the other side
of what I now realize must be the Plymouth bridge.
The 94 freeway makes it nearly impossible to walk from Nordeast to North on foot,
but I head for the bridge,
which swings east, making my walk even longer—
the helicopters telescoping my destination.
(Can’t be a coincidence that when you google “North Minneapolis 4^th Precinct map” you get five crime statistics sites published by minneapolismn.gov
before you can select the map you asked for.)
Big crowd massed near Plymouth and Penn.
A friendly young woman asks me if I’m going to join the march—
she can’t because she has to pick up her kids.
I don’t think I can march to downtown Minneapolis, with my car two miles away in the opposite direction,
but I do step in,
seeing Erica Mauter whom I sang with this summer in Dameun Strange’s Resonant Frequencies cantata
(partly based on the Gil Scott-Heron rap, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”),
in which the two of us sang:

REVOLUTION  REVOLUTION !

REVOLUTION  REVOLUTION !

RE - VO - LU - TION     WI - ILL   BE - E   LIVE !

the crowd immediately beginning to move—
disciplined, pleasant-spirited,
sardonically chanting

Put your hands up. Don’t shoot.
Put your hands up. Don’t shoot.

So for a few minutes I joined the community of the heroes who took the bullets last night.
Then I detached myself,
put my brown hood over my head,
and walked back east and north to the yellow castle
and Maeve’s.