Subtraction

Aug 26 2019

A sculptor in stone

works by subtraction,

chiselling away

sanding down.

Or forms with clay,

warm hands

in cool wetness,

adding, shaping

arresting by fire.

Or the way a forest flourishes,

nascent trees taking root

in fallen logs

subsumed by earth.

We think of memory

as performance art;

as if we could revisit the past,

acting it out

infallibly.

Like souvenirs on a shelf

collecting dust,

instead of confabulation

made even more fabulous.

But we neglect the art of forgetting,

the blank canvas

the letting go.

The gift to oneself

of forgiving others,

the hard-won freedom

of forgiving yourself.

How hard we work

to keep the past alive,

the kiln of memory

that presumes to immortalize

while actually turning to shards.

And the fine art of forgetfulness,

purified

in a crucible of fire

and left to burn itself out.

The baggage that burdens us,

as impenetrable, and overgrown

as a forest grown old,

its exhausted soil replenished

new shoots exposed to light.

There must be a reason evolution made us forgetful.

It's not that the human brain is incapable of nearly perfect episodic (or autobiographical) memory. Because there are rare people with a condition called “hyperthymesia”: give them a date, any date, and they can recall almost everything; from the weather, to what they had for breakfast that day. A great party trick, but a terrible burden: nothing can be let go, everything must be relived; even the horrible events, in all their original intensity.

We not only forget, we remember imperfectly. Because every time a memory is called up to consciousness, it gets altered: by our current state of mind, by events that have occurred since, by whatever context in which it is newly processed. So memory is indeed a slippery thing, unreliable and incomplete.

Which is why we mostly wish we could remember more perfectly. But there is good reason for forgetting. We need to clear space. We need to let go of baggage. We need to cleanse memories that have become contaminated. For example, in PTSD, where memory persecutes its sufferers. Or when memory keeps us too attached to the past – with all its regret, recrimination, shame, and guilt – when we would be far better off letting go. Sometimes, you need to forget to forgive. And forgiveness is a great gift: to the forgiven, sure; but mostly to oneself.

The Lives of Dogs and Men

August 22 2019

A white plastic cone

encloses her head.

Like a megaphone on legs

she stumbles about, pointing randomly

emitting insistent little whines.

And gazes out pathetically

with a confused accusing look.

In the fatalistic way

of dumb animals,

adjusting to circumstance

with stoic acceptance.

But also questioning

why I haven't made it better

as I've always done before;

when she was quilled, and suffering

or tired and hungry

or in need of love.

Like a sloppy drunk

my lithe athletic dog

is pin-balling around,

crashing into table legs and banisters

hanging-up on doors.

Then dropping down in bed

with the world-weary sigh

of the doggedly resigned.

Isn't this

how we all go through life,

pummelled by circumstance

both inexplicable

and beyond our control?

But by living in the moment

she has saved herself.

While we ruminate, speculate

pick away at scabs.

Imagine boot-strapping ourselves;

the essential human conceit

that with enough agency and will

we can master our fate.

She arrived at the vet,

then seconds later, it must have seemed

awakened groggily

constrained and in pain.

Claustrophobic, in this white plastic shell,

with its vaguely chemical smell

and tightly cinched collar.

But such are the mysteries

this existence brings

to the lives of dogs and men.

Like a sudden awakening

to bright fluorescent lights

and strangers hovering

in some cold clinical space.

Is this how it felt

when we took our first breath?

And does the end come

like being put to sleep?

Ours, who are too aware of death,

and hers

in all its blissful naivete?

And are we just as blind

bumbling through life?

Not just the arrogance of youth

but the blinkered wisdom

of hard old men,

the physical limits

of sight and sound and smell?

Our vision constricted, just like hers,

oblivious

to how much we fail to see

the crucial truths we miss.

Outlier

Aug 16 2019

Mid-August

and I couldn't help but notice

a sprinkling of yellowed leaves

along the densely wooded shore.

It seems unfair, this portent of autumn

in our too short summers

that seem to end before they've begun.

Fall approaching
and I'm still looking forward

to that deliriously bone-sapping scorcher,

when you can barely move for the heat

and air is too heavy to breathe

and simply shifting around in your seat

has you in a sweat.

But this is the resilience

that diversity confers  —

the outlier leaf

turning unnaturally early,

the durable one

that persists through fall.

Nature prepares herself

for whatever calamity happens;
adapting

to infestation and weather

the malignant presence of man.

So if uniformity is death

difference is strength.

Like the straggler, we also saw.

A gaggle of healthy ducklings

paddling furiously after their mother

as our lone canoe approached.

Except for one,

who remained on a small glistening rock

surrounded by water

intently watching us.

A singular bird

who is either stupid or slow

or curious and brave.

Reassuring, in a way

for those who don't fit in.

That we are nature's advance scouts,

out testing the margins

and carrying the seeds of survival

whatever change transpires.

Out paddling with the pups again, after a few days of unwelcome weather. I found myself a bit demoralized, seeing that scattering of yellowed leaves. But also reassured when we encountered a big brood of healthy ducklings: a 2^nd clutch this summer, which tells me that the lake is healthy, and that good mothers count for a lot. There was also a rinsed-clean rainbow – something I haven't seen in forever – arcing through the sky as the sun set at our back and the storm clouds cleared.

I somehow managed to shoehorn the first two into a poem. I guess the rainbow – really, an inexcusable cliche anyway – will have to wait for inspiration.

Paleontologists have identified a population bottleneck near the beginning of human evolution when our number was reduced to as low as 100 individuals. We big-brained home sapiens alive today owe our existence to those outliers: the ones endowed with some quirk of body or mind that allowed them to survive some environmental catastrophe. It is this great reserve of diversity, hidden in our recessive genes, that has allowed our line to carry on – no matter what.

The poem mentions “the malignant presence of man”: once again, I couldn't help my essential misanthropy coming through! I have little doubt our species will survive anthropogenic climate change, as unprecedented in speed and scope as it is. But I certainly have my doubts as to whether our civilization will. Culture, I suspect, is not nearly as durable as nature.

Science Fiction

August 5 2019

I loved science fiction, as a child,

when it went unsaid

that the world would get better

    ...or at least in the fullness of time.

And then we went to the moon

thought flying cars would be next,

and got computers in our pockets

that let us hear what we wanted said.

But still, the wars went on.

And from the carnage of Pol Pot

to Biafra/Rwanda/Myanmar

the genocides kept happening

as we comfortably looked away.

So that now

young men are saluting like Nazis

and courtesy is collapsing

and southern preachers are ranting

about God and guns and sex;

their plump pink faces

beaded with sweat

as the collection plate is passed.

How they smirk at global warming

so confident in their Lord,

who gave unto us dominion

and wouldn't destroy His creation

or lead us into death.

I write this

after 31 died

at the hands of violent racists,

in the land of the free

where guns are freely obtained.

And where I feel increasingly numb

at another such atrocity,

the tired litany

of thoughts and prayers and blame.

In a time

when Trump defiles the White House

and the left competes to be pure

and the right persists in obstructing

for tribalism and money,

a smugly smiling Mitch McConnell

summing up our cynical age.

Meanwhile, the planet burns

and the seas will soon engulf us,

the lethal result

of inertia, denial, greed.

Of our criminal inaction

as we let our phones distract us

and life go seamlessly on,

incrementally simmering

like the slowly boiling frog.

While those who care

feel crushed by despair,

the powerlessness of one.

Yes, we have become more aware

of what makes the good life

and how our fate is shared;

that happiness

is not about wealth,

and it took much more

than the self-made man

to really make himself.

Nevertheless

the fiction never came true,

and despite our dazzling cleverness

we have failed to better ourselves.

So 50 years from Woodstock

the hippies are mostly dead

and the poor are no less desperate

and the earth is under stress

as it's never been before.

Science helped get us here.

But technology

cannot change human nature,

and if character is destiny

then our fate is painfully clear.

A blurb seems superfluous here. Because the poem speaks for itself.

Perhaps even more, just the fact that is was written. Because I don't really approve of political poems, and think arguments like these are best made in prose: in essays and articles and self-indulgent rants. So to write such a poem betrays my deep frustration, my feelings of utter impotence, my exasperation at seeing everything repeat without any real change.

The immediate impetus for this was day in which 20 were killed in a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, and another 9 at a shooting at a bar in Dayton. Countless more were wounded. I know I have to be specific about these two incidents. Because otherwise, with so many mass killings and gun deaths in the US, a curious reader would have to cross reference by date to recall them. We have become inured to such events: numb, desensitized, forgetful. They all meld together: the same lame appeals to thoughts and prayers; the same inaction wrt to gun laws; the same denial of the dangers of right wing extremism (not to mention how it has been enabled by a despicable President and his own spineless enablers). ...You see, this is more satisfying in prose!

Parkette

Aug 3 2019

Long days, in August,

and after a good rain

the grass is lush,

a deep saturated green.

Especially in this descending sun;

how it catches the light

and seems to incandesce,

a luminous jewel

amidst the shadows

that will soon snuff it out.

Soft, under bare feet,

broad succulent leaves

in well-aerated soil

still spongy from rain.

Like a cool balm

to my over-heated skin,

the well-manicured lawn

of this small parkette

is a sanctuary

amidst encroaching city streets,

their asphalt and concrete

radiating the accumulated heat

of a long summer day.

The smell of fresh-cut grass

intoxicates me.

Combined with the 2-stroke machine,
its volatile exhaust

gassing-off 

and transporting me back to childhood,

mowing the lawn, in late afternoon.

The small engine rattle

like soothing ballast

to habituated ears.

And then the silence

that never fails to startle

when the machine abruptly stops.

The loudness you get

from the absence of sound.

It is twilight, now

and the grass is a darker shade of green.

Sparkling

with perfect spheres of dew,

a tiny drop

clinging to each blade.

Circling Back

July 15 2019

If the goal of meditation is to still the mind

I would rather busy myself.

To let my mind wander

as it does when I walk,

the body like a metronome

as step follows step

and thoughts run free as jazz.

The stream of consciousness

that listens closely to itself.

That plays by ear,

intuitive, and improvised.

Is free to digress

but also formalized,

the structured score

the disciplined habit of thought.

The propulsive beat

and gut response,

scat, riff, bebop

cool, swinging, hot.

And that final held note,

as if lingering on air

when the music stops.

How many poems

have come to me

trudging through the woods,

reassured

that the parts I will forget

are not worth remembering?

We are built for it,

the walking animal

who has spread to the ends of the earth

and is no less restless now.

It has been 50 years

since the first man

left the gravity of earth

and saw the planet whole,

a blue and green sphere

in the blackness of space.

Since the first man

walked on the moon

and left his footprints there.

Still perfectly intact,

pressed

into fine-grained sand

in the starkly angled light.

While the bright stars and stripes,

has become tattered and dulled,

the merciless power

of unfiltered sun

on man-made material.

And the landing stage

like a squat metallic bug

propped on splayed spider-legs

remains where we abandoned it,

an alien thing

stranded for good.

The Sea of Tranquility,

so ironically named

in a century preoccupied

with genocide and war.

They went all the way to the moon

only to take a walk,

trampling, rambling, sauntering

looking up at earth.

I walk

under a full moon

on a clear summer night.

A man alone

instead of the legions it took

to conceive

construct

and launch,

then bring them home.

Safe, half a century on

in this soft silver light

from the deadly contingencies

and countless might-have-beens

that somehow all went right.

But still, the same as me

the first man walked

and circled back

and left his mark.

The same slow steady gait

that took us out of Africa

and then into space.

Did he, too, listen to the silent thoughts

that play like jazz,

bouncing about

like a giddy child

on that first moon walk?

When the 3 lbs

of gelatinous matter

in the skull's black box

are free to improvise,

expanding out

to fill the universe.

Or, with an ear cocked close

probe inward.

I forgot about the moon landing 50 years ago this month. But it's been all over TV, and I've been sitting rapt, watching the archival footage I never saw on the small black and white TV that was set up in the dining hall of the summer camp I attended, squinting over the heads of the tired but exuberant crowd, well past our regular bedtime. I was 14 in 1969.

I notice the anachronisms: almost all men, most young and white, in shirts and ties, many smoking cigarettes and pipes. But it feels contemporary, as well. Because to me, the cars seems so familiar I find myself forgetting how far in the past this was. And because people do not change, even if fashion does. And because the technology still looks impressive, the buildings modern, the quality of the film immaculate. Not just immaculate, but stunning in how comprehensive it is: how they documented every aspect of this great adventure, clearly so very conscious of their place in history. Which reminds me, as well, of the Cold War, the reason for the moon shot in the first place: how secretive the Communists were, afraid the world might see them fail; and how open and fearless the Americans were, sharing their triumph -- and potential failure -- with all mankind.

It was the same year as Woodstock, which has also been on TV. Watching part of that long documentary film, I am reminded not only of the great music, but of the anti-war protesters and assassinations and the 60s counter-culture that was so at odds with the Cape Canaveral of Apollo. Of the of the idealism and hedonism and changelessness of youth, and of the self-importance of “now”. Of all those beautiful young men and women, all lithe and tanned and hip, who must now be in their 70s.

I wanted to write a poem about Apollo 11, but then thought that the things I wanted to say lent themselves more to prose. At the same time, I've been encountering a lot of articles about walking: reflections on walking and the role it played for some of the great figures of literature; walking as a political act that stubbornly rebuts the modern exigencies of speed and convenience and productivity; the humility of being in nature, the need for unstructured thought, and walking as a form of meditation.

So I started to write, when halfway through I recalled the image of Neil Armstrong's boot-print on the moon. So much technology, collective effort, blood and treasure, and human ingenuity; and all of it for the sake of a man taking a walk on the moon. Which is really all that was done when he and Buzz Aldrin got there. Sure, there were some obligatory scientific experiments, left to run by themselves. There was the flag, a necessary gesture of nationalism to appease the politicians. There were the rocks they brought back, that told us whatever it is rocks have to say. But mostly, it was that exhilarating walk, as well as the tell-tale footprints that will remain on the moon's rugged surface, unchanged for millennia.