Cross Stations

"He is one of the very greatest English poets, and his greatness has never been fully acknowledged or described, in part at least because his prolific writing and his huge and idiosyncratic erudition make him hard to come to terms with all at once--" AS Byatt, "Robert Browning: Fact, Fiction, Lies, Incarnation and Art"

I haven't made an effort to meet any more divorced or widowed males, and at my age, single men might be slightly suspicious, since the lesbian Josie Byzek conveniently disrupted mine and Cecil Morales prospective interest in each other, difficult to dwell on,(excluding my infantile glutton driven ex) but even if I stuck my neck out of my tortoise shell and fortune surprised me with an alternate ending, a good man would have to compete with Linda's shrill enthusiasm in my head, "Oh come on Joanne, we all know that spastic..." It will always make me feel small, her voice, in email, crowing about Bruce's performance. I can ask myself why they divorced, and their split had reverberations within the CIL community, and immediately understand that divorce at the same time, though she never discussed her marital life, other than throwing her gratification in my face, and I can hear her with her most confidential sympathizers calling me a mawkish asshole.

She'd be right. I was a mawkish asshole, but desperation not to have sanctuary and order implode, not to be abused, under intense harassment by Riverside, which is as about terrible as you can imagine without an employer, and the racism of case managers, however veiled or overt, this is why I was so emotionally vulnerable with Linda. Marcia Ian tried to offer me a psychoanalytic perspective, that Linda was, subconsciously or otherwise, uncoupling my infantile need to return to the nest, and buttress those forked tongue assurances that I wasn't abandoned, but Marcia's admirable theorizing doesn't begin to heal the wounds of being scapegoated, victimized on one end by ineffectual case management, re: Trudy Richardson, Debra Horne, Jenelle Dost, and every defensive den mother at Liberty I've dealt with since, and exploited by black dysfunction, attendant neglect, on the other.

I pounded out a regressive rhyming verse for Linda, which I should not have done, simplistic and childish in stridency, which took me fourteen years to rewrite. I sent the esteemed Sheldon Novick a draft as a summary apologia for my social inappropriate familiarity when he was just a blank on whom my libations seeped in their wounds, and Robert liked it. American Poetry Review has remained silent, and I assume I am in the slush pile, if hard drives have one. I do not know, especially since  my mortality is close at hand, if I can ever resurface, scythed, but back on my feet.
*******

My Patron Saint

                             --for Linda C Dezenski

Gold filigree molded to the cast  by the armature will boil
you alive in a molten vat, crisp the epidermis, heaven of a bacon 
back, the needle sting of rosemary, little pitch of thyme,
silken filaments of liposome accumulate the pupils;
accelerate the blind exhaust in idolatry, her moans: their
satisfaction leave you biting fugal dust, serrated blade in puncture.  
Aerophagia onsets beneath the pressured ribs so rapidly,  ebbing away and scrub,
the wounded climax but a moment, these the later Hebrew saints a
prelude to St. Anne, sort of, in the name of transitional gentile
Hannah was barren like Sarah, ailing tadpoles in an acid slink, writhe
and writhe again old woman, forth your issue a womb to hold the uncontainable
Incarnate, supposed to feel good, it is, within Blume's exploratory wash 
cloth, or Toni's mad black bitch.  Liberate it to the boast, pubic spasms an 
end onto themselves, with vocal mandibles they speak, they're old stridency,
Helen Reddy on the LP, brass decor fit for flamenco, if barely in sync.

Empowered with a roar, intimations for the pedestrians on those autonomic
chilly roads, impregnable with so many episodes, turning points. Franciscan 
orders create ascetics impervious to anything but pleasure in humility, one
dimension fresco with its halo most certain as an object, zealotry feared, good
reasons for it amid the lawyering medical class, those who shifted the axis.
Francis de Sales peddled something in commerce mind, not as padre might
envision, running with the bulls, ripped to a weight lifter's stance; better
yet, a green man so full of rage the canopy trembles beneath his tread.
The blessed meek anticipate the end we've reached, the end not of aggression,
eco-colony collapse, nor the whimpers of irresolute despair.

Sissy primate with its tartly bitter taste, the wanderer has a lesion on its
mind, circuits that scramble to ever greater depth, spastics brag,
appalling, sugar cubes of suffering carved into the metastasis, fettered
beyond benign, conscience felled the breast of Joan d'Arc.
Never to suckle, rear her own. Where is this freedom of the broken body?
Bundled into the derivatives, convulsing credit to a standstill?
Compliance gives us more within the fortress built to hide.
Urine bags burst the blush to purple, humiliated by the smell.

--Revised from 4/27/2000

The Cyril Cusack Glib Reassurance

AS Byatt, in her essay about Browning, struggles to capture something about his miasmal wit, which is nearly epic in invective rage without ranting. Keats may anticipate flash fictions and our like of pastels, dying young enough not to wither, but the author of Possession nails the difficulty with Browning. He felt poetry could still argue metaphysics, ideas, striding right along with the reductive nature of positivism, making a careful rereading of R et B move slowly. He is one of the few historical poets I respond to on my own, innately drawn to his voice, without faking it due to the fact poets are supposed to appreciate all poetry-- and because I am tired I will dispense with this simply: fuck that.

Most poetry should be scorned, and if anything has surprised me about late last century poets like my mentor Jerry, it is his ossification into place. What he did in workshop to me had a far more threatening hedonism to it then what I chased down on Google and then contacted him, kicking and screaming-- I told myself not to trust me because I knew I'd burst into tears. In 2002 I cried over Tassoni for two days; in 2007 Frank the ex did not know it, but the remainder of his cognitive function was in danger and my countenance was flushed in pain not because I did not fool around with the bastard back when but because I failed the standards of my best professor and I knew I'd beat myself, and did, and no longer respect his poetry as much as I used to; he ossified. This disappoints me here on my nigger welfare scum sucking throne, cappish?

Commercially or classically, the razor edge of nihilism is comforting, and with spymaster Le Carre, it is a brutally commercialized cynicism that says the same thing as Mitchell really: we'll always find ways to cannibalize each other for our own meat, and we encapsulate this like a warm blanket. The 2010 Canadian Altitude, which reversed my expectations about formula because it had interesting cinematography, almost uses a stem cell approach when dealing with the envelopment of loss. Andrews is almost playing billiards with the narrative of our imprints enveloping us a certain way due to seemingly random tragedy. Every action leads to reaction, one we may not know, but Le Carre overwhelms his characters. Burton through indignation, Guinness, as Smiley, through monastic castration, Fiennes through martyrdom, smiting consciences-- his plots superb and his characters well drawn, many of his endings, are, however, infuriating and deflationary, and yet they console, as much as Browning's palette of metaphysical contests.