Broadway for Paul
Page 5
After the reading, everyone came over to the apartment, which we had painted abstract-expressionist red and black for the occasion, carefully avoiding the Rolling Stones poster c. 1970
Allen and Peter would be spending the night, and there was a lot of action
Our band performed in the kitchen, as that seemed the room most like a stage
I had called Morgan, and he had come down from Wisconsin for the reading
He had brought his filmmaking equipment and shot footage of Allen and the rest of us
I’ve seen this footage, and like all else regarding Morgan, I wonder where it ended up
I headed east, for England, and Morgan west, for the promised land of San Francisco
There, he fell in with a psychedelic-magazine crowd, first under the title High Frontiers, later as Mondo 2000
I saw him “Out West,” one of the most memorable times being a drive to Bolinas on a day thickly covered in mist
Somehow, we managed to find Bill Berkson’s bungalow and had a delightful afternoon together
Morgan took a photo of me next to a sign that said “Dogtown, Pop. 5”
We spent the night with friends of his in Mill Valley, and he took us to meet Jaron Lanier, who introduced us to early virtual reality
Everything was an opportunity to be on the cutting edge for Morgan, and he made it into an art form
After that, it was correspondence again for a long while
He went to Europe and got involved with putting on large-scale multimedia
Extravaganzas, bringing together young experimenters from many different areas in the arts
He was in Budapest, Prague, Vienna…
We were able to meet again when we took a trip up the Danube in the early 90s
Everywhere en route, Morgan provided contacts, people for us to meet
Finally, after techno parties and too much schnapps in Vienna, we made it to Budapest, where Morgan was living near some farms outside the city
He met us in a café with lofty ceilings at a prearranged time, that was how
Europe was then, and Morgan tapped into that
As up-to-the-minute as he was in terms of tech and its connections to frontiers of the mind, he also valued traditions, and we shared a love for ancient poetry
We wandered around in post-sickness daze with Morgan and Hilda
They had been in love but were currently not, but they came together to be our hosts
They were amazingly sweet toward us, bestowed such gentility
Somewhere I have a video we made of Morgan in his backyard, biting into a long, green pepper and speaking, I dubbed him a Medialogue
The house he lived in had dirty dishes piled in the sink, water ran across the floor when you flushed the toilet, and he hadn’t paid the rent in about six months
He sent us to other media people in Prague, who put a poem of mine up on a circuit, pre-Internet, it traveled from computer to computer on a fragile network
Later still, Morgan moved permanently to Vienna
He once asked me to help with a passport snafu
He also occasionally made purchases via the Internet that were then sent to me for safekeeping:
I still harbor a set of Ted Berrigan’s In the Early Morning Rain Morgan purchased
He probably saw them as talismans against an unthinking, bureaucratic world
It angers me that I won’t be able to give them to him
But I’m going to find homes for them Morgan would have approved of
When we got our mini dachshund, Luis, Morgan took him on as part of the family
Future correspondence always included good wishes to Luis accompanied by some specific, dachshund-friendly, reference
And then, when Isaac and Oliver arrived, Morgan asked to be called Uncle Morgan
And Uncle Morgan he was:
He sent them both vintage pull toys, and he sent them hand-colored prints he’d found in a Viennese flea market
In exchange, we sent Morgan a cache of the boys’ earliest artworks
I always felt Morgan was accompanying me on my travels in poetry
When I embarked on translating Sextus Propertius, he was as excited as I was by each new discovery and as delighted to find a real, living person from 2,000 years back with whom we’d have loved to spend a night, or nights, drinking, reveling, and in Morgan’s case, revealing, any place our minds had occasion to alight
When I started editing Vanitas, I let Morgan know
He wanted to have something in each of the seven issues
He didn’t quite make it, but he published some remarkable pieces:
Two poems and three sections from an ongoing memoir
I was proud to have their wit and youthful energy in the magazine
I can’t believe I’ll never hear from him again!
His phone calls could be lengthy, and they got longer, and his voice slower, with the years
But I always loved hearing from him
What can I give to get him back?
I’d like to write to Morgan now about gnomic aorists
I’d like to send him a poem Oliver discovered: Paul Blackburn’s “7th Game: 1960 Series”
Now Isaac is going to college: Morgan would certainly be applauding from afar
He didn’t like to go outside in later years, he’d stopped traveling, I think he found his imagination the safest place
Morgan was a dangerous person, in that he thrived on challenging assumptions
But he was a humanist first and foremost, he adored his mother, and from that, found something to love in most people
As we drive to college on Monday, we’ll take Morgan with us
AUGUST 2018
for Isaac, with Love
There’s something about someone walking
That makes New York City always amenable
Even at its 90 degrees of August
With your music on, they’re in a different world but it’s still your world
A certain extended cuff, a fit of pants, gives eternity
Its ever-present possibility
Not just one, but a ceaseless evolving array
Each looking good, their best, despite the heat
On the corner, the heat no longer feels hot
It’s simply the language we all speak
You are leaving this place but temporarily
You will return, will always find a place here
That is yours, but now, ahead!
The future needs you and your kind
You who have always known better than the rest of us
Who is who and the quality of their mettle
It is still Wednesday
I am happy it is still the middle of the week
This week is a bracing blissfulness, a kind of waiting
That is also pleasurable
There seems to be no limit to what one can do
And the heat perpetuates that feeling, always walking to continue
At its idiomatically leisurely pace
It is Thursday
We are still in a week with its languorousness and delicacy
We have time to shop and figure things out for the week ahead
We have time to see our friends, have lunch
And you have time to go pick up your guitar from the shop
Everything feels as though it is moving at its appropriate pace
We are beginning to learn to live with everything that is happening
Friday, there’s the beauty of experience
The things we do together, like shopping for college,
And the thi
ngs we do separately, you going to a party, me staying home and writing
Suddenly, it is all exciting
There’s the possibility of experience
Another day, look out the window, see the tree in the courtyard, the building behind, people starting their day, make a prayer
That’s it, to find the beauty, the excitement, the possibility
It will all be good, even when it doesn’t seem like it
Saturday night, out for a walk, to friends, in the rain
Sunday, the last day, the last night
There’s no such thing as getting it right
Except in life, there you can
LATE AUGUST
I am a different person, but I don’t have to tell you how.
I celebrate difference, and people’s right to delineate their details,
But I also feel it is right to keep one’s difference to oneself.
I have passed a hurdle. Yesterday, I passed it.
Now I am in the country, and I can see
That time is passing at the pace it is meant to pass.
I no longer feel anxiety about the summer.
I love the autumn, and I love to see the leaves beginning
To turn, already now. I am marching forward
Toward greener pastures. And I will achieve them,
Furnished support by such allies as I can count beside,
As the sun sits in late afternoon, late August sky.
ISLAND
When someone looks at the sea,
Not when they are thinking vindictively
About fame and why they didn’t get
Their fair share, how to get back at
Someone—then, the mind is free,
Momentarily, the human ability to
Look and be free. But that’s only
On the boat. On solid ground,
Mind grinds to thinking, to be
Alert, witty, back on terra firma.
I want to scent water, fresh this
Time, get these sensations
Like of an earlier time, or maybe
A time to come, when we all will
Have a sense of water, the birds,
They continue to call through air.
A LONGING FOR BUGS
I want to get bitten by bugs.
There are no more bugs here,
And my dad says there are no more birds.
There are still fish in the pond though.
Isaac caught a big bass earlier this summer
Before we dropped him off at college.
I hear crows cawing in the trees.
Today is the first rainy day in days.
It was 90 degrees in town the other day.
That is unheard of this far north.
But the days have been blissful:
Calm blue skies, gentle breezes.
And canoe rides on the pond have been
Ultimate essences of something that was,
Is, and shall remain, if we can help it.
SEPTEMBER POEM
Instead of throwing it out the window
I place a tiny crumb into a small wax paper bag and close up the bag
There are many signs that summer is over
Including one advertising Commercial Grade Winter Pool Covers
There’s a shimmer out there that cannot be denied
And light that falls on tree trunks in the woods
The blue heron suns himself on the float in afternoon sun
In the shade, dew still lingers on foliage underfoot
Sparkles out there afar draw one to where the couple lies
Manna falls from where, hours earlier, the stars crowded
NOTHING IS LOST
Not the keys with the GPS attached that is somehow not functioning
Not the sunglasses that I was wearing in the morning but not by evening
I open my bag and smell the country on a shirt I am unfolding
I have rescued several items from a desk where mice had decided
The items in the drawer could be eaten and turned into beds
They must have been living in the drawer this summer
I looked in that drawer earlier in the summer as I was searching
For a photograph of a long-ago meeting over poetry with a friend
I didn’t find it, but I reorganized everything in that drawer
Now I find the ends of a stack of letters eaten, destroyed
There are still bits of manna that float from the pine trees
All day every day lying on my laptop’s keyboard
A QUIET ZONE
Entering the park I hear cicadas
In the distance a low foggy turret
Talking to people in and outside
A commonality near the monument
You see, the monument’s not to some
Ancient general or governor
The green pond and ornate fountain
I try to make sense of the city and our years
Ancient depths not only theirs but ours as well
And even they are human
Couples and coupled bikes chained
On the heights temporarily this morning
Pond’s glassy lime green reflection
A walk on earth and hand to trunk
TWO DREAMS
In the first dream I am in a small laundry room with Donald Trump and a woman, and the woman is explaining how she takes care of a small animal, a pet of hers probably. Trump seems fascinated by the story. Eventually, she leaves, and he comes over to me and says “The little animals,” with tears in his eyes. Then he puts his arms around me and hugs me. I feel a little bit nervous and try to wriggle free. In the second dream I am on a veranda and Vivien is somewhere inside, nearby. I am with a large American bald eagle. He has adopted us as his family. He is sitting right in front of me and he seems tired. He is allowing me to hug him and I do this for a long time. He doesn’t move or seem to have any desire to fly away. I look inside to where Vivien is and say we should call him Tecumseh.
A MARVELOUS SKY
I don’t need to buy any records but there is a record store
I don’t want to play chess but there are still chess shops
I don’t really want to pay for anything right now
The sky is blue, the air is warm, and youth is the tenor
Most people are not excited by their lives
But there’s something in the air that might give them a lift
The younger they are, the easier it will be
But there is youth enough for everyone today
A side street provides protected solitude
Suddenly music is in my ears again
Music reaches body brain and heart simultaneously
The ones one wants to reach are reached by music
CAFÉ WITH BRYAN FERRY
If Bryan Ferry were sitting at this café
He’d be sitting outside, as we are, watching the people pass by
He’d have ordered a plain croissant and coffee
And he’d be putting butter and jam on it and admiring
The freshness of it in his mouth and the soft caress of the warm October air
The breeze is causing the canopy edge to flutter,
In turn causing a shadow to enter and retreat
On the edge of the café table
Its pulsing is mesmerizing and also calming
It helps put him in a general trance of midday
On thi
s quiet back street in a quiet neighborhood
There’s no telling who may pass by
Whom he may have the opportunity to meet
He chats with the delivery man, a young bearded guy with tattoos up his arms
He compliments him on his parking job, how he got the large truck
Just onto the curb so that the small street
Is passable and the sidewalk as well
The man seems genuinely pleased that
Someone noticed a detail in his workday
And then went to the extra effort
To compliment him on it,
There’s a tenement on the corner,
Cornice intact, elaborate terra cotta
Accents, parallel lines alternating with brick,
Geometric leaf motifs above the windows
CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA
for Gary Lenhart
My grandfather takes my grandmother by the hand
And they walk down the aisle
Not of a church, they didn’t have much use for those
No, it was the Metropolitan Opera
Not the gaudy one we have today on Lincoln Plaza
But one we’ll never know.
Like much else, the memory of it went with them,
But that’s as it should be.
“Just the Intermezzo,” hums the announcer,
“Herbert von Karajan,” and it feels good
To be alone here, reading poetry, listening to music
On the radio, that something called “radio” still exists,
And the music too, not to give it any particular name.
“All Is Calm,” the announcer announces;
Because we had weather in the 50s today,
He has us listen to Midsummer Vigil,
But it’s a mistake, it’s too schmaltzy,
Grandma and Grandpa wouldn’t have liked it.
I took them to La Traviata once, when they’d
Already lived in New Jersey for years;
Afterward, my grandfather told me
He preferred La Bohème.
YOUNG IN THE HAMPTONS