Oliver Rice
2008 Creekwalker Poetry Prize Judge
Oliver Rice (1921 - 2016) wrote poems that appeared widely in journals and anthologies in the United States and abroad. An interview with Creekwalker was posted in January, 2010.
Mr. Rice grew up in rural Missouri. He studied music and was an accomplished pianist. He served during WWII as a U.S. Navy Pilot, prior to earning a doctorate in literature and teaching at several universities. Dr. Rice was a book editor, developer of learning programs, and team leader on linguistic projects in Africa and SE Asia through the Ford Foundation, Peace Corps and U.S. Army. While in Singapore, he co-translated a volume of modern Malay verse, the first introduction of Malay poets to an English speaking audience, published by the Oxford Press. Mr. Rice was a widely published poet, some 700 of his poems having appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and college textbooks, including publications in the U.S., Canada, England, Austria, Turkey, and India. Most noteworthy were his published anthology, On Consenting to Be A Man, and inclusion of his poetry in former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collin’s anthology, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. Oliver won the Theodore Roethke Prize and twice was nominated for a Pushcart Prize
Oliver Leroy Rice was born July 14, 1921 in Missouri. He passed away February 16, 2016 in Naples, Florida at the age of 94.
Oliver Rice's interview with Creekwalker in 2010 is available here.
Mr. Rice grew up in rural Missouri. He studied music and was an accomplished pianist. He served during WWII as a U.S. Navy Pilot, prior to earning a doctorate in literature and teaching at several universities. Dr. Rice was a book editor, developer of learning programs, and team leader on linguistic projects in Africa and SE Asia through the Ford Foundation, Peace Corps and U.S. Army. While in Singapore, he co-translated a volume of modern Malay verse, the first introduction of Malay poets to an English speaking audience, published by the Oxford Press. Mr. Rice was a widely published poet, some 700 of his poems having appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and college textbooks, including publications in the U.S., Canada, England, Austria, Turkey, and India. Most noteworthy were his published anthology, On Consenting to Be A Man, and inclusion of his poetry in former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collin’s anthology, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. Oliver won the Theodore Roethke Prize and twice was nominated for a Pushcart Prize
Oliver Leroy Rice was born July 14, 1921 in Missouri. He passed away February 16, 2016 in Naples, Florida at the age of 94.
Oliver Rice's interview with Creekwalker in 2010 is available here.
NOSING AROUND IN A SKIFF
The caracara mounting an updraft,
the twining salt creek,
the marsh periwinkle wish fervently to speak.
Beauty, they say, is a humanoid imposition.
Nonetheless, in those semiotic terms,
say the yellow jasmine,
the red-beaked darting tern,
it is a disclosure of a certain kind,
an effrontry of shapes and tones.
An exuberance of the life force,
says the eddy around the stump of cypress.
An excitation of symmetries, of the light,
say the cattails, the whirling wood stork,
the weeds beneath the surface of the backwater.
Curiosity suspects it,
says the acrid odor of the scrub pine in the sun,
and sensibility confirms it,
says the cord grass wavering in the breeze.
WHO WILL LIVE FOREVER,
WHO WILL DIE IN THE VERY NEXT MOMENT
Look at him there.
What is he doing?
Surely he is the bearer of certain ideas, is carnal,
perhaps has an allergy, likes strawberry jam,
a steady income, temperate waters for a swim,
believes he has a soul.
Perhaps. But ---
think of him as a party to the social contract.
Think of its subtler clauses,
its implicit, its conditional lore.
Think of him as the human average,
as a psychosystem with alteregos,
a gamesman, a symbolist with migraines,
a stranger in his sleep
with an ur-brain still intact,
a fantasist with a mores for dubious neighborhoods,
a fabulist with shadows of vainglory in his voice.
Think of Rousseau himself gone balmy
in the last pages of his Confessions.
SIFTING CROWDS, EERIE CONTINUITIES
To: myself@aol.com
Subject: How does one seize the world?
Wait for me.
I will be back.
And, between me the impetuous rover
and you the guardian of our psyche,
we will be doubly wise.
I am guilty of a prurience
for words with the world in them,
anger, epiphany.
Be steady.
---
All civilization has devolved upon you,
I say to the swarming planes,
to Concourse B and the shops,
as humanity confronts itself and falters.
All history tends to allegory,
I say to the sifting crowds,
to all who know the perils of London,
the financial markets, childhood skies.
.
Although these truths need not distress you,
I say to those headed for the wilds,
for a room looking out on seagulls,
for whatever is hidden in Zen.
Advance upon your true natures,
I say to those ticketed for the Pyramids,
the tin roofs of Freetown ,
a certain house in the village White Horse.
---
To: myself@aol.com
Subject: What is it that cries out?
I lie awake on Bonaire
making a theory of my being,
rumors as old as the trade winds
stirring the shadows of my room.
I pursue a phantom,
a foreigner, an alien,
dissident, disjunctive,
disequilibrious among the myths,
renegade humanist
with ID in chameleon colors,
street smart in Byzantium and Chicago ,
companion of morbid youths,
brave men before Agamemnon,
kebab cooker,
singer of madrigals.
All day I name the breezes,
the populations of the trees,
all entities as they practice themselves,
all day entertain a sense of the neurons,
of stories seeking their depths.
---
We sit in a café above the Bosporus ,
the old Dachshund there, I here,
strangers,
deeply, darkly confidential,
incarcerated in the present,
the past gnawing into the future.
Like eerie continuities,
like a secret wisdom,
the more insistent ironies roam the afternoon,
the fields, the streets,
sidle among arrangements of persons
with names thousands of years old.
To: myself@aol.com
Subject: What do the gargoyles say?
Stay there,
I will be back.
In the house that is not there
I am pondering a declaration
of such profound humanity
that it will survive even death,
even the demolition of Earth.
The swallows sweep low over the bay
and settle in the eucalyptus trees.
The jungle people by the roadside
sell parrots and orchids.
Utrecht goes on without me
THEIR CLAVICLES PROCEEDING
It is their being here alone that is so poignant.
The child flinging bread to the gulls.
The aging one abstracted, confirming the child,
the swooping gulls,
the surf, the skies,
the song of the marsh wren,
the time, the place.
It is all unexceptional hypotheses to the child.
All convoluted actuality for the aging one,
consenting to the ironies, the absurdities,
the fossils strewn along the tide line,
the dark fables,
the small facets of things,
the blue heron stalking in the shallows.
They being practitioners of the sole mode
of acknowledging the metaphysical past,
the metaphysical future,
the morning, the waiting ---
anything anywhere.
Their viscera, their neurons,
their clavicles unaccountably proceeding.
HALLOWEEN AT CITY HALL
The cleaning people have gone.
Security has settled into their ruminations.
-
Spirits of incumbents preside at their desks.
-
Through the hallways, stirring the auras,
roam phantoms of operatives, favorites,
-
random instances off the table of human types.
-
Portraits of civic legends peer from the walls.
Electronics blink in the darkness,
-
The mores, the ethos await the morning news.
THE SHOWER HAS PASSED TO THE WEST
A sea urchin sits in a pool up the beach,
water streaming from its sides.
Black- bellied plovers run along the tide line,
snatching at the sea weed, the turtle grass.
Pennywort, sea oats come alive.
Gulls huddle against the wind,
feathers ruffling.
Up in the dunes a weathered rowboat rests,
half buried among the railroad vines.
PROCLAMATION FOR LABOR DAY
At least once in every decade
someone with an appropriate voice,
equitable as wisteria, pain,
the frets of a guitar,
shall retell the story of the youth who,
from blundering around in certain books,
affirming as respiration, sunrise,
the surge of an engine,
conceives of the vivid altercation
between these mottos:
From each according to his ability,
to each according to his need.
To each according to his ability,
from each according to his vulnerability.
Do unto others
as you would have them do unto you.
Do unto others
so that you may have theirs.
THE PAINTING HE HAS STARTED,
AGAIN AND AGAIN
Sometimes it is himself
advancing into the foreground,
emitting fragments of soliloquy
or talking to his country.
Sometimes it is a morning waiting.
Or he is rendering a justice.
*
Sometimes it is a scene
in a dream he scarcely remembers,
with colors of embryonic water
and sumac in a distant field.
Sometimes it is an expectation of night.
Or he is taking a creature’s revenge.
Or contemplating tempestuous feasibilities.
Or a quietude.
Or the journeys of the whales.
HAS ENDURED, HAS SUSTAINED
Here.
Stand here.
From this position it has the shape of a language
that has endured a drifter calling home,
the cries of the gulls on an eelgrass flat,
night coming in across a prairie,
culture wars,
the evanescence of perfect love,
the continents grinding on their plates,
Democritus, Lucretius, Descartes forgive, protect us,
has sustained eras breaking out,
unanswered songs,
the hot winds of the Mojave,
ironies straight from the double helix,
the lawless myths that cruise the freeway,
rooms without décor.
COMPLEXIONS OF THEIR SCULPTURE GARDEN
They have a nice enough city here,
but it was this retreat
that persuaded me to give myself a respite.
Unavoidably detained an extra day, I reported.
*
Before the gates are open,
a workman tidies about, clipping and raking.
I wait in the first slanting sunlight,
clairvoyant and strong,
thinking I may be here for an epiphany.
Asked why he became a sculptor,
Giacometti said so as not to die.
*
Inside, now, I am alone
in an aura of Rodin and Modigliani,
Donatello and Degas and Brancu si.
The pieces stand expressively apart,
each in its zone of thoughtfulness,
in its plausible, insistent light,
emitting ardors and hypotheses,
intimations of myth,
of intellect and danger,
bearing histories, empathies
out of the sketchbooks
of persons at risk like men.
*
Heat, I was taught, arises in matter
from an agitation of its elements.
*
Art, said Proust,
is the opposite of habit and banality.
*
Happenstance mumbles beyond the hedges.
Others arrive,
straggling singles, couples,
a robust man in a wheelchair with his companion,
an older woman and a teen
who ignores her, slouches off by himself,
while I, unknowing, know
some of the secrets of these makers,
something of malaise and exuberance,
flushing, faltering idea,
intuitive hand
out of the possible, determining just thus.
*
Someone keeps books on this place.
Someone is the director, the curator.
Someone conceived its endowment.
*
So it goes on,
the day, another day, passing,
my plane waiting.
*
Last week, last year
they were here at the false dawn,
in falling snow,
acid rain.
Next week, next year
they will be here in the moonlight,
emitting eerie continuities,
rumors of a language
for what cannot be said.
AN AFTERNOON ON TRAGIC EARTH
I drive through accidental neighborhoods,
warehouses and grassy plots,
restless lore and target markets,
through patches of miscellaneous culture,
beauty parlors and garage sales,
brand names and prevailing fictions,
through sifting, cunning vicinities,
coffee shops and street repairs,
zones of sociology and fable,
past a pot of geraniums,
an athletic field,
a lone boy,
poised, intent,
holding a vaulting pole.
I pull up and park,
engine idling.
The bar is put aside.
He makes a run,
leaps --- for style,
it seems, not height,
returns, sets up,
imaging his flight,
conferring, I conclude,
with his reflexes,
his motor intuitions,
his natural ingenuities,
surrounded by silence,
runs, leaps, images,
with an unconsenting face,
again and again.
*
He may be mythic.
Man, said John Locke,
is a system of matter
fitly disposed
to perceive and think.
But perhaps also to soar.
It is not impossible
that he is a prodigy,
a sport of physiology.
Man, said Neitzsche,
is an entity
to be overcome.
This may be, I declare,
a not inapt,
not inappreciable,
canto of anthropology, I profess,
pulling out, rolling on in the direction of life.
APRIL 19, 1980
One must end up, said Sartre, by ending up.
An atheist’s orthodoxy.
And it was true, in a sense, four days ago
when the nurse forbade Simone
to embrace his still warm cadaver,
declaring the gangrene contagious.
The humiliation of his ugliness was over,
his slight stature, pudgy face, disfigured eye.
His hypochondria utterly resolved,
his squeamish appetite,
egosexual mania,
narcotic hallucinations,
lingual obfuscation.
But in another, a transcendent sense,
he had never been more alive than today ,
his funeral procession through Montparnasse
followed by fifty thousand citizens.
Few of whom are apt to be ontologically inclined,
nor phenomenologically.
Perhaps none believe there is no Louvre in itself,
no Jardin des Tuileries as such,
only their massively various ideas of them.
Nor believe that the innate human capacity
to conceive what is not the case, to make choices,
to observe the self from apart,
are the cause of much of their perturbation.
Why, then, are they there?
Because Jean-Paul was singular as Baudelaire?0D
Compelling, controversial as Voltaire?
Novelistic as Flaubert?
An authentic French celebrity?
An incumbent essential French intellectual?
DE NEXUS
Here is your mother’s diary.
She is still alive.
Will you read it?
She is dead.
Will you read it?
SAUL BELLOW IN OUTER SPACE
Voyager 1, launched September 5, 1977,
to explore the boundaries of the solar system,
bears electronic scenes and sounds of Earth ---
surf, a barking dog, a violinist, a whistling train,
greetings in several dozen languages,
Saul remarking you pay for what you want,
not always for what you get,
a kiss, a laughing infant, a crowing rooster.
FROM HER MEMORABILIA
On a Saturday
in a mood of pleasant expectation
or inadequacy or chagrin,
Alice or Mae or Lucille
takes a left or right from her driveway
toward civilization.
Emerges from a parking garage
into downtown,
random traffic of the populace,
amorphous instances of all sociology,
all psychology.
Enters her bank,
emporium of fiscal demeanor,
of significant wherewithal.
Drives to her usual mall,
acquisitive extravaganza,
incitor of uncommon needs,
of mindful and lurking desires,
vanities, fantasies, delusions.
Has lunch with Judi or Liz or Mabel
in a venue for confidentiality,
grievances, passages, complacencies,
the entire human condition to survey.
Stops by the library,
aura upon aura of human experience.
Arrives at home,
miscellany of her being,
of her psyche to date.
TUESDAY AGAIN
Spring moves imperceptibly to the north.
The iris are provoked. And the sparrows.
A breeze arises, then subsides.
Is this a day we should fear?
It was morning. Now it is afternoon.
What are the silences saying?
White clouds float in from the bay.
How is it feasible to be a man?
HANDLE
Beneath its patina
the grain is clearly mountain mahogany.
It nestles in the palm as if taken from a mold.
The working end is enigmatic,
faintly suggesting the stump of an amputation.
It seems inapplicable for a pistol.
A cane.
A saw.
Any device.
But has extraordinary worth.
As if available for eventuality.
AND GUSTING WINDS
The lilac leaves in the bowl, Darlene,
turn brown at the edges.
Is a maxim obscured in this?
Drying raindrops leave spots on the windowpane.
A root of the sycamore bulges the sidewalk.
Do we see intimations of allegory here?
A grit, Darlene, settles on the tabletops.
The door acquires a patina.
Can we believe these are not parables of betrayal?
THE WASTE BASKETS ARE EMPTY
These are the various offices and cubicles,
and these the dynamic aisles and hallways.
There are the locked filing cabinets,
and that is the litter on the surfaces.
Those are the cleaning people
who left only the night lights as they departed.
The enterprise is absent until Monday morning.
Dispersed to the precincts, the suburbs,
self-regarding selves with expectations
of domesticities, jollities, solemnities,
of idleness, silence, privacy,
disquietude,
trouble,
the work of belonging, of enduring.
---
This is the weekend weather passing through.
These are the neighborhoods
where they have lives,
unsuspected, turning lives,
egos randomly diverging,
whose names are unemphatic on their lips,
who evade the ambiguities in their snapshots,
who vacillate between too little and too much,
who, taking the subway to the sketch class,
trimming the hedges, baking the cookies,
listening in the afternoon from the recliner
to the sublimated lovesong,
the street noises,
the insistent ironies,
ambivalently contemplate the enterprise.
DEAR AUNT ETHYL
Shown a typical letter from Thad at the university,
our local etymologist might, from scholarly habit,
identify derivations from Sanskrit or Bantu,
classical Greek, Old German, or late American.
Perhaps he delights in fantasies of the high drama
when a cave man first sensed the convenience
of attaching a particular grunt or hiss or gurgle
to his spear, rain, or a berry that sickened him.
Our resident anthropologist might join him
in considering Thad’s dialect an instance
of language as an organism evolving
with the experience, the whims of its users,
but sustaining a mysterious autonomy.
Perhaps he marvels at the inevitability
of tribespersons adopting a yawp or a snort
to convey the proposition of a certain adjective.
In particular, he may be awed by their recognition
of the absolute realities named by prepositions.
Even as a premed, but as an upperclassman,
Thad is perhaps aware of these theories,
surely acquainted with poetic elevations,
and as a citizen certainly onto the deceits
practiced by marketeers and demagogues.
But sitting down one night to write his letter,
those learnings were probably barely apt
His intent must have been to convey,
good fellow, genuinely and spontaneously,
in the idiom most natural to them both,
his regard for his doting relative
and to share with her what was appropriate
for her to know about his campus life.
She, generous soul, oblivious to all linguistics,
no doubt received his message as faithfully
as in any of their chats at her kitchen table.
EPISODE IN A DRIFTING CANOE
Things unseen rustle, plop, cheep.
A hawk flashes through the trees.
Minnows flutter in the shallows.
They do not know it is Thursday,
these my cousins, afar removed,
furred, scaled, barked, feathered, shelled,
care nothing for the wobbly orbit of Earth.
A bluejay perches nearby,
makes a raucous declaration, flies away.
The world could have done without him,
I say to the covert populace.
Without you, as well, I answer for them,
saying exactly to the spider,
skimming across the still-water pool.
Tolerate us, I say to the warbler in the tree tops,
our congenital, insufficient, erratic psyches,
our great-spirited aspirations.
Forgive our exploits, menacing as fire or storm.
EYE WITNESS, TRIMMING HIS NAILS,
TO THE ENTIRE HUMAN PASSAGE
Adam, professor emeritus of archeology,
restless in his leisure, has dwelt all spring
on family lore of a village,
traditional home of his ancestors,
which was destroyed by the government
for harboring members of a dissident party
and later rebuilt on an adjoining site.
On a Tuesday, his birthday, in early April,
on Fridays, Sundays, mornings, evenings,
he imagines himself traveling to the community,
saying to the cat, shovel in hand,
your master has aspired to be
an eye witness to the entire human passage,
out walking, repairing the latch on a window,
observes his ancient homeground to be
a sparsely populated outskirt of the new village,
overgrown with natural vegetation,
saying to his coffee mug, his arthritis,
how many down there were good heads,
wondered at the moods of birdsong,
aspired, despaired, danced remarkably,
utterly captive of themselves, but now
sheer instances of hypothetical humanity,
void of personhood, items of anthropology,
as his sweep-second hand pulses
with the urgencies of being.
Taking a shower, mailing his tax forms,
sees himself conversing with townspeople,
negotiating with the authorities for permission
to unearth some of their past for them,
saying, origins of our habits of hand,
dispositions of art, theology, justice,
our innuendos, duplicities, endearments,
saying, models for my chin, my bow legs.
---
In his May Day fantasies, after phoning his son
with news of their old neighbor’s stroke,
in his recliner with a stiffness in his back,
he is reminded of the digs at Har Karkom,
at Jamestown , Casas Grandas, El Pilar,
saying, the labor, week after week,
the irritations of rains, tourists,
official inspectors, crafty local hire.
---
Lying awake on Independence Night,
listens to feeble bursts in the neighborhood,
envisioning the fireworks by the lake,
emblematic of the glory of war,
saying, here in the rubble of the myths,
disenlightened by the errata of history,
we are beset by what we have wrought,
taking the dog to the vet, making cornbread,
says, I might have endlessly dug
through strata of merest matter,
shards of lifeways, of memorabilia,
down perhaps to homo erectus,
and not learned what I wish to know
about my very self among the fates.
OR THE WRITHING TAIL OF A KITE
“The butterfly effect”, a term in common use
among chaos theorists, originated from an
address by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz
playfully titled “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s
Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas ?”
To confront a common view of the forces
driving history as essentially chaotic, Hegel
propounded a theory he called a “dialectic”,
the demonstrations he provided having
since been found dubious in some quarters.
Chaos, said Novalis, must be
viewed through a veil of order.
Accidents are accidents, said
Santayana, only to ignorance.
Let it be our project for the month, Gertrude,
uncredentialed as we are in any of the sciences,
to rid ourselves of this ignorance by sheer wits.
We understand the authentic proposition implicit
in the butterfly imagery, but it does invite parody.
By the same premise, what conflagrations
might result from the whirling of swallows
through the emptiness above the Neva or the Nile .
Or from the wakes of yachts in the Aegean .
Or the swaying of tamarisk trees in a Libyan garden.
However improbably, the butterfly effect
assumes an extremely intricate and precise chain
of causes and effects, which presumes ---
is it escapable, Gertrude ---
an utter orderliness of the universe,
not the inscrutible incoherence
described in our dictionaries.
What else does Santayana proclaim?
That the properties of matter are implacable?
Think of the astraunaut approaching outer space.
What else does Hegel intuit
in the thin air between thesis and antithesis
that he so yearns to prove?
That all life and all event existed,
in potentia, at the instant of the Big Bang.
Think how relentlessly eroticizing,
for now,
is the sun.
And what does Novalis advise?
That we protect ourselves
against the terror of a vast unknown
by affirming its integrity?
Perhaps we will conclude, in our naivete,
that the libretto of history, Gertrude,
with all its rigidity and malleability,
is the table of elements.
OR LIKE A STINGLESS RAY
It behaves like an organism.
Has substance like a giant tick
but without blood-sucking, infectious malice.
Has numerous extremeties like the snakes
attached to the Hindu god Shiva
or like the tentacles of an octopus,
fierce but without malevolent intent.
It is the human perceiving energy.
AEOLUS DREAMS
OF THE VANITIES OF PRAIRIE VILLAGES
Boreas,
the north wind,
rustles the dogwoods of Birmingham .
Zephyr,
the west wind,
ripples the puddles of Harrisburg .
Ruby Felicia Dodd nurses her baby.
Notus,
the south wind,
ruffles the flags of Grand Rapids .
Calvin “Buddy” Parrish, route man,
is just the age of his father at the end.
Eurus,
the east wind,
rattles the eaves of Oregon City .
GRAY SQUIRRELS, METAPHYSICAL KITES
What is that sound?
It is a feast of excited insects.
It is a warbler in the loblolly pines.
A music that listening makes.
What is that motion?
It is the arc of a spider’s eye.
It is a hawk flashing through the birches.
A great slow progress of legend.
What is that efflorescence?
Minnows. Gray squirrels. Willlows breathing.
I see. I see.
It is allegory sailing on the bay.
It is the sheen of metaphysical kites.
And how is it all rectified?
Why, by death. Ingeniously. Exquisitely.
NEAR PILTDOWN
It is noon.
An autumn breeze stirs the leaves.
They have stopped,
hairy and filthy,
to take food.
Now they rest.
Listen.
Do you hear,
faintly as the thunder in the west,
a chorus of “Melancholy Baby”?
BERN . 1905. SPRING.
If, there, beneath the astounding Alps ,
the red-tiled roofs, the ingenious clock tower,
if, along the medieval arcades, the cobbled streets,
at the university, the patent office,
where all physics seethed with will to disclose,
time, space, energy, matter, light,
if there was a deity watching, listening,
an Intellligence covetous of Its Laws,
despairing of Its Mystifications,
Its Sovereignty over Knowledge,
how might It/He/She have Regarded
Einstein, Planck, and the others?
AND THE DISQUIETUDES LEFT FROM THEIR DREAMS
I think of Tom, Dick, Harry, and Eva,
of their attachments back in the towns,
of their affinities for Alaska , for the Blue Grass,
for all abundant milieus,
think of their ambivalent lives,
endowed as they are with free will,
with counteregos and motley genetic trails,
with proliferating cognition,
with obstinate glands,
whose selves can never quite perceive themselves.
But I think also of Edgar, the exile
who has never left the place he was reared,
think of him sitting at a table
with coffee and the news.
EDWARD MUNCH ET AL
The short version is that he painted The Scream
and was at one time as reputed as Picasso.
Was known as the handsomest man in Norway .
Was quite wealthy in his old age.
The long version, however, is that he led a life
of Dionysian extremes and chronic distresses.
Was at the mercy of himself.
In Oslo , Paris , Nice, Berlin .
---
How numerous they have been,
his like,
van Gogh,
Wagner,
others,
others,
Proust,
Nijinski,
others,
others.
WHAT DO THEY ADVISE ONE TO DO
AFTER HE HAS LEARNED THAT HIS LIFE
IS FUTILE IN EVERY WAY EXCEPT THE SYMBOLIC?
Out there, beyond the reach of my senses,
across town, in Albuquerque , in Pago Pago ,
are dubious realities, imprinted on my memory
by books, the news, hearsay, the movies.
In my absence, realms of anthropological gossip
waver into the silence of their fantasies,
their predicaments, their eras.
Is it a failing world?
What do they know about this is Lima ?
In Qom , beneath the elucalyptus trees?
What wisdom do they impart to their camels,
what ironies disclose to their yaks, their dogies.
candors withhold from their young,
exonerations declare to their mirrors?
Above the chatter from the Frankfort book fair,
a duck banquet in Beijing , a quorum in the Knesset,
is that not a yearning obligato,
a soliloquy from the collective unconscious?
SMELL THE GINGER IN THOSE COOKIES
Listen to the voices of the crabbers at dusk.
Everything results from the properties of matter.
Look at the swells on their polo ponies.
Everything results from the impetuosities,
the collisions, the regenerations of the elements.
Feel the angry knot in the child’s throat.
The periodic table never intended any of that.
KARBACHER IN EXTREMIS
These representations --- Kostas, Luigi, and Noah ---
my conversants, have this in common:
they are vernacular Americans,
but with auras of long descent.
To evade the explicit,
I situate them not in Ithaca, Venice, and Bethlehem,
but in Roxbury or Indianapolis
or somewhere like Flagstaff.
The issue is our acculturation.
~~~~
It is not that Kostas takes ritual positions
with Socrates or Descartes,
not that Luigi so much reveres
Augustus or Machiavelli,
that Noah is occasionally conflicted
over Thomas Aquinas or Cardinal Newman,
nor that they are overwhelmed
by Darwin or Freud.
(Although Aristotle is said to have contended
that all truly outstanding men suffer melancholy.)
(Although Saint Augustine may have declared
that a falsehood disturbs the universe.)
The issue is how we, psychosystems,
each in his separate mornings, evenings,
are to reconcile ourselves
to an unremitting fallibility,
how, receivers of tainted myths,
each another sum of behaviors,
we are to verify ourselves,
given the litter of our dream work,
an equivocating mores,
the shadow of mortality,
given the migrating birds,
black horses running in the fields,
Walden Pond,
the Alamo,
the fog eerie white, sometimes in Wisconsin.
A STAGE SET FOR MORTAL CANDOR
The curtains standing open at the little theater
in an artsy town on the Gulf Coast,
memories of Miller, Albee, Wilder
mingle upstage, the deck bare, unlit,
the company inactive for the summer,
departed north for the season in stock.
---
It is dawn, is sultry afternoon, waking night.
Is a horse farm, a racist borough, Santa Fe.
Ardors, discontents, libidinal behaviors
enter, exit stage right, left.
Protagonists solicit from the wings,
jostled by ruthless, plaintive phantoms.
Dialects of the Poconos, the Ozarks
shrewdly murmur from the dressing rooms.
---
From the tiers of empty seats
the human condition peers.
Afterthought waits among the ambiguities.
The common muddle seeps in from wherever.
UNTITLED THIRTEEN
1:42 PM
Walking east toward my attorney’s office
I notice just ahead a figure who,
from the back, somewhat resembles me
and am struck by the fantasy
that he is my alterego, familiarly slouching,
impetuous and loose-living, in my opinion.
I debate whether to overtake him.
1:44 PM
Walking east toward my late-lunch bistro
I notice across the street two figures who,
from an angle, somewhat resemble me
and am struck by the fantasy
that they are my alteregos, one the slouch,
the other a dedicated conservative,
judicious and reliable, in my opinion.
I debate whether they will meet and speak.
1:47 PM
Glancing toward them as I turn south
I notice that they are conversing,
appear to be looking in my direction,
and am struck by the fantasy
that they may intend to join me
as if in sibling identity.
I debate whether to wait, flee, confront them.
WHO HAVE REASON TO FEAR THEMSELVES
Look at that animal.
It is a human.
More grotesque than a snake or a bat.
Oh my.
Known to have requested, though royal,
to be buried in a sewer.
Inclined to gaze at gray spots on the darkness.
Oh my.
Maintains a museum of torture implements.
Whose barbarians are always at the gate.
Oh my.
WORKING PARTS
I sit on the porch, screened, neighborhood-watched,
pleasantly exhilarated by the starlight,
the wind, the near silence of the night,
thinking about what I am thinking,
about my ignorance of the electrochemistry
of which I am a representative effect,
about the periodic table of the elements
of which I am composed,
about the calcium, zinc, niacin on my dietary chart
that convinces me of my primal materiality,
about the sodium, potassium, whatever
that are the working parts of my cognition ---
so eerily,
so methodically,
so recklessly
in this darkness,
functioning.
© Copyright Oliver Rice. All Rights Reserved.
The caracara mounting an updraft,
the twining salt creek,
the marsh periwinkle wish fervently to speak.
Beauty, they say, is a humanoid imposition.
Nonetheless, in those semiotic terms,
say the yellow jasmine,
the red-beaked darting tern,
it is a disclosure of a certain kind,
an effrontry of shapes and tones.
An exuberance of the life force,
says the eddy around the stump of cypress.
An excitation of symmetries, of the light,
say the cattails, the whirling wood stork,
the weeds beneath the surface of the backwater.
Curiosity suspects it,
says the acrid odor of the scrub pine in the sun,
and sensibility confirms it,
says the cord grass wavering in the breeze.
WHO WILL LIVE FOREVER,
WHO WILL DIE IN THE VERY NEXT MOMENT
Look at him there.
What is he doing?
Surely he is the bearer of certain ideas, is carnal,
perhaps has an allergy, likes strawberry jam,
a steady income, temperate waters for a swim,
believes he has a soul.
Perhaps. But ---
think of him as a party to the social contract.
Think of its subtler clauses,
its implicit, its conditional lore.
Think of him as the human average,
as a psychosystem with alteregos,
a gamesman, a symbolist with migraines,
a stranger in his sleep
with an ur-brain still intact,
a fantasist with a mores for dubious neighborhoods,
a fabulist with shadows of vainglory in his voice.
Think of Rousseau himself gone balmy
in the last pages of his Confessions.
SIFTING CROWDS, EERIE CONTINUITIES
To: myself@aol.com
Subject: How does one seize the world?
Wait for me.
I will be back.
And, between me the impetuous rover
and you the guardian of our psyche,
we will be doubly wise.
I am guilty of a prurience
for words with the world in them,
anger, epiphany.
Be steady.
---
All civilization has devolved upon you,
I say to the swarming planes,
to Concourse B and the shops,
as humanity confronts itself and falters.
All history tends to allegory,
I say to the sifting crowds,
to all who know the perils of London,
the financial markets, childhood skies.
.
Although these truths need not distress you,
I say to those headed for the wilds,
for a room looking out on seagulls,
for whatever is hidden in Zen.
Advance upon your true natures,
I say to those ticketed for the Pyramids,
the tin roofs of Freetown ,
a certain house in the village White Horse.
---
To: myself@aol.com
Subject: What is it that cries out?
I lie awake on Bonaire
making a theory of my being,
rumors as old as the trade winds
stirring the shadows of my room.
I pursue a phantom,
a foreigner, an alien,
dissident, disjunctive,
disequilibrious among the myths,
renegade humanist
with ID in chameleon colors,
street smart in Byzantium and Chicago ,
companion of morbid youths,
brave men before Agamemnon,
kebab cooker,
singer of madrigals.
All day I name the breezes,
the populations of the trees,
all entities as they practice themselves,
all day entertain a sense of the neurons,
of stories seeking their depths.
---
We sit in a café above the Bosporus ,
the old Dachshund there, I here,
strangers,
deeply, darkly confidential,
incarcerated in the present,
the past gnawing into the future.
Like eerie continuities,
like a secret wisdom,
the more insistent ironies roam the afternoon,
the fields, the streets,
sidle among arrangements of persons
with names thousands of years old.
To: myself@aol.com
Subject: What do the gargoyles say?
Stay there,
I will be back.
In the house that is not there
I am pondering a declaration
of such profound humanity
that it will survive even death,
even the demolition of Earth.
The swallows sweep low over the bay
and settle in the eucalyptus trees.
The jungle people by the roadside
sell parrots and orchids.
Utrecht goes on without me
THEIR CLAVICLES PROCEEDING
It is their being here alone that is so poignant.
The child flinging bread to the gulls.
The aging one abstracted, confirming the child,
the swooping gulls,
the surf, the skies,
the song of the marsh wren,
the time, the place.
It is all unexceptional hypotheses to the child.
All convoluted actuality for the aging one,
consenting to the ironies, the absurdities,
the fossils strewn along the tide line,
the dark fables,
the small facets of things,
the blue heron stalking in the shallows.
They being practitioners of the sole mode
of acknowledging the metaphysical past,
the metaphysical future,
the morning, the waiting ---
anything anywhere.
Their viscera, their neurons,
their clavicles unaccountably proceeding.
HALLOWEEN AT CITY HALL
The cleaning people have gone.
Security has settled into their ruminations.
-
Spirits of incumbents preside at their desks.
-
Through the hallways, stirring the auras,
roam phantoms of operatives, favorites,
-
random instances off the table of human types.
-
Portraits of civic legends peer from the walls.
Electronics blink in the darkness,
-
The mores, the ethos await the morning news.
THE SHOWER HAS PASSED TO THE WEST
A sea urchin sits in a pool up the beach,
water streaming from its sides.
Black- bellied plovers run along the tide line,
snatching at the sea weed, the turtle grass.
Pennywort, sea oats come alive.
Gulls huddle against the wind,
feathers ruffling.
Up in the dunes a weathered rowboat rests,
half buried among the railroad vines.
PROCLAMATION FOR LABOR DAY
At least once in every decade
someone with an appropriate voice,
equitable as wisteria, pain,
the frets of a guitar,
shall retell the story of the youth who,
from blundering around in certain books,
affirming as respiration, sunrise,
the surge of an engine,
conceives of the vivid altercation
between these mottos:
From each according to his ability,
to each according to his need.
To each according to his ability,
from each according to his vulnerability.
Do unto others
as you would have them do unto you.
Do unto others
so that you may have theirs.
THE PAINTING HE HAS STARTED,
AGAIN AND AGAIN
Sometimes it is himself
advancing into the foreground,
emitting fragments of soliloquy
or talking to his country.
Sometimes it is a morning waiting.
Or he is rendering a justice.
*
Sometimes it is a scene
in a dream he scarcely remembers,
with colors of embryonic water
and sumac in a distant field.
Sometimes it is an expectation of night.
Or he is taking a creature’s revenge.
Or contemplating tempestuous feasibilities.
Or a quietude.
Or the journeys of the whales.
HAS ENDURED, HAS SUSTAINED
Here.
Stand here.
From this position it has the shape of a language
that has endured a drifter calling home,
the cries of the gulls on an eelgrass flat,
night coming in across a prairie,
culture wars,
the evanescence of perfect love,
the continents grinding on their plates,
Democritus, Lucretius, Descartes forgive, protect us,
has sustained eras breaking out,
unanswered songs,
the hot winds of the Mojave,
ironies straight from the double helix,
the lawless myths that cruise the freeway,
rooms without décor.
COMPLEXIONS OF THEIR SCULPTURE GARDEN
They have a nice enough city here,
but it was this retreat
that persuaded me to give myself a respite.
Unavoidably detained an extra day, I reported.
*
Before the gates are open,
a workman tidies about, clipping and raking.
I wait in the first slanting sunlight,
clairvoyant and strong,
thinking I may be here for an epiphany.
Asked why he became a sculptor,
Giacometti said so as not to die.
*
Inside, now, I am alone
in an aura of Rodin and Modigliani,
Donatello and Degas and Brancu si.
The pieces stand expressively apart,
each in its zone of thoughtfulness,
in its plausible, insistent light,
emitting ardors and hypotheses,
intimations of myth,
of intellect and danger,
bearing histories, empathies
out of the sketchbooks
of persons at risk like men.
*
Heat, I was taught, arises in matter
from an agitation of its elements.
*
Art, said Proust,
is the opposite of habit and banality.
*
Happenstance mumbles beyond the hedges.
Others arrive,
straggling singles, couples,
a robust man in a wheelchair with his companion,
an older woman and a teen
who ignores her, slouches off by himself,
while I, unknowing, know
some of the secrets of these makers,
something of malaise and exuberance,
flushing, faltering idea,
intuitive hand
out of the possible, determining just thus.
*
Someone keeps books on this place.
Someone is the director, the curator.
Someone conceived its endowment.
*
So it goes on,
the day, another day, passing,
my plane waiting.
*
Last week, last year
they were here at the false dawn,
in falling snow,
acid rain.
Next week, next year
they will be here in the moonlight,
emitting eerie continuities,
rumors of a language
for what cannot be said.
AN AFTERNOON ON TRAGIC EARTH
I drive through accidental neighborhoods,
warehouses and grassy plots,
restless lore and target markets,
through patches of miscellaneous culture,
beauty parlors and garage sales,
brand names and prevailing fictions,
through sifting, cunning vicinities,
coffee shops and street repairs,
zones of sociology and fable,
past a pot of geraniums,
an athletic field,
a lone boy,
poised, intent,
holding a vaulting pole.
I pull up and park,
engine idling.
The bar is put aside.
He makes a run,
leaps --- for style,
it seems, not height,
returns, sets up,
imaging his flight,
conferring, I conclude,
with his reflexes,
his motor intuitions,
his natural ingenuities,
surrounded by silence,
runs, leaps, images,
with an unconsenting face,
again and again.
*
He may be mythic.
Man, said John Locke,
is a system of matter
fitly disposed
to perceive and think.
But perhaps also to soar.
It is not impossible
that he is a prodigy,
a sport of physiology.
Man, said Neitzsche,
is an entity
to be overcome.
This may be, I declare,
a not inapt,
not inappreciable,
canto of anthropology, I profess,
pulling out, rolling on in the direction of life.
APRIL 19, 1980
One must end up, said Sartre, by ending up.
An atheist’s orthodoxy.
And it was true, in a sense, four days ago
when the nurse forbade Simone
to embrace his still warm cadaver,
declaring the gangrene contagious.
The humiliation of his ugliness was over,
his slight stature, pudgy face, disfigured eye.
His hypochondria utterly resolved,
his squeamish appetite,
egosexual mania,
narcotic hallucinations,
lingual obfuscation.
But in another, a transcendent sense,
he had never been more alive than today ,
his funeral procession through Montparnasse
followed by fifty thousand citizens.
Few of whom are apt to be ontologically inclined,
nor phenomenologically.
Perhaps none believe there is no Louvre in itself,
no Jardin des Tuileries as such,
only their massively various ideas of them.
Nor believe that the innate human capacity
to conceive what is not the case, to make choices,
to observe the self from apart,
are the cause of much of their perturbation.
Why, then, are they there?
Because Jean-Paul was singular as Baudelaire?0D
Compelling, controversial as Voltaire?
Novelistic as Flaubert?
An authentic French celebrity?
An incumbent essential French intellectual?
DE NEXUS
Here is your mother’s diary.
She is still alive.
Will you read it?
She is dead.
Will you read it?
SAUL BELLOW IN OUTER SPACE
Voyager 1, launched September 5, 1977,
to explore the boundaries of the solar system,
bears electronic scenes and sounds of Earth ---
surf, a barking dog, a violinist, a whistling train,
greetings in several dozen languages,
Saul remarking you pay for what you want,
not always for what you get,
a kiss, a laughing infant, a crowing rooster.
FROM HER MEMORABILIA
On a Saturday
in a mood of pleasant expectation
or inadequacy or chagrin,
Alice or Mae or Lucille
takes a left or right from her driveway
toward civilization.
Emerges from a parking garage
into downtown,
random traffic of the populace,
amorphous instances of all sociology,
all psychology.
Enters her bank,
emporium of fiscal demeanor,
of significant wherewithal.
Drives to her usual mall,
acquisitive extravaganza,
incitor of uncommon needs,
of mindful and lurking desires,
vanities, fantasies, delusions.
Has lunch with Judi or Liz or Mabel
in a venue for confidentiality,
grievances, passages, complacencies,
the entire human condition to survey.
Stops by the library,
aura upon aura of human experience.
Arrives at home,
miscellany of her being,
of her psyche to date.
TUESDAY AGAIN
Spring moves imperceptibly to the north.
The iris are provoked. And the sparrows.
A breeze arises, then subsides.
Is this a day we should fear?
It was morning. Now it is afternoon.
What are the silences saying?
White clouds float in from the bay.
How is it feasible to be a man?
HANDLE
Beneath its patina
the grain is clearly mountain mahogany.
It nestles in the palm as if taken from a mold.
The working end is enigmatic,
faintly suggesting the stump of an amputation.
It seems inapplicable for a pistol.
A cane.
A saw.
Any device.
But has extraordinary worth.
As if available for eventuality.
AND GUSTING WINDS
The lilac leaves in the bowl, Darlene,
turn brown at the edges.
Is a maxim obscured in this?
Drying raindrops leave spots on the windowpane.
A root of the sycamore bulges the sidewalk.
Do we see intimations of allegory here?
A grit, Darlene, settles on the tabletops.
The door acquires a patina.
Can we believe these are not parables of betrayal?
THE WASTE BASKETS ARE EMPTY
These are the various offices and cubicles,
and these the dynamic aisles and hallways.
There are the locked filing cabinets,
and that is the litter on the surfaces.
Those are the cleaning people
who left only the night lights as they departed.
The enterprise is absent until Monday morning.
Dispersed to the precincts, the suburbs,
self-regarding selves with expectations
of domesticities, jollities, solemnities,
of idleness, silence, privacy,
disquietude,
trouble,
the work of belonging, of enduring.
---
This is the weekend weather passing through.
These are the neighborhoods
where they have lives,
unsuspected, turning lives,
egos randomly diverging,
whose names are unemphatic on their lips,
who evade the ambiguities in their snapshots,
who vacillate between too little and too much,
who, taking the subway to the sketch class,
trimming the hedges, baking the cookies,
listening in the afternoon from the recliner
to the sublimated lovesong,
the street noises,
the insistent ironies,
ambivalently contemplate the enterprise.
DEAR AUNT ETHYL
Shown a typical letter from Thad at the university,
our local etymologist might, from scholarly habit,
identify derivations from Sanskrit or Bantu,
classical Greek, Old German, or late American.
Perhaps he delights in fantasies of the high drama
when a cave man first sensed the convenience
of attaching a particular grunt or hiss or gurgle
to his spear, rain, or a berry that sickened him.
Our resident anthropologist might join him
in considering Thad’s dialect an instance
of language as an organism evolving
with the experience, the whims of its users,
but sustaining a mysterious autonomy.
Perhaps he marvels at the inevitability
of tribespersons adopting a yawp or a snort
to convey the proposition of a certain adjective.
In particular, he may be awed by their recognition
of the absolute realities named by prepositions.
Even as a premed, but as an upperclassman,
Thad is perhaps aware of these theories,
surely acquainted with poetic elevations,
and as a citizen certainly onto the deceits
practiced by marketeers and demagogues.
But sitting down one night to write his letter,
those learnings were probably barely apt
His intent must have been to convey,
good fellow, genuinely and spontaneously,
in the idiom most natural to them both,
his regard for his doting relative
and to share with her what was appropriate
for her to know about his campus life.
She, generous soul, oblivious to all linguistics,
no doubt received his message as faithfully
as in any of their chats at her kitchen table.
EPISODE IN A DRIFTING CANOE
Things unseen rustle, plop, cheep.
A hawk flashes through the trees.
Minnows flutter in the shallows.
They do not know it is Thursday,
these my cousins, afar removed,
furred, scaled, barked, feathered, shelled,
care nothing for the wobbly orbit of Earth.
A bluejay perches nearby,
makes a raucous declaration, flies away.
The world could have done without him,
I say to the covert populace.
Without you, as well, I answer for them,
saying exactly to the spider,
skimming across the still-water pool.
Tolerate us, I say to the warbler in the tree tops,
our congenital, insufficient, erratic psyches,
our great-spirited aspirations.
Forgive our exploits, menacing as fire or storm.
EYE WITNESS, TRIMMING HIS NAILS,
TO THE ENTIRE HUMAN PASSAGE
Adam, professor emeritus of archeology,
restless in his leisure, has dwelt all spring
on family lore of a village,
traditional home of his ancestors,
which was destroyed by the government
for harboring members of a dissident party
and later rebuilt on an adjoining site.
On a Tuesday, his birthday, in early April,
on Fridays, Sundays, mornings, evenings,
he imagines himself traveling to the community,
saying to the cat, shovel in hand,
your master has aspired to be
an eye witness to the entire human passage,
out walking, repairing the latch on a window,
observes his ancient homeground to be
a sparsely populated outskirt of the new village,
overgrown with natural vegetation,
saying to his coffee mug, his arthritis,
how many down there were good heads,
wondered at the moods of birdsong,
aspired, despaired, danced remarkably,
utterly captive of themselves, but now
sheer instances of hypothetical humanity,
void of personhood, items of anthropology,
as his sweep-second hand pulses
with the urgencies of being.
Taking a shower, mailing his tax forms,
sees himself conversing with townspeople,
negotiating with the authorities for permission
to unearth some of their past for them,
saying, origins of our habits of hand,
dispositions of art, theology, justice,
our innuendos, duplicities, endearments,
saying, models for my chin, my bow legs.
---
In his May Day fantasies, after phoning his son
with news of their old neighbor’s stroke,
in his recliner with a stiffness in his back,
he is reminded of the digs at Har Karkom,
at Jamestown , Casas Grandas, El Pilar,
saying, the labor, week after week,
the irritations of rains, tourists,
official inspectors, crafty local hire.
---
Lying awake on Independence Night,
listens to feeble bursts in the neighborhood,
envisioning the fireworks by the lake,
emblematic of the glory of war,
saying, here in the rubble of the myths,
disenlightened by the errata of history,
we are beset by what we have wrought,
taking the dog to the vet, making cornbread,
says, I might have endlessly dug
through strata of merest matter,
shards of lifeways, of memorabilia,
down perhaps to homo erectus,
and not learned what I wish to know
about my very self among the fates.
OR THE WRITHING TAIL OF A KITE
“The butterfly effect”, a term in common use
among chaos theorists, originated from an
address by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz
playfully titled “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s
Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas ?”
To confront a common view of the forces
driving history as essentially chaotic, Hegel
propounded a theory he called a “dialectic”,
the demonstrations he provided having
since been found dubious in some quarters.
Chaos, said Novalis, must be
viewed through a veil of order.
Accidents are accidents, said
Santayana, only to ignorance.
Let it be our project for the month, Gertrude,
uncredentialed as we are in any of the sciences,
to rid ourselves of this ignorance by sheer wits.
We understand the authentic proposition implicit
in the butterfly imagery, but it does invite parody.
By the same premise, what conflagrations
might result from the whirling of swallows
through the emptiness above the Neva or the Nile .
Or from the wakes of yachts in the Aegean .
Or the swaying of tamarisk trees in a Libyan garden.
However improbably, the butterfly effect
assumes an extremely intricate and precise chain
of causes and effects, which presumes ---
is it escapable, Gertrude ---
an utter orderliness of the universe,
not the inscrutible incoherence
described in our dictionaries.
What else does Santayana proclaim?
That the properties of matter are implacable?
Think of the astraunaut approaching outer space.
What else does Hegel intuit
in the thin air between thesis and antithesis
that he so yearns to prove?
That all life and all event existed,
in potentia, at the instant of the Big Bang.
Think how relentlessly eroticizing,
for now,
is the sun.
And what does Novalis advise?
That we protect ourselves
against the terror of a vast unknown
by affirming its integrity?
Perhaps we will conclude, in our naivete,
that the libretto of history, Gertrude,
with all its rigidity and malleability,
is the table of elements.
OR LIKE A STINGLESS RAY
It behaves like an organism.
Has substance like a giant tick
but without blood-sucking, infectious malice.
Has numerous extremeties like the snakes
attached to the Hindu god Shiva
or like the tentacles of an octopus,
fierce but without malevolent intent.
It is the human perceiving energy.
AEOLUS DREAMS
OF THE VANITIES OF PRAIRIE VILLAGES
Boreas,
the north wind,
rustles the dogwoods of Birmingham .
Zephyr,
the west wind,
ripples the puddles of Harrisburg .
Ruby Felicia Dodd nurses her baby.
Notus,
the south wind,
ruffles the flags of Grand Rapids .
Calvin “Buddy” Parrish, route man,
is just the age of his father at the end.
Eurus,
the east wind,
rattles the eaves of Oregon City .
GRAY SQUIRRELS, METAPHYSICAL KITES
What is that sound?
It is a feast of excited insects.
It is a warbler in the loblolly pines.
A music that listening makes.
What is that motion?
It is the arc of a spider’s eye.
It is a hawk flashing through the birches.
A great slow progress of legend.
What is that efflorescence?
Minnows. Gray squirrels. Willlows breathing.
I see. I see.
It is allegory sailing on the bay.
It is the sheen of metaphysical kites.
And how is it all rectified?
Why, by death. Ingeniously. Exquisitely.
NEAR PILTDOWN
It is noon.
An autumn breeze stirs the leaves.
They have stopped,
hairy and filthy,
to take food.
Now they rest.
Listen.
Do you hear,
faintly as the thunder in the west,
a chorus of “Melancholy Baby”?
BERN . 1905. SPRING.
If, there, beneath the astounding Alps ,
the red-tiled roofs, the ingenious clock tower,
if, along the medieval arcades, the cobbled streets,
at the university, the patent office,
where all physics seethed with will to disclose,
time, space, energy, matter, light,
if there was a deity watching, listening,
an Intellligence covetous of Its Laws,
despairing of Its Mystifications,
Its Sovereignty over Knowledge,
how might It/He/She have Regarded
Einstein, Planck, and the others?
AND THE DISQUIETUDES LEFT FROM THEIR DREAMS
I think of Tom, Dick, Harry, and Eva,
of their attachments back in the towns,
of their affinities for Alaska , for the Blue Grass,
for all abundant milieus,
think of their ambivalent lives,
endowed as they are with free will,
with counteregos and motley genetic trails,
with proliferating cognition,
with obstinate glands,
whose selves can never quite perceive themselves.
But I think also of Edgar, the exile
who has never left the place he was reared,
think of him sitting at a table
with coffee and the news.
EDWARD MUNCH ET AL
The short version is that he painted The Scream
and was at one time as reputed as Picasso.
Was known as the handsomest man in Norway .
Was quite wealthy in his old age.
The long version, however, is that he led a life
of Dionysian extremes and chronic distresses.
Was at the mercy of himself.
In Oslo , Paris , Nice, Berlin .
---
How numerous they have been,
his like,
van Gogh,
Wagner,
others,
others,
Proust,
Nijinski,
others,
others.
WHAT DO THEY ADVISE ONE TO DO
AFTER HE HAS LEARNED THAT HIS LIFE
IS FUTILE IN EVERY WAY EXCEPT THE SYMBOLIC?
Out there, beyond the reach of my senses,
across town, in Albuquerque , in Pago Pago ,
are dubious realities, imprinted on my memory
by books, the news, hearsay, the movies.
In my absence, realms of anthropological gossip
waver into the silence of their fantasies,
their predicaments, their eras.
Is it a failing world?
What do they know about this is Lima ?
In Qom , beneath the elucalyptus trees?
What wisdom do they impart to their camels,
what ironies disclose to their yaks, their dogies.
candors withhold from their young,
exonerations declare to their mirrors?
Above the chatter from the Frankfort book fair,
a duck banquet in Beijing , a quorum in the Knesset,
is that not a yearning obligato,
a soliloquy from the collective unconscious?
SMELL THE GINGER IN THOSE COOKIES
Listen to the voices of the crabbers at dusk.
Everything results from the properties of matter.
Look at the swells on their polo ponies.
Everything results from the impetuosities,
the collisions, the regenerations of the elements.
Feel the angry knot in the child’s throat.
The periodic table never intended any of that.
KARBACHER IN EXTREMIS
These representations --- Kostas, Luigi, and Noah ---
my conversants, have this in common:
they are vernacular Americans,
but with auras of long descent.
To evade the explicit,
I situate them not in Ithaca, Venice, and Bethlehem,
but in Roxbury or Indianapolis
or somewhere like Flagstaff.
The issue is our acculturation.
~~~~
It is not that Kostas takes ritual positions
with Socrates or Descartes,
not that Luigi so much reveres
Augustus or Machiavelli,
that Noah is occasionally conflicted
over Thomas Aquinas or Cardinal Newman,
nor that they are overwhelmed
by Darwin or Freud.
(Although Aristotle is said to have contended
that all truly outstanding men suffer melancholy.)
(Although Saint Augustine may have declared
that a falsehood disturbs the universe.)
The issue is how we, psychosystems,
each in his separate mornings, evenings,
are to reconcile ourselves
to an unremitting fallibility,
how, receivers of tainted myths,
each another sum of behaviors,
we are to verify ourselves,
given the litter of our dream work,
an equivocating mores,
the shadow of mortality,
given the migrating birds,
black horses running in the fields,
Walden Pond,
the Alamo,
the fog eerie white, sometimes in Wisconsin.
A STAGE SET FOR MORTAL CANDOR
The curtains standing open at the little theater
in an artsy town on the Gulf Coast,
memories of Miller, Albee, Wilder
mingle upstage, the deck bare, unlit,
the company inactive for the summer,
departed north for the season in stock.
---
It is dawn, is sultry afternoon, waking night.
Is a horse farm, a racist borough, Santa Fe.
Ardors, discontents, libidinal behaviors
enter, exit stage right, left.
Protagonists solicit from the wings,
jostled by ruthless, plaintive phantoms.
Dialects of the Poconos, the Ozarks
shrewdly murmur from the dressing rooms.
---
From the tiers of empty seats
the human condition peers.
Afterthought waits among the ambiguities.
The common muddle seeps in from wherever.
UNTITLED THIRTEEN
1:42 PM
Walking east toward my attorney’s office
I notice just ahead a figure who,
from the back, somewhat resembles me
and am struck by the fantasy
that he is my alterego, familiarly slouching,
impetuous and loose-living, in my opinion.
I debate whether to overtake him.
1:44 PM
Walking east toward my late-lunch bistro
I notice across the street two figures who,
from an angle, somewhat resemble me
and am struck by the fantasy
that they are my alteregos, one the slouch,
the other a dedicated conservative,
judicious and reliable, in my opinion.
I debate whether they will meet and speak.
1:47 PM
Glancing toward them as I turn south
I notice that they are conversing,
appear to be looking in my direction,
and am struck by the fantasy
that they may intend to join me
as if in sibling identity.
I debate whether to wait, flee, confront them.
WHO HAVE REASON TO FEAR THEMSELVES
Look at that animal.
It is a human.
More grotesque than a snake or a bat.
Oh my.
Known to have requested, though royal,
to be buried in a sewer.
Inclined to gaze at gray spots on the darkness.
Oh my.
Maintains a museum of torture implements.
Whose barbarians are always at the gate.
Oh my.
WORKING PARTS
I sit on the porch, screened, neighborhood-watched,
pleasantly exhilarated by the starlight,
the wind, the near silence of the night,
thinking about what I am thinking,
about my ignorance of the electrochemistry
of which I am a representative effect,
about the periodic table of the elements
of which I am composed,
about the calcium, zinc, niacin on my dietary chart
that convinces me of my primal materiality,
about the sodium, potassium, whatever
that are the working parts of my cognition ---
so eerily,
so methodically,
so recklessly
in this darkness,
functioning.
© Copyright Oliver Rice. All Rights Reserved.
Last updated May 7, 2017 1036 Pacific