Backland

"Has anyone noticed how fulfilled Sisyphus is?" (Dean Young)

I have to admit I’d never heard of Dean Young until I read five of his poems in the new issue of the Oxford American, which you can buy here. According to the “Contributors” section of the magazine, he is the author of “numerous collections,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and received the Academy Award in Literature. (I didn’t know they had Oscars for literature.) According to his poems, he is “ornately thorned and easily torn,” his “throne is a sardine can,” he is “so used to not getting the joke” that he is “probably mostly joke by now,” when he was younger he “could not draw a rabbit but / could an exploding cube full / of flaming tubas and eyeballs / and that has made all the difference,” and he “could use a smoke.” I think he might be lying, but, as he says, “It’s hard to ruin poetry.” You can probably guess that I admire these five poems. They remind me of my own, though his are a lot better. You can read some of his poems here. You can read some of mine here.

Lost Trains Leave No Tracks

A little more than a year ago, I finished writing a short book of short poems called Lost Trains Leave No Tracks. I thought it would be good to publish this book, but in order to do that I first needed to get some of the poems published in poetry journals. Well, with the exception of one poem that was published in The Antioch Review about five years ago, I've had no luck with this at all. So I've decided to make the book available as a PDF for anyone who wants to read it. Here it is.

Lost Trains Leave No Tracks

Fifty degrees

It’s not supposed to go up to fifty
degrees in mid-January. We’re not
supposed to get warm windless days like these,
days when a visit to the dentist becomes
a run through sunny streets or a walk with
the dog becomes an exploration of
the lakeshore. We shouldn’t be eating lunch
on a park bench or seeing a full moon through
unclouded breaths. We should be skating and
skiing instead, slipping on ice and getting
our cheeks numb. What good are those expensive
gloves now? We came back from a desert vacation
only to find that we didn’t really
need to escape the cold. But soon the snow
will rush in and the temperature will
drop to single digits. The basement floor
will be too cold to touch and the pipes will
freeze. The dog will beg to go back after
only a block. And this balmy day will
be forgotten, like warmth usually is.

If a shark is bleeding

If a shark is bleeding
she attracts other sharks.

If you want to hear the sirens
let a woman whisper "Come."

If the octopus lived in a tree
what creatures would she snare?

It's best to blame shipwrecks
on the bloodstained fish.

Remote things

                                     . . . we can behold
     Remote things well, for so much light does He
Who rules supreme still grant us; but we are foiled
     When things draw near us, and our intelligence
     Is useless when they are present. . . .

Dante, Inferno (translated by Robert Pinsky)

Enough snakes

We should send enough snakes to the moon
to fill in all its holes.

Or should we use those holes
for a long, slow game of golf?

Anyway, we should fill them in somehow
before light leaks through to the dark side.

The Third Lamentation

On Tisha b'Av, which begins tonight, we read the Book of Lamentations. Here is my own pentameter translation of the third.

I am the man who saw pain by the rod of his anger:
I am the one he marched through darkness, no light:
Only against me would he turn his hand all day.

He wasted my flesh and my skin, he broke my bones;
He built a yoke around my head to tire me.
In dark places he sat me, as one long since dead.

He fenced me in, he trapped me, oppressed me with chains;
Though I'd scream and shout, he shut out my prayers.
He barred my way with thick blocks of stone.

He was a bear in waiting, a lion in hiding;
He made me rebel, then broke me, to waste me away.
He bent his bow, aiming the arrows at me;

They pierced my loins, the children of his quiver.
I became everyone's joke, their sport all day.
He filled me with bile, made me drunk with bitterness.

He broke my teeth with gravel, fed me ashes:
Peace abandoned my soul, I forgot all goodness:
I now say, Lost is my strength and my hope from the Lord.

Remembering my anguish and pain is venom and gall:
Remembering again--it makes my soul sink.
This I will tell my heart so it may hope:

The Lord's grace is not over, his love has no end,
Renewed every morning, his faithfulness is great.
My lot is the Lord, says my soul, so in him I will hope.

The Lord is good to the patient soul that seeks him;
It's good in silence to wait for the Lord's salvation:
It's good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth;

To sit alone in the silence he has received,
To put his lips to the dust--perhaps there is hope!--
To offer his cheek to him who strikes, to be shamed:

Because the Lord will not forsake him forever;
For though he may harm, he pities with all his kindness;
For he may distress and hurt men, but not from his heart.

To crush beneath his feet all the earth's captives,
To bend a man's rights in the face of the Most High,
To twist a man's plea--does the Lord not see these things?

Who claims there is something the Lord has not commanded?
That from his mouth came not both the bad and the good?
How can man, living boldly in sin, complain?

Let's trace and explore our ways and turn back to the Lord:
Lift up our hearts and our hands to God in heaven:
We sinned and rebelled, and you did not forgive.

Wrapped in anger you chased us, killed us, spared none,
Wrapped in a cloud through which no prayer can pass,
You placed us, nothing but waste, in the midst of the nations.

All our enemies opened their mouths against us;
Fear and a pit were our downfall and our ruin.
Streams flow from my eyes for my people's daughter:

My eyes pour down without respite, without end,
Until the Lord looks down from heaven and sees
My eyes abusing my soul for my city's daughters.

They hunted me like a bird, my causeless enemies,
They held my life in a pit, and threw stones at me.
Water flowed over my head: I said, I am lost.

I called your name, O Lord, from the depths of the pit;
You heard me: Don't close your ears to my cry of help!
You neared me the day I called you--you told me, Fear not.

You pleaded, Lord, the plea of my soul, you saved my life,
You saw, Lord, how justice is twisted--now judge my case.
You saw all their frenzy, all their plots against me;

You heard the shamefulness, Lord, of their thoughts of me
From the lips of those who slandered me all day,
Sitting or standing--look: I am their target.

Repay them, O Lord, for what their hands have done,
Give them sadness of heart, your curse place on them.
Destroy them in anger from under the heavens of the Lord.

Always happy

People were always happy to see you
since then they could talk about you behind your back.

Now you have no wine, women, or songs left.
So why do you still hurt?

Even if you're the only one remaining,
you can still lie to yourself.

We pan for gold

We pan for gold in cornfields
and dig for diamonds in junkyards.

Only at midnight can a CD
produce an ancient sound.

From the depths of Loch Ness, the monster
sings love songs to the birds.

Watermelon smiles when it's cut
and chuckles when it's bitten.

Lies taste better with
a sprinkling of conviction.

The sea

If the sea recognizes you
it waves.

But the secrets it whispers
sound fishy.

When it pounds the rocks
for emphasis,

it's concealing its theft
of sand.

Kennst du das Land . . . ?

Much has been written about mystery in twentieth-century American popular music. But what about nineteenth-century German classical music, with its hundreds of unsettling songs, full of shadows and ghosts? This one is unusually subtle, with an addressee who shifts identity from verse to verse: it's a poem from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprentice (1796) that Robert Schumann set to music in 1849.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Julius Drake - Kennst du das Land

Translation:

Know’st thou the land where lemon-trees do bloom,
And oranges like gold in leafy gloom;
A gentle wind from deep blue heaven blows,
The myrtle thick, and high the laurel grows?
Know’st thou it, then?
        ’Tis there! ’tis there,
O my belov’d one, I with thee would go!
  
Know’st thou the house, its porch with pillars tall?
The rooms do glitter, glitters bright the hall,
And marble statues stand, and look me on:
What’s this, poor child, to thee they’ve done?
Know’st thou it, then?
        ’Tis there! ’tis there,
O my protector, I with thee would go!
  
Know’st thou the mountain bridge that hangs on cloud?
The mules in mist grope o’er the torrent loud,
In caves lie coil’d the dragon’s ancient brood,
The crag leaps down and over it the flood:
Know’st thou it, then?
        ’Tis there! ’tis there
Our way runs; O my father, wilt thou go?

Who cooks for the dead?

Who cooks for the dead?
Are there restaurants in the underworld?

Do they stir the soup with your bones
and serve it in your skull?

Are their ovens fueled
by putrefaction?

Or do the dead
only eat worms?

The Greek gods

The Greek gods would have never allowed
the Hebrew God to go unpunished.

Even the most powerful idols
get lost in the streets of Jerusalem.

Mystery requires
the possibility of evil.

(Apply that to your God
if you dare.)

Moon-tailed orioles

And moon-tailed orioles roost wing to wing
With mocking-birds that only dream they sing . . .

—James Whaler, from Green River: A Poem for Rafinesque (1931)

I can't for the life of me figure out where I first came across these lines, but it was many years ago, and the second one stuck with me. So I obtained a copy of Green River, a justly forgotten book-length poem as unrestrained, romantic, and crazy as its hero. That hero is Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783-1840), who was born in Constantinople and did his most valuable work in Kentucky. He apparently fancied himself not only the premier American naturalist (his work influenced Darwin's theory of natural selection), but also an expert on American Indian history, and was responsible for publishing the Walam Olum, a specious creation narrative of the Lenapes, and for finding hundreds of ancient earthworks in the Ohio Valley. He fascinates me, and I hope to learn more about him. The Wikipedia page devoted to him is quite interesting, but to get a better picture of the man and the problems that researchers face, examine amazon.com's page devoted to Leonard Warren's Constantine Samuel Rafinesque: A Voice in the American Wilderness. It includes a remarkably eloquent publisher's description of the book (and of its subject) followed by a terrifying 3,500-word review, the longest amazon.com review I've ever read, that lists every single error the author and publisher made—a truly fascinating and obsessive document. 

As for the poet, James Whaler appears to have been equally obsessive—his book Counterpoint and Symbol: An Inquiry into the Rhythm of Milton's Epic Style is apparently chock-full of mathematical diagrams and discussions of numerical progressions. Americans who strove for fame yet produced nothing but obscure and flawed works marked by mania, hubris, and a confusion between fancy and scholarship, both Rafinesque and Whaler are, in a sense, "mocking-birds that only dream they sing."

Which is holier

Which is holier,
the Pope or the moon?

And which is more likely
to be right?

The happiest collectors
collect clouds.

The worst actors
look the most like stars.

Does the fountain of youth
flow into the Styx?

There is no homework
in fairy tales.

Psalm 63

God, you are my God;
I seek you.
My soul thirsts for you,
my flesh longs for you,
in a parched and thirsty land without water--
thus to have beheld you in the sanctuary,
to see your might and your glory.
For your kindness is better than life;
my lips shall praise you.
Thus shall I bless you all my life;
in your name I shall lift my hands.
As if my desire were sated with suet and fat,
I sing praises with joyful lips,
when I call you to mind upon my bed,
when I think of you in the watches of the night;
for you have been my help,
in the shelter of your wings I sing for joy.
My soul cleaves to you;
your right hand supports me.
May those who seek to destroy my soul
enter the depths of the earth.
May they be gutted by the sword;
may they be prey to jackals.
The king shall rejoice in God;
all who swear by him shall be glorified
when the mouth of liars is stopped.

—Psalm 63 (my translation)

Explorers plant flags

Explorers plant flags where they want to be remembered.
We common folk plant gravestones.

To paint a true picture of the future
would take longer than the present will allow.

The golden grain of wheat or the
black plum pit: which heart is yours?

The one that will be crushed and ground
or the one that will become a tree?

The last dead end

Only the last dead end
is a one-way street.

The flowers in dry seabeds
are crystalline.

Who sews seaweed
to clothe the drowned?

If played right, each bone,
like each bird, has its own song.