Thursday, July 28, 2011

Menlo Park

I was leaf struck
by sunlight. I remember
the sensation of my greenness—
making greenness of the regaling breeze.
It wasn't a mistake to see myself
as indistinguishable from rain.

I often rained.
That hasn't changed.

And the ducks and drakes, skittering across
the mirroring pond, destined:

I was drake and pond; I was sunlight
on silver water. I was homelessness;
I was a dove cooing in the library's eaves;
a dove's rustling was my heart,
in the shadow of the eaves.

I was the hawk's avarice, defeated
by my opalescence, my cowardice.
But on certain afternoons I was rain
greening a leaf, a breeze carrying
the dove's low cooing. I was

Memory and disbelief, and delight greened
The cemetery stones in Menlo Park.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Ad Honorem (1)

For my dad's 60th birthday, I wrote a small chapbook, of sorts, and sent it to him from Costa Rica.  As he nears 70, I'm going to re-post some of its content, in his honor:


Of course, there is the struggle for existence in everything, and there is no other principle, everybody knows that, but still . . .

You live there, in Dostoevsky’s “but still . . .” In his ellipsis.

Around us the much discussed horror. The heavens’ silence & the mediocrity of its prophets. The dollar-lost. The harvests, in short, season after season, of grief. Nature strange with beauty. Rather like an eccentric philanthropist distributing riches as if intent upon a taunting inscrutability.
To live successfully requires a measure of violence. You hit a man in the face when you thought he’d endangered your child.
But still . . .

Along the top of our backyard wall a short gleaming coil of razor wire. Through the wire a tree covered with bright orange blossoms. Slowly the tree is losing its leaves; in a week or two I will write: Only the blossoms remain.
We know the score, right —to live!— but still . . .

Digressions on the Path to Bewilderment

We're silent to the degree that we're in despair. So I've been pretty silent about politics lately—maybe not just about politics—watching Obama follow the Tea Party into the abyss of "government austerity."

In short, it's become clear that Obama represents the concerns of Goldman Sachs at least as emphatically as George Bush did; and at some level he's more dangerous because he enjoys the camouflage of the Democratic Party.

That travesty aside: Ultimately, I'm trying to decide if I'm a Platonist.

Is it true that someone must be the boss? Must society design itself around that principle?

If it is true—and needless to say that's the current position of both Democrats and Republicans—then I suppose I prefer the tyranny of the welfare state to the tyranny of Goldman Sachs. At least the welfare state serves more than 1% of the population. I'll take the elitist Barack Obama and his ethics of compassion to the elitist Ayn Rand and her virtue of selfishness.

All of this is another way of asking: Can no one rule?

The call for small government pre-supposes that if we limit government's power, liberty fills the void. Plato says otherwise: Goldman Sachs will fill the void, or some other multinational corporation, or—prout Ayn Rand—John Galt, triumphant.

I do know that a fundamental problem with the ethics of compassion—perhaps its fatal flaw—is that people resent help. They'll take it, but they won't appreciate it, ever. To their credit.

Anyway, here are a couple of things worth reading, both of which can be held responsible, to some degree, for my current bewilderment:

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Monday, July 11, 2011

The Starbucks Girl Gave Me My Tea with a Smile

The next morning he was discovered dead in his bed, and the coroner's verdict was — "Death by the visitation of God."
                    — Edgar Allen Poe, "The Imp of the Perverse"
Which might explain what Freud meant when he said that we all want to die. God is Love, after all—a forest naiad tending the fountain of youth. Dying for love retains its lyrical dignity, even in this least lyrical of epochs. So put that on a Starbucks t-shirt: Love is death by the visitation of God. She can wear it with her Dickies and Converse. "'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished."

Or God is the Law, his most successful uniform no longer the priest's frock but the cop's carapace of polyethylene and polyester. A .357 Magnum has replaced the scythe, which replaced the Olympian lightning bolt; the boom is different—smaller, less theatrical—but the outcome no less dire.

Always around love and the law one senses the scent of the divine. But we don't need a scent to know when God has paid a visit. The corpses are proof enough.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

TFTD

There's no sense in a man picking out the worst name he can find for everything.

— Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Churn

The word churn was made

for the sea. If words can be said
to be made. I suppose by a churning
of their own they coalesce; soon, life

becomes unthinkable without
where they lead.

What I mean to say is
I have never felt so summoned. Distantly,

Mavericks, where men come
for fame, has been transformed
into banks of foam

blowing across pools of stone.

Friday, July 1, 2011

TFTD

No one asks Balzac to be Stendhal. All anyone asks of Balzac is that he be God.

— Roberto Bolaño, "Notes on Jaime Bayly"