For Ned, poet who lives in Santa Rosa...

[liaM]

(Found, just now.. on FB!)

POETS IN AMERICA
Poets in America don’t need absinthe or syphilis. Don’t need to be
hunch-backed, club-footed, consumptive, or blind. Don’t need sad dads or
manic moms. Just being a Poet in America is craziness enough to make a
poet out of you, if you weren’t one already.
I found out I was a Poet when I was eight years old. I wrote a story for
homework, about days of old when all birds were brown. One small bird
built its nest in a crabapple tree and laid seven tiny eggs. A boy
climbing the tree to pick apples clumsily smashed the eggs. The little
bird chirped so piteously that the boy dashed home and brought back his
collection of marbles—aggies and opals—which he placed gently in the
nest, three for each egg. The little bird brooded the marbles until
twenty-one tiny chicks hatched. Each chick had feathers the colors of
the marble it hatched from, and that’s why birds today have beautiful
plumage.
Miss Hersch handed my story back without marking it. “I didn’t ask you,”
she frowned, “to copy something out of a book.” It was no use arguing
with her; my spelling was too perfect. I was new in class and my bird
fable was the first assignment. My family had just moved to Iowa from
Minnesota. A few weeks of me were enough to convince Miss Hersch that I
was not a third-grade plagiarist. She was the one who told me I was a
Poet, though I’m sure I would have found out on my own.
I didn’t go advertising about being a Poet. Kids can be pretty jealous.
The only person I told was my Sunday School superintendent, who assured
me that God has mercy even on Poets. I didn’t write many poems, either.
Since people who weren’t Poets felt free to write all kinds of verses, I
concluded that being a Poet didn’t require scribbling rhymes.
My rivals in high school were all dead: e. e. cummings, Hart Crane, Walt
Whitman. By then we’d moved to California, where my family lived in a
cottage in back of Luther Burbank’s experimental gardens. Burbank’s
widow still doddered through the daisies on sunny days. She took genteel
notice of her ragtag tenants and let me browse through the botanist’s
library. The only poetry was Longfellow, but the scent of Burbank’s
creativity clung everywhere. It was a revelation: being a Poet would
require the same single-mindedness of me that botany had of Burbank—a
commitment a sensible person would never make if he had a choice.
One afternoon, the botanist’s widow surprised me lying on my back
between her rows of snapdragons, staring at the clouds. “Goodness!” she
murmured. “Have I disturbed you in the midst of writing a poem?”
“Not really,” I grinned. “What kind of Poet would write about watching
clouds through a cascade of flowers when he could lie here really doing it?”
“Isn’t that what poets do?”
“Yes, ma’m, most of them. But I’m more interested in life-poems than
word-poems.”
“I’m sure you’re saying something clever, young man,” the old lady
smiled, “but I have no idea what you mean.”
I tried blithely to explain that a true Poet can experience everyday
events as poems.
“That’s lovely for a boy like you,” Widow Burbank pursed her lips, “but
isn’t it the poet’s duty to share experiences with others through his
words?”
This was another epiphany, the notion of a Poet having duties!
“My nephew Willard is a poet, too,” she continued. “I’m sure you’d have
a lot to say to each other. He comes to visit me every Saturday. You’ll
see us in the garden.”
I’d never met another Poet, and though I doubted anyone’s nephew could
be the real thing, I was uneasy about facing Willard Burbank without a
talisman. Choosing a subject for verse smacked of homework, incompatible
with my concept of the Poet..
Will Burbank turned out to be Scagney, as he was known at Santa Rosa
High School, a senior—two years ahead of me—but not aligned with any of
the cliques: the jocks, the car-boys, or the country club. His only pal
was scrawny Eleanor, who powdered her face white and draped herself in
black. Hagney, we called her, to rhyme with Scagney. On campus I would
have dreaded being seen with them, but among the widow’s dahlias, I
figured I was safe.
“My Aunt says you’ve got pockets full of poems,” he scowled, “so whip
‘em out!”
Through my mind flashed the image of teenage gunfighters slapping their
holsters and blazing stanzas at each other. “I didn’t come armed,” I
answered.
“Recite one from memory,” he demanded.
“My theory is that each Poet has only one perfect poem to write,” I was
improvising, “and shouldn’t burden the world with inferior efforts.”
“Then I’ll recite one,” he smirked.
I wish I had that poem of Scagney’s, but all I remember is the image of
a clock tolling and a night bird crashing against the Poet’s window. How
he blended the clanging of the bell with the flurry of the owl’s wings,
I’m unable to replicate. What I do recall is my astonishment that there
could be two Poets in a burg like Santa Rosa. Consider the odds!
In a sense, Will Burbank proved my “one poem per Poet” thesis, since
nothing else he wrote equaled his Night Bird Flying. Will lived in the
garage of his mother’s alimony-bloated mansion on McDonald, Santa Rosa’s
“old money” avenue. He was an emancipated minor, a slovenly freedom I
envied enormously. He had a hot-plate and a refrigerator full of beer,
stocked by older friends. There were always guys from the JC hanging out
at Will’s pad—painters, folk singers, revolutionaries, a radical
underground into which I was welcomed on the basis of a chance
introduction amid a hybrid daisy patch.
Myself, I could hardly have been less emancipated. I lived with my
parents and a younger sister in a three-room rental. Sis and I shared
the parlor. She had a cot. My bed was the sofa, for which I had to wait
until the TV was turned off.
Scagney shunned me on campus, though I couldn’t say whether from
delicacy or from disdain for the company I kept. I had a toe in each of
the reigning cliques—the jocks because I outran them with a football,
the country club because I outclassed them in History and French, the
car-boys because I outdrove them. My father was the carburetor
specialist at Andretti’s Wheels, the local hot-rodder haven. It was a
point of honor for his son to drive the hottest cherry-red coupe in
town. Car payments were always twice the rent in our family.
I actually wrote a poem that year, about foghorns groaning in tempo with
oceanic swells and seagulls perching on buoys. It was a parody of Will
Burbank’s Night Bird Flying, like an art student copying Monet. I handed
it to my English teacher in lieu of an essay on Thanatopsis. The teacher
humiliated me by reading my doggerel to the class, and declaring that it
was the efforts of students like me that kept him from wishing he’d
become a forest ranger. Later, I copied the real Night Bird Flying and
submitted it to the same teacher. He examined it ponderously and handed
it back with an A+. “When you’re published,” he declared, “I’ll be the
proudest footnote in your book. But if I may be so bold, this isn’t as
good as the one about the gulls.” I shook my head skeptically. The man
was either a flatterer or a philistine.
Eleanor, alias Hagney, was also a sprout of pioneer stock, the Duttons,
with an avenue named after them. Her mother was related to Aimee Semple
McPherson, the Hollywood evangelist. She served as pastor of the Four
Square Gospel Church, with a flock of a dozen spiritual sheep, and she
managed a health-food store. Eleanor was a journalist. That is, she kept
a journal in which she recorded her life in miniscule. The writing left
little scope for deeds.
Once JV football was over, I spent more time at Will’s garage. Free
booze was an attraction, but it was talk that really drew me. Will’s
leftist friends chased beer with Bolshevism and Chianti with Camus. I
had the grace mostly to listen, as befit a sophomore. Eventually, we’d
pile into my ‘55 Chevy and tool down 101 to demonstrations at UC
Berkeley. One Friday in May, two hundred of us crushed together in the
rotunda of San Francisco City Hall, protesting the HUAC witch trials.
The Boys in Blue kept shunting aside anyone who looked like a
demonstrator. One fat-ass cop starting blasting a fire hose, shrieking,
“You want some of this, you pinko punks!” Fifty of us were washed off
our feet, slathering across the marble floor like bars of soap in a
bathtub. On the soggy drive home, I expounded again my theory of poetics
composed of actions rather than words. The next day, three thousand
protesters surrounded City Hall.
Will had his suitcases packed before the ink was dry on their diplomas.
Eleanor vanished. I heard she was given the choice of Vassar or a year
abroad, coming home to the JC, and she chose Europe. I promised Will to
look after the widow’s forsythias in his absence.
Even without Scagney and Hagney, Santa Rosa was soon enlivened. A block
from the Court House, a genuine coffee shop called La Bottega opened,
complete with bagels and espresso. The entrepreneurs were Dolph
Hardisty, a scion of local wealth, and Llewellyn Shering, the first
Afro-American I ever heard speak without a drawl. Friday nights would
feature folk-singers, Saturdays foreign films, and Sundays open mike for
poets.
Meanwhile my father found a new job as service manager for a Chrysler
dealership. His first business was to lease himself an Imperial. Then he
parked my Chevy in his used car lot and gave me the keys to a ’48
Windsor, a car that would run out of gas before it accelerated to
seventy, but he offered me a deal: I could use money from a summer job
as a down payment on any car they sold, and he’d pay the installments.
As an afterthought, he gave notice on the cottage and rented a spacious
Victorian. I got my own bedroom, upstairs in a turret with gables. There
were pigeons nesting under the eaves. All summer, I was serenaded with
their lusty cooing.
With widow Burbank for a reference, finding a summer job was a cinch. I
had my choice of gophering at the Press Democrat or goading braceros on
a ranch. I opted for outdoors. With three years of French, I figured I
was qualified to order Mexicans around. Instead I found myself bucking
sixty-pound lugs of apples ten hours a day, and I learned respect for
stringy muscles. Later I got to play foreman, tallying, snooping in
other pickers’ lugs for dirt clods, scaling my own three-legged ladder
and plucking the golden Gravensteins. I loved the view from up the
ladder, dapple green and dusty sun speckled with sparrows, and me
swaying in the boughs like a reincarnated australopithecine.
I started my junior year with $1200 in pocket. My dad went ape when I
showed him the car I wanted: the newly imported Renault Dauphine. “Are
you nuts,” he howled. “You drive that thing on the freeway, some
trucker’s gonna make a hood ornament outa you.” That Renault was the
harbinger of hard times between us. We’d already had shouting matches
over politics. He was an Eisenhower Democrat and I was an aspiring
Marxist, with the public library’s only copy of Das Kapital on my night
stand, overdue. My dad had drunk and fucked and fought a swath through
adolescence, and he expected no less of me. He couldn’t object to my
sowing of wild oats—I was a sprout of his—but he didn’t like my furrows.
“Stay away from them beatniks,” he growled, the first time he spotted my
car in front of La Bottega. “Buncha drug fiends and queers! Two years
more of childhood and then you start payin’ rent!” The probability of my
going to college had not yet dawned on my drop-out dad.
The Renault also got me ostracized by the car-boys. The big shift in my
status, however, came when I quit football to join the drama club. The
drama-clubbers were harmless dweebs. It was easy to stage the plays I
wanted to star in—O’Neill’s Touch of the Poet, Rostand’s Cyrano de
Bergerac. How I longed to do the latter in French:
Arrachez! Il y a malgré vous quelque chose
Que j’emporte, et ce soir, quand j’entrerai chez Dieu,
Mon salut balaiera largement le seuil bleu,
Quelque chose que sans un pli, sans une tache,
J’emporte malgré vous, et c’est... mon panache!
The script translated Cyrano’s dying mon panache literally as my white
plume, but I insisted on substituting my cool. Mamas, don’t let your
little boys read Cyrano! I’ve spent my life rehearsing that scene.
My Roxanne was Denise DeLuca. I lured her to the drama club by promising
to do her science homework for a semester. She wasn’t on my academic
track, but I sat by her in study hall and passed her sonnets “adapted”
from Untermeyer’s Great Love Poetry anthology. The verses I declaimed as
Cyrano were also slyly adapted to woo her, but I doubt she noticed. Her
tough boyfriend was not so naive. One evening after rehearsal I found my
little chariot off the ground, its axles on cinder blocks.
The open mike at La Bottega drew moths from every closet: cowboy
troubadours, Dickinson wannabes, Ferlinghetti clones. I read my
fog-and-seagulls poem and my Sonnets to Roxanne, to establish my
credentials. I kept hoping Will would saunter in, but he never did.
School was spectacularly boring. My scorn could not be concealed, but I
cynically spewed it over faculty rather than classmates. By spring I’d
become so impertinent that the dean offered me a deal: spend mornings
next semester at the Junior College and report to high school only for
PE. I jumped at the chance.
One could be a teenage Marxist in 1960 and still a virgin. One could
wield a slide rule and read de Sade in the original. One could be the
coxswain of cool. But I was sure I’d never truly be a Poet until I got
laid. Unfortunately, without the sword and the putty nose, my Cyrano act
played better with guys than girls. To the snooty cuties of the country
club, I was low-rent, and I was no more marketable on the far side of
the academic tracks, unless I swiped the keys to the cherry dragster
rusting on my dad’s lot. Believe me, I considered it. My bohemian alter
ego wasn’t any more successful. The habitués of La Bottega were nearly
all male. I wondered why no chicks were attracted to cappuccino and
Fellini. Once I ventured to ask Dolph Hardisty whether women, in his
experience, were attracted to Poets. “Save that question for Llewellyn,”
he said. “His experience is broader than mine.”
Llewellyn Shering, though he claimed not to be a Poet nor even a
beggarly short story writer, had replaced Will Burbank as my role model.
Aesthetically, there was no contest. Scagney was slovenly and
pock-marked. Llewellyn was dapper. He sliced through the smoke of La
Bottega like the ballet dancer he’d studied to be. When business was
slack, I blabbed to him about Gide and Sartre. He steered me to the
poets,Verlaine, Rimbaud, Cavafy. Besides, he drove a classic purple
Jaguar, the only one in Santa Rosa, which I was still enough my father’s
son to admire.
1960 was the year of Sam Cooke and Little Anthony—when Rock ‘n Roll
turned Black—so 1960 became the year of Civil Rights for me. At school,
I started eating lunch at the table where the colored kids sat. They
were not entirely welcoming, but I persisted. The dean summoned me to
his office to ask if I were trying to stir up trouble. I responded with
an editorial in the school paper, asking why only Caucasians were
programmed in college-prep. The result was that henceforth all articles
would have to be “approved” before publication. I wasted no time in
denouncing censorship and found myself suspended from the journalism
club. I might have been banished from all extracurriculars if the school
debate team hadn’t just won the state championship, putting my picture
on the front page of the Press Democrat. I was already anathema to the
girls of the country club, so I invited Leona Smalls, the only “colored
girl” in third-year French, to the Junior Prom. It was unwarranted
presumption to think she’d be pleased, as her regular boyfriend
eloquently informed me: Keep to your own, fish belly, or I’ll put a hurt
on you.
“Silly Boy! Poets have no business meddling with social problems,”
scoffed Llewellyn. “Poets are made of finer stuff than crusaders.” His
condescension pissed me off so much that I boycotted espresso for a
week. I couldn’t fathom Llewellyn’s disinterest in racial justice.
“Don’t you get tired of people making assumptions about you?” I asked him.
“Depends who’s assuming what,” he scowled archly. “Are you sure your own
assumptions aren’t utterly groundless?”
I had no idea what he was telling me. Poets are often better talkers
than listeners.
***************
A few weeks later I was milking Holsteins for my uncle Carl in
Minnesota. I’d been begging to revisit my lost childhood ever since we
moved west, but my father never shared my nostalgia. Now out of the
blue he’d arranged for me to spend the summer on the farm. His motive
was obvious, to get me away from bad influences. We’d come close to
blows after he saw me giving Llewellyn a ride one night. “You keep that
nigger outa your car so long as I’m payin’ for it,” he ranted. “Boy, you
gonna throw away your good grades to hang out with them damn beatniks?”
The announcement that I’d chosen a career did nothing to mollify him. “A
poet!” he roared. “What the hell kinda foolishness is that? Couldn’t you
at least write something people wanna read, like detective novels?”
Carl was my mother’s brother. He needed me on the farm like he needed
traffic lights in his hog wallow, but he kept me busy shoveling
cow-flop. The rest of the day was baseball practice. Carl was the
pitcher for the Waseca Dutchmen, the second place team in the Prairie
League. All the Dutchmen needed to whip the Mankato Packers was a
catcher whose knees could survive nine innings, and Carl figured it
might be me. He’d been using the side of his barn for pitching practice
until every board was splintered to toothpicks. The first few times I
caught for him, I had to ice my hands before I could curl my fingers
around a supper fork. I was also a “pretty decent” base runner. One game
I stole second, third, and home on three consecutive pitches. I let my
body rule that summer, and I loved it. If I were born again as something
besides a Poet, I’d want to be a damn good ballplayer.
But Minnesota was more than baseball. There were dragonflies, heat
lightning, and the pale-fire polka of the Northern Lights. One afternoon
it rained hard enough to drown a flock of Carl’s chicks in a tractor
rut. Later the sun burst through the thunderheads dragging Noah’s
rainbow. Everything from the wardance colors of sunset to the scuffed
linoleum of Aunt Wilma’s kitchen floor was grist for poetry.
I got off the bus in Santa Rosa on Labor Day—three inches taller and my
voice a third deeper. My old man kept patting himself on the back, as
if his shipping me to the farm had made a man of me. The first place I
drove, however, after we rolled the Renault out of the garage, was to La
Bottega, to read my Tall Grass Sonnets on the open mike.
My new poems were no more sonnets than Velveeta is Camembert, but they
were sufficiently improved over my junior year junk to make Llewellyn
Shering sit down and comment on my development. A more worldly Poet
might have guessed his appreciation was not limited to metrics.
JC classes started Tuesday. I was registered for twelve units— English
1A, Creative Writing, European History, and French Lit. The first two
were taught by Miller Stoddard, the diva of the English Department, with
a dozen “western” novels in print. “Dr. Doddard” was my idea of a weary
hack. History was taught by Doktor Hinzenfelz, who’d passed his Abitur
in time to serve in the Great War. Herr Hinzenfelz quizzed us the first
day, then seated us by our scores, lowest in front and highest in the
last row. Each Wednesday, he quizzed us again and reassigned seats.
French Lit was a dud—readings in translation—so I switched to German A,
also with Hinzenfelz. That gave me just two hours in class on Tuesdays
and Thursdays. I didn’t need to show up at SRHS until 2:00, so I had
ample time to hang out at the JC, where nobody knew I was a 12th grader.
The difference between high school and college, I discovered, was not
curriculum but the protocol of hanging out. In high school, guys stuck
to guys while girls traveled in bevies. At the JC, couples predominated.
I intended to go native ASAP.
Now I was juggling four lives: home, high school, college, and La
Bottega. I acted a different role on each stage. College got my best
performance. Even kids who’d been at SRHS failed to recognize me,
because of my Minnesota growth spurt and because people see only what
they expect. I wasn’t any better at recognizing former high-school
mates, even guys I’d showered with after football, which may explain why
I didn’t recognize Ellie.
I spotted her in History. She was tres Europienne, with clothes from a
less provincial city than Santa Rosa. “Are you interested in studying
together?” she stunned me by asking after our third lecture, not
bothering with names. “Here’s my address,” she said. “See you tonight?”
The address was on Dutton Avenue, but only when I saw the house did it
occur to me that my new friend Ellie was none other than my old friend
Eleanor! No wonder she’d acted as if she knew me. She met me on the
porch and whisked me through the parlor to a room with ceiling-high
bookcases. “This was Papa’s smoking room,” she said. “We can light up
without Mother noticing the smell.” She took out a pack of Gauloises
and offered me one, looking doubtful when I refused. “What are your bad
habits?” she asked coyly, and without waiting for an answer went on, “I
know what you’d rather do than study...” She paused to let my face admit
that I knew what she meant. “...but we can’t do it here. Mother is
upstairs. We can make out, but we can’t get undressed.” Later she me
instructions for the next evening: buy a pack of condoms and a bottle of
champagne, pick her up at 7:15. She knew a place, she said, where we
could play without getting caught.
My old man was on the sofa, soaking up culture from the tube. I was
hoping to waltz past without giving him a chance to needle me, but he
sat up as if he could sniff where I’d been. “You’re home early,” he
growled. “Get sick of hangin’ out with them beatniks?”
“No, I had a study date.”
“A what?”
“A study date. With a woman from my history class.”
“Jumpin’ Jesus,” he hooted. “A woman, you say? So Minnesota really did
make a man outa you!”
I sauntered past without deigning to sneer.
Next morning was Thursday, Deutsch with Hinzenfelz. I sat through two
hours of der, das, dem, den, chuckling over what that scar-cheeked relic
of Freud’s Vienna would think of having instigated hanky-panky between
his two star pupils.
Champagne was a problem. Every under-age guy in Santa Rosa knew which
town drunks could be trusted to buy a pint of Jim Beam. But if you gave
a drunk money for champagne, he’d surely come back with a quart of
Ripple, tell you to fuck yourself and keep the change. I even considered
leveling with my dad—that’s how desperate I was—but instead I drifted to
La Bottega.
The place was dead. “Anybody here?” I called. Llewellyn popped his head
around the curtain. “Ah, Poet!” he crooned. “What can I do for you?”
“Café au lait,” I said, “and a big favor.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” he grinned, pouring the coffee.
“Llewellyn, this will be just once, I promise. Will you buy me a bottle
of champagne? Right now, this afternoon?”
His eyes opened wide. “Poet, poet! What on earth makes you think I’d
risk my already tenuous respectability to help a schoolboy get drunk?”
I ignored the schoolboy. “If I were getting drunk, I wouldn’t choose
bubbly water. I have an, ahh, engagement that demands champagne.”
“An engagement?”
“A tryst. A rendezvous. Call it what you like.”
“Am I acquainted with the trystee?”
“I doubt it.”
“I presume she, or he, is under-age too...”
“If you’re trying to make me tell...”
“Don’t be silly. If you told, I couldn’t help you. A gay Lothario must
be discreet.”
“So you’ll do it?” I ventured.
“I didn’t say that!” He peered into my face. “What’s in it for me?”
“I’ll give you double the price.”
“Come, come! Don’t insult me!”
“What do you want then?”
“Nothing yet. But I may ask you for a favor some day. What vintage does
your ‘engagement’ fancy?”
Knowing nothing about champagne, I gave him $10.00, a princely sum in
1961. He slipped out the back door. Ten minutes later, he returned with
a magnum of Moet-Chandon in a paper bag. “Voilá, mon fils!” he smiled.
“I expect an exquisite ode this Sunday night.”
Later I found my $10.00 in the bag.
Ellie was waiting on the porch. “Come meet Mother,” she greeted me
briskly. “I told her we had to hurry to catch a 7:30 movie,” she whispered.
“Eleanor tells me you have a dazzling intellect, young man,” Mrs. Dutton
chirped, “You’re coming straight home after the movie, aren’t you, Dear?”
“Yes, Mother, but it’s a double-feature. Don’t expect us before midnight.”
We drove to the Foursquare Gospel Church. Ellie had me park in the space
reserved for clergy. She opened the side door with a key. “Take my hand
and let me guide you,” she said. “No one comes here except Sunday mornings.”
She led me past the altar through the choir stalls into a pitch-dark
room. I felt her arms around my neck and we kissed.
“Let’s get naked in the dark,” she whispered, “so we don’t see each
other pulling off socks.”
I heard her clothes rustle but I was too abashed to strip. I scarcely
had my shirt unbuttoned when I felt her fingers stroke my chest. “Don’t
you want me?” she murmured. I jerked my pants down in a heap and she
wrapped around me, soft, smooth. “Not yet,” she whispered when she felt
my penis nudge her thighs. “You have the condom?”
“In my pocket.”
“Let me put it on you.”
Green as I was, I understood enough to refrain from ejaculating
instantly. She took charge of my hands and lips, and opened her thighs
just when I couldn’t wait longer.
“That was for you,” she purred, “and next is for me.” I heard a click.
The small flame of her cigarette lighter danced between our faces. The
space was the pastor’s office. A desk and a mimeograph occupied one
wall. A divan and a rack of liturgical gowns filled the opposite.
“Shall we open the champagne?” Ellie said. “This is Mother’s sanctum.
She used to bring men here before Papa died, but now she can screw at home.”
I felt slightly ridiculous, with the condom dangling from my limp penis.
“Take it off,” Ellie said, as if reading my thoughts, “but for god sakes
don’t leave it here. Mother isn’t ready for me to be grown up.”
We sipped champagne and coupled on the divan. We finished the pack of
condoms.
I missed the open mike that Sunday, but I had no new poems anyway. Ellie
and I went to the Russian River. We rented a canoe and paddled upstream.
Near Rio Nido, we beached the canoe and floated naked. Fishermen trolled
by. The water was green but some of them, judging by their smiles, must
have caught a glimpse of our nudity. Later we followed the river to the
ocean and made love in the dunes. A man with a dog nearly stumbled over
us. “You kids be careful,” he growled. Back in Santa Rosa, we drove to
the church and fornicated in front of the altar.
That Tuesday my picture made the newspaper again. The results of the
National Merit were back, and I’d placed first in California. Dr.
Eggers, the Principal, summoned me when I arrived for PE. A reporter
wanted to interview me, he said, and he hoped I wouldn’t express
dissatisfaction with high school as my reason for taking classes at the JC.
Wednesday morning, Ellie was waiting outside Hinzenfelz’s lecture hall.
“You didn’t say you were in high school!” she snapped. “Mother saw your
picture and hit the ceiling.”
I was dumbfounded. “You didn’t know I was a sophomore when we first
met?” I stammered.
“First met? What are you talking about?”
I reminded her of our gatherings in Will Burbank’s garage. She
shuddered. “You really didn’t remember me?” I asked.
“I was depressed,” she mumbled. “Mother was feeding me lithium.”
Thus ended my first grand passion. Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras.
All ass is grass. And the goodness thereof is as the flowers of the fields.
**********
Creative Writing was a bunch of word-count exercises—30 words to define
a character, 500 words on entering a room—as if one could learn to write
by factoring formulae! Stoddard noted my defiance. I begged him to let
me work independently. “No,” he said. “You’ll only be a Writer when you
stop admiring your words and start coveting readers.”
“May I give you some poems to look at?” I asked obsequiously.
“Certainly,” he answered, “after mid-terms.”
Meanwhile, SRHS was in an uproar. College recruiters were calling from
Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Haverford. When I took the National Merit, I’d
listed the University of Kabetogama as my first choice. The trouble is
there’s no such school, just a big windy lake in Minnesota. Deadlines
were approaching and so far I’d applied only to Berkeley. The Principal
was hot for Stanford. My advisor thought I’d be nuts not to pursue an
Ivy League school. My old man was flabbergasted, too. Guys bringing cars
for service kept asking if he was the dad of the kid in the papers.
“What’s he gonna study?” they’d ask and the old man would hem and haw.
He still couldn’t stomach the thought of a son of his becoming a Poet.
“Why dontcha study geography,” he wheedled, “an’ get rich an’ retire
young an’ write all the friggin’ poems you want?”
Honestly I hadn’t written a poem since summer. My Tall Grass Sonnets
were already juvenalia. I lay in my turret, lulled by the prosy cooing
of pigeons, trying my damnedest to feel something worth writing about.
It wasn’t writer’s block, I was sure, the curse of hacks like Stoddard.
The words would come when I needed them.
“Does being a Poet mean you have to write poems?” I asked the open-mike
crowd. The responses were rude: “A real poet wouldn’t ask.” “Only the
poem is real.” “The poet is only the poem’s dream.” Even Llewellyn
scoffed. “If you have nothing to say,” he declared in his orotund
baritone, “you needn’t be a poet to say it.” I flipped him the bird
under the table. A few days later I gathered my poems and thrust them
into the hardly outstretched hands of Miller Stoddard. Three steps out
of his office it occurred to me that I’d thrown myself on the mercy of a
jealous has-been. Doddard handed back my little sheaf of poems the next
morning, stapled with a note:
Poets die young. Have you considered a career in teaching?
******************
Ever since Will escaped to Berkeley, I’d kept my promise to tend his
aunt’s gardenias. There wasn’t much to do, but the old lady seemed
grateful. Saturday mornings, as soon as the pigeons rousted me, I’d
cycle to the Burbank house and start weeding. Before long, the widow
would poke her face out and invite me to tea. We chatted about her
husband’s work and, of all things, about baseball. She’d been a lifetime
Seals fan until she got too frail to go to the stadium. The Seals were
defunct—evicted when the Giants moved west—but we sipped our tea and
played historic games from her memory. I thought I was the boy scout,
filling a void in the widow’s life. In retrospect I wonder if the
charity wasn’t more hers than mine.
The week before finals, Miller Stoddard died of heart failure. His
obituary said he’d been treated for heart trouble. Oddly, his final
grades for Creative Writing were posted the day after his death.
Everyone got the same grade, B-plus.
Nobody in my family had croaked since I was four. Doddard’s death was a
whiff of mortality, and the note stapled to my poems now read like
prophecy. There was no grief counseling then, or I might have been
labeled “at risk”. Within a week, I got two speeding tickets and I
started drinking on school nights. Dear old dad, a firm believer in a
young man’s right to get blotto, went ape over the tickets and
confiscated my car keys. I rode to La Bottega on my bike and got drunk
anyway. There were always boon companions to be found if I was buying.
One of the garage gang, Richard Radovich, a guy already twenty-one, sold
me his draft card. I kept that card until 1968, when I burned it on the
steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Radovich didn’t care. He managed to die
in Vietnam without it.
Llewellyn seemed more upset with my carousing than my folks. “What’s
eating you, Poet?” he asked playfully. “Shouldn’t you finish your first
book before you drink yourself to death?”
“Maybe I’ve decided not to be a Poet,” I sneered.
“That’s a decision you’ll never be free to make, my boy.”
“Thanks, daddy-o. How come you quit dancing?”
“I didn’t quit,” he scowled. “I failed.”
“I don’t see the difference.”
“You will. Your time is coming,” he murmured. “Once you escape this smug
little mousetrap town, the scales will fall from your eyes.”
“First Corinthians 13, huh?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Something I learned in Sunday school. When I was a child, I spake as a
child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
“For now we see through a glass, darkly;” he continued without missing a
beat, “but then face to face.”
“Llewellyn, sometimes you amaze me.”
He peered at me quizzically. “Why?” he asked. “Do you suppose you’re the
only secret sharer?”
“Not any more,” I answered.
That was the closest Llewellyn ever came to “seducing” me, and the
closest I came to being seducible. If Socrates had shown equal restraint
toward Alcibiades, he wouldn’t have needed hemlock. I’m grateful
Llewellyn didn’t try harder, though I realize “gratitude” sounds
homophobic. To me, homosexuality was extraneous, like a footnote to a
poem. Besides, my favorite poets—Whitman, Hart Crane, Rimbaud—were all
gay. Imagine having to die for something so peripheral!
That Saturday, when Llewellyn failed to arrive with the flick of the
week, which he normally picked up from Berkeley, his partner called the
CHP. No accidents had been reported. We film buffs lingered over
cappuccinos till midnight. Llewellyn’s purple Jag was found the next
day, parked south of Santa Rosa. The keys were in the ignition and a
film canister lay under the seat. Someone had scratched the word FAGGOT
on the hood. Investigations focused on the tiny gay community of Sonoma
County, on the supposition that a botched liaison was to blame. No trace
of Llewellyn was discovered.
Services for Miller Stoddard took place that month in the Foursquare
Gospel Church, where he’d been a member. There were more shoot-em-up
fans in Santa Rosa than I’d suspected. The joint was packed. Sister
Dutton, the reverend mother of my ex-playmate Ellie, preached the
eulogy. The way she chanted the old boy’s praises set me wondering if
they’d been lovers. Ellie was there, preening amidst the all-girl choir.
Several former students of Doddard’s waxed nostalgic about the influence
he’d wielded over their lives, and I wondered what I’d missed.
The Sunday PD ran a blurb on his novels: fifty-some, under
pseudonymns—Marcus Steele for who-done-its, Mason Styles for espionage,
Mariah Starr for romances. Even my old man had heard of him. “Marcus
Steele was your teacher!” he whistled. “How come he was workin’ at a
junior college?”
Spring semester started the following week. I’d had my fill of the
Humanities. I registered for Ceramics, Landscape Gardening, and Life
Drawing. When my advisor saw my schedule, he flipped. “You can’t
graduate without Senior Problems,” he raved. “It’s a state mandate.” I
nearly laughed in his face. Nonetheless, I agreed to dump Ceramics for
Calculus and to slumber through Senior Problems—acne and gonorrhea—with
the car-boys and jocks. I was also trying out for varsity baseball, to
finish high school in a blaze of stolen bases. With La Bottega closed,
the bohemian scene had lost its zest. So what if Dylan Thomas drank
himself to death! Being a Poet didn’t mean I had to act like one.
The gardening class I was looking forward to. Clipping the widow’s
camellias had pollenated my mind with an urge to defy my Calling. Why
shouldn’t I be a botanist, or a baseball coach, or anything less morbid
than a scribbler of odes? Annoying as it would be to concede to Dear Old
Dad, I was beginning to wish I hadn’t been born a Poet.
Baseball practice kept me from tending the widow’s flowers Saturday
mornings. Instead I often scaled her fence at night to weed and snip.
Then varsity season started, with games on Saturday afternoon. The first
home game, I hustled to the garden at dawn. No sooner had I started
pruning than the old lady called me. “Would you care for a muffin,” she
asked, “and a cup of tea?” I laid down the clippers and scraped my shoes.
“Have you visited Willard yet?” she asked as I sipped my tea.
“In Berkeley?”
“No, I mean at home. He’s been home since January.”
“I had no idea.”
“I thought you didn’t,” she sighed. “His mother has been so possessive
of him while he’s been sick.”
“Sick?” I gasped. “What’s the matter?”
“The doctors say he has leukemia,” she declared grimly.
Wordless, I sat staring at her hands—wrinkled, translucent—as they
busied themselves with spoons. “Can I visit him,” I stammered.
“He’d like that,” she replied. “He’s asked about you. He calls you The
Poet. But you must promise to be very discreet, or his mother won’t let
you in. She doesn’t want him to know.”
“He doesn’t know what’s wrong?”
“He’s been told he has mononucleosis,” she scowled. “His mother believes
he has a better chance of survival if he doesn’t lose hope.”
“What do the doctors think?”
She pressed her fingers to her cheeks as if to hold her face in line.
“The disease is in its final stages.”
I hit two lousy singles that afternoon, got picked off and stranded.
After we lost, I peddled to Will’s house and rang the doorbell. Will’s
mother answered. “Mrs. Burbank told me Willard is sick,” I enunciated
warily.
“You’re the boy who writes poetry? Let me see if he’s awake.” She left
me in the vestibule. “You’re aware he has mononucleosis?” she asked
pointedly when she returned.
“Yes ma’am. I’ll be careful.”
“You may go in for fifteen minutes,” she decreed. “He tires very quickly.”
Scagney’s eyes opened as I slipped into the bedroom, embers of gratitude
in the ashes of his face. “You look older and bolder,” he whispered,
thin lips curling back from bloody gums.
“I hear you’ve been sick,” I said lamely.
“No shit, Sherlock,” he coughed. “I’m so fucking sick I can’t remember
well.” What sounded like a cough might have been intended as a laugh.
“It takes a while to recover from mono,” I offered fatuously.
“Don’t bullshit me!” he rasped. “I’ve got cancer and you know it. They
don’t give you fucking radiation for mono.”
I was dumbstruck. What good is it being a Poet if you can’t lie about
important things?
Scagney clenched his eyes. “Don’t tell Mother,” he slurred. “As long as
she thinks I don’t know, she won’t lay a bunch of religious crap on me.”
I grunted conspiratorially. Eyes shut, the only marks of life in his
face were the angry blotches of acne. “So...” his eyelids popped open.
“What do you think, Poet? What really becomes of you after you die?”
“Nothing much, I guess...” I peeked evasively at my watch. “You just
sort of blend in.”
“That’s all?” he coughed. “Then there’s not much to live for, is there?”
I stared at the rumpled sheets shrouding his bones, without a syllable
of solace. What good is it being a Poet if you can’t find words to cheer
up a dying friend?
“I heard about your scholarships,” he wheezed. “Decide where you’re
gonna go?”
“Harvard, I guess,” I grunted.
“You guess?”
“I was thinking of following you to Cal,” I fibbed half-heartedly.
“Sorry to let you down!” he snorted. “Screw Berkeley, man! Get as far
from fucking Santa Rosa as you can.” He struggled with the phlegm in his
lungs. “Harvard, huh? Lucky son of a bitch. You can sit at the feet of
Robert Lowell.”
“I just got the acceptance.”
He lay stiff, mouth agape, for a painful while, then peered at me
skeptically. “You write your one great poem yet?”
“You know, Will...” I stammered, “I’m, ah, not sure I’ve got the will to
be a Poet.”
“Yeah, your Will is fading fast,” he groaned. “No pun intended, right?”
“Hey, all puns intended!” I chuckled. “Poetic license.”
What looked like a healthy smirk danced on his lips. “You can’t get out
of it, dip-shit,” he snorted. “It’s your pun...ishment for living.”
Even this feeble joke brought color to Scagney’s cheeks and his mother
to see what we were cackling about. “You’d better go,” she addressed me.
“He can’t afford to overtax himself.”
******************
I visited Will Burbank every day that summer until he died in August,
whereupon I departed Santa Rosa for good. I drove straight to Cambridge,
eating in truck stops, sleeping in my petite Dauphine crimped between
long-haul semis. After a flirtation with Astronomy, I settled down to
American Lit and spent three years trailing Robert Lowell, from his
rooms in Quincy House to McLean’s Hospital to the Grolier Pub. Those
were the years of his best poems, and of my few, eventually published in
a slim volume dedicated to Will.
Harvard has its quaint traditions, including the annual election of a
Class Poet. The Poet has the honor of wearing a red tassel on his
mortar-board, like a musketeer’s plume, and of reading an ode at
commencement. One year in the 1960s, it was me.
I’ve spent most of the years since then teaching at a community college.

---

Robert Dawson
This is FICTION but of course it transforms the non-fiction of my
teenage years in Santa Rosa. I wrote it years and years ago. It was
published in a magazine and later anthologized. I'm "sharing" it now
because of a FB conversation with a real person -- Jim Shere -- who
shared the non-fiction of La Bottega in Santa Rosa.

---

Jim Shere
Thanks for publishing this again. There's of course more to be said.

---

Robert Dawson
Much more ...

[Captain Squeeka]

On 11/27/2021 7:21 PM, liaM wrote:
> Robert Dawson
> This is FICTION but of course it transforms the non-fiction of my
> teenage years in Santa Rosa. I wrote it years and years ago. It was
> published in a magazine and later anthologized. I'm "sharing" it now
> because of a FB conversation with a real person -- Jim Shere -- who
> shared the non-fiction of La Bottega in Santa Rosa.

This may be the most interesting thing ever posted.
I didn't think it was fiction... Oh well.


--
Captain Squeeka
Master of Penetrating Insights
and Lubricating Social Interaction

[Noah Sombrero]

Glorious.

What would this group be like if we had one something like this to
think about every day. Could we shut up about politics?

Isaac Azimov said that he was asked why his heros are mostly
brainiacs. He said, because that's the kind of person he is. He was
a professor of biochemistry at harvard medical school (or similar), so
that would be true. Of course.

There are degrees. Not all poets die young, or even starve. One
thing is knowing what to write about.

An image that haunts me is from Pablo Neruda. He mentions an old dog
wrapped around his feet like a blanket as he sits in his easy chair. I
don't say it like he did of course. Another of his is "Where might
Guillermina be?"

When my sister invited her
and I went to open the door,
in came the sun, came stars,
in came two braids of wheat
and two endless eyes.
I was fourteen
and I was proudly dark,
thin, tight and puckered,
funeral and ceremonious:
I lived with spiders
dampened by the forest
I knew the beetles
and three color bees,
I slept with the partridges.
Then came Guillermina
with two blue lightning bolts
that pierced my hair
and they nailed me like swords
against the walls of the winter.
This happened in Temuco.
Down South on the border.
Slow have gone the years
pacing like elephants,
barking like crazy foxes,
years have passed impure
growing, frayed, mortuary,
and I walked from cloud to cloud,
from land to land, from eye to eye,
while the rain at the border
fell, with the same suit.
My heart has walked
with nontransferable shoes,
and I have digested the thorns:
I had no respite where I was:
I hit where they hit me,
where I was killed, I fell,
and I rose with freshness
and then and then and then and then,
It is so long telling things.
I have nothing to add.
I came to live in this world.
Where might Guillermina be?

I'm not sure this is the best translation. There aren't many on the
web. But yes, the goodness comes through, I think.
--
Noah Sombrero

[liaM]

On 11/28/2021 4:17 AM, Captain Squeeka wrote:
> On 11/27/2021 7:21 PM, liaM wrote:
>> Robert Dawson
>> This is FICTION but of course it transforms the non-fiction of my
>> teenage years in Santa Rosa. I wrote it years and years ago. It was
>> published in a magazine and later anthologized. I'm "sharing" it now
>> because of a FB conversation with a real person -- Jim Shere -- who
>> shared the non-fiction of La Bottega in Santa Rosa.
>
> This may be the most interesting thing ever posted.
> I didn't think it was fiction... Oh well.
>
>

It wasn't fiction - like he says, the Bottega existed
But one day, maybe, Ned in Santa Rosa will write a fictional account
of his poetic and argumentative activities over the last 25 years
and share the non-fiction of our busy scribbling here on ABSFG.

How fictional is ABSFG? Are your recent posts fictional, Captain
Squeeka, eh.. they are? they aren't? OMG!

[Captain Squeeka]

On 11/27/2021 10:55 PM, Noah Sombrero wrote:
> What would this group be like if we had one something like this to
> think about every day. Could we shut up about politics?

It could happen... I try to post humor and I could
avoid political humor. I have written poetry,
it may not be any good, but I have tried.

I remember my first class in English Literature
a Fairleigh Dickinson University. People ask
why Fairleigh Dickinson. I had gone my first year
to Ramapo College of NJ when it was the wild, wild
west and rather progressive in every way. FDU
was much closer. I could live at home and my father
was personal friends with Fairleigh Dickinson Jr.
who was the head of the college having worked for
him directly in-house as an insurance manager
and as a broken with a large agency. He managed
their complicated insurance needs.

The professor read the Wallace Stevens poem
"The Emperor of Ice Cream:"

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

She asked the class what was going on...
Silence. Of course, me being Mr. Participation
said, "Somebody has died."

Laughter... but I was right.

My favorite poem is the Prisoner of Chillon
and I almost have it totally memorized.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43842/the-prisoner-of-chillon

Of course, I think Pope's Epistle on Man is
sublime... I have said so before. I believe his
view of Deity is right.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44899/an-essay-on-man-epistle-i

This one is mine... I bet Ned has a copy:

It took a while to learn
That hopeless was a mild term
That black did not describe
The dark before light ever shone.
And all life that ever lived
Or ever would live was just a bit
Of chemistry waiting to be smashed
By physics.

After I laughed about that
I envied the stupid plant
In my brother's back yard
After five years pushing this
One Great Flower upward
The following week hacked up
For pushing the fence.

After I cried about that
I watched a spider spin webs
Day after day by my window
And I pondered the means by
Which a spider's egg could transmit
The design, making miracles
Seem rather ordinary.

After being amazed and
Feeling rather hopeful I
Discovered no great message
In all this knowledge
But isn't there a message in that?

NNN

This is a nice piece of prose I wrote:

Dear friend, do not dwell in the darkness, for you will not
be able to see, nor dive into the light, for you will be
consumed. Too tight, the string breaks, too loose, it will
not play. Dwell in the event horizon, perched above the black hole.
Further in, you fall forever, further out, you flee the action.
As I have said,

"Stop trying to see beyond the bullshit, there is nothing beyond
the bullshit. When you stop seeing bullshit, you will see what is."

When you stop trying to judge, when you stop trying to assess,
when you stop trying to criticize, when you stop trying to figure
it out, you will find peace. Live simply, in the moment. Fill
your needs, not your wants. Be not a slave to your desire nor
become a slave to avoidance. The answers come when you stop looking
for answers.

NNN

And this (over 20 years old)

I have been judged and condemned most of my life and I have
grown used to it, yet, I choose the response.

I meet judgement with equanimity.
I meet condemnation with acceptance.
For I have seen the harm they do within myself
and I shall not do it to another.

I have no place to hang my hat. I am most likely not
welcome anywhere and I will not attempt to change
anyone by telling them where they may be wrong,
or even by bringing doubt and trouble to their minds.
Some people need the emotional support they get by
having a strict set of rules and by having the prospect
of a heaven or the threat of a hell to function. I consider
that profane in some sense. I choose right action for its
own sake. I avoid error for its own sake. Children need
treats and punishments to perform.

The greatest doctrine is a good example and I have met
many, many people who consider these distinctions of
belief systems to be unimportant. Christians, Jews,
Islam, Sikhs, Buddhists, Atheists - whomever, I have
met of good will, of good heart, of good intention
we have exchanged peace. Even those who try to "save"
me, I am friends with them also. I cannot embrace their
view, but I can understand it. With that understanding,
I can see that with their life and their experience, I
would believe as they do, so how can I not accept.

Oh, I am not perfect. Perfection is a process, not a
destination. I am not better than anyone else. There
is no such thing. This is my role, this is my place,
I *am* the path that I am given.

(As a coda to this, my brother is perturbed that
I spend so much time alone in my room. I am more
cloistered than most monks were in the middle age.
As a former big mouth, I probably speak less
than 500 words a week. I only go out for an hour
or so every 7-10 days.)

Because of this, I just was looking at old files
and dropped a note to BB and Lil!
(somebody some might remember)

[Captain Squeeka]

On 11/27/2021 11:31 PM, liaM wrote:
> ow fictional is ABSFG?  Are your recent posts fictional, Captain
> Squeeka, eh..  they are?  they aren't?  OMG!

Which posts? I will answer truthfully.

[Noah Sombrero]

There is something a person could absorb, and then absorb some more.

>She asked the class what was going on...
>Silence. Of course, me being Mr. Participation
>said, "Somebody has died."
>
>Laughter... but I was right.
>
>My favorite poem is the Prisoner of Chillon
>and I almost have it totally memorized.
>
>https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43842/the-prisoner-of-chillon

As pablo says:

It is so long telling things.
I have nothing to add.
I came to live in this world.
Where might Guillermina be?

Noah Sombrero

[Wilson]

On 11/27/2021 10:17 PM, Captain Squeeka wrote:
> On 11/27/2021 7:21 PM, liaM wrote:
>> Robert Dawson
>> This is FICTION but of course it transforms the non-fiction of my
>> teenage years in Santa Rosa. I wrote it years and years ago. It was
>> published in a magazine and later anthologized. I'm "sharing" it now
>> because of a FB conversation with a real person -- Jim Shere -- who
>> shared the non-fiction of La Bottega in Santa Rosa.
>
> This may be the most interesting thing ever posted.
> I didn't think it was fiction... Oh well.

Agreed.

I expect his claim of "fiction" was to muddy the waters just enough to
protect the innocent, and so a little poetic license could slip through.

[Ned]

What an excellent memoir!

I've been to so many of those places. I mosey through Burbank
Gardens every other month or so. I walk McDonald Ave. a few
times a week, check out the McDonald mansion, and the house
Hitchcock featured in his movie "Shadow of Doubt" (which he
maintained was his favorite movie of his, all his life), drive
through Rio Nido once month or so.

Ned

[Julian]

Rimbaud and Verlaine used to live near me.
http://camdennewjournal.com/article/exclusive-rimbaud-and-verlaine-house-in-camden-town-is-put-on-the-market

[Ned]

On Sunday, November 28, 2021 at 3:28:48 PM UTC-8, Julian wrote:
> On 28/11/2021 19:58, Ned wrote:
> > On Saturday, November 27, 2021 at 4:21:34 PM UTC-8, liaM wrote:
> >> (Found, just now.. on FB!)
> >>
> >> POETS IN AMERICA
> >> Poets in America don’t need absinthe or syphilis. Don’t need to be
> >> hunch-backed, club-footed, consumptive, or blind. Don’t need sad dads or
> >> manic moms. Just being a Poet in America is craziness enough to make a
> >> poet out of you, if you weren’t one already.

> >> ...

Re:
---
Its chief executive Graham Henderson told the New Journal
yesterday (Wednesday): “We had a wonderful vision for creating
the poetry house there, and we were well on our way doing that,
but as it stands this is not going to happen. It’s very
disappointing.”
He added: “Of course, a sale would threaten the original raison
d’être of the charity. My message to the owner is we would very
much like him to change his mind.” Two months ago, 10 former
culture ministers and a long list of artists in France signed a
petition to President Emmanuel Macron demanding the two poets’
bodies be exhumed and reinterred in the National Mausoleum of
Paris – in a process known as “Pantheonisation”.
---

Dig up their bodies!?

Somebody should write a poem about that.

Ned

(Poetry house? I think we call that a morgue.)

[Ned]

On Monday, November 29, 2021 at 9:13:46 AM UTC-8, Ned wrote:
> On Sunday, November 28, 2021 at 3:28:48 PM UTC-8, Julian wrote:
> > On 28/11/2021 19:58, Ned wrote:
> > > On Saturday, November 27, 2021 at 4:21:34 PM UTC-8, liaM wrote:
> > >> (Found, just now.. on FB!)
> > >>
> > >> POETS IN AMERICA
> > >> Poets in America don’t need absinthe or syphilis. Don’t need to be
> > >> hunch-backed, club-footed, consumptive, or blind. Don’t need sad dads or
> > >> manic moms. Just being a Poet in America is craziness enough to make a
> > >> poet out of you, if you weren’t one already.
> > >> ...
> > >

Ok, liaM, or Julian, or whoever posted the article about
digging up Rimbaud and dragging his corpse back to
the Panthéon in the Latin Quarter of Paris, I've written
my poem about it.

I hope you like it.

Ned


HOW I FINALLY GOT BACK TO PARIS
by Arthur Rimbaud

With I, your on his like their my is - O have her!
For from he love into blue great black, white as eyes,
one up where green has, was me who long man we all,
out under can down heart there be flowers, they come,
dark evening, no not pale, back its old shall those
what would let our then whose if round seen sky so these,
through but, oh trees, waves, whole sun, among find flesh full,
golden kiss know light sea skies, feet had him men stars,
water about beneath breast, child go god, gods hair,
head how night now off red she small this ugly us,
woman yellow along because breasts city dreaming,
eternal, every eye gold here huge knees listen.

Mad nature slowly snow towards vast very wind again,
away children do feel fire, free, hard, infinite
life, lips made nor only over pink poet poor
seas smell some sometimes times too violet wave wild
woods may against air always bathed beer bellies,
belly big, bitter body could dancing daylight
deep dream each even get goes good horizon,
lilies, lily living longer make neck nights open,
other rising rivers say singing skeletons,
skin soft speak spring still take together waters, wine
without world, yes ancient arms, azure, beautiful
beauty, believe birds, boat bright brow brown burst buttocks.

Close, closed, covered dance, dawn dead, distances divine,
dribbles drowned ears, earth eggs end Europe, face fine fingers,
finished flags, girl going grass ham happy haulers,
heaven laughter, lean loved lovely loves lying,
marvelous morning ones, Ophelia paladins,
proud ran river rose sap says seats seventeen,
shivers short should silver sleep sleeps sobs strong sunlight,
suns sweet, taken tears, ten thought thousand time two upon
Venus, were whom wide across after almost been
before blood boots bottom broken brought burning calm,
chairs chewing cold comes cool corn cottons crazy danced
dawns dear death delirious dreamed enormous erect
evenings everything fellow felt fiery filled.

[Julian]

Splendid. Sanctioned.

[DMB]

It's a joke.

[DMB]

On Tuesday, 30 November 2021 at 18:49:26 UTC-7, DMB wrote:

The Valley Before the Mountain

Buddha looked down
From a 333rd Buddha Land cloud
To catch up
On the theatrical show news.
The finite mini-gods,
In their staked
Spacetime land claims,
Finding and losing love
Millions of times a day,
Had an unusual aura of sullenness;
Pulpable grief
Pouring up from the earth.
The link in the causal chain
Has finally been met,
The one that has egos
Permanently bewitched
By the image
In Narcissus's mesmerizing Pool.
After today,
They no longer gave respect
To their Origin;
Instead, making fables
So as to make life
One no longer needing explanations
For mind nor emotion.
No longer agents of will;
Now puppets of meat
In prisons of determination;
Rejecting now eternal birthrights,
As fables of superstition
And foolish naivety.
Gone was intuition,
A gift used to raise suspicion
When mischief appeared
To cause havoc and turmoil,
Or to rain on their joy-filled parades.
Knowing was taboo,
Non-chemical-caused love, too.
Size took off its relative nature
To cast the spell of Insignificance.
So tiny they now were
That the blood was drained
From all of life's gleanings,
Making stones and trees
Surpass, in value,
The ones who dressed them
With names and their meanings.
Journey's path now crosses
Devastation Pass,
Where the shroud of darkness
Takes siege
And the Player feels full
The terrible effects
Of a lost soul's state.
Phase of the New Moon
And days of sourceless joy,
The light given off
Now, mere shadows cast,
As forewarned in Holy Writ;
"If thy light within thee be darkness,
How great is that darkness!"
Enough was enough,
This sorry sight,
Though He tried with great might,
Could no longer bear it.
Most Beneficent Buddha,
Planted a seed
In a hand-picked womb
Of a chosen vessel,
Impregnating their world
With Divine invigoration,
Holy breath twisting
The lattice loose,
The ego's unconscious invention;
A trap they set,
The same trap that snared them,
While being drunk
With the waters of apathy.
This moon child alone,
Was keeper of moon's phases;
The one to come,
With solitary goal
To make the moon full again;
Unfailing promise's sigil;
To restore the loved earth
Right again;
Faithful to Source's plans
From the Mind without limit.
Divine Love and Wisdom
Demands this creation order willed.

[liaM]

https://www.archdaily.com/969332/uk-pavilion-at-expo-2020-dubai-is-a-stage-for-ai-generated-collective-poems/6154872f9f88b401642ca952-uk-pavilion-at-expo-2020-dubai-is-a-stage-for-ai-generated-collective-poems-photo

[Julian]

Yes.

[Ned]

O ye of little faith! Joke you say? NO, Non, Nein! Let us,
rather, say that this meager offering of mine presents a
formulation of words in a state of maximum linguistic chaos.

Within these 325 words, there is essentially no meaningful
sentence. Yes, the last three words of the first line, "O have
her!" are arguably a sentence, but they are only three words,
the rest being unparseable to the most lenient of Midwestern
school marms.

BUT, now watch the magic! If I pass the above poem through
the google translator and render it into German, then take the
German and translate it into French, then take the French and
translate it back into English, observe the transformation...

---

HOW I FINALLY COME BACK TO PARIS
by Arthur Rimbaud

With me you are on his as with me - have it!
Because of love in blue, big black, white as the eyes,
One up there where the green was, I was the long man we all have
outside under the heart, there are flowers, they arrive,
dark evening, no, not pale they should be back old
what would be our to whom then, if the round sky left this one,
but through, oh trees, waves, all the sun, finds full under the flesh,
golden kiss knows the bright sky of the sea, the feet had male stars,
Water under the breast, child goes to God, hair of gods,
Head like the night now red, this ugly us is small
Yellow woman long car breasts dream city,
forever, every golden eye here listens to giant knees.

Mad nature is snowing again slowly towards the huge wind,
far away the children smell the fire, free, hard, infinite
Life, lips have only impoverished the pink poets
The seas sometimes smell wild to purple waves
Forests always have the right to have beer bellies bathed in the air,
Fat belly, bitter body could dance in the light of day
deep dream everyone even has a good horizon,
Lilies, lilies that live longer, nights with an open throat,
other swollen rivers say singing skeletons,
The skin gently speaks still spring water, wine
without people, yes, ancient weapons, azure blue, beautiful
The beauty, believe the birds, the shiny forehead of the boat, the brown buttocks are bursting.

Close, closed, covered dance, dead dawn, divine distances,
drowned dripping ears, more earthy end in Europe, thin fingers face,
finished flags, the girls go to the happy tug grass ham,
Heavenly laughter, skinny adorable loved one loves to lie
wonderful mornings, Ophélie Paladins,
pride ran rose juice from the river said seventeen places,
shakes briefly, if the money sleeps, if the sunlight sobs,
Sweet suns, tears taken, ten thought a thousand times two
Venus, they were on the other side after almost being
Before the boots of blood bring a shattering scorching calm
Chairs chew cold cool corn cotton dancing crazy
rises dear dead in the delirium dreamed enormously erect
The whole guy was on fire at night.

---

Order is emerging from chaos. The process defies the second
law of thermodynamics! Not only is chaos not increasing, but
disorder and randomness are vanishing before our eyes. See the
gems that appear magically from the dross...

I was the long man we all have outside under the heart...

there are flowers, they arrive, dark evening...

If the round sky left this one, but through, oh trees,
waves, all the sun, finds full under the flesh,
golden kiss knows the bright sky of the sea...

Water under the breast, child goes to God, hair of gods,
Head like the night now red, this ugly us is small...

Every golden eye here listens...

Mad nature is snowing again slowly towards the huge wind,
far away the children smell the fire...

Life, lips have only impoverished the pink poets...

The seas sometimes smell wild to purple waves...

Forests always have the right to have beer bellies bathed in the air.

Lilies, lilies that live longer, nights with an open throat,
other swollen rivers say singing skeletons...

The skin gently speaks still spring water, wine
without people, yes, ancient weapons, azure blue, beautiful
The beauty, believe the birds...

Close, closed, covered dance, dead dawn, divine distances,
drowned dripping ears, more earthy end...

Heavenly laughter, skinny adorable loved one loves to lie
wonderful mornings...

If the money sleeps, if the sunlight sobs,
Sweet suns, tears taken, ten thought a thousand times two

Venus, they were on the other side after almost being...
Before the boots of blood bring a shattering scorching calm...

Dancing crazy rises dear dead in the delirium dreamed
enormously erect... The whole guy was on fire at night.

---

Can you believe it? From whence does the intelligence
originate? Or, as the Oven-Breaker said, "You were originally
made of brick and mud compounded; where does the spirit
come from, whence does the sanctity originate?"

But wait! There's more! Clearly the poem gains cogence,
intelligibility and meaning with each translation. Sooo...?

What if we put my meager original through the translator
TEN TIMES? Yes, what if do English to French, then French
to English, etc. in five cycles of translation?

Here is the result...

---

HOW I FINALLY RETURNED TO PARIS
by Arthur Rimbaud

With me, you are on his as on mine - Oh!
Because of his love for the big black blue, white as the eyes,
the one where the green has, it's me that we've all been for a long time,
downstairs can there be flowers, they come,
dark evening, not pale, back his old man will be those
what would then leave us so round in view of the sky if these,
through but, O trees, waves, all the sun, among the full flesh,
golden kiss know the clear sky of the sea, her feet had star men,
water under the breast, child goes god, hair of the gods,
head how the night now red she little this ugly us,
yellow woman with long breasts city car dreaming,
eternal, all golden eyes here huge knees listen.

Mad nature slowly snows towards the vast new wind,
in the distance the children feel the fire, free, hard, infinite
life, the lips are not made only on the poor pink poet
the seas sometimes smell the wild wave too purple
the woods can, against the air, always bathed in beer belly,
big belly, bitter body could dance daylight
deep dream everyone has the same good horizon,
lilies, lilies living longer open the nights of the neck,
other swollen rivers say singing skeletons,
the soft skin speaks the source still gathers the waters, the wine
without world, yes ancient weapons, azure, beautiful
beauty, believe the birds, boat with shining eyebrows, busted buttocks.

Close, closed, covered dance, dead dawn, divine distances,
drooling from drowned ears, eggs from the country of Europe, face with slender fingers,
finished flags, girl goes happy bearers of grass ham,
the laughter of the sky, the thin beloved likes to lie,
wonderful mornings, Ophelia paladins,
the sap of the pink river flowed proudly, says seventeen seats,
brief chills if the silvery sleep sleeps sobs strong sun,
sweet suns, tears taken, ten thought a thousand times two on
Venus, who were wide after almost being
before the socks of boots of broken blood bring a scorching calm,
chairs chew cold comes cool corn cottons crazy danced
dawn dear death delusional dreamed huge erection
in the evening the whole guy felt filled with fire.

---

And as the ancient Arianna always said, "Wallah!"

Ned

[Noah Sombrero]

On Wed, 1 Dec 2021 09:55:58 -0800 (PST), Ned <ned...@ix.netcom.com>
wrote:

Yes, yes, they do. I thought I was the only one that knew about that.

No, you have lost it. The magic is gone.

>big belly, bitter body could dance daylight
>deep dream everyone has the same good horizon,
>lilies, lilies living longer open the nights of the neck,
>other swollen rivers say singing skeletons,
>the soft skin speaks the source still gathers the waters, the wine
>without world, yes ancient weapons, azure, beautiful
>beauty, believe the birds, boat with shining eyebrows, busted buttocks.
>
>Close, closed, covered dance, dead dawn, divine distances,
>drooling from drowned ears, eggs from the country of Europe, face with slender fingers,
>finished flags, girl goes happy bearers of grass ham,
>the laughter of the sky, the thin beloved likes to lie,
>wonderful mornings, Ophelia paladins,
>the sap of the pink river flowed proudly, says seventeen seats,
>brief chills if the silvery sleep sleeps sobs strong sun,
>sweet suns, tears taken, ten thought a thousand times two on
>Venus, who were wide after almost being
>before the socks of boots of broken blood bring a scorching calm,
>chairs chew cold comes cool corn cottons crazy danced
>dawn dear death delusional dreamed huge erection
>in the evening the whole guy felt filled with fire.
>
>---
>
> And as the ancient Arianna always said, "Wallah!"
>
> Ned

--
Noah Sombrero

[DMB]

On Wednesday, 1 December 2021 at 11:22:08 UTC-7, Noah Sombrero wrote:
...

> > O ye of little faith! Joke you say? NO, Non, Nein! Let us,
> >rather, say that this meager offering of mine presents a
> >formulation of words in a state of maximum linguistic chaos.
> >
> > Within these 325 words, there is essentially no meaningful
> >sentence. Yes, the last three words of the first line, "O have
> >her!" are arguably a sentence, but they are only three words,
> >the rest being unparseable to the most lenient of Midwestern
> >school marms.
> >
> > BUT, now watch the magic! If I pass the above poem through
> >the google translator and render it into German, then take the
> >German and translate it into French, then take the French and
> >translate it back into English, observe the transformation...

...

> >Mad nature is snowing again slowly towards the huge wind,

> Yes, yes, they do. I thought I was the only one that knew about that.

How do you think I've been writing those fake National Lampoon pieces?

...

[DMB]

On Wednesday, 1 December 2021 at 14:01:34 UTC-7, DMB wrote:

Time to take a test [no cheating]
Which poem is the Google-Translator-altered poem
and which is the original Arthur Rimbaud poem?

POEM 1

As I was going down impassive Rivers,
I no longer felt myself guided by haulers:
Yelping redskins had taken them as targets
And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.

I was indifferent to all crews,
Flemish wheat carrier or British cotton
When with my haulers this uproar stopped
Rivers wanted to raise this question

Into the furious lashing of the tides
Take care of your child's heart next winter
I'm walking! the peninsula is divided
Have not undergone a more triumphant hubbub

The storm blessed my sea vigils
Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves
Eternal sacrifice to the camp,
Without Nars's eyes, I miss ten nights!

Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children
This green water flows through my pineal gland
And washed me of spots of blue wine
And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook

And from then on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,
Devouring the azure verses; where, like a pale elated
Flat ground, hanging in the air, submerged

Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium
And slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,
Boil the bitter flower of love!

I know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts
And the surf and the currents; I know the evening,
And dawn as exalted as a flock of doves
Sometimes I see who thinks he's seen it!

I have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors,
Lighting up, with long violet clots,
Resembling actors of very ancient dramas,
The waves rolling far off their quivering of shutters!

I have dreamed of the green night with dazzled snows
A kiss fell softly in the eyes of the sea
The vicious circle of anonymous readers;
And the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorous!

I followed during pregnant months the swell,
Like hysterical cows, in its assault on the reefs,
Without dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys
The roar of the sea does struggle!

Stroke, you know, incredible, Florida
Tiger eyed mixed with flowers
Skin! Rainbows stretched like bridal reins
Blossom in clusters under the horizon of the ocean!

I have seen enormous swamps ferment, fish-traps
Where a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes!
Take a bath in the clear sky
And the distances cataracting toward the abyss!

Glaciers, suns of silver, nacreous waves, skies of embers!
Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs
Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs
Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent!

I should have liked to show children the thickness of the sand
Of the blue wave, the fish of gold, the singing fish.
—Foam of flowers rocked my drifting
And ineffable winds winged me at times.

At times a martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea, whose sob created my gentle roll,
You brought me green flowers and brown sugar
And I remained, like a woman on her knees...

A small island like a pier quarreled with me
Raindrops and a flock of yellow-eyed birds
And I sailed on, when through my fragile ropes
Drowned men sank backward to sleep!

Now I am dying in a vase of leaves waiting to be cured;
Thrown by the storm into the birdless air
I whose water-drunk carcass would not have been rescued
Guards and ships of the Hanseatic League.

Free, smoking, topped with violet fog,
I who pierced the reddening sky like a wall,
Bearing, delicious jam for good poets
Lichens of sunlight and mucus of azure,

Who ran, spotted with small electric moons,
Dirty portrait escorted by a dark horse.
When Julys beat down with blows of cudgels,
Burning pole and funnel for Armenia.

I, who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues off
The moaning of the Behemoths in heat and the thick Maelstroms,
Perpetual stalemate on the blue disc
I miss Europe with its ancient parapets!

I have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islands
When the noose of the gallows was changed,
—Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep and exile yourself,
Million golden birds, o future Vigor? –

And Hercules, I cried a lot! Sad morning.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor
O my cool collapse! Oh, I went to the beach!

If I want European water, it is the black
Cold water, with the sweetness of twilight
A squatting child full of sadness releases
A boat as fragile as a May butterfly.

No longer can I, bathed in your languor, o waves,
Follow in the wake of the cotton boats,
Nor cross through the pride of flags and flames,
They don't even swim between helmets with frightened eyes.

POEM 2

As I was going down impassive Rivers,
I no longer felt myself guided by haulers:
Yelping redskins had taken them as targets
And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.

I was indifferent to all crews,
The bearer of Flemish wheat or English cottons
When with my haulers this uproar stopped
The Rivers let me go where I wanted.

Into the furious lashing of the tides
More heedless than children's brains the other winter
I ran! And loosened Peninsulas
Have not undergone a more triumphant hubbub

The storm blessed my sea vigils
Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves
That are called eternal rollers of victims,
Ten nights, without missing the stupid eye of the lighthouses!

Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children
The green water penetrated my hull of fir
And washed me of spots of blue wine
And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook

And from then on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,
Devouring the azure verses; where, like a pale elated
Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks;

Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium
And slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,
The bitter redness of love ferments!

I know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts
And the surf and the currents; I know the evening,
And dawn as exalted as a flock of doves
And at times I have seen what man thought he saw!

I have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors,
Lighting up, with long violet clots,
Resembling actors of very ancient dramas,
The waves rolling far off their quivering of shutters!

I have dreamed of the green night with dazzled snows
A kiss slowly rising to the eyes of the sea,
The circulation of unknown saps,
And the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorous!

I followed during pregnant months the swell,
Like hysterical cows, in its assault on the reefs,
Without dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys
Could constrain the snout of the wheezing Oceans!

I struck against, you know, unbelievable Floridas
Mingling with flowers panthers' eyes and human
Skin! Rainbows stretched like bridal reins
Under the horizon of the seas to greenish herds!

I have seen enormous swamps ferment, fish-traps
Where a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes!
Avalanches of water in the midst of a calm,
And the distances cataracting toward the abyss!

Glaciers, suns of silver, nacreous waves, skies of embers!
Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs
Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs
Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent!

I should have liked to show children those sunfish
Of the blue wave, the fish of gold, the singing fish.
—Foam of flowers rocked my drifting
And ineffable winds winged me at times.

At times a martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea, whose sob created my gentle roll,
Brought up to me her dark flowers with yellow suckers
And I remained, like a woman on her knees...

Resembling an island tossing on my sides the quarrels
And droppings of noisy birds with yellow eyes
And I sailed on, when through my fragile ropes
Drowned men sank backward to sleep!

Now I, a boat lost in the foliage of caves,
Thrown by the storm into the birdless air
I whose water-drunk carcass would not have been rescued
By the Monitors and the Hanseatic sailboats;

Free, smoking, topped with violet fog,
I who pierced the reddening sky like a wall,
Bearing, delicious jam for good poets
Lichens of sunlight and mucus of azure,

Who ran, spotted with small electric moons,
A wild plank, escorted by black seahorses,
When Julys beat down with blows of cudgels
The ultramarine skies with burning funnels;

I, who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues off
The moaning of the Behemoths in heat and the thick Maelstroms,
Eternal spinner of the blue immobility
I miss Europe with its ancient parapets!

I have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to the sea-wanderer:
—Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep and exile yourself,
Million golden birds, o future Vigor? –

But, in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor
O let my keel burst! O let me go into the sea!

If I want a water of Europe, it is the black
Cold puddle where in the sweet-smelling twilight
A squatting child full of sadness releases
A boat as fragile as a May butterfly.

No longer can I, bathed in your languor, o waves,
Follow in the wake of the cotton boats,
Nor cross through the pride of flags and flames,
Nor swim under the terrible eyes of prison ships.

[liaM]

Both translations get off on the wrong foot.
The title is missing. Without the title telling
the reader, how is he or she to know that the
narrator of the poem is a boat?
I halfway prefer the second translation -
but both are lacking in what makes this poem
one of the greatest in all of French poetry.

Le Bateau Ivre

Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles,
Je ne me sentis plus guidé par les haleurs :
Des Peaux-Rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles,
Les ayant cloués nus aux poteaux de couleurs.

J’étais insoucieux de tous les équipages,
Porteur de blés flamands ou de cotons anglais.
Quand avec mes haleurs ont fini ces tapages,
Les Fleuves m’ont laissé descendre où je voulais.

Dans les clapotements furieux des marées,
Moi, l’autre hiver, plus sourd que les cerveaux d’enfants,
Je courus ! Et les Péninsules démarrées
N’ont pas subi tohu-bohus plus triomphants.

La tempête a béni mes éveils maritimes.
Plus léger qu’un bouchon j’ai dansé sur les flots
Qu’on appelle rouleurs éternels de victimes,
Dix nuits, sans regretter l’oeil niais des falots !

Plus douce qu’aux enfants la chair des pommes sûres,
L’eau verte pénétra ma coque de sapin
Et des taches de vins bleus et des vomissures
Me lava, dispersant gouvernail et grappin.

Et dès lors, je me suis baigné dans le Poème
De la Mer, infusé d’astres, et lactescent,
Dévorant les azurs verts ; où, flottaison blême
Et ravie, un noyé pensif parfois descend ;

Où, teignant tout à coup les bleuités, délires
Et rhythmes lents sous les rutilements du jour,
Plus fortes que l’alcool, plus vastes que nos lyres,
Fermentent les rousseurs amères de l’amour !

Je sais les cieux crevant en éclairs, et les trombes
Et les ressacs et les courants : je sais le soir,
L’Aube exaltée ainsi qu’un peuple de colombes,
Et j’ai vu quelquefois ce que l’homme a cru voir !

J’ai vu le soleil bas, taché d’horreurs mystiques,
Illuminant de longs figements violets,
Pareils à des acteurs de drames très antiques
Les flots roulant au loin leurs frissons de volets !

J’ai rêvé la nuit verte aux neiges éblouies,
Baiser montant aux yeux des mers avec lenteurs,
La circulation des sèves inouïes,
Et l’éveil jaune et bleu des phosphores chanteurs !

J’ai suivi, des mois pleins, pareille aux vacheries
Hystériques, la houle à l’assaut des récifs,
Sans songer que les pieds lumineux des Maries
Pussent forcer le mufle aux Océans poussifs !

J’ai heurté, savez-vous, d’incroyables Florides
Mêlant aux fleurs des yeux de panthères à peaux
D’hommes ! Des arcs-en-ciel tendus comme des brides
Sous l’horizon des mers, à de glauques troupeaux !

J’ai vu fermenter les marais énormes, nasses
Où pourrit dans les joncs tout un Léviathan !
Des écroulements d’eaux au milieu des bonaces,
Et les lointains vers les gouffres cataractant !

Glaciers, soleils d’argent, flots nacreux, cieux de braises !
Échouages hideux au fond des golfes bruns
Où les serpents géants dévorés des punaises
Choient, des arbres tordus, avec de noirs parfums !

J’aurais voulu montrer aux enfants ces dorades
Du flot bleu, ces poissons d’or, ces poissons chantants.
– Des écumes de fleurs ont bercé mes dérades
Et d’ineffables vents m’ont ailé par instants.

Parfois, martyr lassé des pôles et des zones,
La mer dont le sanglot faisait mon roulis doux
Montait vers moi ses fleurs d’ombre aux ventouses jaunes
Et je restais, ainsi qu’une femme à genoux…

Presque île, ballottant sur mes bords les querelles
Et les fientes d’oiseaux clabaudeurs aux yeux blonds.
Et je voguais, lorsqu’à travers mes liens frêles
Des noyés descendaient dormir, à reculons !

Or moi, bateau perdu sous les cheveux des anses,
Jeté par l’ouragan dans l’éther sans oiseau,
Moi dont les Monitors et les voiliers des Hanses
N’auraient pas repêché la carcasse ivre d’eau ;

Libre, fumant, monté de brumes violettes,
Moi qui trouais le ciel rougeoyant comme un mur
Qui porte, confiture exquise aux bons poètes,
Des lichens de soleil et des morves d’azur ;

Qui courais, taché de lunules électriques,
Planche folle, escorté des hippocampes noirs,
Quand les juillets faisaient crouler à coups de triques
Les cieux ultramarins aux ardents entonnoirs ;

Moi qui tremblais, sentant geindre à cinquante lieues
Le rut des Béhémots et les Maelstroms épais,
Fileur éternel des immobilités bleues,
Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets !

J’ai vu des archipels sidéraux ! et des îles
Dont les cieux délirants sont ouverts au vogueur :
– Est-ce en ces nuits sans fonds que tu dors et t’exiles,
Million d’oiseaux d’or, ô future Vigueur ?

Mais, vrai, j’ai trop pleuré ! Les Aubes sont navrantes.
Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer :
L’âcre amour m’a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes.
Ô que ma quille éclate ! Ô que j’aille à la mer !

Si je désire une eau d’Europe, c’est la flache
Noire et froide où vers le crépuscule embaumé
Un enfant accroupi plein de tristesse, lâche
Un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai.

Je ne puis plus, baigné de vos langueurs, ô lames,
Enlever leur sillage aux porteurs de cotons,
Ni traverser l’orgueil des drapeaux et des flammes,
Ni nager sous les yeux horribles des pontons.