Constance Stadler

New Book: Rummaging In the Attic

2010-11-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

My fifth book of poetry has become available for a free online download:http://www.differentiapress.com/2010/09/rummaging-in-attic.html

My New e-Book:"Paper Cuts"

2009-07-13T11:39:00.000-07:00

David McLean Reviews: "Paper Cuts"

2009-07-13T11:37:00.000-07:00

Paper Cuts

Constance Stadler

Calliope Nerve Press

As always, in this collection Constance Stadler achieves a balance between modern content and a sampled traditional form, whereby the poetry runs through the lexis of the traditional but with neologisms and archaisms rubbing shoulders and thighs in a glorious mêlée that achieves often the status of poetry of the purest water.

Her targets are everything from Plato (completely unjustly, the poem could be about somebody else) to Jesus and the Society of same, completely spot on target. Modern life is dissected and diagnosed here, found lacking, the anxious and painful half-lives people live are examined and found wanting, the poet's own pain is examined and there is a clear movement in the course of the book towards a tone of understanding and acceptance, the attainment of beauty in some sense is seen as a justification of the anhedonia.

The book takes us from hospital to Gaza, exploring injustices on a variety of levels, Amerikkka's war on Iraq and society's war on the individual.

Everything falls under the poet's lens – passion:

My engorged vulva

Screams for jungle abductions

And whatever would take me

Could not plunge deep enough.

Tomorrow,

Brings shower and the routines

Of numbness.

That is, if I

Conquer this animal

Night.

(Seething ...)

mortality:

Sepia catacombed

In sweet stench of young rot

The maggot is well fed.

Bloating, we are new made

In concatenated leprosies

In our mouldy hypocrisies

In the death bed lie.

(concessional)

the reticence of nature:

Grass tuft, will you not speak to me?

A blue and brown tit jumped on my table

Near the Arno and shared

My sandwich

As a full bosomed poppy floated by.

Wilted corn stalks in vermilion light

Thrill as magic

Snowy egrets dance in pond surrender

To cabbage palms.

(Terrestrial Illuminations)

This book makes love and passion in the face of sickness, dis-ease, bereavement and a more general ontic and ontological abandonment. It makes the word a lover and an expression of the body's engorgement, it makes the muse a bedfellow, and the reader a voyeur, which is what readers usually are, but not so openly expressed.

Only Constance Stadler writes like this nowadays, only she can. Available from http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/paper-cuts/7388443

David McLean

Chap Reviews

2009-01-22T14:00:00.000-08:00

I have had the good fortune to exchange reviews of our recent publications, with the amazing David McLean. I share them here. First his review of my upcoming chap "Tinted Steam" then my review of his exceptional work "pusning lemmings".

Tinted Steam
by Constance Stadler
Shadow Archer Press

This chapbook marks the return of Constance Stadler to the poetry world after a lengthy absence in academia. It makes a very impressive and linguistically phenomenally gifted return to the poetry world.

In the laughing house
strewn in the plum dappled
peach tricking meadow,

from “Welsh-flecked Romance” which is a perfect poem that shows a Dylan Thomas style facility for adjectival use, and a true feeling for the beauty and placeability, the portability, of words that is the mark of an authentic poet.

“Isfahan” shows a knowledge of and sensitivity to Muslim history and culture that is unusual in a country which has a very dismal recent history of oppressing Islam. It lingers around the precincts of the name, “Isfahan” is one of many possible transliterations. It even quotes young Coleridge.

The atmosphere is captured in lines like

A solitary oud plucked by
still warm
ornamented fingers
still warm
sings a sad
uncertain song
to the scarlet dying sun.

(The Last Arabian Night)

The atmosphere in this and some other poems is Oriental, but not one of Orientalism, the poem tastes genuine, the attributes are not just dragged in for effect.

Other poems are genuine and immediate in their emotional impact

I cannot reach up your legs

and pull out the death in you

and I cannot

hug it away.

(Impotence)

There is a whole deal of linguistic precision here, very fetching lines like

I believe in the sky

Elongated rectangles

In mottled, motley hues.

And trapezoids of geese

Protracting necks to

Cry their course

Of Pythagorean perfection.

(World Geometry)

On the whole this chapbook represents a stunning run that takes us from Romanticism and the East to modernism and the postmodernism that (if we are to believe Lyotard) both precedes and succeeds modernism). Since Connie is now definitively back, i hope this is the race, because if it's just warming up then we're all totally outclassed when she starts running for real.

pushing lemmings
David McLean
Erbacce Press

The title of David McLean’s new book, pushing lemmings would either seem to be effort wasted or on the cusp of cruelty. But the latter is where McLean’s poetic soul resides; on the barbarity inflicted by daily life, which naturally leads to an equally unremitting examination of its counterpart. McLean rages but with a singular, penetrative, deeply affected full out stare of ritual, nocturnal, and diurnal horrors. One can see this easily in a poem like summer sun:

summer sun children swim in the sea
they imagine they are happy
they imagine this is life

night in me sings a swimming winter shark to them
rises and strikes

What is so clear is that this is an insightful affected man who is lashing out at the certain abduction of innocence.

Often called a “gritty poet of the macabre”, McLean shows most eloquent sensitivities, philosophic knowledge as well as an array of rare poetic gifts. The lyrical, insightful question posed in culture shows all of this:

we are our antiphysis all of us,
like something out of Huysmans
with our being a denial of what
we are not -the animal - is passing
worth noting, the nothing
we are?

Or as in maybe, creation:

but the questions of why have no home
in science, which is poncy ontology
not manly metaphysics that rips gibberish like hair waxed from time’s
private tits

Any simplistic categorization of McLean’s work reveals a lack of immersion and engagement which is required by the reader, but the rewards are great. McLean in all of his passions has a biting wit, as in details about heaven

they often give details about heaven
without admitting to guessing, pretending
that it sounds rather nice, which it doesn’t
unless you actually like a boring life

Yes, this is a poet who has stared Life and Death in the face and all of its aspects. He questions, and challenges and howls, for anyone who has the courage to hear. In my blessed devils he tells us much, particularly why any sentient lover of poetry and, thus, one imbued in the questions that haunt us all ~ many to silence ~ must read this work of rarefied art. They will be changed.

I hope the blessed devils
And accursed bacteria
That live in me scratch ruins
On my hollow sounding bones
That the replete ghouls may read
A lesson of profoundest negativity
When they plow through the meat
Machine me and see nothing
Onside any of us, just death
And insanity dressed in night.

New Chaps

2009-01-22T11:06:00.000-08:00

I am very pleased to share that my chaps"Tinted Steam" (Shadow Archer Press), http://www.shadowarcherpress.com/constancestadler.htm and "Sublunary Curse" (Erbacce) http://www.erbacce-press.com/#/constancestadler/4532715323 are both available for purchase!

2009-01-05T08:11:00.000-08:00

Welsh-flecked
‘Romance’

In the laughing house
strewn in the plum dappled
peach tricking meadow,
A thicket of blackberried
hummingbirds steal my form.
That I may gaze through the
fawn breast light
at the glimmers of hyacinth hair
and the ripple of your farm hued
body sawing and bailing, in
briny brilliantine hallow.

Till ash evening
falls and I return to the
dragonfly blight in
the onyx ribboned hills
that fill me with the
quarry of your absence
tracing unkissed lips, pale
in the time skewered dusk.

2008-12-17T18:00:00.000-08:00

evening walk

softly dying
in pirouette

a leaf

touched

a man

mourned

a dénouement.

2008-12-17T17:56:00.000-08:00

Impotence

I have no words for you.
Chalk eyes
censor your face

Your witch hair
Your Jew nose

Robin -
we have licked the salt
of our wounds with
tequila hate and
crumbled in adjoining
stalls

but you ask too much

I cannot reach up your legs
and pull out the death in you
and I cannot
hug it away.

2008-12-17T17:55:00.003-08:00

Venture Capitalist (Cut-up)

Dulce de Leche hyperion satyrs oozing torrents of liquid Armani seep from tarmac chasms, steep leviathan Dow Jones chattel box. Tick tock, tick tock, CLANG! Commodities commodified in soulless exhumations of mortgaged evanescences and bonfired immolations of mattress-stuffed altars of dream. Sopping up every bead of rosary sweat encrusted outer borough scrimpers and lottery-filleted assistants to the assistant to the assis… . Incisors sink deep into sweetmeat fantasticalities of obliterated housewifery and ‘for my boy’ portfolio pathétiques. Numerical legerdemain dazzles prostate Sweeneys, in blue collar villanelles of polished impoverished dreams. CRASH!
O! Such impoverished dr… (whirls of ‘ Chevy(ies) from the levy but the whisky was dry’).

“A level of financial exotica ensued, wherefore: ‘irrational exuberance’?”

Maybe this will be the day that you die.

2008-12-17T16:15:00.000-08:00

Isfahan

Long ago
Long ago
In the days before phantoms and phantasms
In the eons before endless nigrescent vistas
In my innocent fertility
fearless to the importunate siren
You beckoned, I came.

Istanbul had left its mark
And though I appeared unmoved
by skin song delectables of obscene plumage
Such decadent deliverance!

You had me, Kanuni,
Ah, Tokapi, your diadem spires
so impaled my Occidental contempt
I felt the imperial ghost forms
The Mighty, the Munificent, the Majestic
all
splayed prostrate
on lucullian kilims.

Oh, I had heard the tales
of an Eastern mosaic conflagration
of the gilded Safavid conurbation
where geometric and mathematical zillij tiles in
blinding cosmological landscapes
made you look the gilded buffoon.
And I had to laugh at the arrogant impossibility:
“Esfahan is half of the world”

(…and there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree…)

For though Shah, Abbas
you were first the Shi’ite potentate
and I knew your family tree.
Death to all who did
not sanctify the meaning of Muharram
or beseech the Hidden Imam
by scourging backs to blood meat supplication.
Such impeccable Western revulsion:
Where could Beauty possibly fit
in such sanguinary marinade?

(A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!)

But ever the ravenous pilgrim
There came a time
Although it now seems
long ago
long ago
When I had to behold you
When I had to know
If beauty could
congeal in blood.

At the foot of Hasht Behesht
The Palace of Eight Heavens
Blinded
Ravished
Spellbound
Breathless
vibrato
tremors
O’er stucco kufic supplications
To Allah and His Prophet
And all the Blessed that followed.

Oh, how
Your tiled Peacocks and Your Angels
Devoured me
There in
the brilliance
of sun-shattering portals
pendiment miracles
achingly etched archings

Drenched by
your blood-soaked beauties
that would ne’er
set me free.

Now time’s passage
caresses my numbered days
and soft! Lone the moonless vista
mocks my buried heart.

But there is breath
of mystic verdancy
and on holy dread
of nights of fire
I dream, Oh I dream…

(Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

…And on her dulcimer
she played…)

Oh my carnivore lover
Such insatiable splendor
….I return
I return…
to impress infinities
of such succulent ecstasies

Come
Take
One
We
Embrace me
Consume me
Isfahan.

2008-12-17T16:12:00.001-08:00

Tuesday Morning

Mist on silver glass
The anonymity
Of ritual
Ablution.

Much as
Automatic aftermath
Of soon forgotten lover.

Dark and brimming
China cup
Censer
Swirls
Prayered palm psalm
In promise steam
As sun streams
Through aspen leaves
Filling black coffee
With stars.

In full gallop, joyously akimbo
I gather incrementals
Of doing and being
Feeling
Everyone
Emerge
From the cisterns
Of themselves.

Automotive interrogations
Re-commence.
Scribbling
In their notebooks
Of raindrops
To be avoided
At all cost
Much as rumors
Of cathedral
Pine.

2008-12-17T16:09:00.001-08:00

The Muse
for Duane Locke

The animus of your pen, visage beheld, rivulet images, sepia, effluence of strophes, claret. Metaphysic lily pads impulse siren-straddling prosodic canals within your silted genius. Melisande to your Pelleas by curve of cheek, the importunate finger, frisson of tonsorial disarray, in 8X11 disturbance of ethers. The mighty bard asea in glossed montage gives way to Calliope, Thalia, Erato, Melpomene opening the door shrine wide to whatever comes, whatever comes…

Est est est, held fast, a balm for civilization of monstrosities, diaphanous saffron prorogue. Here is my body so contrary to au courant opinion in my terrestrial mysticism, stripping the parlor of its veneer of lies, dissembling your shadowed linguistic constitutivisms and contortisms, capturing leaf in the bosom of my web.
Words ARE passion flowers.

2008-12-17T16:07:00.000-08:00

morning near Cape May

There is a Hopper print
in a rental house
near Cape May.

Strangely
it replicates
the very place
in which it resides.

Soft sun
on a sun-blanched
deck of non-description.
Neither invite, nor rebuff
just there.

And so I walk through tidal pools at five AM.
The vast expanse of the Atlantic does not
assail, then.
And no ships appear on the horizon
With promise of rich spice adventure
and other illusions.

Sandpipers skittle dance to quivers of froth.
Droplet parapets of yore are pregnably dissolved.
And communities of hours are a knee-bend away.

sand crabs prowl most fruitfully
grand minnow ballabile
mermaid slippers immodestly saunter
an urchin begs for solitude

my moveable molluscan feast…
ah Dave, there’s your starfish!

Everything bears this imprint of impermanence.
Each footfall carried away in murmur of foam.

And like every child I scour
the shore for the special ones ~

mother-of-pearl teasing
the perfect black fan
a tangerine surprise.

When the brine is washed off
You will lose your patina.
But now you are perfect.
Full ripened dead seashells
Not a shard in the lot.

It is time for black coffee
and the chattings of morning.

I walk past the Hopper
cupping my wealth
a breeze kiss on bare leg
it will be warmer today.

2008-12-17T16:06:00.000-08:00

Charleston, WV

Who could resist you?
Oh, how you tantalized

Your threadbare imprecations
your hemp heavy knots
The verdant cilice
of homespun pathos…

…Cloaking every resolution
to leave you.

My cankerous courtesan
Charlot/vagabunt

My mutant genius
staving every metaphor
of ‘wild ‘n wonderful’ filth.
Until today.

Treasures stacked in
carnivorous remembrance
filling
rented yellow truck, and

…it all spills out…

Yes,
more flea than tabby
runt of the litter.
You memorized my ankles
with such fantastic contortions
how could I move without hurting you?
Purring such sweet rumbled nothings
small wonder
I never felt claws.

Your vermin besotted hillsides
of fallow promise
and such lush lies
are behind me now
says my rearview mirror

And ancient homespun
like dead kittens
and leprodic tramps
will ball into dust,
and
someday, one day
will
blow away.

2008-12-17T16:05:00.001-08:00

Clinic

Porcelain fleur-de-lys
Blemish
blue splash archway
of routinized indignity.

Quaking
In
The
Wraith.

Plastic paneled
Calcified,
Barnacled
Inertia
Mocks the scribbled
Pathos of my pain-soaked
Particulars
as
Drops of spit foam
Fleck the shoreline
Of cheap orange lips

With every quavered
Signature
On ream upon ream
Of aborted humanity.

"He will see you now."

White walls, white floors
Dilate
Paper coated nudities
Billowing
In gunmetal gusts
of neglect.
Each script, a phial
Of portioned potent
suppliant
insignificance

Yet to come.

2008-12-17T16:00:00.001-08:00

Amour et Capitalisme: The Valentine's Day Poem

Don't get me wrong
Magic. Moment. Arcing high, high, higher
Trailing stardust, bending moonbeams, scorching time
Beyond everyone, everything
Save us
Save now.

Oh yes… Oh so….

So tonight, This Night
Weave your shanties to the sirens of opalescent flesh,
salted tips of tongue,
and foraged recesses of seared, shared souls.

Sing, Poets, Sing,
If not you, then who?
If not you, then Hallmark…

Yes.

There must be celebration.
There must be commemoration
There must be punctuation.
But must there be capitulation?

Tonight a million sweetheart roses will be tenderly arranged, just so
And acres of chocolate strawberries softly nibbled in sweet rotation
Heart shaped pendants will kindle torrents of tear soaked kisses
And proclamations of 'forever' will deafen the Gods.

But after the flowers die, and the fruit falls off the vine
And the diamond seems 'just a chip'.
And routine claims passion.
And dry pecks are hastily swapped at half opened doors
And passion resumes its bi-weekly schedule

When the cherubs and lace are 75% off
On clearance.
Making way for shamrocks and leprechauns
And bunnies and baskets galore.
Tell me, Poets. Tell me.
Please.
Then ---

Where is the Love?

2008-12-17T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Toothache

Odours of cloves
frescoes the corridors
of my pained passage.
Like touch of Jesus
a tongued impress
on condemned incisor

changes nothing.

Flecks of notions
speckle existentialist obscura
as
Textual glosses
of inspiration dwindle
into simulation
of a simulation.

Vicodin miasma
imbues vapours of bleached
cream of wheat
heat
with metaphoric potency
of enameled detrium.

2008-12-17T15:57:00.002-08:00

Autumn Eve

Asthmatic wind
On the loose skin
Of an aged neck
On this monochrome
Day of
Abandoned things
Crying out
For Touching

As
Nude stone girls
Blithely
Frolic
In stagnant
Grey water.

Like tumbleweeds
Crenellated newspapers
Flounder in
Yesterday's
Urgencies
Down lonely, sodden
Streets.

While threadbare
Tabby slithers
Between
The remnant chassis.

This cloak of endings
Enfolds in
Dank dusk
Ease
Soft
In want
Of peopled
Dreams.

2008-12-17T15:57:00.001-08:00

World Geometry

Disembodied midnight
Obsolescence of obscenities
Happy Jesus eBay bargain
Another tango
Of political remorse.

I believe in the sky
Elongated rectangles
In mottled, motley hues.
And trapezoids of geese
Protracting necks to
Cry their course
Of Pythagorean perfection.
The concrete rhombus
Offering rooms by the hour
Gives familiar compass
To inane vagaries.

"Us" is not a polygon
And therefore does not fit
In a universe
Of perfectly closed figures
So perfectly encased
In the singular
circumference
Of cyclic circular time.

2008-12-17T15:54:00.000-08:00

Fairy tales can come true…

Goodbye, Snow White
the Prince can't make it

I'm afraid

will never climb into your
glass box

Cheer up, Kid
maggots don't mind

unhappy endings.

2008-12-17T11:38:00.000-08:00

Smote

Pregnant
with shatterings

ochre clouds

annul

the scripted wishes
of another starless midnight
Misted trellis
of fresh killed vows
and passions’
particulates

Lift up
new morn
Sobs

into the
billows
of
Cimmerian
shroud.

The inevitable
melding.

Slate sky
aerugo dreams.

The graphite canopy
of immolated soul.

2008-12-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

… frémissement un coeur, qu'on afflige…

Time
Distance
The remarkable capacity of the human mind to eradicate
what is most dear
will never separate us.

You cup my chin.
My left hand bends softly around your exquisite neck
as it has done

Since that very first time…

Fingertips dig deep into your hollows of response
Caressing without mercy
The fibers of my whirlwind wand lay firmly on
your belly.
Tense, taut, quiverring in expectation
The aching gyre
Your liquid sonorous sobs
We are one again.
We begin.

Tear, tug, jerk,
whimper

scordatura
arco, arco, détaché, collé

portato, tenuto,

legatissimo,
legatissimo

legatissimo

The moans of Saint-Saëns shatter
the darkened linden trees
at the feet of entombed lovers
undulating in their shrouds…
screaming
at the voracious insatiability
of renewal
of our union.

Laughing
at the helpless penetration of my
peau de chagrin.

And,
as ever
whenever

I lie you down.

‘like a monstrance
(Mon ostensoir)

your memory
(Ton souvenir)

steeps a muted body
sheaths its mottled soul.

2008-12-17T11:05:00.000-08:00

Sublunary Curse

You do not exist.

Sweet ashen maquillage.
Do you remember the day
I brought you home in that

silly

pewter

ossuary?

Burying fingers deep, coating cheekbones
in precious powdered
Beloved
bone, flesh and soul.

The day before we let you set sail
to dance forever with Zephyros’ wildness
to dwell as you willed with Nethun’s children.
Phantasm of Nepenthe.

Where are you now, my Symmetrical Companion?
My purples gone, bereft of opalescent nights.

You are no longer you.

When you had a face
and a death date
and I scratched my face
in blood streaks to embed the saline rawness
and hurled whatever touched my belly into any
willing receptacle
and I traced your picture so ritually, in imprint
ravaged glass…

Then you existed.
Then you were dead.

All those votive offerings
of celebate convulsion.
Evidencing to all
that my essence
the spearhead of my womanhood
was defined by your absence.

Such secure agony.
Oh, the ever fixed mark.
As stiff twin compasses
were two.

My ebon broaches. pomanders, ropes of pearls,
my night silk farthingales
The glorious regalia of my widowhood
does not become me now…

Oh yes,
I had it all figured out
Breath by breath till surcease
of breath.

Yes, the primal sympathy
which having been … must ever be … me.
Yes, the soothing thoughts
that spring out of unending human suffering…

But now grief abates and “you” assume new form
and I know no matter how hard I press the accelerator
I shall
never reach anything that connects you to me
and ...

... Goddamn it

I will swerve
before the consummational merging
of steel and concrete wall.

Gone …
… are the ‘lamb white days’
of ‘green and golden’ existence
past tense.

I could live with a memory.
I could live as a widow.

I have no referent for need.
I have no referent for wanting to be
free of delectably suffocating solitude.

Now,
I want “you.”
And I don’t know who you are.
Oh, I am assaulted by litanies of images
gyrating, taunting, devouring remnants
of the surety of self.
Because I have again ‘eyes, lips, hands to miss’
and I yearn again for dull sublunary lovers love.

I want to live with phantoms.
I know where and how they dwell.
I want my widow’s weeds back.
I want to be that imaginary axis of two twined compasses
forever spinning en pointe
spiraled memory eternal
Nibbana’s tintinnabulations.

I do not want to know I have lips
and loins.
I want to weep over what I have lost
not what I cannot NOT imagine
not what I cannot bear.

You are no longer “you”.
I am no longer “me”.

2008-12-17T11:01:00.000-08:00

voyage

... in the absence of light
I reach out to the dim
faint, fading
evanescence
of a midnight star.
cold light.
stark.
Soft shivers
run their course.

this haunting division
light from light
the death of the light
aborts time
stills
new life.

leaving imprints
in the shadows ...

2008-12-17T11:00:00.001-08:00

Femicide

Henna tattooed
Kohl rimmed
Sun burnished
It was permitted.
The goat hide slid.
Whisking in
fluent chador
so
impeccably cloaked
For the black place.

In fresh slaughter stench
and swelling ululations
I tasted blood intensity
hovering at the cusp
of Berberophone womanhood.

The phalanx of the gnarled Mother ones
Swirling like gnats in a dust swollen myth
Billowing in sunless effusion
as leaden-black snowflakes
Settling throughout the gut-hewn hut
of scorched dust
and yogurt billage.
Anointed by fresh vomit.

In breath-stippled syncopation
We moved to the scream strewn straw.

… three scorpions scampered …
Over frozen hemp sandals
on crucified soles and
Western obtundent eyes.
Benumbed blankness.
Feigning understanding.
While obsidian cataracts
damned.

Oh, the screaming had never abated.
For her mother
For the fervid hands that bound her
For the storm of black snowflakes
That pried her innocent labia
While the Ancient One
Flicked bone skewer
Criss-cross, Criss-cross
The sacred whet stone.
I thought it would be quick
Like some cutting room castoff bit
of documentarian vagaries.
But no.
It was not.
…such a tiny clitoris…

And with each deft puncture of
That
Pearlescent
Infant Vagina
New shrieks were born.

From what can neither be forgiven
Nor forgotten.

Witness
‘Scholar’
Field researching
Accomplice.

Agonistes mistress
Tortured unto death.

2008-12-17T10:55:00.000-08:00

Surviving Relatives: for Sharon Olds

I. I put The Father back on the shelf. Feeling violation in
the bobbing public acknowledgements of the chin
next to me, buried deep in her copy of the plain beige
text.
... sensing the certainty of fresh incineration,
the doubtless torment of your words, I left
the slim bookshop steeped in literati musk.

Safe abed, husband to my right.
I gazed at the closed copy of your earliest words, at balance
in open palm:
Glossy, fire red cover
Black gothic title
Your white Garamond name.

II. The first poem that touched all
the hollows and swells of my emergent I
was culled by Woman, crafted of women
And while I did not yet know the full
meaning of unforgettable abortions, I, too,
had heard "those voices of the wind."

She was flame and she was knife and she was
rocking chair, riding soft, on an August porch.
Black, fierce, woman sobs hurled to the air, to the
Ashes, to those who could pause to listen. She was The
Mother I never had, and the image for my own soul,
still in the making.

III. In the broken house, I began speaking with other poets, often,
all the time. I turned my back to Whitman's
Everyman and the world splayed according to
Eliot. I became intimate with Poe's caress of sound,
and embodiment of beautiful fear. I let Thomas'
Welch-flecked cadenzas spill all over, brim to the very
top of my Bronx teenaged room.

But where, I wondered, were the women? I searched and
I strained. I pushed out of Plath's suffocating Bell-Jar
and pushed against Sexton's awful upward stroking. They
violated my immunity and touched my violations.
Besides, they telegraphed their endings.
A decade further on, I still stayed to the path of
mindless meanderings, in flight from the death-grip
of a murdered childhood.

IV. I found, in time, new voices. The steel tongued
warrior songs of born-again victims.
Black, lesbian, female screams and shouts. Parker, Hooks and
Lorde, who took up the stiletto, giving form and incantation --
Slaying social and self hates in incising tongues and
irrepressible images. I cleaved to them, moving behind, now towards,
ever nearing, even when pale, man-centric, raw pieces
of me, might not all be welcome.

Then we met, though you did not know it.
Now you do. After all, this is your poem.
Kinnell offered you his book, the new one,
the one with iridescent Garamond lettering
on Gallic landscape (by Klimt). A good book,
with soft words, a fine book.
But this is your poem.

V. Satan Says so much. Doesn't He?
Everyday. He Speaks. Your father's heaping,
heavy body, studded with bile and waste, hurled
me back to other places, sites of distant, deliberate,
time, sites of desecrated 'lamb-white,
mustard seed, green and golden' impress.
I tried to dismiss you -- to fight the life grip of your
paged heart. Your brutal exaltations. Your gratuitous vulgarity.
‘a veritable thesaurus of filth, a litany of genitalia.’

But your truth impaled denial Exquisite, anguished
written communion drew me into the vortex of
ravaged souls. Yours and mine, now joined.
And from that union, I wanted out. I closed you quickly and
often. I even tried in quiet time to re-edit you.
But the siren would not be silenced.

VI. So having said all this. Having
shared all this, having partaken in this
ritual, the formalities of introduction.
I have something to say, to share with you.

Just as you are most welcome to embrace and eviscerate
these words, I will tell you frankly, that in That
Year you discovered your name -- as Jew, as survivor,
in that moment of impoverishment and birth, you left
something out, sold us both short. For, as you well
know, when the prison guard, the tormentor is your
God and your guardian. It is much worse

Than the space spanned in that last stanza, in the
space between Auschwitz and armistice, there is,
as Satan knows, as you know, as I know, a hideous
abyss. You cannot rage as collectivity in your
barracked cells, in the dignity of your
emaciation with your disemboweled brethren,
rocking and cradling a dying parent.

You cannot wear your yellow star, your pink triangle, with secret pride,
if Hell and Home and Home and Hell are one.
And your Goebbels is your world -- both Mother and
The Father.

2008-12-15T18:43:00.000-08:00

Bed & Breakfast

Victorian bouquets:
Petals of oiseaux, jaquemar,
Eau de nil
Dapple antique eiderdown
In assaultive
mackling
On cockcrow myopia.

Grecian valence frames
Perfectly positioned scenic wonder
awash in London Grey gust
of modernity’s befoulment

…nary a footnote
in brochured fineprint...

Of Indian Summer
Saturday Getaway.

Varnished and burnished
Undulations of walnut balustrade
Await grandeur frenzied
morning hoard
Inhalations.

Innkeeper’s lacquer and clatter.
Fresh bun salver/lilac doilies
Lalique saucered cups
Brim and steam
Rendering hasty departures
From sunrise
Jacuzzi delectations.

Post matinal satiation
Hedgerow impeccability
invites
Vaporous meanderings
Of routinized reflection.

In the distance…

Beyond the boundaries
Of propriety
An ancient evergreen
Impales manicured
Perfection
Shattering scansion
Of manicured lawn
And architectural immaculata.

Losing myself…

I digress
Trailing
soft earth path
‘Neath the belly
Of ancient
forgotten
Pine.
In approach
The delusion of assembled
Natural happenstance
Shapeshifts into upright slabs
Of fragmented bleached alabaster
Cambered and cruciform stelae
Cracked Cornish crosses
Adrift in weedy integument.
…in memento mori…
Aged bas-relief proclamations
Crying out for notice:

I lived
I was

Duly noted, save
this moment
this day
By industrious puff-tufted
Woodpecker
And ever shadowy
Aeolian kiss.

In a wilderness
Of catacombed questions
effusing from
Tintype/colllodian
phantasmic Swirling
Synaptic trails
To
Imagistic impress…

…Parlor portraiture of customary
Impassiveness.
Seated mother in
Organdy peplum finery
The
Tonsorially flawless chignon
Cradling preoccupied
Baptismal babe
A
Sailor suited shaver
Stolidly at the bulwark
Of kith and kin flank
Dundreary whiskered
Pater Familias…

The thirst of ripened life long quenched.
No more the verdant sommersault of innocent abandon.
No more begging for the baffled coin, the clink of pride.
No more copulations of old, deluded seeking.
No more straying through funereal gravel of the labyrinth.
Just complete silence.
Empurpled drippings of unfulfilled resurrection?

I am deeply moved.

Turbidly
Arising from
Ruminant crouch
Dandelions graze
Solitary wayfarer
Of insanable expanse
Ever receding
By the quickening footfall
Into
Immemorial mist…
Ever more
Striding the shallows
Of mortal coil thought.
Vitalizing
Eternal erasure
Of even faintest lamentation.

In the distance…

Polychrome Queen Anne gables
Pierce
Sudden sunless sky.
As
Whispers of fresh brown bread
And pumpkin soup
Impel needful cantered pace.

The loping affirmation
Of human
Typicality.

2008-12-15T18:40:00.000-08:00

Tinted Steam

Most
Holy
Gravel

I suckle pebbles
As Communion Wafers
Wanting so desperately
To Believe.

Hearing imprint
On fresh crushed
Rock
A Courante of Hawks
Deliriously
Cavort
In Cherubim
Anticipation.
I treat them
As the Children
They are:
“Not today, not today.”

How could
I tell them
That their Dearest
Companion
Is bereft of tomorrows…

The Lowering Sun
Speckles
Our Lake
In Dragonfly
Flickerings
of Prismatic
Bedazzlement…

…like that day at the Tate

Your Sapphire Eyes
Brimming
When you thought
I couldn’t see.
Giddy
In our riches
Of day old bread, flat cheddar,
£2 wine
Tugging at each other

As Toddlers
At Disneyland…

… Such Succulent
Mesmerizing
Cellophane
Impress
Intangible, Tactile
Luminescent
Interminglings
Of
Nature’s
Violence
In Wake of
Human
Violation.

‘Shade and Darkness’
Heartbreak
Of Creator’s
Vendetta

Sfumato ‘Petworth’
Intimations
Of Glistening
Neglect

‘’Snowstorm’ Chiaroscuro
Of Blinding
Ferocity.

We left in the Quiet
Enjoinment
Of Reverential
Prayer Clasp
And the Whispered
Exhalation
Of Freshly Blessed
Smile…
…That remained
Till
Last Breath
Severance.

… Now
Feeling
Your Passage
Suffuse
Without/within
Aloft as
You Beam
In wafts
Of Sunset Kiss.

How you patiently await,
My Love.

As I endure the decades
In granule measure.

Awash
In
Tinted Steam…

2008-12-15T18:37:00.000-08:00

Uncle Edgar

Ever
Baltimore’s
Own
Gutter
Splayed

Marinade

Torrential excreta
&
Booze-sopped
Rot.

‘Arrogant, reprobate
Godforsaken
Beggarly’
Execration
Of
‘Hideous
Mortification’

How could I know?
In my Catholic
Pleated
Adulation

That the Throbbing
Derangement
Of
Amaranthine Palpation

That the Ebon
Plumaged
Accusation
Quaffing
Sanity/Soul
Brew

That Detested
Fortunato
Ever
Questing
Amontillado

That all
That
All

Were You.

In the Sepulchre
Miasma
Of
The Resounding
Sounding
Seas

Where Mediocrity
& Genius

Bob and Weave
Bob and Weave

We Dissever
Evermore
Beyond the
Compass

Cleaved.

But at
Eventide
I lay down my pride

Gobbling
Kaleidoscopic
Ampoules
Savoring
Swallow
&
Glide.

Staving Unhallowed
Dominion
As
Mephistophelean
Bride.

Seizing
Hound of Usher
By the Throat
To
Engrave
&
Inscribe.

Yes,
Your
Ever-lasting
Torment
Is Kindred
Close
Betide.

And the Angels Sob
As Vermin Fangs
In Human Gore,
Imbued.

Eternal Travelers
Of Valley Shadow
Where Demons Pillage
& Denude

Where Horror rakes the Dawn
And Soundless Screams are Born
Where Joy is ‘ere Foresworn
And Adamantine Breath, Be

Mourned.

Two Ravaged Lives
Bestrewn.

Prophetic sounds … arise forever
From Us, and from

all Ruin …

2008-12-15T18:35:00.000-08:00

Killer Instinct (for A.D.Hitchin)

Bastard entomon.

I curse you, I detest you.
I dream your disembowelment.

Just the thought of your
Writhing
Flailing
Pathos
Graspings for last breath Thread.
Feeds my
Bloodlust.

O rapture!

I found you
Wounded
In
Thoracic
Convulsion.

And I knew:
Here…
Now.

How invidiously I seduced You
To accompany Me
To the Cistern
Of Damnation.
And then…

(Pulsation quickens from Cantor to Gallop
Breath stipples to Delicious Orgasmic Ripplings)

I pulled the chain.

Swirling and twirling in the
Suctioning gyre.

O I flushed, yes I flushed!
Watching you thrust
your stinger mightily
…as a Roman tribune
Surrounded by a circlet of iron Pagan blades
Till Final, Fatal
Plunge.

I could not bear to Honor you,
But I could not Escape the imprint
Desperation
Of your drowning Death Throes
And the Magnitude of
My Delight…

…Gacy, Dahmer, Bundy
Must have resembled
My Reflection
In the wake
Of each
Fresh Kill.

So truly
Was there a
d
i
f
f
e
r
e
n
c
e
?

I pondered long and hard
F i f t e e n minutes
Of Hell on Earth.

Only disturbed by the Brush
Of Silken Filament
Guide wire to woven
Filigree…

…And Big, Fat Mama
Sweet, Juicy Arachnopod
Kindles neonatal

Salivation.